Please help me fill the gap in my Vampire adventure!

[DarkMasterBR]

Hello everyone!

I really like to receive different ideas for campaigns, and I would like some help on this 4e adventure I'm running.

My players (3, a ranger, a paladin and a fighter) are lvl 7 and they are investigating the disappearance of some wood elves (or just elves, in 4e). The elves don't know what attacked them, all they know is that there are signs of battle but no dead elves, only dead wraiths. The elves florest is near some mountains and near the mountains there is a human/dwarf town from the kingdom of Myr. This town was the first place the players started their investigation, and they ended up discovering that many miners / traders were attacked in the road between the mines and the city. They also find out that regular humans / dwarves / etc become wraiths after attacked, but elves become vampires.

So, the story so far progressed this way: they went into the woods, acted as baits and defeated the first vampires that attacked them. Their plan now (the session ended right after the attack) is to use Speak with Dead to find some info on the vampires. The ambush on them was pretty powerful, but they used the Gravespawn potion from Adventurer's Vault and it was pretty easy.

My idea is that they will eventually have to track a vampire lord in Shadowfell, but I wanted them to be about lvl 10 when they reach him. How can I fill the blank between that? What interesting mysteries can I place in a vampire story? I was thinking, one of the things I could do is having an agent working for the vampire lord to find out who sold them the potions (it was a dwarf in the local tavern) and kill him. But I don't know how much sessions I can fill with this, nor if my players will feel compelled to drop everything and seek revenge for the poor potion seller.

I'm eager to hear your suggestions!

 

[Mark]

Please help me fill the gap in my Vampire adventure!

Called The Diastema Darkness?



Have the town celebrate their victory in the woods and have any further investigation turn up no sign of further trouble. Later, when they get to an appropriate level, have some NPC they know from the village track them down to seek their help with the resurgence/renewal of trouble. Drawing it out for its own sake is bound to be unsatisfying. Making more immediate and interesting use of the time between should prove more fun, IMO.

 

[Mistah J]

Thoughts.


1. The PCs come to learn that in order to defeat this vampire.. they are going to need the proper tool. A ritual, a special holy symbol, some specially made stake, a piece of the sun.. whatever.



2. This vampire decides to throw them off the trail by leaving false clues. This sends the PCs on a wild goose chase/distraction. Perhaps it could even be a trap, with minions waiting for the group on the other end.



3. The vampire decides to send minions towards another group of innocent victims knowing that the PCs can't be in two places at once. This one might work best depending on the nature of your paladin.


Just some ideas

 

[Gregor]

Perhaps the Vampires have a lair nearby, perhaps in an old castle, where they guard an ancient portal to the Shadowfell? The Vampires are feeding and gaining strength so they can summon their Master into the material plane?

You can make an old school Ravenloft style adventure where the PCs have to find a way into the castle, overcome the Vampire's minions and traps and ultimately defeat them at the threshold of the portal? Put on horror music, play up the fear of the castle, make them fight horrible undead terrors, etc.

Perhaps when they finally reach the portal, the Vampires have just completed their ritual and are ultimately sucked into the portal and cast into the Shadowfell as the two realms merge?

EDIT (AND SPOILERS)

When reading my post I realized that its very similar to some of the events in the Keep on the Shadowfell module which you could adapt for your party?

 

[Jack7]

These are based upon ideas for a campaign I wrote and my players played in a setting in Eastern Europe. They may or may not be appropriate for what you are doing.


1. The Vampire around whom the story revolved was not what he appeared to be.

2. The Vampire appeared to be trying to increase the number of vampire infections in the local area. What he'd actually been doing was conducting experiments on how to reverse the Vampire infection/curse upon himself and upon others, and some of the vampires he tested his cures upon actually transmuted into other types of undead creatures, some became other types of monsters, and some died. Various attempted cures also had different effects upon different races of creatures.

3. One experimental cure created a mutated form of vampirism which was cyclical, like lycanthrope, so that people could be normal on occasion and vampires when the disorder/disease/curse was triggered. The main vampire of the storyline eventually contracted this mutated form through exposure to his own experiments which rendered him normal at times.

4. The main Vampire took up an intense study of both Arcane and Clerical magic, eventually becoming a priest himself in order to try and completely destroy his vampirism urges. It didn't work as intended and instead he drew the attention of both angelic and demonic forces. This added a number of sub-plot elements to the main campaign storyline.

5. Alchemy and religion both played a big role in the campaign. As did relics and one artifact.

6. Another party, a team of Witch hunters moved into the area, their attention drawn by the apparent appearance of the demonic and occult forces surrounding the vampire. The vampire and the Witch-hunters had a number of encounters in which the player characters were often either accidentally or intentionally "caught in the middle."

7. The Paladin in the party became infected by the mutated form of vampirism of the vampire turned Priest, but since he was a paladin he could not become directly changed. Instead his "disease and curse" resulted in the Paladin having horrible nightmares, being able to get little rest and therefore slow to recover hit points, and he began to dream of and see visions of the dead who had died violently or horribly. He also temporarily lost his ability to "lay on hands." Eventually he was nearly driven mad and almost died but the vampire priest took him on a pilgrimage to a relic where he was cured of his curse (the cure had been meant for the vampire, but he used it to help cure the Paladin instead), unless he was in the presence of his vampire priest friend. So even though they remained close friends and the Paladin knew of the vampire's intention to become cleansed of vampirism, they could no longer associate with each other.

8. Angels and other types of creatures like Ki-Rin and Lammasu eventually began to both harass and try to stand guard over the vampire. (Both oppose his vampirism urges, and try to aid his cure.) Demons and powerful undead creatures however tried using him for their own ends. One minion demon of Orcus went to the vampire in disguise as a famous hermit/saint and tried to use him to control the undead in order to secretly establish a sort of undead stronghold in the mountains of what was then Bohemia. The demon seemed to be helping the vampire with his efforts at a "divine cure" for his vampirism. It worked for awhile until the party helped expose the demon's true identify and had to help the vampire destroy the stronghold and send the demon back to hell.

9. Eventually the vampire priest had to undertake an extremely dangerous pilgrimage to an area of Russia with the help of the party where he underwent "blood-letting" and was drained of most of his own blood while simultaneously drink the collected blood of a weeping black Madonna statue carved into a holy rock-face who cried tears of "living blood." This cured his affliction but reduced him to a physical invalid and aged him greatly. It also made a sort of prophet out of him, but he could only prophesy impending death completely accurately. The rest of his prophecies were usually in riddle form, like the Oracle of Delphi and could include many different and confusing interpretations. He later underwent another pilgrimage with the help of the party where they recovered some rare substances, relics, and using what he knew of alchemy was able to concoct a medicinal potion which allowed him to recover his strength every month. If he didn't take the medicine every thirty days then he would revert to becoming an invalid again. This "cured" NPC/former vampire eventually became a mage/cleric with very unusual abilities to communicate with the dead (as well as being extremely effective at turning or dispelling undead) and was taken over by one of the players as his main character. He lived for ten more years (game time) until slain in combat with a demon he had earlier had dealings with, but his son inherited many of his unusual abilities in dealing with the dead and the undead.

That may give you some ideas. There were other aspects of the game but those were the most important ones, though it also included a number of smaller side-quests, pilgrimages, religious and mythological themes, and so forth and so on.

Good luck with your campaign.