Scarey Nerd
2012-11-17, 11:23 AM
Hi all. A friend of mine's been, for want of a better word, pestering me, to run a D&D campaign recently. I haven't run a D&D game in quite a while, so I agreed after a while. At the moment, my idea is thus:
After perhaps a session or two of standard adventuring, let them get into the swing of it, the party is asked to go check up on a wizard that lives a few leagues from city X, as he hasn't communicated with the city in a couple of days. When the party gets there, they find that the Wizard has completely vanished. What is there, however, is a Tiny scarab of some kind. It appears to be glowing with some kind of internal energy, and it's calmly chewing its way through some metal in the workshop, and the players can see that its been eating at some wood, some stone, basically anything. It will look curiously at the players and fly over to one, and promptly try to eat them. The players will obviously try and kill this thing, and it will die fairly rapidly. When it does, it curls up like a dead spider, shimmer... and duplicate.
The two scarabs will get up and start wandering around, chewing on things again, ignoring the PCs for now. If they try and kill them again, they'll duplicate again. The idea I have is that the Wizard (A creation wizard by trade), tried a spell a bit too powerful for him, and it failed. Horribly. The spell sucked all of his creation magic and all of his life force out of him, and he died, but his spirit became trapped in the Ethereal plane. In essence, he'd been killed too hard to actually die, and therefore he became a ghost. He's still manifesting himself on the Ethereal plane at the moment, but he'll be haunting his workshop after that.
When the players report their findings back to the city, the city council will promise to try and sort it out. Cue another session, maybe two, of adventuring. The players will receive a distress signal from the city saying something about the scarabs. The idiots decided that the players were obviously incompetent, and tried to eradicate the scarabs, with disastrous consequences. There's more of them, and they're spreading. The players obviously need to find a way to stop these things before they all get a taste for humanoid flesh and chomp their way through the world.
Here's where you guys come in, if you're willing :smalltongue: I can't really figure out HOW to stop these scarabs... They'll be asked to/they'll think to return to the workshop and look for clues, and they'll find a way to communicate with the wizard's ghost, but I can't think what he's gonna suggest. Perhaps they have to cast the original scarab into the fires of Mount Doom, I don't know. The best idea I could think of was that the ghost will somehow give the players a sword/dagger/whatever, but they have to visit 6 other wizards around the world to get it sufficiently enchanted, then they stab the original scarab with it and hey presto, they all drop like flies.
Do you guys have any suggestions? Any advice? Or do you think the plot's not great? I could use any help you guys have to offer :smallsmile:
After perhaps a session or two of standard adventuring, let them get into the swing of it, the party is asked to go check up on a wizard that lives a few leagues from city X, as he hasn't communicated with the city in a couple of days. When the party gets there, they find that the Wizard has completely vanished. What is there, however, is a Tiny scarab of some kind. It appears to be glowing with some kind of internal energy, and it's calmly chewing its way through some metal in the workshop, and the players can see that its been eating at some wood, some stone, basically anything. It will look curiously at the players and fly over to one, and promptly try to eat them. The players will obviously try and kill this thing, and it will die fairly rapidly. When it does, it curls up like a dead spider, shimmer... and duplicate.
The two scarabs will get up and start wandering around, chewing on things again, ignoring the PCs for now. If they try and kill them again, they'll duplicate again. The idea I have is that the Wizard (A creation wizard by trade), tried a spell a bit too powerful for him, and it failed. Horribly. The spell sucked all of his creation magic and all of his life force out of him, and he died, but his spirit became trapped in the Ethereal plane. In essence, he'd been killed too hard to actually die, and therefore he became a ghost. He's still manifesting himself on the Ethereal plane at the moment, but he'll be haunting his workshop after that.
When the players report their findings back to the city, the city council will promise to try and sort it out. Cue another session, maybe two, of adventuring. The players will receive a distress signal from the city saying something about the scarabs. The idiots decided that the players were obviously incompetent, and tried to eradicate the scarabs, with disastrous consequences. There's more of them, and they're spreading. The players obviously need to find a way to stop these things before they all get a taste for humanoid flesh and chomp their way through the world.
Here's where you guys come in, if you're willing :smalltongue: I can't really figure out HOW to stop these scarabs... They'll be asked to/they'll think to return to the workshop and look for clues, and they'll find a way to communicate with the wizard's ghost, but I can't think what he's gonna suggest. Perhaps they have to cast the original scarab into the fires of Mount Doom, I don't know. The best idea I could think of was that the ghost will somehow give the players a sword/dagger/whatever, but they have to visit 6 other wizards around the world to get it sufficiently enchanted, then they stab the original scarab with it and hey presto, they all drop like flies.
Do you guys have any suggestions? Any advice? Or do you think the plot's not great? I could use any help you guys have to offer :smallsmile: