D&D 5E New 5th edition Adventure: Baleful Coven (6th level)

[JohnLynch]

The Baleful Coven is an adventure for 6th or 7th-level characters that brings deadly danger to your heroes as they learn that their crusading heroics sometimes come with a price. Whenever adventurers toast their success after a hard-fought victory, their boots are soiled with the spilled blood of the conquered. Sometimes heroes forget that their enemies had friends and allies of their own, and families, and mothers. You may call them evil, but there is a love stronger than death, and a thirst for vengeance like no other in the heart of a mother weeping over her monstrous brood. What you called heroism, they call horror; what you called valor, they call murder. And they are coming for you, a mother witch and her deadly sisters, drawn from the far corners of the world to bring to life a nightmare world that will swallow your heroes and make them pay. Your characters thought the adventure was over, but the wrath of The Baleful Coven is just beginning.
- See more at: http://www.makeyourgamelegendary.co...s-and-adventures-for-5e/#sthash.L6fgkgra.dpuf

This was a really fun storyline to work with and convert to 5th edition. All of the NPCs could be easily represented in 5th edition in ways that used 5th edition mechanics but kept the core concept of the characters alive. It includes lots of new monsters including a Wood Golem, Frost Wights, Inugami (spiritual guardians from Japanese mythology) and two versions of the Annis Hag. Annis Hags are a CR 4 creature, however the Annis Hag the PCs face is a CR 7. So both the base version of the Annis Hag as well as the specific NPC that the PCs face are statted out separately so you can use the higher CR stats in other adventures as a unique NPC or you can use the base stats to represent your average Annis Hag.

If anyone gets a chance to have a read of it I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are. I'm going to be incorporating this adventure into my upcoming campaign (as it can be slotted into pretty much any campaign without too much trouble). What I'd love to do though is adapt it so that the adventure site becomes a Ravenloft Domain of Dread. I don't know much about Ravenloft though so would certainly love to hear people's thoughts as to how compatible the adventure site and the domains of dread are.

 

[Orlax]

A quick question about sliding this into a campaign. Does the offense which draws the coven's ire occur in game of could I build off of a previous slight already existent in my campaign?

For instance: when one of my characters was first level he participated in the murder of a hag, and was followed by one of her coven for revenge and managed to kill her too. Their next micro adventure on the way to another pre written adventure (the whisperer in darkness I believe it's called) is to face off against that very coven which has picked up two more hags. They are currently level 5 and after the pre written will be level 6, could I easily tie this adventure back to the existing hag coven in my story line?

 

[JohnLynch]

Does the offense which draws the coven's ire occur in game of could I build off of a previous slight already existent in my campaign?

Definitely. It is kept fairly vague so that GMs can pick up this module and use it without very much (if any) prior planning.

For instance: when one of my characters was first level he participated in the murder of a hag, and was followed by one of her coven for revenge and managed to kill her too. Their next micro adventure on the way to another pre written adventure (the whisperer in darkness I believe it's called) is to face off against that very coven which has picked up two more hags. They are currently level 5 and after the pre written will be level 6, could I easily tie this adventure back to the existing hag coven in my story line?

Oh definitely. So the adventure has the 3 villains all come together sometime after the players did the crime that bothered them. So in your story you could have one of the three people be the daughter (or cousin or mother or close friend) of the hag (or coven member) that the players killed. The other two villains could have had dealings with the now dead coven and have come to see why their allies are no longer contactable.

That's essentially the hook that's written in the adventure (I've tweaked it slightly) and can be easily adapted to any prior events in a campaign.