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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tilla the Hun (work)" data-source="post: 1196414" data-attributes="member: 14214">So tell me what you think of this plot line (I'm tying some previous occurrences in the game into this as well - mainly an encounter at extremely low level with an insanely powerful arch-lich)quote:Eons ago, before the humanoids came to the world of Umari, dragons ruled uncontested save for each other.  The slumbered for millenia, treating the world like a resort where normal creatures would never disturb them.  During these times, dragon fought dragon until they met in councils and forbade direct conflict on this restful vacation spot.  So dragons turned to plotting, and the usage of allies to wage conflict against each other.  One such conflict occurred in a green, fertile river valley in the far east.  The desert area now known as as the Burning Sands.J'Kalar was an adult dragon that highly desired the hoard of an elder blue Y'tros.  Knowing that direct conflict was prohibited by the elder council, he spent a millenia perfecting his magical arts and bred up a race of creatures he called Dragori.  A reptilian race that had no use for good or evil, only cold, emotionless logic.  When they grew strong enough, he used them to begin raids on Y'tros.Y'tros was no fool however.  Her safeguards warned her of the younger dragons actions, and she used many scryings and other means both magical and mundane to carefully observe and reproduce the efforts of the other.  She made a new insectoid race called the Valhor, or Dragon Servants in the common tongue.  These she set to guarding her horde, and to exterminating the Dragori when they begain raiding her hordes.Both Y'tros and J'Kalar vanished soon after the conflict began between the two created races.  As it escalated, both sides had legends of their creators return.Where the Dragori were cold and heartless, focused on sheer physical strength of arms, the Valhor were masters of the mystical energies and concentrated more on magicks and enchantments.  Their war escalated over time and resulted in the eventual destruction of the land itself, changing it into a barren landscape of shifting sands.Their war moved into the underworld, then deeper into the underdark itself, and still the combat raged almost unceasingly as mighty magics were brought to bear and the earth itself shuddered under the conflict.Eventually, the Valhor won a pyrrhic victory.  The Dragori were exterminated in a magical plague (the forerunner of a later plague), but the Valhor paid a terrible price.  Of their once proud race, only a single queen had survived to breed more.  The Dragori were presumed dead, so the Valhor retreated to the hoard left by Y'tros and began to slowly rebuild their shattered nation, now far underground.The Dragori were not completely dead, however.  In their final days they managed to master rudimentary planar portal magicks and brought in a hive of fomori to their stronghold to be used as shock troops against the Valhor.  Legends of the creator and the story behind the war were imprinted on the fomorian hive.  When the cataclysmic end of the war arrived for the Dragori, the fomori managed to flee undetected, and set about establishing their own nation, from which they would someday set forth to destroy the Valhor.Time passed, humanoids arrived on Umari, and set about building their own nations.  The Fomori and the Valhor races grew in power in the deepest underdark, seperated from each other by the shattered underdark that once housed the Dragori.  Eventually, their power grew enough that both sides pused up through the underdark and emerged to the light of day for the first time in many millenia.Generations had passed since the fomori were brought and since the Valhor had been created.  Their creators and their wars were little more than racial legends.  Their first meeting might have been peaceful if a certain arch-lich Demos had not been observing their re-emergence into the surface world.  Demos had designs on a nearby kingdom, and knew that the desert lands provided a valuable portal to distant lands across the sea, so he set about laying an ambush and when the two races met for the first time, he had orcs and desert giants attack the meeting in order to break it up.  He harried both sides with illusions of the other until they retreated back to the underdark.  He then sent dreams and messages to both sides to resurrect the nearly dead embers of hatred that weighed heavily on both sides.The Burning Sands erupted into fierce warfare that consumed almost all the humanoids in the area.  The orcs retreated to the west and the desert giants to the hills and mountains of the south as mighty magics once again rocked the land where the Valhor strive against the now strong Fomori.end quote.Of course, the Valhor are actually Thri-kreen appearing insectoids.Into this mess walks my party (cle1/wiz8 + bar7 + rog1/cle4 + monk4) wanting to know why the desert caravans have stopped traveling <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Comments?</blockquote>

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