It's a horrible time to have a curse! Each wielding a powerful item to a family legacy, your players are a group of young adventurers who barely survive an attack on their order of vampire-hunters by agents of Dracula. After escaping, they discover Dracula has placed a curse upon the land which makes restful sleep difficult outside of hallowed areas. Dracula, "alive" on another plane but dead on this one, must be resurrected so they can kill him, end the curse, and avenge their dead. To accomplish this goal, the player characters must journey through forest, marsh, hill, and underground paths to retrieve relics of Dracula's last life from keeps and fortresses overrun by monsters and the undead. If they can resurrect him, he will be weak and easy to kill... but the adventurers aren't the only ones who want Dracula on the Material Plane, and Dracula is not the only vampire in the world. Gameplay overview This adventure takes the players from 2nd through 9th or 10th level on a milestone basis as they choose where to travel in what order to retrieve what they need. Starting at a happy gathering at the Belmonte Order, which the characters are hereditary members of, the campaign kicks off with a bang as the group retrieves their chosen legacy items, salvages what other gear they can in a race against time and a growing number of foes, and then escapes to begin their quest. In addition to the six main "dungeons," there are two optional regional lairs, traveling vampires, and many foes along the way. Most of the towns in the area have managed to survive, providing points of light at which the party may stop, long rest safely, acquire supplies, and socialize. Travel is hazardous! 5e classes are balanced for resource management across a 5-8 encounter adventuring day. The campaign is designed to have a semi-variable flow of encounters as the party traels around the area. Encounters grow progressively more difficult as time passes and the party spends more time within a region. These are not random encounters rolled on a table, but encounters designed to be unique to each area's geography, combat terrain, and mix of foes. As the party spends more time in a region or revisits it, the encounter difficulty increases. Dracula's curse requires a Constitution saving throw to successfully long rest outside of Hallowed areas (towns). The difficulty scales up over time, forcing the party to balance speed and safety as they try to accomplish their goals without pushing beyond the limits of what they can handle. The game concept, general map layout, and some enemy distributions are loosely inspired by Castlevania II for the NES, one of the forerunners of the "Metroidvania" genre. Dracula's Curse is indeed a game in which the forests are dark and full of monsters, and every night is a horrible one to have a curse. Includes 15 Legacy items, from weapons like whips and swords to a shield, a belt, or a decanter of holy water 60+ enemy statblocks 8 unique dungeons with unique layouts & challenges 5 inhabited towns with multiple named NPCs 100+ travel encounters (expect to use 30-50%) The module is printer-friendly with no artwork and straightforward grid maps for location-based encounters which require one.
Heat beats down from the blazing summer sun and the adventurers are hot on the trail of a fugitive, ordered by the bengoshi Akia the Iron Shell to hunt down the charismatic cult leader Shinjirarenai. Soon after routing the foul oni-touched mage however the mystery deepens, forcing the PCs to chase across southern Soburin after a curious stolen shipment until the true powers at work are revealed and the party realizes they are but pawns in an ancient conflict, pieces on a gameboard between two Imperial Siblings! Mists of Akuma is an eastern fantasy noir steampunk campaign setting for 5th Edition where the last continent of the world has embraced a fear for technology, what might be the only means to save them from the primordial fog spreading across Soburin and corrupting its peoples, transforming them into fearsome adeddo-oni—should the adventurers achieve victory at all in this merciless and unforgiving land, it is sure to pyrrhic. WHAT'S INSIDE THIS ADVENTURE MODULE: A mystery adventure that takes the party across three prefectures of Soburin (Korusu, Yokuba, and Ikari, all detailed within) and into the river city of Nesuto before meeting two of the most powerful creatures to ever tread upon the world! The continental map of Soburin by Michael McCarthy as well as 11 play maps for Nesuto, two teahouses, encounters in the badlands, mountains, or jungles, two shops, a city street, a building being used for a ritual, and an enchanted cavern. The supernatural Mists of Akuma, the misted condition, and two new attributes (Dignity and Haitoku).
"The Hive" is a spawn of Arbeyach lair, also featuring giant termites and termite swarms, for five 6th-level characters. This adventure can be finished in one session. Several mounds in the Forsaken Hills are the dens of voracious termites that have added flesh to their diet to supplement dwindling wood supplies. At night, swarms of termites hunt and devour prey. They swarm over victims in wooden carts and wagons, and bring the dismantled wood back to their mounds. Three spawn of Arbeyach, searching for a location to summon Ia'Affrat, Arbeyach's herald, discovered a mound filled with particularity nasty termites and used their vermin empathy to gain acceptance. They dug out a cavern beneath the mound, and now use the termites to protect themselves and gather food while they complete a difficult ritual involving dozens of sacrifices. The final sacrifice is prepared and the spawn are finishing their ritual when the party arrives.
Yesterday, young Tobias went to investigate an old tomb by himself. Everyone told him it was a bad idea. Everyone was right. Today, you and your companions awaken to a town in chaos. Why is the temple sealed behind a divine shield? Why are children and worshippers trapped within? How do we get inside? What did Tobias do?! Ragged Hollow is a full-service starting town, full of classic creatures and challenges all updated and brought together for newbies and nostalgia-lovers alike. There are goblins and witches in the woods, a house full of traps, a basement of vermin, kobolds in a cave, bandits on the road, riddling ravens, a 50-room temple dungeon, nursery-rhyme monsters, living nightmares, Lovecraftian horrors, and tons of unique items to find. This is a mystery with lots of relevant side-quests around the town. The heroes can investigate the situation, get into the temple, save the innocents, and stop the monsters. And get some loot! ADVENTURE TYPE: Medium Dungeon / Town / Wilderness Adventure DESIGN NOTES This adventure is intended for characters levels 1 to 4. It includes several wilderness areas (forest, hills, mountain), a bustling town, several local mini-dungeons, and one 50-room temple dungeon. Each area contains various encounters and unique items. There are many opportunities for combat, but it is possible for players to explore most areas and complete many interactions without any combat at all, depending on their choices. INCLUDES: Story hooks, dialogue prompts, random encounters, stat blocks, original creatures and treasures, and maps. KEYWORDS: town, village, forest, goblins, goblin market, witches, hags, hills, bandits, ogres, mountain, kobolds, caves, dwarves, temple, clerics, nightmares, demons, riddles, traps, ghosts, fairy tales, Lovecraft, mutant
Laveth, Lolth's half drow daughter, is plotting to seize power from her chaotic evil mother.
A routine recovery job, bread and butter work for any party of sell-respecting adventurers. What could go wrong? A few bugbears aren't going to cause any difficulty, are they?
The Hag's Hexes is a 66 page guide designed by Dungeon Masters Guild luminaries like JVC Parry and Janek Sielicki alongside rising stars and old stalwarts like Matt Butler, Matthew Gravelyn, and Tim Bannock. It was created with one thing in mind: to make hags more than the sum of their (often meager) Challenge ratings, giving them the mechanics, roleplay potential, and weird magic that can inspire campaigns, lay low kings and warlords, and potentially ensnare unwary Player Characters into campaign-changing curses or long-term bargains that force them into terrible moral quandaries! Split into five chapters, the authors have provided everything a DM needs to terrify their players for years to come. The Bestiary features over a dozen monsters; some are new hags, some are their minions or even their mobile lairs, and one of them -- the Shaitan AKA Desert Hag -- was featured in Monsters of the Guild! Bargains & Curses is a chapter filled with ideas that can kick-start campaigns, threaten valued NPCs, or put Player Characters' very existence and morality at stake. Chapter 3 includes two dozen items of wonderment, weirdness, and dread, ranging from fairy tale-inspired items of whimsy to terribly cursed items of horror. Chapter 4 is titled "Filthy, Vile & Downright Dirty" and provides dozens of roleplaying tips to make hags come alive, new mechanics inspired by and expanding on Volo's Guide to Monsters (coven spell lists, aunties, grandmothers, alternative coven members), and ends with useful combat tactics for each of the hags from the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide, as well as tactics for covens. Finally, Chapter 5 presents five encounter groups (with sub-encounters) to give you quick story seeds and monster lists that you can put together in minutes to create a single encounter or to inspire a full campaign, and ends with three full-length adventures -- each with 3-5 encounters -- that showcase many of the new monsters, rules, magic items, and so on that appeared in earlier chapters. Each of these adventures comes with an encounter map meant to act as inspiration for hag lairs, and they include useful mechanical ideas for terrain effects and descriptive keywords listed directly on the map for added inspiration and easy customization! Designed by Tim Bannock. Written by Matt Butler, JVC Parry, Janek Sielicki, and Tim Bannock. Edited by Matthew Gravelyn and Tim Bannock. Cover Art by Elena Naylor. Cartography by Tim Bannock using Inkwell Ideas' Dungeonographer (Dungeonographer is copyright Inkwell Ideas). Layout & Graphic Elements by Elena Naylor with Tim Bannock. Interior Art by Arcana Games, Bruno Balixa, David Lewis Johnson, Dean Spencer, Earl Geier, Filip Gutowski, Jacob E. Blackmon, Joyce Maureira, Petr Kratochvil, Jayaraj Paul, Brian Brinlee, and Wizards of the Coast.
Your PCs are reaching the upper end of the heroic tier. New worlds are opening up to them—they might have already ventured to the Feywild, for example, and made contacts with inhabitants of that magical plane. Now they are ready to take their first steps into the darkness. The Shadowfell awaits... Vandariel, a shadar-kai witch who calls herself the Voice of Pain, is a fanatic devotee of the Raven Queen. She has founded and become the self-proclaimed high priest of a bizarre cult, the Lords of Pain, whose purpose is to bring more fey into the shadow pact with that goddess of death. Although the original shadar-kai entered this pact voluntarily, and the race breeds true, Vandariel is consumed by what she sees as a divine mission to reveal the mystery to all fey—whether they wish it or not. Those who do not come voluntarily to the truth are brought against their will. Dark stalkers move like the night, seeking out and abducting suitable subjects. This Side Trek can serve as an introduction to the dangers of the shadow realm. It works well for PCs who are approaching the paragon tier, since it presents a reasonable challenge for characters of 10th level. It is suitable as a climactic encounter for lowerlevel adventurers, as well. It consists of only two encounters.
No Loose Ends is a mini-adventure that has a single encounter, based on a group of orcs (or ogres based on level) setting up an ambush for the players by setting up a fake bridge that they attempt to collapse under the players before attacking. The cloak of elvenkind is optional, it is included only in the higher level adjustments. Pgs. 17-18
Into the Drachensgrab Mountains! Hot on the trail of the marauding slavers, you and your fellow adventurers plunge deep into hostile hills. Spurred on by your past success, you now seek the heart of the slaver conspiracy. But hurry! Your must move quickly before the slavers recover from your previous forays and attack! This module was originally used for the official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Tournament at Gen Con XIII and is the third of four in a series of related tournament modules. This module contains a challenging scenario, the tournament scoring system, plus nine pre-rolled, playtested tournament characters. Also included are large scale referee's maps, notes, and background information. A3 is a complete adventure in itself, but it is also a companion to A1 (Slave Pits of the Undercity), A2 (Secret of the Slavers' Stockade), and A4 (In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords). TSR 9041
Written in celebration of Swords and Wizardry Appreciation Day 2017, Return to Fel’Valashar picks up where Dungeons of Fel’Valashar left off. In this book is a collection of mini dungeon adventures with a small region called Fel’Valashar that they take place within. Each of these adventures is written in such a way that they don’t have any ties to each other or to Fel’Valashar. This means you can easily drop them into your own world with no fuss. Includes: Details of the south-western region of Fel’Valashar. Four mini dungeon adventures. New monsters. New magic items.
"For Blibdoolpoolp!!" "The power of the mind and belief are wonderous, often leading us to manifest things that aren’t real. For the kuo-toa, this power is heightened, allowing their collective belief to manifest gods." Two tendays ago, a paladin of Torm was kidnapped by kuo-toa. In a strange turn of events, she was mistaken for a kuo-toa god, and whisked off to their underground lair. Barria has managed to pose as the god and now shakily leads a small faction of kuo-toa while trapped underground. With her influence being increasingly scrutinized, and with the different kuo-toa sects on the brink of civil war, it’s a dangerous time, even for a ‘god’… The heroes’ mission — rescue the paladin from the kuo-toa oceanic lair before she’s transformed into a kuo-toa god. The kuo-toa are an Underdark-dwelling race of fishlike humanoids. Different sects worship different god-like beings, each god manifested through the strength of a sect’s collective zeal. Such “gods” feature prominently in this adventure. Product Overview ♦ 4 to 8 hours for four to five characters. ♦ Scalable for 3rd-6th level. ♦ High-resolution maps of the Kuo-Toa lair. ♦ 9 new statblocks, including Dire Barnacles and Hypno-Cuddlefish! ♦ Includes plot hooks, handouts, rules for faction combat, and more!
An inexperienced eladrin leader leaves herself dangerously exposed to her enemies. An exiled hag schemes to rebuild her army. A bog troll conspires to overthrow. A child is kidnapped. PCs find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between competing forces, each seeking to dominate the feywild territory known as the Unbound Regions. Trapped in the feywild until they complete the quest, the adventurers must deal with the curious culture of the fey by striking deals, battling opponents, and ultimately deciding which competitor they will support.
Not even memories of past glory live on in the gentle hills around the village of Kusnir. Today its people have more concern for commonplace things, like the harvest, trade, and the threat of death in the night! Kusnir is beset by a skulk. The attentions of such a creature are a curse on any community. Streets and alleys which ring to the voices of children by day become fearful, shadowy places by night. Men go abroad armed and in groups, while women and children stay behind locked doors and even there are not safe. But life goes on. The lot of the peasant is always hard, what cannot be prevented must be endured and, of course, things could be worse. Much worse. The skulk has begun to visit the village more and more often. Sometimes it kills, yet just as often it spares a victim, leaving clear signs of what it might have done had it wished. Its visits are now marked by strange and illegible symbols scrawled in blood on the walls of the buildings. The people are worried, helpless, and desperate. Desperate enough to welcome adventurers. UK2: "The Sentinel" (1983) is the second UK-series adventure, the fifth TSR UK adventure overall, the first solo effort by Morris, and the first half of the two-part Adlerweg series (whew!). It was run as a tournament at the GamesFair '83 Open, then published later in 1983. TSR 9101
A short adventure for the Midnight campaign setting from Fantasy Flight Games. Harried by pursuing Shadow forces, the adventurers take refuge in the fissures of a vast glacier. In these icy caverns they battle the risen remains of an orc tribe and make contact with a powerful potential ally.
A young black dragon and two hatchling dragons live in an excavated sandstone burrow in the swamp west of Knacker Knob. Connected to the dragon lair is a complex of sandstone tunnels and chambers inhabited by lizard men. Some sandstone tunnels and chambers are partially flooded, and others are filled with nasty things such as slimes, oozes and gelatinous cubes. The lizard men revere the dragons as magical spirit guardians. In small groups the lizard men are easily defeated, but if allowed to prepare a common defense, the lizard men tribe with its spellcasters may present serious threat to the player characters (PCs). Wild Dragon Den is the first dragon's lair to conquer. Part of TSR 1073 The Dragon's Den
The village of Hammerston is the site of a quick meal stop for a single PC and they quickly discover that the people are highly superstitious. A mage booms into the Kingfisher Tavern and reports his apprentice was chased while returning from collecting some items. The apprentice refuses to return to the cemetery where he was attacked and the mage, seeing your adventurer garb seeks your assistance.
Welcome to Assault on Gumdrop Mountain. This is designed to be a fairly tough adventure for 5th and 6th level Dungeons and Dragons characters using the 5th edition of rules. In it, the characters wade into such nasty circumstances that only the assistance of a hallucinogenic elixir makes it possible for them to act at full capability. While under the effects of the drug, the characters perceive the world as a candy-infused landscape and monsters as sugary assailants. The adventure is broken into 9 fairly small chapters containing one significant event or a connected series of small events.
A tribe of evil norkers led by a human illusionist threaten the town of Nolivari. The heroes must brave the wilderness, find Grakhirt's lair, and defeat him to ensure the safety of the local villagers. A straightforward dungeon crawl against lots of norkers! When do you get to see those guys in an adventure? Lots of monsters from the AD&D Monster Manual II as well. This adventure features a little bait-and-switch; the titular bad guy Grakhirt is assumed to be a norker, or gnoll, or some other monstrous humanoid, but is in fact a human illusionist/assassin! Note: The adventure doesn't feature caves AND a dungeon, but since the caves are treated like a dungeon with doors and numbered rooms, this is listed as a dungeon adventure as well. Pgs. 28-37
Encounters in the Savage Underdark is a 150-page supplement containing mini-adventures, NPCs, locations, and magic items,from eighteen of the DMsGuild's best authors.This incredible 150 page supplement features 24 amazing new Underdark adventures. Visit Annarei's Garden Encounter an insane aboleth Interact with traveling merchants Attend the Fire Fest Perform an Underdark heist and so much more....