Request for plot help from the Excellent Egos of Enworld.

[Death_Jester]

Greetings Everyone,

In the next few weeks I will be starting a new campaign set in the Forgotten Realms (Silver Marchs/Silverymoon area). I have this idea for a series of adventures for the first few games being around collecting some books that were lost. The books used to belong to a Wizard on the path of Lichdom and while he was out getting the ingredients for his transformation, his tower/home was raided by a local adventuring group. These are the players mentors not the players themselves. The mentors are about 5th level and the players will be starting out at first level. The mage will show up later in the game but for now he is out of the picture and has no way to knowing about what has happened to his books. So he will not be part of this little series of adventures either directly or indirectly.

His apprentice however is acutely aware of the problem. It is because of his appetite that the adventures (The fifth level mentors not the players) came to the tower in the first place. He is a vampire mage that was seriously wounded in the fight and is laying low as the adventures believe that they killed him. He will only act indirectly though charmed people/vampire thralls(or whatever they are calling the lesser vampires these days). As he wants everyone to contiune to think he is dead because the adventures almost killed him last time. He needs time to plan and get ready for a the next confrontation so he will not risk his life directly. He is very intersted in getting the books back befor his master shows up but he is also scared of dying.

The books were taken, when the adventures were busy with something else, by some kobolds and traded for weapons. The person that took the books would have sold/traded them to certain people to recoup the money for the weapons and made a killing on them in the process. The person that sold the books would have the kind of contacts that would make sure that he got top gold for them. She is a rogue weapons dealer type of character that has lots of contacts.

My question to the board is do you have any suggestions for adventures set around collecting books? To make things easier I don’t have a number of books in mind that the players have to get back. Also the players will be level one and should go until about level three with these quests.

What can the players do in order to find out who has the books and or how do they get the information from the Rogue?

I would ask what kinds of books would be important to a mage on his way to lichdom, other then spellbooks which is pretty much a given in this situation?

Why are they valuable to this mage?

I would like to make collecting some of the books a mini sub-quest kind of adventure like a two or three adventures to get one book back. Others more role playing related to getting the books back.

Example: One of the books is an old text related to funerary rites of the rulership in Mulhorand. The current owner is a merchant that wants to be buried in the manner of an Old Mulhorandie Noble. This put the players in an awkward situation as they cannot kill the person and just take the book but must figure out a way around the situation without resulting to brute force.

Not all of the suggestions should be like this but it should help illistrate what kind of help I’m looking for.

By the way the book are important to the players because they might block the path of Lichdom from this mage. They are hoping to get the books to a place like Candle Keep or some place else safe.
Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Piratecat]

There was a fantastic adventure in dungeon, years ago, called Ex Libris; it took place in a shifting library. Very cool.

 

[diaglo]

Dungeon 29 Ex Libris by Randy Maxwell.

edit: crud PKitty beat me to it.

 

[Death_Jester]

How do I get a hold of these adventures? I don't have a copy of this particular issue. Anyone have a copy that I could look through?

 

[diaglo]

pester Josh K...i think he lives near you.


also try and check out

 

[Death_Jester]

Quote From the Dungeon Index "Ex Libris (5-8) Opening a book in this library can expand your mind-or scatter it around the room!; *** (fantastic adventure-jh)"

A book that transports you into the story could be fun but what I was hoping to get from the board is some suggestions for plots that involve the players retrieveing books from places people things. Sort of your classic grocery list kind of quests but with a bit more depth and involvement. Hope this helps out a bit.

 

[Piratecat]

I'll think up more ideas and plot hooks. Stay tuned!

 

[Argent Silvermage]

One of the books was sold to a Dwarven noble who is on a quest to rebuild the library that his grandfather had built. You could have hints about what happened to his Grandpa's library (attacked by the lich want-to-be.) The dwarf will not part with it because taking it out of the library will not allow his grandfather's spirit to rest.

 

[Agback]

My question to the board is do you have any suggestions for adventures set around collecting books? To make things easier I don’t have a number of books in mind that the players have to get back. Also the players will be level one and should go until about level three with these quests.

What can the players do in order to find out who has the books and or how do they get the information from the Rogue?

I would ask what kinds of books would be important to a mage on his way to lichdom, other then spellbooks which is pretty much a given in this situation?

The thing that immediately springs to my mind is something like the sketches Leonardo da Vinci made in his note-books during dissections. They (and the accompanying notes in Greek and mirror-writing) would be valuable to the mage if a systematic knowledge of anatomy were hard to come by. The notebooks would also be valuable to an art collector, mechanician (for the mechanical inventions also found in the notebooks), alchemist, architect, military engineer, or enthusiastic admirer of the original polymathic genius. And they might incidentally include notes on a maze or other structure the da Vinci clone had built in his career as an engineer, and of the deadly traps therein. So somebody hoping to raid the complex might be interested, too.

Which leads me on to the thought that if there were a special resource that was necessary or very helpful to becoming a lich, the would-be lich might have stockpiled books about getting, preparing, and using that resource. There might be partial maps and memoirs mmade by adventuring parties that had explored part of a dungeon, if some sort of lich-making artifact were in that dungeon. There might be bestiaries including the descriptions of the beasts from which essential spell-ingredients must be obtained (but also containing invaluable details on the weaknesses of many monsters). There might be books on alchemetic procedures, which the lich needs because of the recipes of emalming, but which are valuable to others because of the mmany other recipes therein.

Another possibility is a big book of liches, listing the famous liches, their last known whereabouts, tactics they have used to defend themselves, methods heroes have used to circumvent these measures. If I were ambitious to become a lich, I'd want to know about the object lessons in how to prosper at it. For the same reason, any books on methods of destroying liches, memoirs or histories of heroes who have destroyed liches, books suggesting how one might protect oneself from liches, and what they might do to get around those protections, would be something that I would want to have read, even if I thought they were too dangerous to keep around for reference.

Then, regarding adventures, books can be sold, stolen, collected, copied, memorised, hidden (in portable holes?), mis-shelved, lost, damaged, and destroyed. A famous mediaeval bible was lost out of a boat and washed up on the beach three days later, undamaged except for the bindings (it is in Durham Cathedral now, having spent several centuries in a coffin witht he corpse of St Cuthbert). A certain valuable collect of Shakespeare first folios was once cut up by an illiterate servant for lining pie-tins. A huge number of JS Bach's manuscripts were lost forever when they were used by a butcher to wrap up cuts of mmeat. Back when books were written on expensive but durable parchment and vellum, it was common to scrape the writing off, apply a fresh coat of size, and to write over, producing a palimpsest. Quite a lot of invaluable ancient texts have been recovered by scraping the otiose or redundant mmediaeval writing off palimpsests and recovering the half-obliterated originals.

Basically, from an adventure point of view, a book is just a McGuffin. It doesn't offer anything unique from a motivational point of view except that its contents (if that is what is important) are reproducible.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Piratecat]

A really cool book would be an anatomical skeleton, with the necromantic advice carved in tiny letters on every bone of the skeleton's body.