BASIC REDsurrection - Doomsday Bride in Gargoyle City

DUNGEON MIX: Doomsday Bride in Gargoyle City

Add...a bunch of stuff this time I guess, this is not that usable really?

Weeks ago a note was delivered to you by an indistinct bird-like space. It formally requested your attendance at a wedding for two people youd never heard of, much less met, in the city of Morlojog. Your curiosity has gotten the better of you - or maybe you just cant resist an open bar - and here you find yourself, at Morlojog, surrounded by strangers, near the Mouth of Morlojogoth, the cathedral of Morjog the Inevitable. (These names can be confusing but they make more sense in the original Molg.)

or

Your local lord or duchess or whatever received such an invitation. Perhaps they are curious, perhaps they are embarrassed at having forgotten such an occasion, perhaps they are furious, perhaps they are merely observing courtly custom. Either way you are their envoy, and you have very specific business with the bride and groom once all this is over.

or

Theres a gift in your pack. You thought it was absolutely delightful at the time you bought it, and later decided to give it to someone special. Now youve lost your way, and wearing your finery at that! Its odd that you decided to dress to the nines for this ride. Now you find yourself outside this hard to pronounce town...hey a wedding! That sounds like fun. And you wont even feel uncomfortable crashing because you have a gift with you! That was fortunate! A string of coincidences has led you here, like an anglerfish, and you are none the wiser.

or

You were at home, in bed. It was night. Now where are you? Did you get dressed in the dark? Did you giftwrap your spare boots? Without knowing why you know youre at a wedding and that you need to just go along with it and not upset anything. You know the bride and groom on sight...well, not KNOW them, youve never set eyes on them before, maybe not even someone of their species, depending on where you're from and what you are.

or

Morlojog is an up and coming city-state that has made tremendous strides in the last sixty years. You'd been meaning to see what all the fuss was about and on learning of the upcoming festival, the 100th Flowering Festival Morlojog has had since installing their first monarch, you decided that now was the perfect opportunity. The inns are all at capacity and even the citizens are turning away would-be-lodgers and their gold, strangers stuffed in the rafters. So you wander, and in wandering you come upon this church...

AND

Your hands are shaking. Your mouth is dry. The air smells like iron and fire. Your breaths are quick and deep. Everyones eyes look stoned, and youre sure that yours do as well. Forgotten instincts that once screamed at you in the dark about serpents, about wolves, ABOUT the dark, howl and scratch at you now. Youll die here if you dont do somethingbut you cannot stop the ceremony. You cannot change this one moment of crystallizing salt, this fate. Somebodys getting married. That is etched as fact in the bedrock of your existence.

However you've arrived, you're here now, and you're having a bit of trouble remembering what you've been doing lately. You may know where you are, or even why you came here in the first place, but the story begins as in a dream and you never learn much about what you dreamed just before. You may have walked into town, had a sandwich, rented a room, fucked a dude, it's all a blur. You set out, and now you're here, Ed Helms as shit.

This all started centuries ago. It begins with the wedding.

DOOMSDAY BRIDE

BASIC REDsurrection - Rambling Collection of the Sky Thieves

DUNGEON MIX- Rambling Collection of the Sky-Thieves

It appeared in the night, a strange ziggurat jutting up from the forest, beckoning like a gold-dripping finger. Many fear this sudden intrusion and assume the devil is involved but you know an opportunity when you see it. Anybody willing to spend a fortune on golden buttresses is packing some serious quality items inside.

or

The Foul One's work is afoot. You are awakened in the night by your local bishop, your order, perhaps even the booming voice of one of your strange gods itself. There is a task before you: repel the master of the moon-shewn cathedral and, if possible, raze her to the ground. It would also be meet to return to the local church any items of occult power or great value, purely for safety of course.

or

You have been after a particular item, for personal reasons or because you were contracted, for a long time, and have reason to believe it lies within Watchtower Rambling. You have traced its movements, the predictable devastation and horrible miracles it leaves in its wake, the unexplained vanishings of bandits and lessers across the countryside...You had all but given up, and now here it is.

or

You awake, fully vested with whatever power is available to you (MUs have spells and shit), whole and healthy, standing still alongside the rest of your party. You are all fully armored and armed, set behind a rope. On the rope hangs a tin-seeming, gold-looking metal sign embossed with some alien message. This all comes as an enormous surprise to you, and you may find some of the fellows you stand with to be strangers. None of you know how you got here. None of you know the way out.

                                                                          --------

SKY THIEVES

The Vault of the Midas Stone

John Langdale

There is a mountain even the weather avoids. Clouds skirt by it like oil around a soap bubble. The ground is cracked and dusty, with only the most hostile of bramble-plants choking the mountain's approach. Still, despite the lack of vegetation, the place is a maze.

Perhaps after a couple of hours of marching in circles near the peak a traveler might see something strange - an over-sized seed with an eye (painted?) on it, lying in the dust. It's about as big as a tennis ball, and not much heavier.

Soon the seeds are everywhere.

Then the travelers stumble upon the town.

Sad Dolls

Written in a hurried scrawl in the last page of the journal is an address, then nothing but blank pages. The address leads to an abandoned building adjacent to the Old Bugbear, a suspiciously cheap inn on the quiet side of town.

The Caves Beneath Otbara

What are you doing down here? It's dangerous under the city!

1. I wanted to get down to the port without paying taxes or having my luggage searched.
2. I wanted to find the Rewarding College.
3. I wanted to see if it were true that the weight of the city was going to crumble the cliffs one day and tumble everything into the sea.
4. I heard you can get into the palace through these caves.
5. I just followed one of those hooded creatures you see deliberately pacing the streets of the city, the ones with all the legal protections -Peaceful Monks. I mapped their progress and discovered their paths were drawing intricate city-wide pentagrams. Then I decided to follow them.
6. I heard there was a series of shrines down here that, if visited in the correct order and with the correct rituals, can supercharge magic items.

THE CAVES

The caves sprawl for a very long way - going beyond the borders of the city and down all the way to the water. I suppose it could be a megadungeon but maybe not.

Enforced Poisoning and Dismemberment in the Mycelium Metropolis

"Is this the largest organism in the world? This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it.Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees. Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique in that their mycelial mats can achieve such massive proportions."

—Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running

REASONS FOR GOING TO THE MYCELIUM METROPOLIS

1. To find the ingredients to complete an obscure and powerful spell or ritual.
2. To find a god-poison.
3. To hire an invincible mercenary army.
4. To find the fabled Homokaryotic Hammer.
5. As part of a pilgrimage for a weird, musty god.
6. Because you are a secret agent for the SLIME MOULD.
7. To find help purifying a region of poison or radioactive taint.
8. To find Old Mould Mouth.
9. Banished there by a sadistic hell-sorcerer.
10. To plead that a town in the path of the mushroom-men's autumnal warparth be spared.
11. To become infected with old knowledge.
12. Because you are so fucking lost.

The Dragon

A demon sits in the ailing heart of the Old Empire. Her name is Missy Lillian Misseria Lemon Gloriana Underhoof XIX, and she is a guest in the court of the Emperor. Most of her days are spent in needlework, gossip and petty court intreagues.

 
She has an incurable fascination with adventurers. She will seek them out and invite them to tea the moment she hears of their arrival at the palace.

At these ridiculous engagements she will invariably demand to hear about all the party's adventures, with particular emphasis on any wealth they managed to acquire along the way. She will be equally eager to hear about any future ventures and will predict, with unnering accuracy, which one will be most profitable.

Adventures in Russia

(EDIT - Revised to be more concise and better)

I bought a copy of Hoard of the Dragon Queen on a whim. That was a mistake. Still, I liked the idea of an overarching pursuit/mystery dynamic in an adventure.


Time to reskin HotDQ as a pointcrawl set in Weird Civil War Russia.

GO

Things are bad in Moscow. The Grand Prince has been murdered and the Communist Reds have taken power. The Reds are forced to fight not only the Whites - who are still loyal to the old Monarchy - and the Greens - who are anarchists and fighting everyone. Feeding the people and keeping order have been forgotten. It is 1919.

The Revenant

 "It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony" 

-William of Newburgh

So a player character died. My condolences - my players always take that shit hard. The rest of the party probably couldn't afford to resurrect her and her player probably had another character all ready to go anyway. Maybe they buried her.

Anyway.

About a day's journey from her grave, a charming old man appears. He is offering to sell a scroll of resurrection for ridiculously cheap. (At this point the players may believe that the old man is a crudely shoehorned way for the DM to apologise for killing of a character and bring her back into the game. That's funny.)

The scroll will detect as magical and examination by those knowledgeable in the arcane will confirm that it should indeed summon the dead. However, the scroll does not work. Or, at least, it appears not to. Though after being cast on a corpse it no longer detects as magical.

In d66 days after the scroll is cast, begin questioning the player about the dead character. Where did she grow up? Did her family move around? Did she have any close friends back home? Did she ever go to school? Was she a member of any organisations? What was her hair colour? Eye colour? What tailors did she favour? Who would she have liked to have been, had she lived? Explain nothing. When the player runs out of biographical details, the dead character will finally seek out her old party and kill them one by one until she is saved.

Probably.

Let's talk about summoning a revenant.

The Pleasure Palaces of Al'Yin Jin Zarain

HOW DID YOU EVEN MANAGE TO DIG ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE?
1) Prototype demon powered drill tank.
2) Full body suits of Rock to Mud.
3) Safely tucked inside the belly of a Xorn.
4) Riding a Duergar mining drill down from the Underdark. Duergar machinery runs on blood. I hope you brought a couple of paralysed giants with you.
5) Houdini's Collar: If the wearer of the collar's movement is ever completely constricted then she will be immediately teleported 50' in a random direction. And-
Miner's Twine: As long as this string remains tied around your little finger you cannot be crushed to death by stone, earth, or mining slurry.
6) More traditional methods. Probably took about 100 + d20 years, at a rough estimate.

Congratulations. That must have taken a lot of hard work and preparation. I hope you're equally prepared for the drop.