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The Weekly One-Shot
The lighthouse doesn't warn ships off the rocks. It calls them in.
At a glance — 4 players · 3rd–5th level (scales 1–10, parties of 3–6) · one ~2 hour sitting · grounded sea-horror; the win is a moral choice, not a kill.
Read this before the players arrive. Everything turns on it.
Tobin Carrow has kept the light on Gull's Tooth for sixty-three years. He has the face of a man of forty-four, and he has had it the whole time.
The arithmetic is the horror. Sixty-three years ago he let the lamp go dark for one night — drunk, grieving a wife three days in the ground — and in that dark a ship called the Halcyon came in on the rocks with ninety souls aboard. He heard them in the water and could not see them. By morning the bodies were gone and the sea below the lighthouse had stopped moving the way water moves. Something down there had eaten well, and it wanted to keep eating.
Tobin has kept the light burning every night since, and he has not aged a day past the night he failed, because the thing under Gull's Tooth will not let him die and stop the light. It needs the beam. The beam does not save ships. The beam keeps the drowned ninety asleep on the bottom — and it lures fresh ships onto the rocks, two or three a year, to feed the thing that holds Tobin's death hostage. He worked out the trade decades ago: a handful of strangers a year against the whole coast, which the thing will drown to the last harbor if the light ever goes out for good.
He hates the light. He cannot put it out. He has tried.
Tobin cannot leave the island, cannot die, and cannot stop the lamp without waking the ninety and whatever feeds on them. He needs a keeper to replace him — someone to take the deathless watch so he can finally drown. He has been waiting a long time for visitors who look like they could carry it. He will not force the choice. He will make it look like mercy, because from where he stands it is.
The party is on the coast road, or aboard a coaster working up the shore, or hired to find out why three ships in two months went down off a stretch of water that has a working lighthouse. However they come, they come at dusk, and the light is already turning.
Gull's Tooth is a fang of black rock a half mile off a beach littered with the bones of boats. The lighthouse on it still works — you can see the beam swing out over the water, slow and steady, gold against a sky going purple. It should be a comfort. Instead the fishermen mending nets on the beach won't look at it. One of them, an old woman with a needle in her teeth, follows your eyes out to the light and says around the thread, “Don't wave at it. It waves back.”
The light is not warning ships off the rocks. It is calling them onto the rocks. Three weeks ago the coaster Mareschal went in with all hands while its captain swore the harbor lamp was dead ahead. The beach village (Saltmarrow, forty families) knows the lighthouse is wrong and has known for two generations. They keep their own boats in by dark and they do not talk to outsiders about Gull's Tooth, because the last time someone rowed out to fix it, the light went dark for one night and a wave took six houses off the beach. They've decided that whatever the light is, leaving it alone costs less than touching it.
The water between the beach and Gull's Tooth is calm in a way the open sea around it is not. The party will notice, because something is keeping it calm.
Halfway across, the swell flattens to glass. The dory glides like it's on a millpond, and the only sound is the oars and your own breathing. Below the hull the water is clear to a great depth, far clearer than seawater should be, and down in the green there are shapes. Pale, upright, swaying with no current to move them. They are facing the light. All of them, every one, turned up toward the beam like a field of flowers turned to a sun.
That's the drowned ninety of the Halcyon, plus everyone the light has fed to the rock since — the whole host still goes by “the ninety,” for the ship that started it. They stand on the bottom, asleep, held in the beam's gold. They are not aggressive while the light turns. They stir only when it falters. The calm water is the same effect — the thing below smooths the path so its next meal arrives intact. Any character who stares too long (a failed DC 13 Wisdom save) hears, very faintly, ninety voices saying the same single word in time with the light's rotation: wake.
Outcomes. By the time the party reaches the jetty they know the lighthouse sits on a mass grave that does not decay, and they know the light is doing something to keep it that way. What they don't yet know is whose side the keeper is on.
Tobin Carrow opens the door before anyone knocks. He has been expecting someone like them for a long time.
The man at the top of the stair is younger than the village made him sound — forty, weathered, a sailor's hands. He looks at your faces one by one the way a buyer looks at horses, then something in him sags, like hope is a weight he's tired of carrying. “You rowed out,” he says. “Good. Sit. There's tea, and I'll tell you the whole of it, because nobody's let me tell the whole of it in a long while. Then I'll ask you for something, and you'll hate me for it, and you'll be right to.”
Tobin tells the truth, all of it, without being made to. He explains the night he let the lamp go dark, the Halcyon on the rocks, the ninety in the water, and the deathless watch he's kept since. He explains the trade: the light feeds the rock two or three ships a year, and in exchange the thing below stays asleep and stays under Gull's Tooth instead of rolling up the whole coast. He has run that arithmetic for sixty-three years and it always comes out the same. A few strangers against every harbor from here to the capital. He does not pretend it's holy. He calls it murder and he keeps doing it because the alternative is worse, and he is the only one who can.
Tobin wants to die. He cannot, while the watch is his, because the thing below will not release a keeper who might let the light fail on purpose. The only way out he has ever found: pass the watch to someone who takes it willingly. A new keeper, freely chosen, and the deathlessness moves to them. Then Tobin can finally drown with the Halcyon he failed. He will offer this to the party — not as a trap, as a confession and a plea. He will not seize anyone. He has watched too many people die in that water to add a kidnapping to the count.
Plain, tired, unbearably honest. He has gallows humor about his own situation and none about the dead. “You'd think sixty-odd years alone would teach a man to enjoy the quiet,” he says. “It taught me to talk to a lamp.” He answers every question straight, including the ones the party wishes he'd dodge. When he asks them to take the watch he does it once, quietly, and does not push.
There is no monster to simply kill here, and the man at the top of the stair is the most honest person the party has met all year. They can:
Whatever the party decides, the answer lives at the top of the tower, in the light itself. Tobin takes them up because he wants them to see the thing he serves before they judge him for serving it.
The lamp room is all glass and brass, and the light at its heart is not flame. It's a cut stone the size of a man's skull, white-gold, turning on a brass cradle, and the great lens throws its glow out over the water in that slow, steady sweep. Up close you can hear it. Under the click of the gears, the stone is humming, and the hum has words in it, ninety voices deep, and they are not asleep. They are singing themselves to sleep, over and over, and the stone is the lullaby, and Tobin's hand rests on the cradle the way you'd rest a hand on a fevered child.
The light is a bound thing, not a lamp. The stone is the heart of the Halcyon — what the ship was carrying the night it went down, a holy relic the thing below wanted and got. The relic's glow is the only thing keeping the drowned ninety dreaming and the thing beneath them fed-but-sleeping. Tobin is bound to the cradle: while he keeps the stone turning, he cannot age or die, and the rock stays a local horror instead of a regional one. This is the off-switch and the doomsday device both. Stop the stone and the singing stops. The catch is what the silence does.
Whatever the party reaches for, the truth lands the same way it landed on Tobin sixty-three years ago: the light is the murder weapon and the only mercy, and there is no version of stopping it that doesn't kill someone. If they put the lamp out to save the next ships, the ninety they came to pity surge up the rock to drown them. If they take the watch to free a good man, they become the next good man chained to the cradle. If they leave it running, they row home past a field of standing dead and know they chose the same trade Tobin chose, the one they came out here to be disgusted by. The horror isn't the thing under the water. It's that Tobin was right, and now they're holding his arithmetic.
Optional climax — only if the party stops the light or wakes the grave.
The thing beneath Gull's Tooth never fully surfaces — it is the size of the harbor floor and showing it cheapens it. What comes up the rock is the Standing Tide: the drowned ninety, risen together, climbing the tower in the dark to put the light back on, or to drag down whoever put it out.
The singing stops, and for one breath the night is the most silent thing you have ever stood inside. Then the water below the tower hisses white, and they come up out of it. Not swimming. Walking. Pale shapes past counting, climbing the black rock with the patience of a tide coming in, faces turned up to the dead lamp, hands reaching for the cradle, for the stone, for you. The sea behind them is bulging upward, slow, like something vast turning over in its sleep and deciding not to go back down.
The Standing Tide wants the light back on. It is not a slaughter; it is the drowned trying to return to the only dream they have left, and they will go through the party to reach the cradle. They are slow, relentless, and they come in a rising count, not a wall. A party that relights the stone (or hands it to a new keeper) sees the Tide stop where it stands, turn, and walk calmly back into the sea — instantly, eerily docile, the dream restored. A party that destroys the relic outright frees the ninety to true death (they collapse to bone and sink) but removes the leash on the thing below, which now stirs toward the coast over the following weeks — a campaign-sized problem the one-shot leaves on the table on purpose.
Run risen drowned as SRD zombies, reflavored as waterlogged sailors, climbing in waves of 2–4 per round up the tower stair until the light is restored or the relic destroyed. They have Resistance to bludgeoning (they're already broken) and they do not pursue beyond the lamp room. Their goal is the cradle, not the party — a creature standing between the Tide and the stone is attacked; a creature stepping aside is ignored. This makes the fight a question of what the party is defending, not a kill-count.
Relighting the stone is an action requiring a free hand on the cradle and either a new keeper's vow or a DC 15 Dexterity (or thieves' tools) check to reseat the relic and restart the gears. Each round the light is dark, add 1d4 to the climbing Tide. The moment the light turns again, every risen drowned stops on the same breath. The scene is a clock, not a damage race. (Use the DM Tools → Dark-Round Clock to track this live.)
The stone is AC 15 · 40 HP · vulnerable to thunder and force, immune to poison and psychic. Destroying it ends the binding: the ninety find true rest, but the thing below loses its leash. Reaching the stone means crossing the lamp room while the Tide climbs for the same prize. The kind of plan this table will either be proud of or never stop arguing about.
For 3rd-level parties, cap the Tide at 6 total risen and drop the per-round add to 1d2. For 5th-level, run as written and have the sea itself reach into the lamp room twice during the fight: a tendril of black water (SRD giant constrictor snake, reflavored, surfacing for one round then withdrawing) grabbing whoever is nearest the stone.
Four ways the night ends. None of them is clean — that's the point.
They will. Here's where they push, and what holds.
Square-grid tactical map · 1 square = 5 ft · with an inset of the lamp room for the Scene 4 climb.
Place it on a VTT or print it for the table. The climb in Scene 4 runs from the water's edge up the rock to the tower base, then up the stair into the lamp-room inset — the Tide is always headed for the cradle at center.
❖ The Cast ❖
Tobin Carrow
Keeper of Halcyon Light · SRD commoner
AC 10 · HP 4 · Insight +4 (sixty-three years of reading the sea) · cannot die while the watch is his
The Standing Tide
The drowned ninety, risen · SRD zombie (reflavored)
As zombie · Resistance to bludgeoning · rises 2–4/round · goal: the cradle
The Thing Beneath Gull's Tooth
An old, vast hunger on the harbor floor · original entity
Never statted, never fully seen · lamp-room reach = SRD giant constrictor snake (reflavored tendril)
Saltmarrow Villagers
Forty families on a beach of boat-bones · SRD commoner
Wary, not wicked · will warn, withhold, and pity · will not row out
The Relic / The Light
The white-gold heart of the Halcyon · an object · original item
AC 15 · HP 40 · vulnerable to thunder & force · immune to poison & psychic
A small toolkit built just for this one — roll when the party pokes at the edges. (Use the DM Tools dice roller for the d12 and d8.)
| d12 | You find… |
|---|---|
| 1 | A sea-chest swollen shut, a child's drawing sealed bone-dry inside. |
| 2 | A ship's bell, green with verdigris, that rings once on its own each time the light passes over it. |
| 3 | A bundle of letters in oilcloth, all to the same woman, all unsent, the last dated this year. |
| 4 | A whalebone charm “for safe harbor,” snapped clean in two. |
| 5 | A full barrel of lamp oil stamped with the crown's mark — someone was still resupplying the light. |
| 6 | A drowned man's boot, the foot still in it, a folded map tucked in the heel. |
| 7 | A child's painted toy boat, perfect, that always drifts back to shore no matter how far you throw it. |
| 8 | A strongbox of coin, every piece from a different port and a different decade. |
| 9 | A logbook page listing “souls aboard,” one name scratched out and rewritten in a shakier hand. |
| 10 | A length of new rope, taut, tied to nothing, leading straight down into the calm water. |
| 11 | A wedding ring that fits whichever character picks it up, and slowly tightens. |
| 12 | A corked bottle: “If you're reading this the light took us too. Don't trust the calm water.” The ink is still wet. |
| d8 | A flash of… |
|---|---|
| 1 | A lullaby in a language no one at the table speaks, that the character can't stop humming for an hour. |
| 2 | The deck of the Halcyon tilting, and a child handed up to someone who didn't catch them. |
| 3 | A name. The character simply knows this one's name — and that it's in no book of Tobin's. |
| 4 | The view from the bottom, looking up at the gold light, and the awful relief of it. |
| 5 | A grudge. This one didn't drown by accident, and it remembers the hand that helped. |
| 6 | Nothing. Just cold, and patience, and the certainty that the character will be down here too. |
| 7 | The captain's last order, unfinished — the dead are waiting to be told to stand down. |
| 8 | Warmth. Gratitude that someone finally touched them. This one turns to face the character for the rest of the scene. |
The boxed lamp-room location, then the dial table for levels 1–10 and parties of 3–6.
The top of the tower: a glass drum braced in salt-pitted brass, the great lens taller than a man, turning on gears worn smooth by sixty-three years of one hand keeping them clean. At the lens's heart a cut white-gold stone in a brass cradle, humming a lullaby ninety voices deep. A cot in the corner that has not been slept in for a lifetime. A logbook on the sill with one entry per night, the same three words in the same tired hand: light kept. nobody came. Until tonight, somebody did.
The pressure here is the clock and the choice, not raw CR, so this one-shot holds across a wide band on a few dials. Pick the row for your table.
| Tier | The Standing Tide | The relic (to destroy) | The thing below | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Levels 1–2 | caps at 4 risen, +1/dark round | AC 13, 20 HP | no tendril | Pure dread + the cradle clock. One good hit should matter. |
| Levels 3–5 (as written) | 2–4/round, up to ~8 | AC 15, 40 HP | tendril once (5th) | The baseline. |
| Levels 6–8 | 4–6/round, no cap; risen resist nonmagical | AC 16, 70 HP | tendril (giant constrictor snake) every round | Tobin offers a “test”: let one PC briefly hold the watch, feel the pull, then give it back — raising the stakes of the real choice. |
| Levels 9–10 | unbounded, led by a drowned captain (reflavored SRD wight) who coordinates them | AC 17, 100 HP, immune to nonmagical | two tendrils | The party can probably win the fight — so make winning the trap. Kill everything and the leash breaks, freeing the thing below. The lesson scales up, not away. |
Print or hand across the table — the keeper's nightly log, and the message in the bottle.
light kept. nobody came.
light kept. nobody came.
light kept. nobody came.
light kept. nobody came.
light kept. somebody did.
If you're reading this the light took us too. We saw the harbor lamp dead ahead and steered for it like sailors do, and the water went calm and glad, and then the rocks were under us where no rocks should be. Don't trust the calm water. Whatever is down here, it is patient, and it is full, and it is still hungry. The light is not for you. Row back while the dark is still only dark.
Compatible with fifth edition. Portions of this work are derived from the System Reference Document 5.1, © Wizards of the Coast LLC, available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0). The Keeper of Halcyon Light, Gull's Tooth, Tobin Carrow, the Standing Tide, Saltmarrow, the Halcyon, and the thing beneath Gull's Tooth are original content © Long Island Dungeon Master.
