Short free/pwyw adventure for Shadowdark RPG or similar roleplaying games. Months ago the snow elf princess Ysren was pressured by her mother to begin accepting suitors. To thwart them, she vowed her suitors that anyone who brought her a piece of the moon would have her hand in marriage. The sorcerer-prince Sandor of Excelsis took up the challenge & began building an ambitious spiraling tower atop the highest nearby peak. Once it was high enough, he would begin a ritual that would open a portal from the top of the tower to the moon. One cold day all communication with the tower seized & the “Spiral Prince” has not been heard from ever since. King Galian has sent men in search of his lost prince, but none have succeeded in besting the frigid mountains. He offers a hefty bounty for the return of his son. Will you brave the rime-covered cliffs of Mt. Excelsis to save the prince... or perhaps scour his tower for arcane knowledge & regal wealth?
X11 Saga of the Shadow Lord consists of two linked adventures as a mini-campaign: In the first adventure called Elvenstar, PCs try to steal a magic item from the Shadow Lord to thwart his planned invasion of a peaceful neighboring kingdom. Encounters in this adventure include a village populated by adventurers, and a cloud giant living in a small castle, before the party reaches the Shadow Lord's lair for the final encounter. In the second adventure, also enclosed in module X11, The Halls of Drax Tallen, the Shadow Lord returns more powerful than ever. His undead minions are searching for another magical item to give him immense power and the PCs must find this item before he does. Player characters must get past the undead army of the Shadow Lord and infiltrate his haunted fortress to retrieve the magical Elvenstar. TSR 9165
Claiming to possess Hartkiller's Horn, Ryndölg makes his move to take control of the Hartsvale. The non-giant residents have been pressed to declare their allegiance or be destroyed. Do they swear fealty to Jarl Ryndölg, or is there another option? Is there another contender to the throne? Sometimes the best choices can be the most dangerous. A Four-Hour Adventure for 5th-10th Level Characters. Optimized for five 8th level characters.
A monastic community of elves and orcs worshipping a divine daughter of both Corellon and Gruumsh tried to bring peace and reconciliation between the two races. For their trouble, they were wiped out by zealots and erased from history. Centuries later, their mountaintop temple is rediscovered -- and rumor has it that two artifacts hearkening back to the very origin of elvenkind and orcdom are concealed within....
The player characters are contracted to go on an expedition to discover the fate of a long-lost tribe of Elves (the followers of King Thiondar). This is a lengthy adventure across several locations. Roleplaying is stressed, as some encounters will be very deadly if resolved through combat.
His name has inspired fear in legions of heroes, and his cult has lurked in the dismal reaches of the world for countless ages. His minions are savage and feral, his worshipers vile and wretched. He is Demogorgon, and his temples are nightmare realms haunted by primeval menaces and hateful legacies from a time when the world was savage. And now, a vengeful death knight has discovered one of these lost temples—will the PCs aid him in his dark quest for revenge, or will they fall before the awakened host of the Prince of Demons? Pgs. 64-83
The bustling metropolis of Saydown City is the largest settlement in the Denali land and home to the current ruler King Pellet. As your party reaches the watery entrance a huge iron statue guards the docks. Upon closer inspection you notice that the item is actually a golem. After continued investigation you discover that the ‘heart’ of the creature has been stolen and you accept the job to uncover the loss!
WE-1: Red Dawn: An Eberron adventure about the end of the world. The year is 1019 YK, and the world is ending. Twenty-three years ago, the nations that were once Galifar signed the Treaty of Thronehold and ended the Last War. Now, the drums of war rumble once again. The peace that lasted a generation is threatened, and Eberron may go to war once again. As a member of the Scions of the Second Dawn, a secretive order dedicated to studying the Draconic Prophecy, this is merely background to you. Or, it was, until the eve of your initiation as full Scions. You emerged from the rite to find your monastery destroyed, bandits looting it, and all your friends and allies slain. You are the last survivors of your order, and the world is ending. You cannot stop the end of the world. But you can rebuild it. Can you escape the wreck of your secret order’s monastery, journey across the mountains in winter, search the mountain valley to unlock the cipher, and discover how to rebuild the world? Or will your frozen bodies join those of your fellows? Will you fall to fatalism and ennui, or will you fight to save what can be saved and rebuild what can be rebuilt? Find out, in the light of this RED DAWN.
The quest continues…kind of! After enjoying the accolades of your previous successes in the Barony of the Knolls, your group begins to get that adventuring itch and finds a job opportunity and will allow you to see more of the Duchy of Bast at the same time. The local caravan service is in need of a few hearty individuals that can handle themselves in a fight. A quick trip to Phillipsburg should give you an idea of where you would like to go next right?
Fane of Serpents is a titanoboa lair suitable for three to five 10th-level characters. A rocky butte covered with soaring ruins looms over the landscape. Legend describes it as a monument raised by an inhuman race that was wiped out centuries ago as retribution over foul practices. Locally, the spot is known as Titan’s Height. It rises starkly above the surrounding area, with four terraced plateaus. Each level is covered with the ruins of many-columned halls in an architectural style unlike anything else in the area. Their age and strangeness alone are enough to generate fearful legends. The stories grow worse when travelers or livestock disappear near Titan’s Height, which they sometimes do.
Five centuries is not long enough for a giant king to forgive a defeat - or forget a curse. When falls the axe of Mok-Turoknin. This is a moody arctic wilderness/dungeon adventure in which the player characters must undo an ancient frost giant curse that plagues a barbarian village and its tribal chieftains. The PCs will travel across a frigid tundra en route to the deserted mountain keep of the frost giants where they must put an end to the curse before the restless ghost of the frost giant king rises again to claim another victim. Pgs. 53-72
In this adventure, designed to last for a 3-4 hour session, the player characters encounter (or are directed to) a mysterious object in the mountains: A strange, silvery disc around one hundred feet across. If they make it past the deadly laser turrets and the very hungry sole survivor who lurks inside the only viable entry, they can explore the derelict craft. They will find several magic items, including a solar-powered laser pistol, as well as evidence of the ship's dead masters: The brain-eating illithid. But with technology comes other ways to stay alive over long periods of time, and the greatest danger is accessed by pushing the only lit button in the entire ship...
FVC9 – Royal Recovery is a short adventure involving a lost princess. A peace accord is in jeopardy when a royal wedding may be postponed due to a missing bride. She was secretly coming to Tol Borron, home to her future suitor, but her ship is now missing. The party has been asked by a gypsy, working on behalf of the king, to head towards the Horns of Barnack where some debris has been located. Will your party be able to solve the mystery of the missing princess?
This setting was used in the F series and was used as an area for multiple adventure opportunities as a separate crossing of the Border Mountains. This mountain area has several travel sections to get from the civilized area to the frontier. With a multitude of side adventures this area helps mid-level adventurers increase their experience point base. In the Filbar campaign it was commonly used to get from Havendale to Arcanum College and Cordicstown.
The chase to save your family continues! After your encounter at the cove, you head south across Esaq to try and catch the slavers. With some experience under your belt, you are feeling more confident about your fighting ability, but it is about to be tested yet again. This scenario picks up where DQ1 left off and is the middle of a trio of adventures.
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.
When the water source of the city-state of Guerino is poisoned and its citizens enchanted, a group of adventurers must follow the treacherous path deep into Mistfall Mountain and restore balance to the kingdom. Pgs. 91-97
The rubble-strewn passageway twists and turns, winding ever deeper into the mountain, lower and lower into the bowels of the ancient, forbidding halls of long-dead dwarves. The torchlight flickers, threatening to succumb to the oppressive darkness. Creeping along one striated granite wall, Arikus the warrior moves cautiously toward the great cavern ahead, its sides and walls disappearing into the gloomy distance. Cocking his head to one side to listen, he holds his hand up for a moment, demanding unconditional quiet from from his companions. Then , his arm relaxing in relief, he waves everyone forward and moves into the open. Before him, scattered to the far walls of the enormous cavern, are piles upon piles of glittering treasure - coins from countless kingdoms, sparkling gems, exquisite jewelry, and items of wondrous power - enough for twenty kings' ransoms. Arikus laughs gleefully, thrusting both hands into the nearest cache of coins to let them runs through his fingers. At that moment, a monstrous shadow looms threateningly over him. Looking up, Arikus blanches and stumbles back in horror before the terrible visage of a Great Red Wyrm. The fearsome dragon opens its razor-filled maw and spews forth a gout of white-hot flame, engulfing the hapless warrior.... The ultimate Dungeon Master Fantasy! This is the most deluxe dungeon. Designed to appeal to discriminating and demanding role-players. Adventurers, beware. This is more than just a dragon hunt. Within the lair of the beast lie cruel and deadly traps, befuddling conundrums and puzzles, and cunning minions that will be the end of overconfident or careless adventurers. Comprised of three 64-page books, for two adventures that link to one super-campaign 12 full-color reference cards 16 special player handouts Eight Monstrous Compendium sheets A Sheet of cardstock standups with 24 plastic bases. Six full-color poster maps, two of which link together to make a giant tactical playing surface for use with miniatures or the included cardstock figures. TSR 1089
A gnomish settlement is plagued by inexplicable earthquakes, the wrath of an Earth Elemental. Can the heroes save the gnomes? Do the greedy gnomes deserve to be saved? "Valanche's Eye" was inspired by a desire to write an adventure which blurs the line of who the bad guy actually is, or indeed whether or not there's a really tangible villain. It takes the "patron hires adventurers to clear dungeon" trope and twists it – the patron turns out to be a pretty rotten bastard, and the monsters in the dungeon are just trying to live their lives. It starts when gnome gem-miners strike the mother lode of emeralds and sapphires, only to find themselves run off their claim. First they accidentally broke through to the Elemental Planes of Earth and Fire, and mephits burst out to annoy them. When they were just about done dealing with the mephits, they disturbed an earth elemental who just wants to be left alone, and emeralds are its favorite snack. The mine boss hires the adventurers to come kill all the elementals. But should they?
A Giant Ransom is a short adventure for four 11th-level characters. There are opportunities for diplomacy, stealth, and combat, based on the choices the PCs make, so any mix of classes is appropriate. The adventure can be set in any campaign world, in a frontier region near glacier-covered mountains. The newly appointed Duke Castaril Ambrinigan has recently relocated to a modest, newly constructed keep near the frontier town of Ormanlak. He and his family arrived safely, but a caravan containing family heirlooms was waylaid by a band of frost giant raiders. Most of the items were of no consequence to the Duke, with the exception of one: a three-foot tall golden statue of a lion. The Duke, wanting to avoid a war, sent an emissary to the frost giants. He offered gems totaling 10,000 gold pieces in value as ransom for the lion. The giants accepted, and a time and place was set for the exchange. But there is more. A white dragon named Whildenstrank lives in the midst of a nearby glacier, and has maintained a network of winter wolf spies, including some in the frost giants' camp. Through these spies, Whildenstrank learned of the capture of the golden lion, and the upcoming trade. Thinking that the lion would make a fine addition to his frozen treasure hoard, Whildenstrank has prepared to strike.