Mind's Eye: the revealing artefact, related to the mind and to seeing the truth.
Iron Warriors: the mercenary company, bearing this name to honor the Iron God and as a sign of their heavy-armored combat style. Also, the iron statues of the temple, which Dunukai will animate for the final battle.
Shoe Horn: the way Karlith was placed in command. Also, the item which triggers Baridon’s awakening from his state of denial.
Defeated Champion: Baridon at first. Champion of his faction, and defeated. At the end, Daneth is the defeated champion instead: in the fight with Baridon, he is clearly inferior.
Devil in the Details: Dunukai. He is “in the details” metaphorically in his way of manipulating events, but he also is almost literally in the corrupted details of the Temple.
Unforgivable Oversight: there are two, both on Daneth’s side. The first is his oversight of the Temple. His overzealousness, culminating in his striking the worker, is unforgiven by his God, which strips him of his paladin status. The second is not reading the entire book, and therefore not knowing the hidden power of the Mind’s Eye. If he had, in his pride he may have decided to use it – and this would have ended the problem there and then.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
A D&D adventure for low-level, good-aligned parties.
BACKGROUND
The adventure is set in Vanadon, a small, isolationist theocracy, dedicated to the worship of the lawful good-aligned God of Righteous Warfare, also known as the Iron God, or simply “the God” to the monotheistic folk of this place. The DM may substitute this place and religion with any similar concepts in his campaign; monotheism is not a requirement but a dominance of a good battle-related deity is. For example, Dragonlance’s Kiri-Jolith. The adventure begins with the PCs arriving to the capital city Xanaria for any reason; they may be just passing through, or visiting a friend, or be summoned by someone who disagrees with the current regime.
Some years ago, disagreements about interpretation of certain passages of the scriptures escalated in a full-scale conflict. The riots culminated in the destruction of the Great Temple in the capitol city Xanaria one year ago. After the disaster, both factions agreed to settle the dispute with a duel between their respective leaders: the paladins Daneth, second-in-command to the High Priest, and Baridon, governor of Greenhill Castle.
The two champions met on the field of battle, and Baridon told Daneth that he was ready to negotiate their differences. Daneth rejected the offer and drew steel. The duel was long but in the end Baridon was defeated. Daneth declared that the Iron God had granted him victory in honorable battle, therefore proving the righteousness of his faction beyond a shadow of doubt. He went on to become High Priest, tightening Vanadon’s fundamentalist law under the conviction that he could do no wrong.
The defeated Baridon, instead, healed up and returned home to where his pregnant wife waited for him. There, he found that an early birth followed by tragic complications robbed him of both his woman and his future son. Devastated by pain, he left the castle without saying a word, and was never seen again. Government of Greenhill was hastily shoehorned on Baridon’s young nephew and only heir Karlith, who never thought he would actually have to govern, and was unready and unfit to command. Despite his good intentions, and because of lingering hostility from the church’s central government, Greenhill’s economy almost collapsed in just months.
A DEVILISH PLAN
Dunukai is the name of an ancient, evil fiend-god who has been opposing the Iron God for eons untold. His ways are treachery and corruption, and his schemes span millennia. Lacking the power of affecting the material plane directly, he has influenced the minds of mortals for thousands of years (as per suggestion), setting up small details that never made the history books but yet are about to culminate in the destruction of the God’s church.
A thousand ago, Dunukai has influenced translators and scribes to plant key divergences in holy texts. A century ago, he has maneuvered politicians worldwide to create the right circumstances later. A decade ago, he has seen these actions come to fruition as the holy war ignited. A year ago, he was nudging Daneth’s mind to rage against Baridon, while planting exactly the wrong suggestions in a midwife at Greenhill castle.
And, just ten days ago, he made sure to let his unwitting champion Daneth know about a certain artefact called the Mind’s Eye, which could allow him to see into the minds and hearts of men, enabling him to spot evildoers and those of weak faith in the entire Xanaria. Yesterday, a group of templars has returned from a dangerous mission and has delivered the Mind’s Eye to the High Priest.
But today, the PCs come to Xanaria…
OVER THE EDGE
Xanaria looks like a very busy city. Carts and carriages of food and raw materials are hauled around and it looks like there’s some serious building going on. As the PCs wander around, they can learn that right after his election to High Priesthood, the Lord Paladin Daneth has ordered the reconstruction of the Great Temple, hiring thousands of workers for what seems to be the fastest construction ever accomplished. After barely one year, the main structure of the temple is in place and the sculptors, and painters are doing the decorations. The heroes may use Gather Information to find out some less-spoken rumors: Daneth is widely reputed to be a bit overzealous, considering workers as lazy sinners and forcing them to work very hard to speed up the building.
When the PCs reach the Temple plaza, they can see a crowd of people all around a massive building, working on it like so many ants on an anthill. The focus of the attention seem to be a some massive metal statues, depicting the Iron God they worship here, which are being slowly lifted up. The rest of the plaza isn’t lacking activity, either. An armor-clad man on a white horse is riding up and down the construction site.
Suddenly, the man stops not too far from the PCs. They can see that he is holding a shining eye-shaped jade orb in his left hand, and he seems to be concentrating on one of the workers who is currently struggling to pull a rope which is connected through a pulley to one of the statues. Daneth dismounts from the horse with an angered, red-hot face, strides through the crowd towards the man, and shouts: “Blasphemer! THIS is what you think of your God?”. The apparent confusion of the poor folk only makes the paladin more and more angry, but the crowd prevents the PCs from arriving fast enough (if they do somehow intervene, this still doesn’t change Daneth’s fate; it will make him angry at them, though, slightly changing the plot hook). Daneth lifts his armored gauntlet and smashes it into the worker’s face, sending him tumbling down the temple stairs. When he stops, he seems to be severely injured and struggling to stand up. Daneth reaches him and puts his hands over the man’s back. For the briefest moment, someone very observant may notice a look of surprise and horror on his face. Then, he stands up and walks away. The ex-paladin disappears in a crowd of church guards. The people around seem somewhat reluctant to call a healer. Certainly the High Priest must have had a good reason…?
If the heroes move to help the wounded man, whose name is Goram, he will thank them profusely and ask them to follow him into a tavern. There, he explains that the Lord Paladin Daneth has been behaving strangely for the entire day, glaring at people throughout the plaza and generally looking angered. Goram was thinking something on the lines of “If the God wants this temple so bad, why doesn’t He build it Himself?”, but he said not a word. The implications should set in quickly in both the worker and the PCs: Daneth can read minds, and what he’s reading doesn’t please him. Knowledgeable PCs may also suspect that the High Priest has just lost his paladin status.
Goram implores the PCs to leave the city and warn Lord Karlith at Greenhill Castle, a few days from Xanaria. He’s afraid that unless something is done quickly, the capital will become a sort of holy hell for everyone within.
The PCs may decide to stay, Gather Information and do some research now (or they may do it after returning from Greenhill). Daneth no longer shows up at the plaza, and his heralds declared that he was fasting, and meeting noone, until the opening day of the temple. The PCs can find out that Daneth has indeed sent templars to recover an artefact and they have returned just yesterday. People believe that the green orb Daneth is carrying around is that same item. If the PCs want more information on that item, they should visit the library. There, the library keeper is in the middle of fixing a book’s spine. If the PCs ask about artefacts, the keeper tells them that the book he’s working on talks about some of them. Daneth was here ten days ago; he was reading the book and suddenly he let it fall and stormed out. Since the spine broke, it is fairly easy to see what page he was reading: legends about a green, eye-textured orb, called the Mind’s Eye. The Eye allows its wielder to “see” the thoughts of others (detect thoughts always active; it may also reveal memories that are relevant to the moment at hand). Some cryptic hypotheses on the Eye’s location are also given; evidently, either Daneth or his servants must have been able to decipher them. On the next page, it also says that the wizard who crafted the Mind’s Eye activated it by uttering the words “let my eyes see my mind from afar”. This apparently triggered a hidden power of the Eye: enabling the owner to view his own mind from the outside. That is, it showed the wizard’s own thoughts and memories, stripped bare of all the lies and transformed truths that the mind makes up to justify itself. The increased clarity in turn allowed him to better understand what he saw, in a recursive cycle of self-discovery… of which noone knows more, since the wizard apparently went insane and died.
GREENHILL
The burg of Greenhill is located at two days of travel from Xanaria. Despite being relatively large, it is in a dismal state. Many houses have been abandoned, as it is evident that many people have left Greenhill to work on the temple in Xanaria. The inns are empty, criminality is rising, and the overall attitude is bleak. Shortly before arriving, the PCs are attacked by brigands, further demonstrating Karlith’s inability to rule effectively.
From what the heroes can gather, the current governor, Karlith, is good-minded but utterly inept. He’s desperate for the state of his land, but even after the resolution of the conflict, the church has not supported him, knowing full well that he was in power only because there was noone else to put there.
Karlith lives at the Greenhill Castle with a bunch of servants. He’s a very depressed man, bound to his land against his will. When the PCs meet him and explain the situation, he tells them that they must find more information about this new power of Daneth.
If they have already visited the library and read the book, he tells them that they must now go and find his uncle Baridon. Karlith knows where he went, but he never contacted him, recognizing and respecting his state of mind. This, however, is far too important. Baridon has left Vanadon to lead a mercenary army. He called it the Iron Warriors, as a last honor to his god, before renouncing his vows. It is said that the Iron Warriors only fight honorable battles and are some of the most skilled combatants around, but only a very few people know that their leader used to be a paladin. The PCs must travel to his current location – a warring city-state a couple of weeks’ travel from Vanadon – and convince him to return to free Xanaria. Karlith gives the PCs an item, an ivory shoe horn, explaining them that while his wife was pregnant, Baridon used to help her in every action, and every day he would use this shoe horn to help her wear her shoes in the morning and remove them in the evening. Not that it was needed, with the lady’s beautiful and light feet… but, Karlith narrates, it was a small family ritual which may remind Baridon of his past.
If the PCs still don’t know the details about the Mind’s Eye, Karlith tells them that he will contact Baridon while they search Xanaria, or the other way around if they prefer. In the first case, Karlith’s messenger will return empty-handed, unable to persuade Baridon, and the heroes will have to try themselves. In the second case, when the PCs return with Baridon, Karlith will present them with the book and the information.
YOU ARE NEVER DEFEATED AS LONG AS YOU CAN COME BACK
The PCs will eventually reach the Iron Warriors encampment. It seems that the Iron Warriors are an elite unit of heavy cavalry. They are only about a thousand people, but they are extremely well-trained and well-equipped, all wearing full plate armors and horse barding into battle. Several of them are also siege specialists, and the heroes can see several sturdy siege engines in the camp. Baridon may have abandoned his faith, but he never forgot his skills.
The PCs are accompanied to Commander Baridon. As they’ll find out while talking to him, Baridon has a thin sheet of military pragmatism over a deep chasm of self-pitying. He, too, has interpreted his failure and the death of his family as proof that the God has abandoned him. Baridon has never used his paladin powers again and he really doesn’t want to try and fail; he will tell the PCs that he hasn’t had them for a long time, he must have lost them somewhere along the way.
Several factors must be combined to break his inertia. If the PCs remind him of his past, and tell him how bad Karlith is faring, and what Daneth is doing, he will be visibly shaken. When they show him the shoe horn, though, he grabs it from their hands and stares at it for some long moments. When he can’t take it any longer, he becomes enraged, stands up and shouts at the PCs to go away and never come back. But the job is done; even if the PCs do go away, they will be reached after one or two days on the road by the entire Iron Warrior unit, led by a fiery-eyed Baridon, hell-bent on not allowing Daneth to tread all over everything they used to believe.
REVELATIONS
When the PCs return, they discover first of all that Karlith has been arrested by the templars. The church was keeping tabs on him and with the PCs’ involvement, they decided that enough was enough. Secondly, the temple is almost complete.
Baridon’s plan is to attack Xanaria on the day of the temple’s inauguration (attacking by surprise, during the night would be more effective… but that would be unhonorable and he doesn’t want to do that in the city of his God). While his Iron Warriors keep the town defenses busy, he and the PCs will reach the temple. With an army around his city, the soldiers will be busy at the walls, the templars will be busy in the streets, and Daneth will be forced to come out and confront them.
So, Baridon and the party enter the city at dawn, and head to the plaza, where already people are gathering. A few hours later, templar guards run into town, shouting that the city is under attack! As predictable, panic spreads quickly. The templars quickly have their hands full and find that they don’t have the numbers to control the overcrowded Xanarians. They can barely keep them away from the temple proper.
When finally Daneth, in his ceremonial armor, comes out of the temple, demanding to know what’s going on, Baridon gets out of the crowd, pushes aside a couple of templar guards, and loudly reveals himself to an astonished High Priest. The paladin strides on the temple stairs, heading towards Daneth.
As he gets closer, it seems that the sky is darkening. Yet there are no clouds. As Baridon says that he has not come to fight him, but to convince him of the error of his ways, it is clear that Daneth isn’t even listening to him as he draws his sword. There’s a strange, electrical feeling in the air. And a monstrous, massive devilish figure is coalescing in the air above the temple! Daneth shouts “You have brought the evil with you!” and then the fight begin. This time, it’s to the death.
Dunukai is a cunning foe. The PCs need to think quickly and there is a very real possibility that they’ll fail in stopping the fiend. This isn’t the end of the world, but it definitely means the end of Vanadon and the coming of a new major foe in the campaign.
Baridon is clearly superior in battle. He has fought for every neighboring kingdom in the last year, awhile Daneth occupied himself with overseeing the temple’s construction. Even without the PCs’ help (which he’ll vehemently refuse), he outmatches Daneth. But with every hit, the fiend seems to become stronger. If the PCs make him notice this, he stops attacking. Instead, he murmurs a prayer and touches his foe, healing him. While this doesn’t make Dunukai weaker, it does astonish Daneth, who takes several steps backwards before pulling out the Mind’s Eye from a belt pouch and concentrating to use it on Baridon.
The best thing that the PCs can do now is to pronounce the activation formula for the Mind’s Eye. Daneth will freeze, assuming an astonished expression. His pupils dilate and the sword and the jade orb fall from his hands, yet the effect doesn’t seem to be over. Everyone else stares at the enormous fiendish image, watching the scene from high above. Its anger can be felt even though it doesn’t seem to be quite here yet. Baridon seems overwhelmed for a moment, as the Mind’s Eye rolls down the stairs. A will likely grab it (otherwise, Baridon will do it after some rounds) and try to use it. If noone uses the activation formula, the fight resumes but Baridon will not harm Daneth again. The PCs will have to figure out how to stop whatever is going on.
If they use it on Daneth, they will see the mental whirlwind in his head. It’s still too quick, too confused, but they can make out that an external influence caused him to attack Baridon one year ago, to retrieve the Mind’s Eye, and to fight again now. Odd enough, it also suggested him to change some details in the temple schematics. As this knowledge flows toward the PC, the fiend speaks: “It is too late. I can already feel my power coming into the world. Observe my power, mortals!”
With these words, two of the eight massive iron statues of the Iron God come into life (as per animate object; they are Large-sized and have hardness 10)and attack everyone on the temple – Daneth included, who seems to be recovering and is now only stunned (ie, he can’t take actions but he’s not helpless and has no other penalties). Every blow deal to either Daneth or Baridon seems to make the fiend stronger. Worse, the rest of the statues are slowly animating as well.
If a PC uses the Mind’s Eye on the fiend, Dunukai’s plans will be revealed. Everything he did towards this moment, from the corruption of the scriptures to the events that have taken place while the PCs were looking for Baridon. He has directed many people involved in the construction of the Temple, from Daneth to the artists, to change minute details in the structure and in the decorations. A bas-relief which looks like a devilish symbol under the right light. A complex circular grid shape which hides a pentagram. A stone which was carved with the left hand by just the right type of sinner. This and much more, leading the temple to be suitable as the focus for a grand ritual. Which will be completed by the slaying of one of the God’s paladins on the temple ground. And which will finally grant Dunukai physical access to the world, and the freedom to lay waste to Vanadon. After revealing this, the Mind’s Eye shatters, its power destroyed by being used on a deity-level creature.
The tough part of the combat has just begun. The PCs now know several ways to disrupt the ritual. First, they may flee, leading Baridon and Daneth to safety. This will leave the temple as a cursed place, though, where Dunukai is strong enough to animate objects, and the danger of his coming will be ever-present. Or, they may start smashing that particular bas-relief, bending that shape, pulling out a certain stone, and so on. Running around the temple and undoing Dunukai’s work means that the fiend-god will send most of the statues after them. The PCs are probably going to have a very hard time fighting them; besides, the monster is going to animate more objects (even though the statues are the most dangerous). They’d better run away from them and rely on speed to shatter the ritual. The more warped features they destroy, the weaker Dunukai becomes. Until, eventually, with a mighty howl the fiendish form dissipates again and all the animated objects fall to the ground, inert.
When everything is over, Baridon and Daneth, both severely wounded, help each other down the stairs. Once again, there is rebuilding to do, but they have already rebuilt the most important thing: their faith. The Iron Warriors become an elite force of Vanadon’s army; the PCs are praised and rewarded, and Baridon returns to governing Greenhill, with much relief of Karlith.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
