[4E] Campaign help- Night Below conversion

[The Halfling]

I'm wanting to do a conversion /mashup of Night Below, GDQ series, and the Chaos Scar from Dungeon. Calling the campaign "Enemy of my Enemy..."

This is the synopsis I semi-developed to help give a background to these. Any ideas or feed-back to flesh this out would be much appreciated

The Far Realm is encroaching on the material world. An unlikely alliance of gods is marshalling the forces necessary to thwart the madness. Cults of Torog are harvesting the slaves and sacrifices needed by the Torture Dens of Torog to produce those few inured to the mind-shattering abilities of the aberrational agents of the Far Realm. Covens of Lolth are gathering sacrifices to empower Lolth, allowing her to strengthen the bonds of her Demonweb. Thereby slowing or stopping the cancerous spread of the Abyss, and indirectly stopping the Far Realm rift, opened by Tharizdun, at its base. Her agents manipulate the Giants to both raid settlements and villages for victims, and to gather forces needed to oppose a Fomoran incursion in the Underdark.

The Shard of Evil, a physical piece of the Far Realm, procured when Tharizdun last opened the Living Gate, is slowly opening a new Living Gate. Tharizdun is sacrificing his sanity and being into holding the Living Gate closed. The DemonWeb serves a two-fold purpose. The lesser purpose is to bind the Abyss and slow its expansion. However its true purpose is to channel her divine energy into Tharizdun to slow the growth of the new Living Gate until a resolution can be found.
Torog, in his mad wanderings in the Underdark, broke through the planar barriers to the base of the Abyss. He realized the implications to his survival should the Living Gate fully manifest. He bound Tharizdun with chains formed from the essences drawn from his three realms: the Underdark, Feydark, and Shadowdark. This provides a grounding in reality that Tharizdun was quickly losing in his madness. As a side-effect, Torog has taken on some of the pain that Tharizdun is experiencing, and is now subject to sensations of pleasure and pain that he has never experienced before in his jaded existence.

 

[Derulbaskul]

I'm doing something similar in my current FR campaign... but I am also mashing in parts of The Savage Tide, 1E's Dwellers of the Forbidden City and goodness knows how many other 1E, 2E and 3.5E adventures. Heck, the first dungeon crawl is based on JG's Caverns of Thracia and the Rod of Seven Parts is the key MacGuffin!

This is my rough idea for a campaign arc stretching from 1st to 30th levels although it doesn't use all of the ingredients that you are proposing but it still might be helpful:

Heroic Tier: Slavers of the Chaos Scar

I would suggest running this in a manner akin to a sandbox but with a basic plot that orcs, hobgoblins etc... are uniting to enslave as many folk as possible and these folk are disappearing into the Underdark. Gradually the party pieces together that the various tribes and whatnot of the region are being manipulated by the aboleth. Basically, combine The Chaos Scar with Book One of Night Below and bits of Scourge of the Slavelords and maybe conclude with a battle against an aboleth that has been tasked with the slaving operations so that the party feels that they have accomplished a major victory by stopping the slaving operations.

Paragon Tier: Giants & Drow

While I essentially hate, loathe and detest 4E's Revenge of the Giants as yet another WotC masterpiece of really poor adventure design that I unfortunately wasted good money on, one thing I do like is the use of the release of a primordial of earth, frost and fire as that which links the three disparate giant races together but, because of their relative levels, the drow need to come first.

Basically, send the party on D1-3 Descent into the Depths/Vault of the Drow with a mission to uncover and destroy (either directly or indirectly by manipulating the Lolth-worshippers to do the deed for them) the drow house that is now following the same deity or Far Realm entity that Tharizdun worships. Whatever happens, the party should find information that also shows how this drow house has uncovered a ritual to allow the release of a primordial of earth, frost and fire and provided that ritual to the titans or kings that lead the three giant tribes.

Before they get to the Vault of the Drow, the party should fight or otherwise negotiate their way through the troglodytes, the kuo-toa and some of the other sites suggested in 4E's Underdark.

The party then head back to the surface to take the fight to the giants before they join together to release the primordial. And how does this primordial relate to the plans of the aboleth? It seems it has the power to weaken the Pillars of Creation (see Plane Below: Secrets of the Elemental Chaos) which will make it that much easier for the aboleth to create the Living Gate.

Epic Tier: Lords of Madness

OK, now it's time to really pursue the aboleth. Perhaps first they need to travel to the Plane Below and get the aid of the githzerai and fight off slaadi or whatnot assaulting one of the Pillars of Creation.

Next they need a weapon against the aboleth. The githzerai tell them about the annulus (see 3.5E's Expanded Psionic Handbook for details of this artefact and its ability to nullify psionics: in 4E terms, treat it as providing phenomenal protection from any of the powers of the aboleth) but the annulus is held as part of the treasure of the Lich Queen of the Githyanki so that, of course, leads to an adventure on the Astral Sea and, in due course, to the githyanki capital of Tu'narath.

After that perhaps it's time for the party to make an initial foray into the aboleth city armed with the annulus only to discover that the real battle lies at the site of the new Living Gate. And, taking an idea from page 21 of Underdark, why not allow this final battle to include the chance of sealing Creation from the Far Realm forever... and possibly even ending the existence of all aberrations right away!

What I have sketched out doesn't include some of your ingredients but I think it is simple enough to insert Torog, Tharizdun etc... without too much effort and then you will have a skeleton of a story that will easily bring the party from 1st to 30th level.

 

[DayTripper]

IIRC Night Below is a bit of a hackfest though with some interesting compnents. Are you going to introduce those odd elves who can move through stone (was it elves - some time ago since I played through this one)? Also was it Night Below where you have to take out a Kuo-toan city using some sort of scoring system? Are you keeping that, I thought it was quite an interesting idea and can probably be improved on using ideas presented in Tome of Battle from v3.5 or perhpas turned into a complex skill challenge linked to key battles..?

 

[Derulbaskul]

IIRC Night Below is a bit of a hackfest though with some interesting compnents. Are you going to introduce those odd elves who can move through stone (was it elves - some time ago since I played through this one)? Also was it Night Below where you have to take out a Kuo-toan city using some sort of scoring system? Are you keeping that, I thought it was quite an interesting idea and can probably be improved on using ideas presented in Tome of Battle from v3.5 or perhpas turned into a complex skill challenge linked to key battles..?

Yes, you're right.

The skill challenge system could work really well. Have, say, three or five core objectives based on skill challenges together with several key encounters. If any SC is failed the corresponding encounter has its XP budget increased by the same amount to reflect the price of failure (and to make it easier to plan out the party's rate of level advancement).