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This is a thread for entrants into the W3 open call contest to share ideas and comment on one another's submissions, including help with English spelling & grammar (esp. since some very cool Paizo adventures have been written by folks like Tito Leahi for whom English is a second language).
The thread contains spoilers in that reading it will expose you to the ideas of folks who are also entering the contest. If you want to be sure that everything in your submission is your own idea, read no further! Likewise, if you don't want anyone else using one of your ideas, don't post here. For my part, I believe that no ideas are truly original, and that the best writers are the most inspired pilferers and recyclers: also, one of the things I admire most about the canon of Paizo writers is their open presence on these boards, so I want to emulate them in this way as others!
The thread also contains spoilers in the hopeful sense that if the published module is one that was workshopped here, reading this might give away vital plot points :)
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Here are some design ideas:
1) Three-way races are cool. Nick Logue's Age of Worms AP entry used a classic triangle where the players had to race another team to be the first to raid a monster's lair. I'm thinking about putting a twist on this, where the PCs are chasing a party of unscrupulous higher-level adventurers who have stolen a relic from the town armory. This black-hat party isn't running away from the PCs, though - they're running after a monster who is the rightful owner of the relic, barred from entering the village to reclaim it but able to jump the black-hats once they got into the mountains. The PCs will blunder into the ambushes the monster sets for the other party, but it is potentially their ally. The black-hats will try to talk the PCs into joining forces against the monster, but they are ultimately the PC's enemies.
2) The new monster's lair should be the goal of the race. Designing a monster is easy: making players care about it is hard, so a plunge deeper & deeper into its habitat where each obstacle lets you game out some dangerous aspect of their ecology is irresistable. I'm thinking about making the monster a ruin-weaver, a race of intelligent spiders who obsessively build cliff dwellings that other core monsters move into. I love that scene in one of Jackie Chan's movies where a police car chases a robber's through a hillside shantytown, causing an urban avalanche. And one of the coolest Erol Otus illustrations is a cross-section of a dungeon crawling with monsters in the ceiling & beneath the floor. So if the ruin-weaver structures are extremely flimsy, even 4th level PC can chop their way through the walls, and heavy-armor types are likely to find the floor giving way underneath them, dropping them into the living rooms of various critters who are just trying to get along. It'd be fun to put some kind of low-maneuverability, high thrust flying device into the module, like the scene in Minority Report where they jet-pack in & out of an apartment's kitchen.
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Here's another design idea:
The progress of the race should be obvious to the players. My Age of Worms party liked that there was a sense of urgency in the LoLR race, but not knowing whether we had minutes or days to work with meant that we couldn't make strategic decisions like whether to rest in-character and had to think about it in metagame terms instead. I thought of making the stolen item so big and/or shiny that PCs could always see how far it was and whether they were gaining or losing ground. It'd also be fun to give them some kind of divination item, with one of the obstacles being a ruse to throw the divination off-track.
Ha. I just sent mine in. Don't really know what I can add to the discussion. Mine's a pretty simple suggestion - with the PCs being hunted, while they chase the culprit.
Which is always fun.
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Ok so get this, Azuretown is a city in Minkai, and there's a gem there that is protecting a tear in the fabric of reality!
To make matters worse there's a lich and a goblin army led by a guy in a red cloak marching on the city! Not to mention the psycho ex-Paladin trying to kill the leader of the city...this sounds familiar somehow...
Ok so get this, Azuretown is a city in Minkai, and there's a gem there that is protecting a tear in the fabric of reality!
To make matters worse there's a lich and a goblin army led by a guy in a red cloak marching on the city! Not to mention the psycho ex-Paladin trying to kill the leader of the city...this sounds familiar somehow...
I like it, lol
*And unlike the WotC guidelines for submission, Paizo didn't specify not to plagiarize! Well, that may have been an unspoken rule, lol
I like the chase idea but am getting ready to send mine in. It involves hags. :D
RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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I'm not planning to send in an entry, so feel free to steal my ideas as much as you want ;)
I was thinking: the title of the module is "Flight of the Red Raven." The obvious conclusion is that the object that the PCs are chasing after is called the Red Raven. But what if that isn't the case?
I was thinking of making the Red Raven something like the divinatory item tav_behemoth mentioned. Perhaps the Red Raven is even the new monster; some sort of scaled-down version of a phoenix that is also hunting the item. The PCs would be able to see it flying above the thieves, which would both let them know how far behind they are and make it possible to track them.
Of course, once the thieves realize this, they'll head for cover. At that point, maybe the PCs team up with the Red Raven or something of that nature.
What does everyone think a "good distance away" means?
5 days? 10 days? Longer?
Well, the only other W series module we have to compare to is W1, which gave the PCs up to 60 days to clear the Vale and build the road.
So I'm assuming at least 2-3 weeks, probably closer to a month, at least on foot, for my query.
Of course, this assumes detours due to terrain and obstacles. Flying time would probably be a couple days.
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Flying time would probably be a couple days.
That raises an important design issue. How do you keep the players from just magicking their way past the race? Having the adventure be for 4th level characters isn't a guarantee that, if you make it clear that they have 3 weeks to get there*, they won't spend 2 weeks and six days mugging commoners for money to buy a scroll of teleport / overland flight / throw-a-monkey-wrench-in-the-works?
(* Even if it's not clear where the PCs are going or exactly how long they have, the decision "do we have time to rest and re-spell?" is so tactically important in 3E that I think you have to give the players some kind of in-game information on which to make that decision.)
Oh, and here's another vitally important question that's not one of the five you're asked to answer directly:
Why is "Flight of the Red Raven" the best of all possible titles for your proposed adventure?
Obvious answers are that a "scarlet avian scavenger" (as the awesome Mr. Jeremy Walker put it) is the precious object that the PCs are chasing, or the agent that is running away with that object. I'm thinking about trying to work out a spin where "Flight of the Red Raven" is a well-known song or poem that the players realize secretly contains the solution to the adventure.
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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A couple of my building blocks:
The PC's have to hurry up and catch the thief before the snows make tracking impossible. So, the thief has to be physically tracked. Why don't divination spells (find the path and the like) work?
And the thief can't be flying, because snow wouldn't necessarily mess up any tracks that he would have left in the air.
My submission has the PC's borrowing an enchanted flying wagon christened the "Red Raven". There'll be a trade-off: high pursuit is faster, but ground movement provokes less attention from the superstitious village folk, and makes tracking easier.
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A couple of my building blocks:
The PC's have to hurry up and catch the thief before the snows make tracking impossible. So, the thief has to be physically tracked. Why don't divination spells (find the path and the like) work?
Relying on physical tracking also makes the Ranger class pretty much mandatory, which is generally a bad idea since it's not even one of the core 4.
Relying on physical tracking also makes the Ranger class pretty much mandatory, which is generally a bad idea since it's not even one of the core 4.A couple of my building blocks:
The PC's have to hurry up and catch the thief before the snows make tracking impossible. So, the thief has to be physically tracked. Why don't divination spells (find the path and the like) work?
Well, there are ways around that... not convenient, but there are ways. The PCs could hire an NPC tracker, or use animals to track by scent. (Even if the party doesn't have a Ranger, they very well might have someone with a familiar/animal companion that could help out, or someone with handle animal who could use bloodhounds, etc)
You can also use Survival to track without the Track feat. You won't be very good, and are screwed if the track DC is over 10... but that means you can track a single person across soft ground as long as you kept no more than 24 hours behind them. Which would put an interesting impetus on the party, if they had to keep on pushing to gain ground so they didn't lose the trail.
As to divination spells... well, its for 4th level characters, so anything other than 1st and 2nd level SRD spells are outside of what the PCs can be assumed to have access to. Which means that [i]Find the Path[i] is out I think.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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It's not just the spells the PC's are assumed to be able to access. If the community of Azurestone has any higher-level casters, they too will need to rely on physical tracking. One way to do that is by narrowing the focus of Azurestone; for example, making it a monestery.
I'm trying to arrange things so that the culprit knows that he can't be tracked magically. But he isn't aware that he's being pursued, either.
I decided the Red Raven was a bird control ring. Normally used to encourage songbirds in the spring festival, in the showdown it'll be used to control blackbirds and worse.
Definitely riffing off "The Birds" by Hitchcock, though I'd probably throw a moral conundrum in the final product. Have someone strong but too far away to really fight encountered early in the adventure, and then as a coda, have them run across him again, this time with the powerful magic ring in hand. Is it payback time? What if the enemy was just defending his territory?
Mmm, love stuff like that.
hmmm too late for me to flesh this one out so I will stick it out here for someone with more time.
Azurestone is like Lexington, KY and the Red Raven is a triple-crown-type thoroughbred that is answering the call of the wild.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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I, for one, would love if, after this process is finished, the PAIZO folks would take a few of the unchosen submissions and show us what can get a prospectus red-flagged. Which is to ask, in their opinion, what makes a good module design, and what kinds of problems are likely unfixable?
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I, for one, would love if, after this process is finished, the PAIZO folks would take a few of the unchosen submissions and show us what can get a prospectus red-flagged. Which is to ask, in their opinion, what makes a good module design, and what kinds of problems are likely unfixable?
I'd like to see this, too. Examples of just-this-close-to-making-it, particularly.
This is off topic, I know, but I have some questions about the Item Cards. I just ordered a whole pile of them with my store credit, mostly because of the great reviews they have gotten, but also because I run a group for some of my Grade 6 students and I think the visual representation of their treasures would be fantastic.
I wonder, though. How versatile is the blank space on the back. Is it possible to erase what is on the back without wrecking the card? Can you use pencil on them? I don't want to have to keep the same stats all the time, I'd like to change them from year to year.
Can anyone help me with this information?
Creative Director
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I wonder, though. How versatile is the blank space on the back. Is it possible to erase what is on the back without wrecking the card? Can you use pencil on them? I don't want to have to keep the same stats all the time, I'd like to change them from year to year.
Can anyone help me with this information?
In my home campaign, I've had little trouble using pencil on the card backs, erasing, then rewriting. It helps if you don't press SUPER hard, of course—I didn't write any different than I would on any ohter surface though, and it worked well enough.
Once erased, the card back wasn't mint any more, of course, but it's still totally usable and reusable.
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I'd like to see this, too. Examples of just-this-close-to-making-it, particularly.
Me too.
Now that I've submitted my idea I shall share a bit.
I like games where there's a bit of political intrigue going on. In my module the Red Raven is a priceless statuette that was a gift from the local Dwarven community to the adventurer who founded Azurestone after helping the Dwarves get rid of a demon cult acting in the area.
A century later though there've been problems with the dwarves, competition over mines has turned into violence and so the Baroness (descendant of the adventurer) was going to give them back the statuette as a peace offering and begin open negotiations with them. Until the statuette was stolen. Now it's up to the PCs to find the statuette and deal with the revived Demon Cult.
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Director of Narrative
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I'm doing one about a candy apple red 1977 Trans Am that was boosted from this dude's trailer outside of Twin Falls. See, the fella just won four tickets on the radio to an Def Leppard concert in Spokane and rushes out of the house to pick up his best bud when he notices that his mean machine, the Red Raven, is gone. Next to the burn out marks in the gravel he spots one of his ex-girlfriend's AA tokens and knows that she took his ride to sell it to a pool shark in Billings. So the guy gathers all sorts of colorful characters from the trailer park and they head out in Scooter's tow truck to reclaim his cherry muscle car and make it to the show in time. The reward...the other three tickets and a kick ass time rockin' out, drinkin' some brews and checkin' out tha ladies.
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This is off topic, I know, but I have some questions about the Item Cards. I just ordered a whole pile of them with my store credit, mostly because of the great reviews they have gotten, but also because I run a group for some of my Grade 6 students and I think the visual representation of their treasures would be fantastic.
I wonder, though. How versatile is the blank space on the back. Is it possible to erase what is on the back without wrecking the card? Can you use pencil on them? I don't want to have to keep the same stats all the time, I'd like to change them from year to year.
Can anyone help me with this information?
A piece of clear packing tape over the area and a superfine-tip Staedtler Lumocolor waterproof pen. The white alcohol pen they make is perfect for erasing.
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Daigle, that sounds sweet, especially when the PCs show up at the concert with their broadswords and leather armor and are revered as rock gods but are attacked by the police and wind up looting their "magic weapons"!
I inherited a white box OD&D set that has an early issue of the DUNGEONEER fanzine with a Paul Jaquays adventure that's old-school fantasy through & through until you find that the wizard at the bottom of the dungeon has a December 1978 issue of Playboy under his bed, and a secret door that leads to the inside of a smokestack in Los Angeles. In reading the books cited in Appendix N of the original DMG, I was suprised to see how few of them are what we consider "pure" fantasy nowadays, without SF elements.
A piece of clear packing tape over the area and a superfine-tip Staedtler Lumocolor waterproof pen. The white alcohol pen they make is perfect for erasing.This is off topic, I know, but I have some questions about the Item Cards. I just ordered a whole pile of them with my store credit, mostly because of the great reviews they have gotten, but also because I run a group for some of my Grade 6 students and I think the visual representation of their treasures would be fantastic.
I wonder, though. How versatile is the blank space on the back. Is it possible to erase what is on the back without wrecking the card? Can you use pencil on them? I don't want to have to keep the same stats all the time, I'd like to change them from year to year.
Can anyone help me with this information?
I put mine in clear cardsleeves, the type you can buy for any CCG (Collectible Card Game) like Magic, Pokemon, etc.
You can write on both sides, and if it gets wrecked... oh well, its like $5 for a pack of 50.
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A piece of clear packing tape over the area and a superfine-tip Staedtler Lumocolor waterproof pen. The white alcohol pen they make is perfect for erasing.This is off topic, I know, but I have some questions about the Item Cards. I just ordered a whole pile of them with my store credit, mostly because of the great reviews they have gotten, but also because I run a group for some of my Grade 6 students and I think the visual representation of their treasures would be fantastic.
I wonder, though. How versatile is the blank space on the back. Is it possible to erase what is on the back without wrecking the card? Can you use pencil on them? I don't want to have to keep the same stats all the time, I'd like to change them from year to year.
Can anyone help me with this information?
I put mine in clear cardsleeves, the type you can buy for any CCG (Collectible Card Game) like Magic, Pokemon, etc.
You can write on both sides, and if it gets wrecked... oh well, its like $5 for a pack of 50.
That's an awesome idea! I've bought CoC CCG individual cards in singles sleeves before, but never thought to use the sleeves for the Items Cards. Great idea.
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Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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I'm doing one about a candy apple red 1977 Trans Am that was boosted from this dude's trailer outside of Twin Falls. See, the fella just won four tickets on the radio to an Def Leppard concert in Spokane and rushes out of the house to pick up his best bud when he notices that his mean machine, the Red Raven, is gone. Next to the burn out marks in the gravel he spots one of his ex-girlfriend's AA tokens and knows that she took his ride to sell it to a pool shark in Billings. So the guy gathers all sorts of colorful characters from the trailer park and they head out in Scooter's tow truck to reclaim his cherry muscle car and make it to the show in time. The reward...the other three tickets and a kick ass time rockin' out, drinkin' some brews and checkin' out tha ladies.
Unfortunately for you, I don't get a vote in this contest. :)
--Erik
Thinking about this project, the most intriguing challenge was the "Flight of the Red Raven" thing. I wanted it to be something exciting and cool. Something fun. The name Red Raven was a bit ambiguous I thought. It doesn't sound overtly evil--you don't exactly get a shiver from it (actually it could be a B-list Marvel badguy...) On the other hand, you break it down and it isn't really that heroic either. Red is seldom a good color, associated with blood and the like--and a raven is a big carrion bird. So I thought, what if it was the name of a privateer airship from days of yore when such things were more common than they are today; the sort of ship that bards sing swashbuckling tales about.
It turns out the wreck of this legendary ship has been found and bought by leaders of Azurestone at tremendous cost. Their plan is to get the greatest engineers and technicians from all around, magical and mundane, to put the thing back together and use it as a beacon of light and hope for the small scattered settlements under the long shadow of the Fog Peaks, to bring fast communication and travel across its untamed reaches. At long last it is ready to take flight, but unbeknownst to everyone the powers of darkness that rule from the mountain peaks do not take kindly to their attempts to bring peace and civilization to the region. They send a nefarious mob to steal key components--ones that took months to figure out and get running, but which could never be created from scratch to sabotage the effort.
After following through frozen linorm infested fens and nearly getting blown up crossing explosive strapped ancient stone bridges over misty abyss, the adventure would conclude with the launch of the Red Raven and a massive air battle with the badguys in their own re-engineered airship styled to look like a massive red wyrm.
Just my thoughts...
No Zeppelins! Too many modules and novels with airships at the core of the story.
But Airships are cool! ;-)
Actually, I seriously contemplated making the Red Raven an airship, and having the adventure be a flight to one of Golarion's moons. You know, get a little pulp-style visit to the red moon, a little swords and swashbuckling with the aliens, a la John Carter. (This isn't a crazy idea, elements have been mentioned before by Paizo staff in the Moons of Golarion thead)
But as James Sutter is one of the only ones that likes to mix Science with Magic, and I don't think he is on the selection committee... it was too far off the mainstream swords and sorcery feel of Golarion.
I'm doing one about a candy apple red 1977 Trans Am that was boosted from this dude's trailer outside of Twin Falls. See, the fella just won four tickets on the radio to an Def Leppard concert in Spokane and rushes out of the house to pick up his best bud when he notices that his mean machine, the Red Raven, is gone. Next to the burn out marks in the gravel he spots one of his ex-girlfriend's AA tokens and knows that she took his ride to sell it to a pool shark in Billings. So the guy gathers all sorts of colorful characters from the trailer park and they head out in Scooter's tow truck to reclaim his cherry muscle car and make it to the show in time. The reward...the other three tickets and a kick ass time rockin' out, drinkin' some brews and checkin' out tha ladies.
That is seriously f@%*ing hilarious. and I would read it, watch it, or play it....
Unfortunately, I just had too many eggs in one basket at the time to submit anything, but I thought about it at work last night, and if I had entered, it would have gone something like this:
Azurestone is a farming community named for a magic rock given to them about 50 years ago by evil yeti like creatures called Greymen (who have a fear aura they are immune to, and a vertigo aura they aren’t, so they tend to even hate each other), masquerading as sociable forest neighbors. The blue stone regulates the seasons, allowing Azurestone to grow crops all year long.
Turns out the stone is actually the elder stone, which holds the memories of generations of these altruistic tree-hugger bat-primate things called Ahools, which only live a decade, so they backed up all their knowledge in the rock. The greymen are xenophobic freaks, and hated the ahools (which migrated from another world, so even though they get free druid spells, they’re outsiders here) soaking up space in the mountains, so they stole the stone and butchered the elders. In a few generations, the poor ahools have descended into primitive forest dwellers, forgetting everything they’ve accomplished (by the way, they don’t have mouths, and they get their name from the sound they broadcast telepathically). The greymen needed a good spot to stash the stone until the older ahools passed, so they gave it to the farmers, knowing the calm weather broadcast would have given the location away if they’d kept it.
Anywho, this eccentric dwarf paladin has been studying the ahools, much to the derision of the hard working farming folk, and all hell breaks loose the day he brings one back to town. Once the little guy gets within radius of the Azurestone, it starts to teach the ahool with the accumulated wisdom of their formerly proud race. Surprise of surprises, the thing starts broadcasting to the paladin for aid returning the stone to its rightful place. The farmers think he’s (he being the dwarf hero, self titled “The Red Raven”) “eccentric” to begin with, and when he starts trying to convince them to send the stone up into the mountains, they’re sure he’s gone off his nut. When he shows them the telepathic ahool, the get fed up with his “freaky puppet-show” antics and rough him up a little before tossing him in a makeshift jail.
Dismissing the now intelligent ahool, the farmers go about their business, but to their surprise, the little bugger springs him. The ahool gets killed in the ensuing escape, and having no choice anymore, The Red Raven does something very un-Paladin like, and lights out with the rock, heading for the hills with all speed.
The farmers hire the party to go after the “criminal” and retrieve the stone before the real winter finally comes and destroys their off season mega-cash crop. On the way they’d have to battle greymen (who are good with stone and natural traps), probably a dragon who captures and kills The Red Raven thrown in there once they get into the mountain (wanting to seize the rock either to smooth out or corrupt the weather based on the color of the dragon), and eventually leading to finding Raven’s journal, which leaves the party with a tough choice. They can return to town with the Azurestone, and be heroes and get paid, or they can go for the moral win, and put the stone back in the “special spot, ” uplifting the primitive ahools to full sentience again, causing the town to be unhappy with them for failing, or downright hate their guts if they knew they had the stone and ditched it. The stone itself might know where a cache of makeup items is, maybe reincarnate the dwarf, try to “teach” the town how to live with nature in harmony maybe….I don’t know yet, not bad for an hours thinking though….
Ahools
Dude what is crazy is that I have statted out my own version of ahools for my campaign. Not for this open call (Vapor Lynxes a version of the Bodmin Cat for the win), but in general as a monster I one day want to get published.
Very interesting.
Thanks for the positive reinforcement. My wife and son both conked out, and I managed to get three more ebay packages shipped, so I figured, eh..what the hell. Rubbed sandpaper all over it and hit go! Good luck everyone. :)
Requires a bit of work, but I had scenario that opens with the set up of the climactic show down and then we go into Flashback, with the Players dying to know what the hell is going on and what happened. Of course, the opening has to be suitably vague on specifics, but if everyone runs with the idea, it makes for a great experience.
Oh crap on a stick. I forgot to double space it. That's going to be a fun read; Oiy.
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I made the Red Raven an airship too....I wonder how many other people did?
The Red Raven as an airship was my very first thought, but I ended up rejecting it for a couple of reasons: the outline given to us stipulated that the coming of winter would make the culprit hard to track, which didn't seem to work so well if the PCs and/or their quarry were in airships; I also considered making the item stolen from Azurestone something that would get the culprit's airship (downed in the mountains) up and working again, but there was a Dungeon adventure not too long ago about a downed airship - seemed too similar; As far as 'current' D&D goes, airships are very Eberron, and I figured the Paizo guys might not want to associate their world with that; also there is an Eberron adventure called "Flight of the Golden Dragon" which I think prominantly features an airship; If you feature an airship in the game there is every chance that the PCs will end up in command of it, one way or another - and a lot of DMs might not like that, particularly in a campaign where such things are not common.
I didn't like the Red Raven thing, so I changed it to a Black Cardinal.
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Thanks for the positive reinforcement. My wife and son both conked out, and I managed to get three more ebay packages shipped, so I figured, eh..what the hell. Rubbed sandpaper all over it and hit go! Good luck everyone. :)
So you got it in? Cool!
Yeah, in my proposal it was also 'the Azurestone' (of Azurestone) which was stolen (by the Red Raven) ... and there is also something of a potential moral quandry in returning it.
I was concerned that making the Red Raven 'the culprit' was a little too obvious ... but then sometimes obvious is good. Oh well, hopefully some of my other ideas are interesting enough to be considered.
So you got it in? Cool!
Indeed-io. Luckily for me my freakishly wrong way of self taught typing has often been described as the fastest anyone has ever seen. I blame being a guildleader of two EQ guilds simultaneously.
I consider not receiving an auto rejection letter to be a success. I may not be picked, but I can follow directions, darnit! Winning is just losing with better marketing, as they say ("they" being me).
Of course, now I have paranoia they'll see I've posted the majority of my goofball synopsis and 3 point it into the bin, or go, man, this sounds like that other guy's idea...but then I suppose there can only be so many "red ravens." Unless it's a cover, and Red Raven is actually an addictive psychotropic drug, which makes you fly, and then drops you from 1000 feet up. Well hell.
I too made the "Azurestone" the object that was stolen. Though about making the Red Raven an airship, but like Mothman, I rejected the idea.
And I wouldn't worry about double spacing, mwbeeler. The submission guidlines said nothing about double spacing (I think...!), so it shouldn't really count against us. I hope.
I couldn't resist making the Azurestone a Lapis Lazuli - the original azure stone of the ancient world. And rearranging 'red raven' to be a villain named Verendra and Vera Dern, depending on her purpose. And throwing in some Yeti. And blue-fisted monks of Irori. Oh, And swapping an airship for an overland chase with ice-ships.
Can't wait to hear more ideas now that the submissions are done!
Here is my take on the Flight of the Red Raven:
1. What is the object that vanished and why is it important to retrieve it?
The story revolves around the stolen manuscript of the recipe of a famous red ale, called the Red Raven, invented by a mad dwarven monk, Severus. The creation process of this ale is one of the most guarded secret of a human community living in the Fog Peak Mountains, mostly because of a dark secret tied to its ingredients, secondly because it is their most valuable exported good to the outside world.
3. Who took the object and why?
Surprisingly, the thief is Septentius, one of the monks of the monastery where the Red Raven is brewed , basically stealing back the manuscript from the spy of a merchant house. This spy spent years as a newly initiated monk inside the monastery walls to find a way to get his hands on the manuscript. He succeeded, but found out the horrible secret of the ale and his goal became the rescue of the villagers living around the monastery.
The secret is this: the monks struck a bargain with dark powers to send them the souls of those passing away in the nearby villages while they give them the extreme unction. In exchange, their ale is possessing a power to act as a longevity potion which is why it is really sought after (when selling it, the monks weaken its potency, but it is strong enough to give 5 more years to live to the rich and old merchant/noble buyers).
4. What will the final showdown with the culprit look like?
There is no way to catch the fleeing monk before him reaching the monastery, so the final showdown takes place in the monastery, specifically in its brewery against the unaging, several hundred years old monks and one of their demon masters whose task is to supervise the ongoings around the monastery.
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Time for the big reveal:
I made the town of Azurestone be named after a nearby quarry of rare blue granite. Basically it is the only reason the town exists.
The item stolen was the dowry pledge for the mayor's daughter to one of the noble princes. Basically it was a token gift, but once it was pledged it has to be delivered or the wedding is off. Suddenly the piece is very valuable to the mayor, but still worthless to the party. (nor will they be auctioning it off to the highest bidder)
It was stolen by the Red Raven, a local pseudo Robin Hood, though a much darker character. You get lost in the woods, and the Red Raven will guide you home, but once your there, she will disappear, along with whatever possessions she had a chance to grab.
Yeah, I said she. I thought that having a female antagonist might create some interesting moral questions. Probably not, the party I play with would deffinetly shoot first and forget questions, but that is okay.
So anyway, after most of a week chasing the Red Raven through the forest, they reach the foot of the mountains, only to encounter some undead. First the undead seem intent to help her escape, but once she is in reach, they grab her and carry her off.
They deliver her to a druid circle high up on the mountain side, where the party will eventually find the slightly insane (by slightly I mean completly and then some) elder druid of the circle, who has fallen to worshipping Rovagug. He had duped the Red Raven into stealing the bell, and now plans to use it to summon a powerful demon, who Rovagug promises will destroy the town, save one person.
Why, you ask, because the druid fell madly in love with the Mayor's daughter himself when he was last in town for a harvest festival. She in no uncertain terms shot him down infront of everyone. A little publiuc humiliation goes a long way, and he cracked a bit. And nothing says true love like sending a demon to kill the girls friends and family, then abduct her, and drag her kicking and screaming to you bear skin bed in a cave.