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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="Libertad" data-source="post: 6197093" data-attributes="member: 6750502">Adventures in the Upper Planes    The Abyss is a plane of seemingly infinite layers controlled by an equally uncountable number of demon lords.  It has all sorts of terrain, from steaming jungles to towering cities of evil.  Acheron is in a constant state of warfare, with orcs, goblins, and living siege constructs fighting over just about every conceivable reason for battle.  The Lower Planes are handily suited for extraplanar adventures and are all interesting places for your party to explore.    Not so much with the Upper Planes.  As described in the Third Edition Manual of the Planes, the celestial realms seem to be lacking in comparison.  This could be due to the idea of heaven being a “Utopia” and thus relatively free of conflict.  Maybe it’s due to the conceit that most parties are non-evil and that the forces of Good don’t have much reason to fight each other like the various Evil factions.  The purpose of this post is to find ways to create interesting adventures in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons (Explore dangerous places!  Fight vicious monsters!) by adding ideas to the Upper Planes or extrapolating from existing ones.Bytopia <img src="http://i.*****.com/snLh1S1.jpg?1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />    Bytopia’s one of the planes in need of the most work.  What we get out of it from the Manual is an idyllic, pastoral landscape of sparsely populated villages in the region of Dothian, towering hill-cities home to the Gnomish Pantheon, and the wild, rugged region of Shurrock.  Here's my redesign:An Individualist Society    Bytopia is sort of a pseudo-Libertarian commune in the sense that the societies are organized by the ideal of “personal achievement working with social interdependence.”  The agricultural industries are individually run, and shops located between habitats are beholden to no person or ideal except the “common good.”  And Bytopia’s ideal of the Common Good is that individuals working towards their strengths and dreams results in a greater society for all.  The idea is that individuals will form alliances and agreements with each other when in need of certain things, and the people who work the hardest and/or are the best at their trade will have the most potential to form alliances as long as their services are in demand.    This is a great deal for merchants, business owners, and people who love their job and wish to improve their craft or profession.    As long as you're not of Evil alignment and don’t deprive the Plane’s inhabitants of their rights or destroy their property (no slave rings, no deliberately tainting the town’s water supply, etc), you’re pretty much left to your own devices.  Of course, you won’t get free handouts, and any benefits of civilization you desire, such as supplies and security, are worked out in social contracts with the relevant parties.  Many traders in planar goods and magic items have private retreats on Bytopia, doubling as a scenic landscape and tax-free haven.    This also resulted in a large influx of scientific and magical talent.  The experiments of enterprising artificers and mages, unconstrained by regulation and oversight and combined with the seemingly boundless and unpredictable nature of gnomish science, often results in amazing breakthroughs as well as catastrophic lab accidents.  Abandoned labs and company towns are usually located away from major population centers in the wild reaches of Shurrock, their scientific notes and untested devices scattered in the ruins and debris below flying swarms of mutated leeches and rogue war golems.  Companies seeking to recover their losses or steal from the competition often pay bands of adventurers to scour these places for anything of value.The Wilds of Shurrock    Inhabitants of Bytopia who don’t feel that the rural towns of Dothian are independent enough often retreat to the other layer of Shurrock.  The region’s terrain is inhospitable and full of hostile predators, making it a poor choice for habitation.  These factors, combined with the rugged mountain passages and hidden alpines make it a haven for all sorts of privacy-seekers.  They majority of Shurrock’s inhabitants are hermits, scientists seeking an isolated environment, and explorers with a thing to prove.  Most settlements are temporary and almost always heavily guarded (mostly to keep out wild predators, sometimes to keep dangerous experiments in).The Machinations of Urdlen    Urdlen is the sole evil deity of the Gnomish pantheon.  He’s a gluttonous, badger-like monster whose thirst for destruction is as great as his all-consuming hunger.  He makes his home in the Abyss and doesn’t much care for worshipers; his clerics mostly hang around his tunnels and try to please their god, and sometimes he grants divine spells to evil gnomes so that they can cause death and destruction to their local communities.  It’s for this reason that Urdlen doesn’t have a thriving priesthood, but the gnomes he does favor have more than proven themselves in their savagery and cunning.    Urdlen’s hill-city is all but abandoned now on Bytopia, although it’s still littered with traps, undead and construct guardians, and Abyssal portals.  There’s no sizable community of followers on Bytopia or in any easily-reached locations, and that’s exactly how Urdlen prefers it.  He’s the unseen threat, the lone voice that urges the misanthropic and bullied loner to plot vengeance; the voice that tells the furious husband to kill his unfaithful wife and her paramour.  Urdlen’s the type of deity that can drive good folk into the depths of evil without the victim realizing it.  A priesthood and holy symbol would give a face to the opposition, an easily-identifiable enemy for Glittergold and his followers to attack.    Urdlen’s followers live in Bytopia, their identities, life stories, and personalities all carefully forged to ingratiate themselves into the community.  They may live as honorable and trustworthy citizens for decades before enacting some terrible deed and vanishing into the Abyss.  They use Bytopia’s permissive attitude against itself, severing bonds of trust and abusing the freedom given to them to sow doubt about the gnomes’ way of life.  If they can push even a small community or individual to the breaking point, they’ve done Urdlen’s work.Adventure Hooks in Bytopia:•    A siege engineer working for an important war effort lost contact with the army/rebels.  His last known location was in a science city located in the wild reaches of Shurrock.  Enemy sabotage resulted in the settlement’s war golems going berserk.  The PCs have a limited amount of time to retrieve the engineer and his valuable research notes before the golems and the saboteur kill him and destroy the research.•    A valuable contact the PCs need to reach went missing.  In order to hide from his enemies, he fled to Shurrock.  Unfortunately, the mountain territory proved too much for him to handle, and he’s now trapped in a ravine full of anti-magic.  It’s a race against time as the PCs search for him before he becomes truly lost or the bad guys get to him.•    An assortment of rich merchants gathers at a scenic Bytopian villa to discuss business.  A merchant known for his cutthroat policies is attending, and while the PCs have no solid evidence, it’s highly likely based on past events that he might try some dastardly scheme which will result in disastrous economic havoc and/or widespread suffering for many people (war profiteering, flooding the market and putting people out of business).  How do the PCs act on this information?  Do they have the right to attack, kidnap, or kill the merchant based on suspicion?  Convince him to go after a worthier target (such as an Evil Empire or Yugoloth soul-traders) or appeal to his better nature?  And there’s always the risk of he merchant having no evil plot, but decides to enact one out of spite for being inconvenienced by the PCs.</blockquote>

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