Lost Elvish City Adventure

[Aholibamah]

The adventure I want to plan for features a lost elvish city in a vast wilderness. I like the idea but I'm stumped for how to actually do it. The main details are these: party of 11th level characters with one v young dragon companion, 1 lower level ranger cohort, 1 pseudo dragon companion. I was going to have some npc sages propose the adventure in order to gain information and knowledge in particular.

What I'd kind of like to try is a Conan style lost city--one wherein the elvish folk seem to live in a dream world but are secretly oppressed by some awful Cthulhoid menace. Any thoughts about how I could present this would be appreciated. I'm trying mainly to figure out the following:

1. Encounters.
2. What the city looks like.
3. Which particular Cthulhoid menace...and how is it involved? Is there a cult among the elves or some more recent arrivals?

 

[Prince Atom]

Well, the cliche elven city looks a bit like one of the big set pieces in the Dragonlance novels, or a more advanced version of the Ewok village in RotJ. All the houses are up in trees, reached by climbing rope ladders or traversing suspension bridges. The houses themselves are bulbous, with very few straight lines or hard corners, and are either plastered white with frescoes or decorated with all kinds of woodcarving.

There's this one building, though, that's different from all the rest. It's heavily guarded, and it's in a location that makes it stand out. If all the elfs' houses are in the trees, this building is on the ground. If all of the elfs' houses are along a river, this is set back a ways. Physical isolation from the other buildings is a good clue, as are size and architectural style, that Something Is Odd about the whole building. Of course, that's where the Old One is staying. The climax of the adventure would be raiding that building and defeating whatever it is that is staying there.

As far as encounters go...

Initially, though it's a bit cliche, the heroes could find what seems like the perfect community; everyone's happy, there's no crime, no one argues, everyone smiles all the time, and yet they are singularly unhelpful to visitors, referring all questions to Someone Else, who in turn just points the heroes at yet another unhelpful person.

So how do they get answers? Don't ask the elfs.

In one of the monster books for 3E there were a number of dragons which were conceived of as companions to elves. These dragons aren't large and winged, and I forget what the book called them.

Perhaps the Great Old One who has enspelled all the elfs cannot similarly trap those companion dragons, and as a result has had his thralls drive them out. The elfs could perceive them as once-friends who've all gone mad or something, and fear them, seeing them as monsters instead of allies.

Now, none of these dragons as written in the book would be a threat all by themselves to several 11th-level PCs, but you could advance them or get them all together. They're pretty intelligent and can speak several languages, IIRC, so that may be something for your dragon companion to work with.

So once the heroes start interacting with the dragons, who haven't much more idea than anyone else what's going on, but haven't spurned the elfs despite being driven out, the Old One starts poisoning the minds of the elfs against the heroes. So the deluded elfs take up arms against the heroes, who have to defend themselves without doing much harm to the thralls for fear of angering their new dragon allies. Finally, the heroes break into that Odd Building, confront monsters and villains on whom they can vent their well-stoked spleens freely, and kick butt until the adventure is resolved.

I don't think you should aim for any resolution other than violence at the climax, if there's some reason the heroes can't do lasting harm to any of the elfs or the dragons. The butt-kickers in your group would be Very Upset if they had no opportunity to do their thing.

Hope this was helpful!

TWK

 

[Einan]

Sorry to threadcrap, but I seriously thought the header was "Lost Elvis City" and all I could picture was a skyline full of sequined buildings, all fading in the sunset...

 

[reason]

The city is between hills in the center of a once-mighty forest. The trees here have lost their leaves and most of their branches to a strange rot, and have become petrified in but a short time after. The undergrowth is all gone save for strange, ropy thornbushes. Strange runes are marked upon the hills in broken stone, shapes that hurt the mind to see.

The city was pillars and white stone amidst the mightiest trees; now it is in ruins, the stones pulled hapazardly to build rune-structures upon the hills. The trees themselves look like twisted pillars, bare of branch and leaf. Bones lie in the street, unnoticed, where the incautious crushed themselves in pulling down their manses.

The thing beneath the hills rose from the depths of the world, fallen from the stars in an age of mighty sorcery. It is a maggot of the starspawn, massive and vile, slowly transforming in sorcery and strange growth. Its thousand fine spine-tendrils rise from its lair beneath the earth to twist in the air. Many elves stand and stare, mindless and starving, at the movement of the tendrils. Others yet work themselves to death in dragging stone to the hills.

This is a shunned place now, remote even before the starspawn, but none go there, and none come from there.

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[reason]

Or, less openly, you might liberate the City of One Thousand Children idea. Needs a bit of elvenization, though, to make the endless revels less human:

Upon a warm shore facing the Lantac stands Rej Neroo, a city of nut-brown and lustful people. They build halls in the shadow of a great, crumbled statue of an ancient priest, standing upon a mountaintop. Ancient indeed is this place; spired ruins of cities that have come before spread far and about; fields of strange herbs grown by the men of Rej Neroo curve about fallen statues. The name of he who shadows the city - and that of the God he sacrificed to - are lost to a past aeon of the world; in the age I plied the concubines of Rej Neroo with heady nessen wine, they had long given heed only to the Undergod Bulsath.

The bloated, hair-wrapped body of Bulsath rumbles beneath the city in loathsome sleep, lulled only by machinations of priests of the Five Grey Temples - stern and unlaughing Lords within a city given over to pleasures of the sun, sea and flesh. Dour priests stalk the streets by day and night, in festival or drunken aftermath, and in fear the brown, lithe women of Rej Neroo obey their every whim. To hear the priests, it is the dreams of Bulsath that sustain their city - and prevent the Undergod from reaching out His long thorny hairs to spear the left eye and liver from every man and woman of Rej Neroo.

There are one thousand children within Rej Neroo, always and ever more; no more than five more nor five less than this number are permitted. It is the cries of children that lull Bulsath's pulsing organs and quiet his dire tendrils, the sounds given to Him down through earth and rock by great tubes and Grey Temple sorcery. Ever forth go the forbidding priests, with tablets marked for each child - and to order the fate of women, the better to calm the Undergod they serve, and steer His dreams to their end.

Woe to the trader children who are carried to Rej Neroo upon coastal ways in ignorance, for they will be slain and cast into the sea, lest Bulsath awaken to shake off the city from His back. Entwined bodies and drugged, laughing revels of the following day will be their only tomb marker. Woe to the nut-brown woman who is ravished and with child of her own choice and does not flee this laughing city and the worms within its core!

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[Aholibamah]

TWK: I think those small flightless dragons are called Felldrakes. http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mm2_gallery/88268_620_49.jpg
(one on the left is a Crested Felldrake)

I quite like the idea of the dragons being added, I think my pcs will find that fascinating. Here's a question as an aside: they are MM2 beasties, so is that worth picking up? I really just have the basic books.


Reason: I really like your cthluhoid application--since it also fits within the forest environment. The image of the elves staring at the tendrils weaves somehow with the image of the city...perhaps I could combine both somehow?

BTW, did you write that entry? It's very Lovecraft and very cool.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

You know, the module B4 "The Lost City" has a human civilization oppressed by a Cthuloid horror ... perhaps you could adapt? It's set below a pyramid in a desert, but ... BAMF ... you change it to a forest, and change the inhabitants to elves ...

 

[Aholibamah]

Wow, I actually have the old 1E of that! Thanks a lot of the suggestion. Certainly that will help a lot with maps and stuff like that.

 

[Lidgar]

Ruins of Myth Drannor boxed set might also be useful for maps and ideas.

 

[rgard]

The adventure I want to plan for features a lost elvish city in a vast wilderness. I like the idea but I'm stumped for how to actually do it. The main details are these: party of 11th level characters with one v young dragon companion, 1 lower level ranger cohort, 1 pseudo dragon companion. I was going to have some npc sages propose the adventure in order to gain information and knowledge in particular.

What I'd kind of like to try is a Conan style lost city--one wherein the elvish folk seem to live in a dream world but are secretly oppressed by some awful Cthulhoid menace. Any thoughts about how I could present this would be appreciated. I'm trying mainly to figure out the following:

1. Encounters.
2. What the city looks like.
3. Which particular Cthulhoid menace...and how is it involved? Is there a cult among the elves or some more recent arrivals?

Just some thoughts...

How about you put the city on it's own demi plane that blocks the Cthulhoid plane from directly touching the Prime Material plane?

Maybe the elves have been fighting the Cthulhoid menace for centuries and no longer know the way back to the prime material or don't even know it exists?

And then maybe the tide has turned against the Elves and the PCs have to convince them to evacuate and destroy their home which servers the link with the Cthulhoid plane and keeps the prime material plane safe?

Maybe the PCs act as rear guard, ala the Song of Roland?

Thanks,
Rich