Suggest to me a cool monster for this encounter

Slavers who sell off the surviving adventures for profit. However in this case if the players escape, the remaining slavers can have the paladin as a special slave offering that the group will have to rescue. This will set up a second adventure if needed.

A Lamia or Medusa looking to further decorate their lairs and gain more thralls! Perhaps the gambler is even one of these thralls.

Twist it! Make it a real map. But the thing is the lair has already been cleared out by high level adventurers. The gambler is the original owner (or an agent thereof) and needs some poor saps to remove the wards left by the high level adventurers so she can recover the maguffin the high level adventurers didn't find.

Wiseblood said:

Devil Swine....

Click to expand...

Was thinking along the same lines - Devil Swine or a group of Seawolves.

To me it seems it could be a lesser devil. They circulate the map to entice hosts to their lair where they offer them a deal. Trade their soul for power, or die.

To make the deal interesting you could offer a warlock invocation to the pc at the cost of never being able to be raised from the dead.

Of course deal taken or not, the map finds itself in the hands of another gambler, in another tavern, in another town...

You could still make it a vampire who is sending the PCs to his private "training ground" where his spawn try to prove their worth by taking out the adventurers. The real vampire is never there of course, he's testing his spawn to see which of them is strongest.

I'd probably throw in some vampire spawn variants such as spawn that have gone too long without blood and basically turned in ghouls.

This sets up a future villain and other potential side plots if the group wants to pursue it further. Are there other "training grounds"? What's the vamp's long term plan? Is he part of something bigger?

Or if the group doesn't express a lot of interest it's just a one-off adventure.

I like [MENTION=40176]MarkB[/MENTION] 's suggestion of the Otyugh handler. So much that I think I'm gonna steal the idea

This may be a long post...but I had an adventure idea(I'll try to keep it brief, though):

A dragon...young dragons are too weak to raze villages and plunder caravans so...

Once Upon A Time...An elderly woodsman with his toddler grand-daughter lived near an old pit mine. (for arguments sake, we can say the parents died and the old man is raising the daughter. I think it works best if the man is kind of frail). On a walk, they hear a sound from the mine - it's an abandoned dragon hatchling. They don't know how it got there and It's a red but he takes pity on it, takes it home and raises it.

Fast-forward 10 years later: It's bigger than a horse and is living in the mine, hunting deer etc...The daughter is 12ish. The dragon brings them food and stuff...but it's not a great family relationship - dragons are possessive and cruel but the old man loves the dragon like his own even if it's getting more aggressive and abusive. One day the man fears for his daughter well-being and tells the dragon they are going to move in to town. The dragon says something along the lines of, "If I can't have you, no-one can. I'd rather kill you than see you living with someone else." (because the dragon does love them but this is how this red dragon shows love)

The man secretly decides to leave and is planning to do so, but the dragon is smart. The man goes out one day and comes back and his daughter is missing. The dragon tells him, the daughter is now living with him. But not in the mine - somewhere different. What the man doesn't know, is the dragon, while out on his many forays, came across a small cave of kobolds. The kobolds revere and fear the dragon and give the dragon lots of 'shinys' and has collected a modest horde. He's taken the daughter there and ordered the kobolds treat her like a Queen. The daughter thinks it's a great arrangement because she loves the dragon and has no idea how much danger she is in and they get to spend the days together with her father and the dragon as a nice happy family and she gets her 'freedom' to be a 'grown-up' and live on her own with her 'servants'.

The dragon tells the woodsman that they will visit every day but, at night, the daughter goes back to the secret lair. Kobolds skulk around the woodsman's cabin to ensure the woodsman doesn't leave with the daughter while the dragon is away. In return for not killing the daughter - and for the dragon providing food from hunting, the man must bring 'food' and treasure.

So the man goes to town and tricks people in to going to the mine, where the dragon lives (not the kobold lair...the man doesn't know where that is). People with loot. The old man hates the idea of luring people to their deaths but he doesn't want his daughter to die.

Here is the dilemma: He doesn't want to lure strong adventurers because they might kill the dragon and, if the dragon dies, he might not ever find out where his daughter is hidden. Also, he still half-loves the dragon. But at the same time, he wants to be free of the dragon. And even if they kill the dragon, what will his daughter think? She'll be devastated! Will she even leave the kobolds? What if the dragon escapes thinking it's been tricked? Will it kill his daughter?

So, maybe he's playing poker with some young men, trying to trick them with the map and the adventurers overhear...they might be a bit more powerful than he was expecting...he's in a pickle...but just maybe they can also help? Maybe He'll see how things play out. He's a bit spineless, after all.

Edit: the only thing that might not work is the age of the dragon...but maybe the old man and daughter are wood elves or something...then the dragon can be as old as you need it to be.

The map is the monster: a mimic.

“Feed me,” it whispered to the poor unfortunate gnome illusionist to last possess it. At first he did not heed the strange whispers, but gradually as his badger pets, his owl familiar,and then his auntie disappeared he realized it was the map’s doing.

Now he tries to get rid of it by deliberately losing at the gambling tables. He even casts Nystul’s magic aura to make it seem especially valuable to doubters.

The map leads the party to a trap filled murder dungeon designed by the gambler, who likes to watch people die because he's a maniac. If the party survives, they kill the gambler and take a pile of loot collected from previous victims. You could include monsters that the gambler captured and locked in the dungeon. I'm think Carrion Crawlers and other less intelligent monsters.