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So I am currently running an adventure in a city and I'd like to keep it in there. I'm looking for ideas on city adventures as wilderness and dungeon crawls are more my forte. I do have Curse of the Crimson Throne and Council of Thieves for ideas, but I could use more. If it helps:
One player enjoys using magic for non-combat ways. He is playing a bard currently so that would leave him open for a lot of diplomacy and sneaking around. He also can disguise really well.
One player makes fairly simple characters but he gets really into roleplaying quickly.
Two players enjoy somewhat off-the-wall character (one is a dwarf in the Dwarf Fortress sense and the other is a stonelord dwarf :p).
And one is only really interested in the hack n slash aspect. Grab loots, get better.
Thanks for any help.
Zobeck's always a nice place to visit. Otherwise:
- raid a warehouse after hours and stumble onto some campaign hooks
- work as security for the city's major bank and refuse a few late night withdrawals
- a major religious festival shuts down businesses and clogs streets for several days
-Stopping a beastly serial killer
-Urban Vampire targets a friendly npc for eating
-Cultists of Apollyon are experimenting on the homeless?
-Horrid, godawful weather brings a flood that endangers the lower areas of the city?
PC's are asked to get rid of a gang that holds territory in one of the city's ghettos. This could be given to them by a rival gang, or the local militia/military, or even as a reaction to events occurring to them or those around them (something precious to them is taken, and they want it back).
This allows you to have an investigatory period where the PCs find out about the gang and what they'll be up against. "Oh yeah, the Bloody Knives, they like to cover their doorknobs in poison. They also have this big half-troll of a cutter called Ralstok Bigfists, though he's blind in his left eye."
The ghetto itself can be somewhat dungeon-like, with many twists and turns, as well as possible short-cuts by breaking down weak walls, climbing through windows, shimmying up the sides of buildings, etc.
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I'll just write up a summary for a quick adventure I ran with my group in Sharn, Eberron. It should still work anywhere else providing you're not hesitant about going underground. Sharn is a city of tall towers and most civilized places to visit are in the mid levels. Lower levels are basically slums and a lot of abandoned areas. This has been adjusted for non-tower use.
Plot Hook: The players chill at some tavern or so when they hear a voice from a nearby table. The voice belongs to Maxirallion, the intelligent shield. His owner is asleep at the table and Maxirallion promises GOLD to the players if they will just help him with this minor little thing.
The players are led deep below a certain gambling den into abandoned tunnels are smuggler hideouts and whatever until they finally reach a large abandoned hall. In the middle of the hall there's a large pillar seemingly holding up the roof above, and around the pillar someone has piled stacks and stacks of barrels (containing gunpowder). A fuse can be seen though its nature as a fuse might not be that obvious. Perhaps describe it as a rope.
Maxirallion demands a closer look and promises "the gold is close now, the gold is close!". If held up, he'll cast some rudimentary fire spell on the fuse setting it ablaze. They have just a short while to stop the fuse before the gunpowder explodes.
The truth: Maxirallion is an insane +1 CN shield who was sold far below market value by a drunkard in the gambling den above. A fight about the price erupted between the gamblers and it escalated until the owner of the place agreed that the price was reasonable. Maxirallion took this as a personal insult and swore revenge and for the last 30-40 years he's spent his time lying and sneaking in order to make other people assist him in his plan... To take the gambling den down, owner and guests alike.
The original adventure was run in the city of towers and the room with the gunpowder was on a floor very close to the bottom of one big tower. If the plan had succeeded he'd have taken down an enormous tower and a lot of innocent lives.
-An Alchemist has been selling bunk "Healing" potions, that actually turns out to be poisoning any Elf that drinks one. Can the Party find the culprit(s) before any more Elves die??
-Some "Ladies of the Night" have shown up as Ritual victims, missing their hearts and other organs. Are they victims of a serial killer? A demonic Cult? Or something "Far Worse"?
-Random Citizens have been finding magic items scattered around the city, each seeming to fulfill the Finder's greatest Wish... Untill the Curse starts to unravel the wish until it has become an inescapable Nightmare. The oddest thing is that the "Lucky" finder of these items becomes so bonded with it, that they literally sicken and die if seperated from their "Treasure". Who is leaving the "Gifts" and why?
(just realized all three could be connected! Or not... Hehehe)
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Use a construction site as the arena for a battle. The scaffolding, scattered tools, trenches, and machinery should provide plenty of extra challenges over what would otherwise be a dull, by-the-numbers fight. With that kind of hazardous terrain, what the PCs are fighting barely matters-- perhaps a few earth elementals have been disrupting construction?
Lots of cities have towers with gargoyles. Some of those gargoyles aren't just for decoration. Perhaps a rash of disappearances leads the PCs to a late-night combat against an aerial opponent, and must take to the skies-- or the spires-- to defeat it?
If you want some non-combat encounters, try having the constable show up at the PCs door and tell them they're in violation of a minor ordinance, and must pay a fine or contest the ticket. Then introduce them to what bureaucracy looks like when the clerical work is done by Asmodean clerics, the laws are written in Axiomatic, and the courts can Hold Person you in contempt!
You can't have a city without steel, and you can't work with steel without a forge. How does the city keep all the smiths' forges hot? With fire elementals of course! Perhaps one of the city's main smelting plants needs the PCs to recapture an escaped elemental, leading to a showdown in the forge itself as the elemental uses the molten steel and alchemical devices as insidious traps!
Some really good ideas so far. I'll have to do the missing persons thing a bit later since the first adventure dealt with missing people being kidnapped and experimented on by derro. But, they did save a kidnapped inquisitor that's a member of the church of the sun god in the campaign. If it helps, the city is fairly slavic themed and cold. Modeled a bit after Lankhmar.
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Hmmm. Without looking over prior suggestions:
-- Kidnapping. Preferably a friend of the PCs.
-- Mugging / rescue for a quick bit of excitement.
-- Bar fight. Large one. A mercenary company staged a massive bar fight
to cover a kidnap ploy in my game once.
-- Wedding. Preferably with one of the PCs as the bride /groom or,
better yet, as best man. Challenges are so much fun at a wedding
(better than cake!), and that's what the best man is for.
-- Jewelry / expensive stuff heist.
-- Street gangs / protection / extortion / harasment.
-- Bounty hunter mistakenly (?) after PCs or friend.
-- Drunken bravo. If they kill him, he turns out to be VIP. With a very
powerful family.
-- Thieves / smugglers caught in act. And unhappy.
-- Interupt an Assassin at work. Never a good idea.
-- Fires. Fire is good for rescues, meeting new people, and relieving
the PCs of excess wealth. maybe a riot to boot...
-- Serial killer. Or a ghost that people think is one. Or vice versa.
-- Plays. Yes, it can be entertaining, rowdy, and different.
-- Gambling house. Crooked (?), legal (?).
-- Challenge / jousting (held just outside city).
-- Street faires / carnivals. Lots of stuff there.
-- Missing person. Runaway? Dead? Hiding?
-- Investigation of theft ring / missing children / bizzare happenings.
-- Security work, bodyguard or property. Protecting a target is always
a good time.
-- Sieges are interesting.
Read some of the Garrett P.I. series by Glen Cook. Always good for inspiration and an interesting take on fantasy cities. More ideas when I have a moment or two...
Posting for a dot. Interesting!
Storming the bastille: Party vs fortress
War be declared: the city is besieged, and martial law is declared. The party may even be drafted into the militia.
Alt to previous: the city is besieged by a DRAGON!! who is terrorising the city, breaking stuff, and demanding tribute.
A carnival of souls type of thing. A traveling carnival comes to town and all seems well until some the local orphans or street urchins go missing. No one notices at first because no one really cares.
Turns out this carnival travels town to town abducting those that wont be missed to harvest their souls or sacrifice them to some demon. The ringmaster is behind it all of course and maybe he is a demon in disguise himself.
You also have the freaks and monsters from around the world to play with.
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In Golarion they have banks. I gave the Group information on an old abandoned account and they were asked to pretend to be descendants of the original owner and clear out the account. They had to con the bank personnel and the bureaucrats involved. In the end they blackmailed a banker with a gambling problem and bribed a bureaucrat. You cold adapt this to be a sort of safe deposit box.
That can lead to a treasure map that leads to a dungeon.
Since they have printers in Golarion I print up weekly (game time) newspapers and pepper hooks throughout them.
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Send them to the abandoned sanitarium and have them deal with some insane ghosts. Use the "sanity and madness" stats in the GameMaster's Guide to come up with some appropriate maladies for the ghosts. Have various effects that deal ability damage to a mental stat, and if one of them hits zero you can have the PC develop an insanity of their own.
There's an election coming up (think Edwardian House of Lords).
All the bards are getting bought up by one side or the other, they're forming primitive news networks and they HATE eachother. Events include: holding rallies, disrupting enemy rallies, smashing the other side's printing press, defending your own press, framing others for crimes, proving your innocence, intimidating voters, keeping others away from your voters... anythig from increasing crime to make an incumbent look bad up really.
Or you can just take a page from your favorite mystery novel and try to get the players to detective it up.
Or have them open a shop, say a booke shoppe specializing in spell books, magic tomes and things people were better off not knowing. (Think Bookhounds of London).
Don't tell them and start running a super hero game? Have them use their extraordinary powers to battle criminals?
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I have always wanted to run a campaign arc based on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, where the PCs just keep digging themselves further into events that they can't understand and aren't fully aware of. They come into treasure, they lose it, they come into trouble, they lose it, and at the end of the day they're left no worse for ware but just ... surrounded by destruction, and without any real answers as to WTF just happened.
Sorry if already mentioned.
Assassin's Carnival: Assassin's have been hired to take care of a complication (the party) and they've decided that the best place to do this was the upcoming carnival set in the city. The event is huge! Drawing in a large part of the cities citizens, the assassin's have sent in their most disguised killers to handle the problem.
Through some means the PCs learn of this, albeit through means that leave the party questioning whether the info is true or not. Their goal is to take out the assassin's without harming any innocent civilians, which is difficult due to the assassin's skill in disguise. Should they succeed, they save themselves from assassins (for now), they get loot from captured / fallen assassins and perhaps a bounty for each assassin if they play their cards right.
An Important Acquisition: A very powerful mage has asked for the help of the party in finding a book that he happens to know is within the city. The problem? The thieves guild has been hired by another powerful wizard, who also happens to be a necromancer. The necromancer wants it enough that he's sent some of his disciples of his own to help the thieves obtain his book.
(Optional) There's also another problem. The book has multiple false copies containing incorrect information in them, a prank made by the wizard who originally wrote them. So, the players either must have a magic user they can trust (including one of their own) analyze the books which could very well have magical traps / runes written into them and do so until they find the correct one.
Once they finally find the correct book and get past the thieves and necromancer disciples they take it back to the wizard to find that he has decided not to pay (probably saying this from a safe distance) and leaves them to fight some of his built constructs. If they succeed, they get whatever's in the room and the DM (you) get another bad guy that can recur as you see fit.
Anyways, those are just some ideas.
Some more ideas...
-- The PCs (after the big bar fight) are arrested, convicted and get a stint at hard labor to repay damages. Sewer clean up is a favorite in my game. That sewer "dungeon crawl" is a lot more exciting when you're unarmed in a chain gang...
-- Hunting the vampire, or some other evil killer monster that can blend in and abuse city dwellers.
-- Stumbling over a spy rings activities.
-- Stumbling over an arson for profit ring.
-- As others, I'm certain, have mentioned, the zombie apocalypse or some other undead plague.
-- Flying monsters (Manticores, Wyverns, Dragons) terrorizing the city. It's urban combat followed by a search and destroy mission.
-- An evil cult hidden in an underground beneath an abandoned building. Preferably involving human sacrifice.
-- Riots against "those non-human scum". Or maybe those "human scum". What side, if any, will the PCs take...
Back to grading papers... *sigh*
Throw them some curves they don't expect.
-- Carnival of Rescued Souls : A carnival comes to town, and everyone is enjoying it. But, street kids are disappearing, and several women approach the heroes and give them some jewelry and ask them to find out what's been happening to the poor street urchins. Clues lead to the Carnival (exotic animal scat in the area of disappearances, a clown nose, or makeup smeared on walls, etc). The heroes find several tents that are always guarded at the circus, and if they can get inside, the find dozens of kids all sleeping on plain bunk beds, with exotic animals patroling the inside, and guards with big weapons.
The twist is, the kids aren't being kept prisoner, they're being protected. The circus folk are all former urchins who were abused and used as kids, and they go from town to town rescuing unwanted and unmissed street urchins. The women? They work for the local brothel, that recruits from the urchins, and is also allied with the local thieves guild who use the kids as lookouts, scouts, messengers, and canon fodder if need be. They are ticked off their slave labor force is being decimated.
This could go very good or very bad, depending on how 'kill first and loot later' the group is.
dot.
Also check the thread "What would a wizard do in a city?" as it's a similar thread and useful for more than just wizards.
Definitely have been reading all of these options. I like the idea of a player interrupting an assassination in progress and becoming marked by said assassin. I'll keep many of these in mind. Even the heist (for a good aligned party it's possible :) ). I like the carnival idea and had at one point thought about doing one with a wayang shadow puppeteer bard from the ARG as the troupe master.
Also below
So, I had my game on Monday and it consisted of them going back under the sewers to fight a chuul. After the crazy fight, they goofed off a bit but one was able to stop an assassination. Now he is stuck babysitting the business man/ambassador while an assassin is out for his blood.
What are some good ways to follow this scenario up? Some things from my campaign:
- The assassin group is based in a foreign nation much modeled after India. I call them the Circle of the Black Krait. Poison themed and lavish assassins fit them well.
- The assassins go out of their way to minimize casualties that aren't in the contract. If the PCs continue to foil plans, however, they may be confronted by the main assassin who will at least try to convince them to begone before adding them on the list of "threats and loose ends".
- The business man that's a target is a target because he unwittingly sold a merchant's daughter into slavery. When this is brought to light, it'll make for an interesting decision.
I was thinking of having some encounters that lead up to the assassin revealing herself. One that I liked was having the PCs and the target go to his loft to gather his belongings, only to have the floor in his bed chamber carpeted with some venomous snakes made for him. What other ideas do you all have?
Das Bump
Not sure how well adult themes go over in your game Odraude, but, this might be funny if one or more of your guys can take a joke.
In a shadowrun campaign, I had a player that picked up a hot elf in a bar, when they got back to his room, she went to the bathroom, came out in very racy lingerie, made him lay on the bed, and then jumped up on top of him. She knocked the wind out of him, very heavy. He thought at first she was heavily cybered up, but then the disguise spell dropped, and he had a 9 ft tall male troll in racy lingerie on top of him, with a very large knife at his throat while he imparted some threats about quitting his current job would be better for his health.
Bonus points if the troll's (or minotaur, or muscled gnoll, or whatever big hair/scary male you pick) partner is a hot female elf, for future confusion. Super bonus points if the hot female elf takes a liking to one of the other PCs, and pursues him romantically. :) The elf and troll shouldn't be seen together for quite a while of course. :)
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A fire breaks out in a local wizard's workshop. The wizard is now frantically begging anyone who'll listen to go in and rescue his homonculi-- he has about seven or eight of them in there, and if they all die in the fire the wizard just might as well. He's willing to let the PCs keep as much of his magical treasure they can find in there, as long as the homonculi get out safely.
Once inside, the PCs have to deal with alchemical devices exploding, wands and wondrous items misfiring wildly, crumbling rooms full of smoke as thick as a fog cloud spell, a berserking construct or twelve, stacks of scrolls and tomes that might be worth a fortune if the PCs can find the valuable ones before they burn up, and homonculi who are panicking and don't know that they can trust the PCs to get them to safety. Beating a homonculus's Stealth check in a burning building will make the PCs realize just why they put all those points into Perception in the first place.
If you're worried about the PCs finding too much treasure in there, you can just say that once they get out of the fire they realize that their Spellcraft checks weren't as good as they thought.
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The below ideas are all someone elses but suit the urban environment
1. have a look at the Styes adventures for crazy odd cults urban stuff
2 here is an adventure thread/series that might work- a shadowy figure who later turns out to be the mayor (or someone else important) is gathering bits for a ritual to become a half fiend. he has a vampire working for him who helps collect the bits, such as bones from a particular family crypt, a specal medallion from the museum, a delivery from an exotic location etc. He also tries to kill particular person who has a half fiend bane sword and so forth. The PC's get involved initially becuase the vamp kills a few people and they hunt him down, but eventually they realise whats going on (the bard gets knowledge rolls or whatever). after the vamp is taken down the real bad guy becomes apparrent as he seeks to culminate the ritual with a mass slaughter. (Buffy season 3)
3. A heavily pregnant wealthy woman is kidnapped, the husband seeks help to deliver the ransom. it goes bad as the kidnappers snatch the husband and the ransom & head for an abandoned district. turns out wifey is a crazy cultists about to give birth to an omen like child and wants the husband as a sacrifice (dungeon87- tharizduns love child + potential The Omen mash up)
4. kids are sick and dying, turns out they are all kids of the thieves guild which has been cursed for being involved in the theft of a maguffin and killing the guardian by burning him to death. The youngest of them will die first. A fey ghost is doing the deed. he is weak but getting more powerful. he can only be defeated by destroying the bauble he was guarding, but it has been sold to a wizard who knew what would happen but has taken magical precautions (nightmare on elm street)- find out whats happening, get the bauble back & save the children