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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5146867" data-attributes="member: 59082">I need to plan an adventure for a party of six 8th-level PCs tonight and have been super busy, unable to flesh out details. The Hook (What the PCs know)*Their home city has been undergoing invasions "from below" - previously unknown pale dwarves bursting up through cellars and sewers and stealing people. *The PCs have run into these guys a few sessions back when they saved one of their companions from being sold to them by gnolls; the dwarves used explosives to cover their tracks as they fled into caves.*The lords of the city have offered to pay for information as to  what is going on, why the dwarves are attacking, who they are, etc.*A craftsman has asked them to find his daughter, who was taken by the dwarves through his cellar.The Background (what the PCs don't know)*Under the city is a vast dungeon complex similar to Waterdeep's Undermountain - this is well-known and a common locale for adventuring. What is not well-known is that it connects with the vast Underdark domain, which has had very little contact with the World Above, at least in recent known history (most of history beyond a couple hundred years is lost to humans for reasons I won't get into now).*The pale dwarves (duergar) are essentially Underdark mercenaries stealing humanoids to sell to this world's version of the drow, who in turn are transforming them into drider in order to build an army.*The drow themselves are undergoing a schism - the majority who want to invade the World Above and seek revenge upon their kin, and the minority who wish to find their own way, even establish peaceful communication with other peoples.*The drow in turn are being manipulated by illithids, who are the agents of the aboleth, who serve their dark master from the Far Realm who seeks entrance into the world in order to, I dunno, eat it.The Adventure (What I don't know - yet)*Presumably the PCs would go through the craftsman's cellar and track the girl. Unfortunately they don't have a ranger or trained tracker, but I have a stash of magic items that they retrieved on their last adventure which I haven't detailed yet, so I was thinking of making one of them a "tracking device."*The first adventure should be relatively straight forward: find the girl/save the girl, but how to flesh it out? I want this to be the prelude to a possible Underdark campaign...or not, depending upon what the PCs decide to do afterward. They've already agreed to help the craftsman find his daughter, but after that they may follow some other lead - last session I gave them a bunch of adventure hooks and they chose this to start with, but could very well go down another after saving the girl.In short, I want to develop a short adventure (one or two sessions) that gets them a nice taste of what the Underdark has to offer. One idea I had was that when they find the girl they also release other captives of the duergar, one of whom is one of the "good" (unaligned, really) drow, who would be an NPC contact going forward and might give them a better idea as to what is going on.What I want to avoid is "You go down a long passage for what seems like miles, and then fight a weird creature, then go down another passage for miles, and fight an even weirder creature." Some of that is fine, but I'm looking for ways to break it up, flesh it out, diversify their experience. Skill challenges, role-playing opportunities, strange underground locations, etc.The floor is yours.</blockquote>

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