Hey gang, I could use some inspiration help. After the (very fun) first session of a new campaign, I’m trying to put together Fronts. A lot of what happened actually ended up being somewhat self-contained, but the biggest hook my players gave me was that something is wrong in the nearby swamp/forest, and is causing the animals to disappear. There’s also a wizard that may or may not be involved (he showed up around the time this started happening), but is definitely not Evil. That’s pretty much all I know for sure right now.
So help me brainstorm here. What’s making the animals go missing? Some sort of plague, which will soon start spreading to the townsfolk? I really like the idea of a chaos entity of some sort, but I don’t think I want to throw reality-warping attacks at them before they’ve had a more straightforward adventure of some sort. Maybe a tribe of frogmen have established a cult (many of the characters have some sort of divine interests) to a forgotten swamp god and are unwittingly what… poisoning the swamp? Right now I’m just treating the swamp itself as Unholy Ground, but until I know more about what’s causing it, I’m going to have a hard time prepping for future sessions. Where would you go with this information? And how does the wizard fit into all this, anyway?
And yeah, I know, ask questions and use the answers, but I’d like to have some monsters and stuff on hand for next session, and this is all I know for now!
An alien spacecraft has crashed letting loose a Froghemoth that the frogmen are worshipping as a god. Radiation from the crash is killing off the local wildlife. The wizard has been tasked by his guild to eliminate all this dangerous alien technology and preserve the world of magic at all costs. You could adapt my dungeon starter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7cav44145d9ODhNVFQ2VlZyTW8/view?usp=sharing by making my forest your swamp.
Going off what Mark Tygart said, but excluding the alien part and staying within the standard fantasy theme. Replace aliens with fallen Angel that has taken a hideous form. Perhaps the earth it touched when it came down from the sky has become radiant/necrotic and is killing off the inhabitants.
Robert Doe That works very well as well. You might want to check out another dungeon starter I did recently: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7cav44145d9VmxOZmhka3NjWkE/view?usp=sharing Meteor Elemental/Fallen Angel/Crash Site its all good. The wizard could be investigating the dark cabal that caused the meteor or angel to fall. Should be enough for a session with room to expand.
For sure! All good stuff
Oh man, great ideas, thanks so much!
If you’ve got the time/money/library access, Lois Bujold’s first book in “The Sharing Knife” series features all your main points to the letter should you want to take a look. Here’s a short version (bear in mind that the Farmers call Lakewalkers ‘Necromancers’) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sharing_Knife
Something weird is sleeping at the bottom of the swamp and will awak soon. The wizard opened a portal to a far land and animals are migrating through it to a distant swamp, to safety. The magic of the portal is hastening the wake up process … what is resting there? Why the wizard wants to risk it to awaken to save the local fauna?
The very swamp itself is slowly becoming a (very large) single, carnivorous, sentient being. It’s literally eating it’s native fauna (and flora?) to fuel this metamorphosis.
Whatever it is, it should involve fungus. Not much else to offer, other than that.