Can you jazz up this adventure hook?

Set

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I'm thinking about throwing in an adventure hook, but it lacks something. I'm having trouble thinking of a cool final encounter, in particular. Any brilliantly creative sorts able to think of something to give it 'oomph?'


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One of the PCs awakens from a vivid dream that sticks with him;

In the dream, you are in a classroom with a bunch of other students. Some are talking in accented voices about coming from a far-away land and how their own countrymen seem strange to them now, as if they have changed so much that they can never come back. You end up talking with one girl who is playing some word game with another girl that also involves the name of a country she can’t seem to figure out. The teacher is a tall woman with long black hair, who doesn’t seem to do any teaching so much as lean back and ignore you while various discussions take forth, rarely interjecting some comment or correction, although she seems a bit bored, and even dismissive at times.

At the end of class, you are looking a picture that someone has made with chalk in one of the desks, of a young boy with hair forward in a mop over his eyes and a white mask covering his lower face, along with another girl, a half-elf with amber colored eyes, who is wondering who drew that, since it’s been there forever. You leave class together, only instead of a hallway, you are in a damp tunnel, leading up to the sunlight. The girl you are with walks out into the sunlight, but you stay behind.


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On the streets of the city, you bump into a woman in the market place, she’s got a severe expression and was clearly distracted. She’s dressed in a moderately expensive looking dress with a tight leather bodice, painted to match, and has a fair amount of makeup on. Her hair is shoulder-length and brown, dyed with red henna, and her eyes are amber. She has clear half-elven ancestry, and you know you recognize her from somewhere. She looks up ready to snap off an angry comment, from the looks of it, but stops herself and just stares at you before turning to leave.

The girl from the marketplace is a high-price courtesan. Talking to her takes time and effort (the PC will likely have to 'pay for her time'), since she refuses to believe that you are who she thought she saw for a second.

It turns out that she lived through whatever dream you just had as a child, almost 40 years ago (which is why you can’t be the boy she saw, because he was human and would be much older)! Only it wasn’t a ‘classroom,’ although she admits that children might want to remember it that way. It was a slave-pen in a bluffside cavern near the city, where slavers would stow away their illegal cargo before sailing into port to meet with their underground contacts. This particular pen held only children, and the ‘teacher’ was a dour-faced black-haired woman who made sure that they were fed and that nobody got away. Almost all of the children were young girls, with one or two exceptions, and were mostly human, with a few halflings and a single half-elf. The two girls who spoke of their homeland were from the Scarlet Brotherhood, sold into slavery by their own parents, who had been holding out for blonde-haired, blue-eyed children, and sold off their ‘impure’ kids.

The ‘chalk drawing’ of the masked boy was made by an earlier inhabitant of the pen, scratched into the rock with another rock, and some of the kids would fantasize that the masked boy was going to come and rescue them some day.

The half-elf woman remembers a gift for sorcery even then, demonstrating Animate Rope (which she uses these days on high-paying clientele, who have strange interests) and explains that she used it on the twine holding the bamboo ‘bars’ of their pen together, and then to restrain the woman standing guard over them, while the children made a run for it, the larger ones carrying the smaller ones in a dash for freedom. Other guards at the end of the tunnel made short work of that escape attempt, and only she escaped, to return to town and find that her mother had vanished in the months she’d been away, and turning to a life on the street, finally landing herself in a job at an upper-class brothel, thanks to her ‘exotic looks.’

She can be convinced to point the PC in the direction of the slave-pen, in the bluffs to the east/west/whatever of the city, but points out that it’s been forty years.

What do the players find at the old slave pen? Small bones from children who died there? A fresh batch of child slaves being kept there by all-new slavers (the old ones having retired)? Ghosts and dust and unpleasant memories? Evidence that someone high-up in the city that they’ve been dealing with was one of these original slavers, forty years past? Ideally, some mix of all of the above, to have RP, immediate combat encounter and political ramifications after-the-fact.

The PC who had the dream may turn out to be the reincarnation of the boy from the dream, who died in the ill-fated escape attempt. Or the ghost of that boy might be sending him that dream, aware that new slavers have taken residence in the cave, and attempting to summon someone to come rescue these new children from dying as he did, or worse, living with the sort of life that would have befallen him. If the ghost-child possesses or just influences the PC, he might even end up combing his hair down over his eyes and wearing a white mask over his lower face when he rescues the new captives, fulfilling the idle wish of some children that are long-dead.
 
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the long hair on the teacher wasn't hair but tentacles or snakes. depending on if you want to go medusa or mind flayer. edit: in the present. in the dream it was still hair.
 

I gotta say .. that's already pretty jazzy! :) Miles beyond "a cloaked figure approaches you in a tavern and offers you 200 gp each to bring him the McGuffin du Jour from the Caves of Wherever."
 

diaglo said:
the long hair on the teacher wasn't hair but tentacles or snakes. depending on if you want to go medusa or mind flayer. edit: in the present. in the dream it was still hair.

There is a slave-taking mind flayer pirate in the setting, Cuttleblack, but I'm not sure I want to use him quite yet. Neat idea 'though! I definitely want to come up with stuff that the dream suggests but doesn't quite state, so this is exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for!
 

general - dreamscape.

I really like the basic concept. The substitution of elements in the dream is interesting.

Wouldn't a mind flayer or medusa be little to powerful for the half elf to deal with?

Here are some initial thoughts.

Keep the courtesan's mother somewhere just off stage. Finding the mother could be offered in exchange for information, assistance. Good hook for a bit of travel to exotic lands.

Make one of the PC's a descendent of the slavers, perhaps the woman responsible for watching the children. This can lead to all sorts of nastiness as the PC's uncovers the truth - dirty money and nasty secrets. Cursed by their own grannie!

Perhaps several of the more powerful individuals in the town owe their wealth, and subsequent position to the slave trade. Perhaps the PC's family does as well. After 40 years, some might be descendants, some actual participants. No would likely welcome people nosing around and looking under old rocks. Efforts could be made to 'dissuade' the PC's. Some of the people may still have ties with some fairly unpleasant and dangerous people.

The investigation could lead all sort of places. Lots of opportunity to get the PC's out and about.

Perhaps the PC has inherited some small item that once belonged to the boy, which is why he now haunts them. Make the haunting really brutal, impacting upon their ability to function. Increasingly terrible dreams leave the PC fatigued, or cause Stat loss over time.

Introduce the dreams while the PC's are doing something else, another adventure or something. Start small and innocuous and ramp it up. Then introduce the half elf.

Perhaps the ghost wants retribution. Perhaps he just wants his remains returned to his family for a proper burial. Doing so would require asking a lot of questions many people would rather not answer. But it also means that the PC's have some negotiation room. They are not after vengeance, just information. Lots of opportunity for the social interaction skills. Ot side quests, perhaps someone wants the McGuffin du Jour from the Caves of Wherever in return for information. Gotta have a MGdJftCoW.

doghead
aka thotd
 

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