The ranger can't make it to our game, halting the current quest-line.
Here is the "filler" plot seed I am working with instead... the ol' party snatcher.
As the PC's make camp, the ranger leaves to forage for food. Party stays back, as they have been doing (for various reasons) only to find that the ranger doesn't return.
Its soft ground so tracks won't be TOO terribly hard to track.
The idea is that the ranger has been taken, and they will need to investigate...
Where do I go from here?
Why was he taken? For What motivation?
I'd like to do something horror themed, or just creepy. maybe as they are looking for him, they find a haunted mansion, that he is for some reason in the basement of? or something... idrk.
Here is what makes it tough... we re-rolled last week, so everyone is first level atm.
Also, we have some pretty new players so don't be afraid to suggest the cliche. :)
IF I do end up running a mystery style adventure,
There is rest stop / bunkhouse nearby. The party would be camped there, but arrived at nightfall, and find the gate pulled shut until morning.
(My excuse to force the ranger to go forage.)
This may provide some opportunity for the PC's to ask around for any strange happenings.
Also, this could provide for a decent reason that the gates would be shut at night in the first place.
My issue is that I don't know "what" they would be investigating.
Anyone?
Just throw out whatever you got.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Monsters and difficulty will really depend on your party classes and numbers, adjust as needed.
Party arrives at an old inn, owner ushers them inside. It is just the owner, and one dark brooding guest. He says his food shipment is coming at first light, but the beds are ready. He says there are plenty of fruit trees and abundant game outside. Ranger goes to forage (bam, trap, taken by necromancer).
Party goes to bed, when they awake they find the place is in shambles (years old), the owner is missing, their coins are behind the counter...
Maybe a caster can summon forth he tortured ghost forced to aid the necromancer, unable to pass on...
This is a trap set up by a necromancer for collecting travellers. He wants to do magical experiments. Track to his lair (a ghost town overgrown over the years), have zombies/skeletons (unbound) in various houses as un-living traps. They can find his "home" an old antiques shop (with basement), it is infested with vermin (swarms maybe?).
They can listen through thin walls as the necromancer argues with an older female (cliche!), he explains how he is merely causing excruciating pain to the ranger, but not "Damaging the vessel", merely "Softening up his spirit".
Basement can have a maze of rooms (ruined by roots?), some corpses on chains, cages with zombies and dead animals (disease checks?), and jump scares as they open storage closets/dead end rooms.
Final fight is a necromancer and his (wait for it) deceased mother! He desires to bring her back, but he has failed so far at putting her into a new vessel (she is driving him crazy!). He divides his attention (and minions) between defending his new vessel, and defending her corpse, (destroying her ends the voices and releases him? or makes him snap completely and get reckless?). Fight ends, rescue ranger, grateful spirits tell how they were slaughtered by the mother, had her hanged, then he went insane and killed the few remaining. Now the spirits can rest (yay).
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
They find the body of the Ranger, dead, and a trail leading away. Cue shock and outrage! (Might want to text the Ranger player and let him know what you're planning, lest one of your players text him that you killed his PC and avoidable drama / misunderstanding hijinks ensue!)
His gear appears to have been pillaged, and, if they think to examine the means of his death, the wounds are consistent with whatever sort of weapons he carried.
The blood trail leads to a cave in which they will find signs that some wounded beast dragged itself here to hole up, the Ranger having apparently gotten some good hits before falling. An encounter with scavenger animals that have also followed the blood trail ensues (wolves, jackals, giant vultures, some sort of vermin, whatever suits the area).
Entering the cave to get revenge (and / or recover their companion's gear, depending on their motivation), the PCs finally discover their Ranger companion, having retreated here and then passed out after getting in a fight with a Doppleganger that assumed his form, and then died (the body they discovered).
(If he's got an animal companion, he might be unconscious and have been dragged here by said companion, which is guarding his body, which has stabilized and is in no danger, although the party might have to finesse their way past the angry animal companion to reach their friend, as the beastie is not allowing anyone close...)
you guys make me realize how bad of a GM I have become...
really great job guys! Thank you!
Moderator? please close this thread. game over. case closed. issue solved.
:D
(jk tho, keep it coming, in case others like these plots)
|
|
Random followup, now that I've had time to sleep on it.
Doesn't have to be a Doppleganger, specifically. The Ranger corpse could be half-formed and twisted (giving the impression that something was deforming/mutating/transforming him when it killed him, when actually it's more like that scene from John Carpenter's Thing movie, where people find a corpse of an alien that was frozen halfway through attempting to shapeshift into a person to impersonate them). Some sort of Lovecraftian ooze-beastie could be the culprit, dropping on a creature and paralyzing it with Dex-damaging venom, and then slowly turning into it (and then devouring it?). It died before the action was complete, and the Ranger got away before the Dex damage finished paralyzing him.
This also might help keep the Ranger alive, since he'll have positive hit points (if no Dex), and not be subject to a friendly fire insta-kill if someone in the party does something bone-headed like chuck alchemist's fire near his incapacitated body during whatever final encounter is to occur. (Which sounds *exactly* like something my players would do...)
The Ranger player, when he returns, can be messed with as well, as you plant hints that the shapeshifter laid some sort of egg inside him, or he could have odd 'alien dreams' that suggest that the deformed 'monster corpse' his friends found might really have been the body of their friend, and that he might indeed be the shapeshifting ooze-alien, having taken on not only the form, but also *the memories* of the person it killed...
(All just side-effects of the neurotoxin, surely! Especially since the player probably didn't sign up to play a very confused monster that thinks it is his original character!)