Whether it's due to superstition or a distaste for a toilsome and muddy trade, folk tend to pay little attention to gravediggers. This makes for an awfully convenient cover for your travelling troupe of tombrobbers as they tour around the realm's backroads filling their pockets with mementos purloined from the dead.
Planning adventures for "evil" campaigns can be tough, but sometimes you and your players just want an excuse to get your hands dirty. What better opportunity to get DEEP down in the dirt than to hand out shovels and have them start out as a group of travelling undertakers/thieves?
Setup: A handful of crews have run the bonecart scam over the past several generations, tempering their skullduggerous actions with a bit of honest gravemaking. This dichotomy is no better represented in the current heads of the operation: Dour and hardworking Heliana, who minds the cart's reigns and keeps the crew on track, and the knavish academic Benjamin Eelpot who loves delving into things that should best stay buried. These two have taken the party on for a series of jobs that will likely require a cold heart and a strong stomach, stealing from both the living and the dead and hoping not to get caught in the meantime.
Adventure Hooks:
The party's first outing on the bonecart should be a meat-and-potatoes sort of job, used to set the tone of the campaign, which happens to sound like "Someone old and rich and lonely has died, leaving their house haunted and their valuables unguarded".
While being stewards of the dead is a great cover, it sometimes attracts the wrong sort of attention, such as when a nobleman offers the party a great reward to investigate an abandoned necropolis and the source of the terrifying dreams that haunt him. Gold is gold though, and surely this couldn't have too many long reaching complications for them.
Irony of ironies, Shortly after one of their scores the party is setupon by a group of bandits disguised as dead men, who manage to make off with a good portion of their illgotten gain. There's no way to recover their goods through official channels, so they'll have to do it themselves.
Throughout their early adventures the party will need to avoid the attention of the heavy handed sheriff hired by the local nobility to quietly and brutally dispose of criminals like themselves.
You get a lot of weird jobs being a gravedigger, but "limo service" is not usually one of them. Still, money is money, and when a bloodsoaked countess offers to pay the bonecart well to defend and transport her coffin across the lands so she can attend a gathering of the great and the ghoulish who are they to say no?
Heliana will eventually approach the party once they've gotten enough shared time , experience, and nightmarish close calls under their belts. She's got some personal matters to attend to, which involve a list of names belonging to an old secret society and a series of graves across the countryside that may contain clues to the locations of some great treasure. Its a bolder job then the crew usually pulls, and will draw unwanted attention, but they can rely on eachother to pull through, right?
Before we begin I’d like to get personal for a moment. About a year ago I decided I was going to step away from this blog as a daily format and only post when I was really inspired to. It was a drastic step, but one I had to make because I was so burnt out and so deep in seasonal depression that I was on the edge of having a breakdown. Ironically, it was this specific adventure arc that did it for me, as I felt pressured to make something for the holiday season but literally couldn't get words on the page.
Taking a break turned out to be the best thing for me. This past year has been great and I’ve actually had enough energy to not only do the projects that are important to me, but to also improve my writing. My partner and I have written a narrative podcast and we’re shopping it around to producers at the moment, I couldn’t be more excited. (BTW if you happen to be in the business, give me a shout)
In many ways it’s very cathartic to come back and finish this adventure. I’d even say it was easy, since I didn’t have the pressure I self imposed because I thought I needed it to write.
I just wanted to say: Take care of yourselves friends. Nurture yourself and good art will follow. I am so thankful to have you all as my audience and I hope you know that no matter how bleak the season gets it’s an absolute joy to write for you.
It’s the coldest night of the year, and despite all the lights on in town no one is home. They have been snatched from their beds and their hearthsides by a sinister song that carries on the wind and has spirited them off to another world. Our heroes must follow, and in order to get their friends and family back they must lay siege to the sorrowful heart of winter itself.
Find out what led to these events, and their outcome, below the cut.
Into: Some weeks before the disappearances begin, the party are sent into the cold to check on a missing mail shipment, only to end up clashing against a group of hobgoblins intent on ruining the holiday season. From there, acts that might be construed as harmless planks escalate into outright malice as it becomes clear the hobs are disappearing townsfolk, working off some sort of list given to them by an unknown villain.
Adventure Hooks:
If you’re running this adventure arc as part of a longer campaign, consider previewing the hob’s lair long before the villains every arrive, an old ruin where fey and witches are said to revel during the new moon. Having a low level party venture out to the ruins for a test of bravery only to return months later as veteran heroes will show them just how far they’ve grown.
From deadly pranks to highway robbery, each act of malicious mischief committed by the goblins is accompanied by a list of names and seemingly innocuous offenses, evidently ripped off a far larger list in possession of their leader. The party are likely to collect more than a few scraps of these over the course of their journeys, and will be surprised when they begin to form together, laying out a series of disappearances that stretches back some years.
The goblins’ leader Klatterbell was having such a nice time in the mortal realm before the party got involved. As a hob-knight in service to an archfey of sorrow and frost, the material plane was practically a balmy vacation destination compared to his patron’s foreboding frozen realm. This led to Klatterbell slacking off on his task of collecting mortals and develop aspirations of becoming a sort of yuletide bandit lord. Aspirations the party can’t help but thwart when they riad Klatterbell’s fortress and set the captives free. The fight can end either two ways, either the party is defeated, captured, and banished through the portal to the frozen realm of the bleakfather, or the party is victorious, and as his last act Klatterbell rips a horn from his belt and plays a haunting and mounrful note that will be picked up by the wind and transformed into a haunting tune.
Returning home from defeating the goblins and rescuing the captives, the party find the town deserted, the strange music unleashed by Klatterbell’s horn echoing in the roar of an approaching winter storm. With their rescued townsfolk in toe, the party will begin to explore the eerily empty town, discovering that the inhabitants seemingly got up from what they were doing and walked into the cold, proceeding enmass to the edge of the settlement where the snow erases their footprints. It’s at that point that the frost giants attack, walking out of the enroaching storm like it was a curtain between worlds. They’re here to mop up any townsfolk where were not swept up by the enchanting song and whisked away to the feywild, and maybe do some looting while they’re at it.
Regardless of how it shakes out, the party will have to assail the realm of the Bleakfather, battling their way through a boreal wind that will seek to rip all warmth and joy from their bodies. The only way of getting through this storm is to think back on the moments of joy and light they’ve experienced through their adventures: the festivals, the little kindnesses, the gifts, the pranks, the games, the songs, their friends: These things will lend them strength when the cold and the dark creep in to swallow them… battling their way up the mountain, to rescue the townsfolk and perhaps defeat the archefey himself.
Future Adventures:
It wasn’t only the party’s neighbors that were taken captive by the bleakfather, scores of innocents from across the realms were taken by the frostgiants as thralls, all living out their indenture over the feywild’s timeless years. Hospitality will hold for the winter, but come spring the heroes will need to set off to find these people a place to live.
With their slaves stolen and their fortress breached, the ice giants will scatter, some returning in months or years later at the head of raiding parties as they too seek a new home. While some may be hesitant to give up their supremacy and seek to subdue the locals wherever they go, others may wish to live only in peace.
Since the beginning, mortal artifice has only had one aim: to stand against the storms and calamities of our world and say “no more”. Sure we get distracted trying to build a better mousetrap, your clockwork armies, your time controlling clocks and the like, but all if it is rooted in the desire to shield those we love from reality’s next ruinous blow.
... and in some cases, to hit back
-Cosimo, chief artificer in service to the Duke of Alanath
Looking for a subtly steampunk maritime adventure? One that begins with a little mystery and a rather daring con, moves on to dungeon delving, subterfuge, pirate raids and ends with a Pacific Rim style clash between a seamonster and a giant robot piloted by the party? You might not have been looking when you started reading but I bet you are now.
Campaign Start: The Duchy of Alanath is a beacon of progress towards the coming age, airships carrying cargo between most major settlements, advanced naval batteries defending the shore from pirates and worse, secret projects up in hidden mountain foundries that will forever tip the balance of power. , but the root of all this industry threatens to come to a grinding halt when the goods exchange in the Harbour of Breeker’s Bay threatens to turn into a riot.
Dispatched by benefactors with concerns about the market, or merely in town and caught up in all the chaos, the party will either have to get to the bottom of what’s caused this gridlock, or figure out a way to turn the crisis to their benefit, without getting taken advantage of by more shady characters looking to do the same. Regardless of where the party end up, they’ll eventually come into the service of a shadowy schemer with unintentionally heroic goals, who will set the party towards all manner of inadvertent good deeds before having them get to the bottom of the conspiracy at the heart of the duchy’s problems.
Early Game:
Preparations to sail out on the evening tide have been completely derailed when the party realizes the crew of the ship they were attempting to board have been slaughtered, and they’ve stumbled upon the killers in the midst of deposing of the bodies. These killers are no mere pirates, but a cult of cuthroats from the deep who’re looking to intimidate local smugglers and pirates into obedience.
Follow a trail of on-land drownings to discover a merfolk priestess cutting her way through the duchy’s exotic animal dealers. Her niece has been kidnapped for a noble’s menagerie, but does rescuing a child really condone such savage methods?
The party’s patron sees a means of getting close to their target, a fretful and oft distracted duke, by hunting a great beast that’s marauding around the borders of his territory. This hunt goes a bit awry when the beast crashes into an ancient ruin hidden beneath the surface of a lake, which the party will need to explore if they want to deliver a killing blow to their target.
Mid Game
A ship of famed treasure hunters has beached itself miles up the coast, the crew scattering to the winds. After delving the wreck and tracking down some of the sailors aboard, the party discover that they defiled an altar to an ancient sea goddess, and now a monster from the depths is due to hit the nearby port any day now.
Break up a fight between two of the Duke’s most trusted advisors, an arcanist and an artificer, and then escort the artificer on an expedition to some far off ruin under mysterious pretenses. This is the party’s best chance to discover what the Duke’s secret project really is.
Foil an assassination attempt against their patron, Racing against time to save his life and track down the source of the attack. Even if the party manage to pull him back from death, they’ll need to seek out a great act of healing or alchemy to permanently undo the damage.
Throughout their adventure, the party will be hounded by the Duke’s all seeing spymaster, a woman with strange powers and an undying loyalty to her liege. Do the party take her out to fulfill their objectives, or can they convince her that their actions are innocent, and earn a powerful ally in the process?
Late Game
Infiltrate a massive, hidden foundry high in the mountains where a titan sized construct is being assembled piece by piece. A kingdom destroying weapon in the wrong hands, the party will face a difficult choice in joining with the duke’s forces to see the construct completed, halting its progress through sabotage, or finding a means of triggering a meltdown in the robot’s arcane engines.
Hitting the self-destruct button on the giant robot might be a bad idea, as the arcane energies that gave the thing both power and defence, once destabilized, will tare a hole through the fabric of reality and give the party many more problems to deal with than just a petty duke and his tin soldier.
Surprise Surprise! That cult that was chopping up sailors back at the start? Turns out they’ve managed to lure a kaiju into working with them, a terrifying beast that’s capable of summoning tsunami-level tidal waves, meaning it’s capable of levelling coastal ports but attacking any settlement connected to the duchy’s central waterways. If the party has been paying attention to the signs of this cult’s escalating threat, they may be able to convince the power players of the campaign to work together to defeat this beast... if not, the party might’ve just sabotaged their primary means of fighting back against it.
Hail and well met, good sir! First off, I must say, you have great skill with the quill, and it gladdens my heart every time I see something new you have penned. While I understand you shall not be writing at the same magnitude as you once did, I hope you are not discouraged entirely, and I look forward to what you may yet put forth. To that end, I have a request, if you should be so kind as to help me with it. Pray, if you could help me design an adventure where in the party must hunt a great foe that is in turn hunting them, I would be ever so grateful!
Be welcome my archaic friend! Though the scrivner might have put up his quill for the moment he's got more than enough tales to page through, though a few might be yellowing on the shelves.
Skirt the edge of the desert to the necropolis of a nomadic people to put down an ill-buried prince.
Compete against other hunters as a dwarven king tries to rid his realm of an all too dangerous lindwyrm
avoid execution by beast by slaying it first, wandering through the mazelike depths of a canyon.
A fey themed horror-hunt where the party are after a shapeshifting owl-hunter with a bad habit of snatching children
Every few decades a generational curse strikes a particular noble family with lycanthropy, the most recent victim claims to have overcome it, but they remain dangerous
Doesnt the Skyscour Clan feel like the sort to follow the Revolation Tyrant Mnyull? Or, rather, ride at his front...
Imagine the days leading up to impact, portals tearing onto unsuspecting planets, ships descending from the silver void, legions of untold number raiding whole wildspaces.
Then they suddenly scatter, with or without their prize, the star vikings and astral war boys clear out as if smoked like bees.
Only days, if even that, are given to the raided few before a cosmic armageddon makes impact.
Campaign: Shore of the Silver Sea
As this eagle eyed reader mentioned, there’s been a trend in my writing over the past few months, seemingly unconnected occurrences that herald something great and cosmic, the emergence of a new campaign to launch your parties from the beach of the mundane into the vast and wondrous depths of the astral sea.
Our Story begins as many do, in the aftermath of a great storm: With the party having only a few nights past taken shelter in a portside tavern known as the Long Walk, waiting out the rain and the wind in the traditional manner: sitting by the hearth with the other patrons as they listen to the old salts spin yarns. One of those patrons was fellow of the royal botany society, who was more than happy to hire the party on as guides and escorts as he explores and documents the flora of the coast. This intrepid ( if a bit tepid) expedition rapidly heats up as the party stumble across a hidden cove and the fresh wrecks of two ships, one civilian, one royal navy, cast far from the sea and left without survivors.
This discovery leads the party to getting caught up in a silent tug-of-war between the navy and a secretive faction of smugglers, with one wrong decision ( likely them filling their packs with plundered goods) ending the party up on the wrong side of the law. On their way back to town however, the party watch as a light falls from the sky over the barony, forever changing their fates as they return to a realm that’s been touched by the stars.
Early Game
One of the tall tales told by the sailors at the Long Walk was of a marauding reaver king who invoked the ire of the sea god, who in turn brought down a wave so mighty that it smashed the reaver’s fleet to splinters and buried him in the rubble of his own castle. Buried so they say.. along with all the treasure he had taken from raiding richer ports... and while the story is likely exaggerated... it wouldn’t hurt to go take a look, would it?
Strange rumours trickle in from the hinterlands, odd folk on the roads, sightings of unnatural animals, talk of a cave where whispers of the past and imagined tomorrows dance. All of these threads will lead the party to a meeting with a potential mentor, an old lighthouse keeper who holds the mystery of the stars and stands against the cold cruelty of the void. Perhaps he can shed some illumination on the party’s current struggles
The star’s falling has caused chaos in the region’s capital: an arson spree, the baroness forcefully conscripting oracles, sightings of a dragon out in the wilderness. Trekking along with a professional hunter, the party discover that they are not on the tale of some feral drake looking to move into new territory, but a full dragon who seems to be purposefully searching the region with the help of a masked rider.
As it turns out, the dragon and rider are travellers from the astral sea, pilgrims following an omen from the goddess of guidance and starlight. They followed the star across worlds until it landed in the barony, and was eventually misplaced by a hapless young man rounded up by the baroness’s agents shortly after becoming an accidental oracle and asking the party for help earlier on their travels. Reuniting the star with its chosen seekers grants the party a vision of the future, of an attack they will not have time to avert.
Mid Game
Hollowed out by eons of immortality and war, a clan of astral elves has ripped open a portal and begun raiding the original port city the party started their adventure in, snapping up goods and taking hostages. Here is a decision point: should the party rush to save the innocents before help can be raised, they will be overwhelmed, taken captive and hauled away to the raider’s stronghold. Should they rally their new allies and arrive in force, they will be too late, and will have to seek out another means of travelling beyond the reaches of the waking world.
In the latter option, the party will find themselves portalling to Lydestrum, a city of glass floating in an eternal gyre of mist and wind, and the hub of their outerworld adventures. Here they might begin their search for the pirates by seeking rumors at the alien filled docks, make an alliance with local powers by helping to wrangle some storm-tossed architecutre, or simply sign on to a spelljammer ship and begin to learn their space-legs.
The bright maiden Urania is not the only goddess at work among the stars, for as the party explore the city they hear the name and see the handiwork of Nyx, Mother of Primordial Darkness. Catching a night blessed thief is enough to earn the party Nyx’s attention, who decides to rope the party into a little wager involving her astronomic counterpart and the disaperance of a sacred lantern before an imporatant voyage.
After meeting an artisan who can make marvelous weapons out of light, the party end up getting snared in local politics after this new friend is kidnapped from their shop. The trail leads them into conflict with blackmarket dealers from the plane of exiles and getting mixed up with the glass city’s political powers.
Tangling with the astral sea’s criminal element may have just paid off, as the party have managed to snag themsleves a star-chart pointing to what just might be the haul of a lifetime: The long abandoned manor of an archmage hidden in the vastness of the silver sea. What they find instead is a labyrinth of nightmare and splendour and fungus, which just might hold power and secrets that will aid them as the campaign closes.
One of the expeditions sailing out of the star port has its aim on discovering the much speculated origin of an eerie signal coming from a haunted nebula. As luck would have it, this happens to be a regional base of the elven pirates who attacked the party’s homeworld, who destroy the ship they’re travelling on, capture their companions, and leave the party stranded in the frigid barrens of a meteor field. Searching for shelter, they find the origin of the signal: the partial wreck of a long abandoned jammership still attempting to deliver its message. With a little elbow grease and some ghostly aid, the party can take this ship as their own, bring vengeance against he pirates, and begin hunting for the villains who set this all in motion.
Late Game
The party’s enemies are not simply slavers and pirates, they are recent converts to the following of Mnyull the revelation tyrant, a god of interplanetary conquest. He has tasked the rabid immortals with the reunification of their long scattered army, and the reactivation of the ancient weapon they were once tasked with guarding, a labour to which many including the party’s old friends have been put to work. If Mynull’s plan comes to completion, whole systems will be forced to submit, and if the party can bring evidence of this to their allies in Lydestrum, they may just have a chance to fight the pirate fleet on equal terms.
Fighting an army is one thing, defeating a god is another, and so the party are counselled to seek out the great celestial sage who makes weapons at the star-goddess’s behest. Therein the party must undertake a sea-spanning quest to gather the materials necessary to withstand their struggle: Venturing into shadowed vaults within the core of a moon-sized forge, seeking out the most dangerous and beautiful of lights at the edge of known space.
The Revelation Tyrant cares nothing for the fate of his pawns, merely that victory is achieved in his name, and so has planted the same vision of supremacy into the Skyscour elves as he did the leaders of Lydestrum. The idea of a weapon that could strike far away worlds, tribute and glory delivered by subjugated neighbours, a threat to that glory by a challenger from afar and the need to strike before that challenge is made. No matter who wins the battle, Mnyull benefits from the outcome, as the leader of the victorious force will be struck by further visions and ascend as the Tyrant’s physical avatar.
The Party will be hunted, possibly by former allies, into the depths of wildspace, unable to return home lest they single out their humble world as a target for the weapon. In that lonely and desperate moment the goddess will appear to them: Nyx, merciful but resigned will offer them a shroud, a means of hiding their world from Mnyull’s sight and sparing themselves the conquest others will doubtlessly suffer provided they give up sailing the astral sea forever. Bright Urania offers them a chance, a divinely ordained heading to slip back around their pursuers, back past the fleet they helped to provision and the weapon they ensured would be completed, and right to the foot of the tyrant’s throne. It is only a chance though, no guarantee they can pull it off without loss and sacrifice, no guarantee that they will win in the end.
We all know what the party will choose, Nyx does too, and when the heroes jet off to go on their suicide mission they’ll do so with the ancient goddess working from the shadows to turn aside the eyes of wary sentries. She’s had a cold, dark vault beyond the boundaries of reality picked out for Mnyull for quite some time. She just needed him to make the mistake of incarnating himself in one place so she could stick him in there all at once.
Taking place in a snowy land ruled by faith and riven with injustice, this campaign is a chivalric tale about a group of people who find themselves with the power to change a broken system just as that very same system crashes down around their heads.
Our setting is the Abladed Lands, union of small crusader kingdoms carved out of pagan wilderness by a number of zealous holy orders who used their devotion to the goddess of civilization as an excuse to claim territory for themselves and force the native inhabitants of that land into serfdom.
More than a century since this conquest, The Abladed lands have grown increasingly unstable as the last of these holy orders tighten their grip on a rebellious populace, all while the bishop who ostensibly governs these patchwork territories seeks an ancient power that will let him rule uncontested.
Onto this stage stumbles our heroes, travellers who’ve stopped off in a grand cathedral located in the high wilderness on their way to whatever business they once had. After doing a favour for one of the priests and delving a series of catacombs, the group ends up involved in a murder mystery that brings the tensions of the region to light. From there, with their reputations earned, it’s just a matter of where the party wants to go next:
To Barbaric Frontier of Deolimar, where an aging warlord uses a hunt against a marauding beast to try and forestall the divine reckoning of his crimes.
To Wartorn Jaatisbaine, where rebelling peasants clash against squabbling nobles, and roving gangs of bandits maraud across the land.
To the Capital of Volskolt, rich in trade an opportunity, only to be waylaid by a marauding frost giant and a waylaid huntress making her last stand
Out to the Rimebough Forest where the pagans and rebels hide, a holy order using the disappearance of a royal heir to launch an inquisition against them.
Wherever the party go they will accrue glory and upset the tenuous order imposed by zealots, slowly earning the favour of both the people and perhaps earning themselves status as champions of the realm. Players might even earn the favour of the ancient spirits of the land, or the goddess of order herself, who would see this oppressive structure broken down and rebuilt by more dependable hands.
Such blasphemy and rebellion will not be tolerated by the Bishop Prince of Jaatisbaine, who will unleash an army of long buried horrors in the hopes of purifying the Ablated lands and securing his power. To Defeat him, the party will need to martial their allies, and perhaps even venture to the fey besieged court of the last pagan king, and then to the furthest north to the mythical city of the aurora in order to defeat the Ancient threat unleashed by the Bishop’s pride.
If you'd be so kind, may I request a sword and sorcery styled romp? Ancient forbidden magics, treasure, evil cults, etc~ I plan on trying this out for a potential upcoming session
Mini Campaign: The Bastard's Wish
Whether it ends in triumph or ruin, it’s of no doubt the bards will sing of this tale till the end of their days.
Our story begins in a wholesome and peaceful kingdom, entertaining an embassy from a neighboring land to discuss terms of trade and potential alliance. The party play as significant figures (champions, courtiers head knights, children of ruling monarchs) who have been enlisted in recent years by a knindly wizard known as Edarth the Enduring to use their influence to mend the rift between these two quarreling nations. These are fine days full of promise for a brighter future, at least until a shadow comes creeping in: an army of marauders led by Malzaat Felhand, a warlord of the forsaken lands who has decided today of all days to lay siege to the party’s home.
The warlord has taken the kingdom’s defenders unaware by opening a hellmouth on the outskirts of a nearby village, marching his soldiers through this living portal of fire and fangs to march on the fortress where the embassy was taking place. Malzaat’s goal? the Wizard Edarth and the staff of ancient power he has guarded since the fall of the previous age, which he hopes to turn to some foul and disastrous purpose. The party rallies, but with innocents and nobles to protect and only a small garrison to support them they are stretched too thin to prevent the warlord from cutting down the wizard and retrieving his prize.
A horn sounds and the marauders retreat carrying off what valuables and hostages they can, tired and blooded the party creep through the wreckage to find a number of their friends and loved ones slain, and their mentor soon to join them. In his dying moments, Edarth entrusts the party to seek out Malzaat and retrieve his staff, break it if need be, for the power it commands could lay waste to kingdoms or let the warlord set himself up as a tyrant. With this last request and a few whispered words of goodbye, the wizard sets the party to their quest, and leaves the fate of their homeland in their hands.
Adventure Hooks:
To travel to the forsaken lands, the party must venture out past the outskirts of their kingdom, over a haunted mountainside, and through a swamp of ancient magics, all the while overcoming the hazards of the wilderness and the supernatural dangers lurking in their path.
The closer they get to Malzaat’s home the more they must contend with his spies and agents: desperate souls who would seek a reward from the warlord, or beasts bewitched by him to serve as his eyes. Being discovered in their task means having Malzaat throw more obstacles at them through more hellmouths, just marauders at first but later various monsters dredged up from the depths of the swamp or raised from the pits of hell.
Throughout their travels the heroes begin to receive visions of a youth beset by phantasmal demons, thrashing as one would in a nightmare and calling out for aid. Through dreams and vision pools, the youth calls out to the heroes, giving them advice on where they must go, and cryptic hints to overcome the challenges they must face. This youth must be one of the captives taken by the marauders, using some psychic gift to reach out to the heroes for aid.
Setup: Malzaat’s mother was once the general of a great kingdom, exiled to the forsaken lands along with her loyalists after committing unspeakable cruelties in an attempt to win the war she’d been tasked with fighting. Filled with wrath and regret over her apparent “betrayal”, her darkening soul attracted the attention of a demon of the wastes, who offered the fallen general power enough to carve out her own little kingdom, if only she would do so in his name.
Neither expected this compact to eventually become a dalliance, or the birth of a half-fiendish child to follow, but between them the two had a cruel, villainous sort of love that seemed suited for the forsaken lands they made their home in.
Their child however did not have such a happy existence, brought up by his mother to glorify strength and hate weakness, the young Malzaat grew to detest his mortal half, wishing he could be a full fiend like his immortal and oft-absent father. It took decades for him to gather power, first serving as his mother’s right hand as the captain of the marauders her loyalists had become, then leading them himself after her death. With a small army at his beck and call, Malzaat roved far and wide, gathering more and more power but always searching for a means to overcome his mortality.
His attempts were less than successful, culminating in a ritual bastardized from blood-stained scrolls he’d stolen while looting a temple. Malzaat did manage to cleave his mortal essence from himself but the end result left him as a half-there thing, wraithlike form and malicious intent. Diminished but unwilling to return to mortality, Malzaat set about looking for a means of true transcendence, which eventually led him to a marvelous palace where dreams becomes take physical form, at least within its illusion choked grounds. Using Edarth’s staff, the warlord hopes to turn these phantasms tangeable, to make his idealized, all powerful fiendish body a reality even if he has to break a part of the world to do it.
Should Malzaat’s plan succeed, it’s not only an incarnated greater demon the realms will need to worry about. With staff in hand and possessing the ability to bring his imaginings to life, the warlord would create ever more dangerous weapons and warriors until he ruled all the realms or shattered reality under his feet. This is a scenario the heroes must avert at all cost.
Challenges & Complications
If they anger him enough, Malzaat will ride out to challenge the party himself, potentially opening a hellmouth and stranding them in some desolate realm buying himself time as he forces them to fight their way back to the mortal world. The tide may turn however and as heroes manage to cut the villain down, only to see his wraithlike form begin to recorperate over a matter of minutes, angrier than before, seemingly unkillable. This turns any confrontation with the half-fiend into a game of keepaway, putting as many barriers and as much distance as possible between them and the murderous shade as possible before they manage to tire.
Malzaat’s mortal essence didn’t just disappear, as the ritual he used was originally intended as a means of excorissm fiendish influence from a person’s body. And so there is a boy, perhaps thirteen years old, the embodiment of all Malzaat’s weakness, frailty, innocence, and anything else the warlord hated about himself. The half-fiend would have long disposed of him, save for the fact that any harm done to the youth is felt by his wraithlike form, leading him to fear that should the boy die, his blackened soul would depart right along with him. The boy, Taz, sleeps, not having strength to wake save for small periods, but as he does so his mind blends with the dreaming essence of the palace that is his prison, allowing him to reach out into the unconscious minds of others, growing clearer as they near the palace itself. He tries to warn the heroes of Malzaat’s seeming immortality, and tells them of a secret weapon hidden within the warlord’s fortress that they can use do permanently defeat him. ...... It turns out selflessness is one of those qualities Malzaat left with his better half, as Taz is aware that his death might be the only means of stopping his other-self’s wicked plans. He’ll keep the party in the dark for as long as possible until they manage to fight or sneak their way to his chamber, at which point he’ll explain the grim necessity that will allow them to save all the realms without having to fight Malzaat directly.
Far older than he seemed, the wizard Edarth was once a student of a titan named Tourmal, from whom he inherited his staff after the giant was slain by another. Tourmal’s other students took a far darker path, becoming a coven of blood-mad oracles that the party will doubtlessly stumble over the course of their quest. Should the coven learn of their mission ( and why wouldn’t they, they’re oracles after all), they’ll offer to provide insight to the party provided they swear a binding oath to give the staff over to them once they’ve retrieved it. They’ll also warn them about a bit of subterfuge on the old wizard’s part: Breaking the staff will unleash its power, annihilating the one who did it as well as anyone standing nearby. Wouldn’t such a dangerous object be better out of the hands of the ignorant, and in the hands of those who’s only goal is to look further and further into the future?
Hello! I absolutely love your stuff, I've definitely gotten so many good ideas from you, and now I'm gonna ask pick your brain for another amazing idea.
I DM, and am in the planning, prologue stages for a homebrew campaign. One of my players grew up on a farm, and their reason for adventuring is that their homeland's crops are dying. The land is sour, animals are starving, the whole shebang. What could be a cool cause of this blight?
Thanks again, love your stuff! 💛
Hilariously I got this message just after I’d finished queuing up a pair of adventures dealing with a widescale agricultural blight, symbolized by the appearance of twisted black trees that produce no leaves or fruit and seem to well up from deep within the earth. So without Further ado, let me present:
The Withertide adventure Arc
In The Haunting At Bitterheath the party is introduced to a land left abandoned after folk have their livelihoods ruined by dying crops, now inhabited by bandits, witches, and the heir of a mining magnate who’s looking to hire the party on.
In The Cankerwood House the party delve deep into the earth following a mine collapse, discovering that the black trees are all infact the roots of the same plant, sprouting from the foundations of a twisted and impossible mansion occupying a lightness cavern far below the surface.
There’s hauntings, witches, and the tragedy of a fairy-deal gone rotten. If I were including this in your campaign, rather than have your character actually be FROM the Bitterheath ( where the blight is generations old) I’d say the blight just recently sprung up in their territory, tens of miles away from where it originated. Journeying to the Heath would give them a grim preview of what’s going to happen to their home, and gives them a reason to join up with the mining heir to use their resources to get to the bottom of things.
As a bonus, this arc is a great way to introduce Zuggtmoy, Demon Queen of Despair and Decay as a potential reoccurring threat to your campaign, potentially even as an archvillain
