18 Hours to Kill (aba Brainstorming Plots)

[Mercule]

Well, I'm finally back in the DM chair, starting tomorrow. At this point, though, with holidays, a few things happening in January, and the strong suspicion that I'm going to use more of Unearthed Arcana than I'm going to discard, I'm not planning to start a campaign in earnest until late Febuary/early March.

So, I've offered to run a beer-and-pretzels game in the interim. Looking at the calendar, it actually amounts to about 18 hours of game time, post character-generation. I honestly have no clue what to do, though, so I thought I'd see what everyone 'round here came up with.

Here's the ground rules:

--3.5 rules.

--15th level characters, anything goes. One player is doing a straight halfling Rogue (standard adventuring build). Another is playing a half [gold] dragon troll Ranger (okay, so the Ranger is incidental). I suspect a third will want to play some good-aligned variant on a werewolf. And the last two have mentioned something about clerics (to which I offered to look at angels and archons for them).

--Our default setting is Greyhawk and the troll has enough backstory to require his origins to be there. I'm not opposed to dropping them somewhere else, though -- there just has to be some logic behind it.

--No new purchases for a short-term game. That means Core books, Psionics Handbook, the splatbooks, ELH, BoVD, and Complete Warrior are the staples.

--Must be completable in 6-8 sessions of 3-3.5 hours each.

Beyond that, I'm open for ideas.

 

[demiurge1138]

In the BoVD, there's a spell called preserve organ. Now, why would such a spell exist? Here's why.

The players start off being summoned to a large magocratic community. Not necessarily epic, just a big city. People have been dropping dead mysteriously. Sometimes it's instantaneously. Sometimes they linger. Remove disease can't heal the sick ones, and autopsies show that all of them are missing a different body part. Then, if the bodies are ever left alone for any length of time, they disappear. What's going on?

An evil wizard, shunned by the community for his "unorthodox" methods, has been getting his revenge on those who slighted him. He's written a new spell, teleport organ to kill people who either had him banished, or are friends and relatives of those who banished him, and using their body parts to create a massive flesh golem that he's planning on sending into the city. Oh, and did I mention he's using a blood magus lieutenant to steal the bodies back so he can animate them as his shadow horde to clean up behind the golem?

Demiurge out.