D-Man said:
Hey guys,
Soon I'll be introducing two players to Eberron, and would like to start things out with a bang. Does anyone have any ideas you'd like to share for a killer one-shot, single session (about 4 hours) adventure that would really show off the fun you can have in the setting?
It'll be set in Sharn and the two characters will be 1st-3rd level, probably either warriors or rogues. Thanks in advance for any helpful ideas.
This is what I started my current Eberron campaign with (I'm assuming that you've got Sharn:City of Towers for purposes of some of the stuff I'm including):
The PC's just got to town and go to a bar in Dura for a drink. The proprietor is a Halfling and there are several other Halflings in the establishment. In walks a Bugbear and some Goblins and in seconds they are yelling back and forth with the proprietor. Then a fight breaks out with things starting off like a typical bar room brawl but taking a deadly turn when the Goblins start to coup de grace some of the unconscious Halflings. (Hopefully) with the help of the PC's the Goblins are beaten just as the City Watch shows up.
The gruff dwarven seargent takes their names and asks where they are staying and so forth. The following day they are asked to return to the bar for a meeting with the seargent. He tells the PC's that the Bugbear and Goblins were part of a rival gang (Daask)trying to extort protection money from the Halfling owner of the bar. The seargent tells the PC's that he would like to hire them to "send a message" to this other gang that such things won't be tolerated in his district.
The PC's are to go to a Dreamlilly Den and "shut the place down". The drug den is located in the back of a Goblin-run tinkerage in Malleon's Gate (the Goblin district of Sharn) and the PC's basically go in there and crack some heads. I had the place guarded by a couple of Hobgoblins and Goblins and also had one of the patrons turn out to be an Orc who was a Roach Thrall in disguise. The PC's do their job and leave.
Later it turns out that the seargent was not actually the seargent at all but in fact a Changeling hired by the Boromar Clan to do some dirty work for them against Daask (though the PC's may never discover this).
The net effect is that the PC's get to mix it up, travel through some of the seedier districts of the city, have a potential future ally in Boromar and have made an enemy of Daask that provides me a default random encounter that I can toss in whenever I want.
In my game this resulted in the PC's having two other run-ins with Daask that ended with them sending the message, "We don't want to kill any more of your guys and you probably don't want any more of them killed. Leave us alone and we'll leave you alone." That worked up until the Halfing Rogue/Cleric in the party joined the Boromar Clan and they went after a boat carrying one of Daask's shipments of drugs.
I found that the intro adventure I used "stirred the pot" nicely and introduced the PC's to Sharn on a lot of different levels.
