In today's "Dreams of Erthe" campaign we completed one short adventure and then started a second one, knowing we wouldn't finish it off until next time (it had a natural stopping point built in).
The first adventure, "Dregs," started with an 8-year-old boy asking the PCs, who are traveling across the continent rescuing people who have fallen into stasis as their minds get stuck in their dreams, to come wake up his mother who's been sleeping for two days and won't wake up. They feed him and he takes them to the slums of the city, where he and his mom live in a one-room hovel. One of the clerics checks out the woman in the corner...and she's been dead for about two days. Then she surprises everyone by sitting upright. They keep the boy from seeing what's going on (one of the PCs gets the idea to send him away with a silver coin to go buy garlic for the "waking up procedure") as the cleric/paladin tries turning the zombie - no luck. Then the first dregworm bursts out of her torso and tries burrowing its way into a new, living host. They kill the three dregworms that exit the nearly-hollow body of the boy's mom, deal with her now-driverless body, and when the boy returns they tell him they're having a hard time waking up his mom and ask if he has any other relatives they can take him to. He takes them to his Uncle Willick who works at "the temple with the lady," which turns out to be a whorehouse disguised as a temple to the goddess of fertility. Once the PCs realize Uncle Willick is planning on using the boy as a worker in the temple, they have it out with him, he attacks, and they end up taking on the two dwarven guards and a cleric of the god of betrayal disguised as a cleric of the goddess of fertility, freeing the six "priestesses" forced into working there. The boy ends up as an apprentice to the owner of the inn the PCs are staying in.
The second adventure, "The Missing Dreamer," started with the PCs being asked to accompany a cleric to the temple of the god of death and undeath, as someone fell asleep in their temple and everything they've tried to awaken him has failed. They show up to see if they can wake him from his dreams and find out he's now missing. A commune spell indicates he's still asleep, trapped in his dreams, was taken away from the temple by a living person for some nefarious reason, and is still on the material plane although he's no longer in the city from which he was abducted. Scouting around, they find a homeless beggar who saw the sleeping guy being carried away by a necromancer, and for the price of two chicken legs he tells them they went into the shrine of the goddess of magic and haven't come back out since. But there's nobody there at the shrine; the PCs find a hidden door allowing entry into a cramped passageway with a magic book that allows you to teleport to other shrines of the goddess of magic. They figure out the puzzle giving them the command phrase and teleport away, no doubt to the same place the necromancer and his kidnapped dreamer went. But whatever city they're in now is crawling with undead - and the teleport book is missing from the shrine at this end....
Johnathan
The first adventure, "Dregs," started with an 8-year-old boy asking the PCs, who are traveling across the continent rescuing people who have fallen into stasis as their minds get stuck in their dreams, to come wake up his mother who's been sleeping for two days and won't wake up. They feed him and he takes them to the slums of the city, where he and his mom live in a one-room hovel. One of the clerics checks out the woman in the corner...and she's been dead for about two days. Then she surprises everyone by sitting upright. They keep the boy from seeing what's going on (one of the PCs gets the idea to send him away with a silver coin to go buy garlic for the "waking up procedure") as the cleric/paladin tries turning the zombie - no luck. Then the first dregworm bursts out of her torso and tries burrowing its way into a new, living host. They kill the three dregworms that exit the nearly-hollow body of the boy's mom, deal with her now-driverless body, and when the boy returns they tell him they're having a hard time waking up his mom and ask if he has any other relatives they can take him to. He takes them to his Uncle Willick who works at "the temple with the lady," which turns out to be a whorehouse disguised as a temple to the goddess of fertility. Once the PCs realize Uncle Willick is planning on using the boy as a worker in the temple, they have it out with him, he attacks, and they end up taking on the two dwarven guards and a cleric of the god of betrayal disguised as a cleric of the goddess of fertility, freeing the six "priestesses" forced into working there. The boy ends up as an apprentice to the owner of the inn the PCs are staying in.
The second adventure, "The Missing Dreamer," started with the PCs being asked to accompany a cleric to the temple of the god of death and undeath, as someone fell asleep in their temple and everything they've tried to awaken him has failed. They show up to see if they can wake him from his dreams and find out he's now missing. A commune spell indicates he's still asleep, trapped in his dreams, was taken away from the temple by a living person for some nefarious reason, and is still on the material plane although he's no longer in the city from which he was abducted. Scouting around, they find a homeless beggar who saw the sleeping guy being carried away by a necromancer, and for the price of two chicken legs he tells them they went into the shrine of the goddess of magic and haven't come back out since. But there's nobody there at the shrine; the PCs find a hidden door allowing entry into a cramped passageway with a magic book that allows you to teleport to other shrines of the goddess of magic. They figure out the puzzle giving them the command phrase and teleport away, no doubt to the same place the necromancer and his kidnapped dreamer went. But whatever city they're in now is crawling with undead - and the teleport book is missing from the shrine at this end....
Johnathan