Need some Plot Help

[XianTheCoder]

I'm going to be running a one-shot level 4 5e halloween adventure for some friends, but I'm struggling to fill in some of the plot. I have a series of cool ideas, but I'm having trouble coming up with the grand scheme of the big baddy. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

The basic storyline:
The players are asked to investigate a village known for it's pumpkin harvest after the harvest is late and rumors of hauntings are spread throughout the region. The players witness the often jovial autumn festival of thanks (something like thanksgiving) turned into a dark gothic festival (basically halloween), and a population that's almost lethargic. The players investigate a bunch of things and eventually discover a werewolf who is the only one in the town not under the effects of whatever is dampening the moods of the population. The werewolf becomes an ally as they continue to unwind the mystery. The big baddy is a necromancer who's turned the local lord into a vampire and enslaved the population. The players will be spied on by a Headless Horseman (playing it like a Fade from Wheel of Time), will be attacked in a pumpkin patch by PumpkinHead while searching for something, and wil be chased through a corn maze (probably by zombies) all on the path to discovering what the necromancer wants with the village.

So now... what DOES the necromancer want? Why is he here in this sleepy town. What could the players be looking for in the pumpkin patch to put them in position to be attacked by pumpkinhead? How do I more directly incorporate the headless horseman? The town has a dock on a lake which I want to incorporate, but what makes sense?

I thought about the old and boring "the church is built atop something important", but what and why go through the effort of enslaving the population? If he's so powerful why not just use the power to quickly recover the item? Maybe he needs to be in the right spot to perform some ritual on Halloween, but what does the ritual do and again, why does he need to go through the efforts he's going through.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[Anime Squirrel]

Try a scooby doo kind of thing, were its perhaps the mayor or reagent working with or without the village to scare outsiders away. meanwhile he or they are working to unearth something of extreme value from the lake. Keep having the headless horseman ( i assume he is the aggressive antagonist type) only really attack the party near the lake or around areas that would hide or conceal the nefarious doings of the antagonist NPCs. The village may be under a mass mind control or something of that lot, and the werewolf is immune do to there curse.

something like that is what i would go for personally.

[XianTheCoder]

I like your idea about using the lake as the target of the necromancer's attention... I actually can't believe I didn't think of that myself. And I like using the horseman as the guard, it gives the players a clue about what's really important without it being too direct.

[Anime Squirrel]

I like your idea about using the lake as the target of the necromancer's attention... I actually can't believe I didn't think of that myself. And I like using the horseman as the guard, it gives the players a clue about what's really important without it being too direct.


The pumpkin patch could also be used as the horseman's lair. if the adventurers decide to hunt him in turn. Plays sort of like sleepy hollow.

[Fighting_Ferret]

Dead men do tell tales... and your Necroamncer is after something that the founder of this village knew, that perhaps died with him, when the Necromancer's ancestor killed him prematurely. Now he knows that the body is here somewhere, but he needs more information, but his family name is well known and reviled and he may even bear a curse, so he uses his power to take over the town and use it's inhabitants to look for the lost grave site of the founder.

Maybe the lake is blessed and repels undead, so he needs living people to perform the duties, not his undead hoards.

[gullveig]

Once upon a time there was a good man devoted to protect this village and his people, a paladin of sorts perhaps.
He lived in a lodge near a lake with his family, a beautiful wife and their children. Life was good, but since his wife was born, she suffered from bursts of depression and insanity. This illness increased with age and one day he comes home only to find his children drowned by their own mother.
In madness and despair, caused by the loss of his children, he broke the oaths of devotion and killed his beloved wife. The fall of this man was so great that his sadness spread through the village and countryside changing surroundings of this hallowed place forever...

Well, this is just the backstory or how everything started... Maybe this melancholy plague is spreading and threatening other villages but no one know its sources and it is the players job to knows its origin. Maybe the necromancer/oathbreaker are not going after something (it is just the manifestation of his mourning) and the players just need to put an end in his grief or get out of there before it is too late.

[XianTheCoder]

I actually like Ferret's idea about the founder having been buried with some kind of key, and I can expand it to having the founder's grave being lost. This gives the necronmancer a reason for being subtle and not just going in guns ablazing... he needs time to find the grave and since he won't be doing the searching himself he needs to brainwash the locals to do the work for him. So the necromancer is searching for a grave that holds the key to unlocking something in the lake, with the Horseman as a spy and acting as guardian of the lake. That gives me a good base for the plot. I'm thinking the founder could have been a warlock and the players learn about it when they encounter a convenant of witches/warlocks in the woods afterthey go searching for the "monster terrorizing the village" (which ends up being the friendly werewolf). That should get the whole plot rolling.

[Kane0]

Make some form of information the 'key', not a physical object. That way a necromancer will naturally have the appropriate solution, a Speak with Dead spell.

[Regitnui]

Don't forget the option of guardians of good/guard beasts around the founder's tomb; something placed to fight off the necromancer's servants, if the people who entombed the founder predicted the adventure's events. Something like animated armour..

[XianTheCoder]

Don't forget the option of guardians of good/guard beasts around the founder's tomb; something placed to fight off the necromancer's servants, if the people who entombed the founder predicted the adventure's events. Something like animated armour..

I was actually going to use a Nightmare mounted Helm Horror as the "Headless Horseman". I haven't decided on the founders tomb yet, part of me wants to make the tomb something more surprising.. the necromancer is searching the graveyard, but it ends up being in a cave somewhere. Since I'm still on the fence about it, I'm not sure what kind of defenses to put in place. That being said, the founder is going to have been a wild covenant witch (probably Druid levels) so something more nature oriented makes the most sense to me.

[kaoskonfety]

what he wants... player level? some brain storm... most of this assume he needs the location/time/people for arcane reasons

New Threats:
To summon Orcus (CR 26?)
Bring back his *lich* master (CR21?)
Wake a Death Knight (CR17)
And onward down the undead themed boss list

Augment threats
To become a Lich! (Death Knight/whatever is roughly appropriate/ slightly too strong but preventable)
Permanent/resummoning skeletal/zombie/Ghost minions (basically an upgrade to the necro wizard undead control stuff)
JuJu Zombie - Big bad voodoo monster rather than the out of the book groaning undeads

Story focusing
Vengeance - he grew up here and has a petty or rightful grudge against the local lord and town (stoned his wife to death - insert ghost wife, burned his children/apprentice at the stake (more ghosts), picked on him for being a nerd (less serious end of the game spectrum
Redemption/not really the bad guy (probably more involved that you are looking for) - he's trying to stop something YET worse - driving the living away so that they do not all die from ***something!!!!*** and come back as banshees/vampires/mummies/wraiths/summon ORCUS - feels more like a short campaign idea than the one shot - but you know - things sometime grow past our intent (I once had a 3 Year campaign spring out of covering one night for a DM who couldn't make it)

[Regitnui]

I was actually going to use a Nightmare mounted Helm Horror as the "Headless Horseman". I haven't decided on the founders tomb yet, part of me wants to make the tomb something more surprising.. the necromancer is searching the graveyard, but it ends up being in a cave somewhere. Since I'm still on the fence about it, I'm not sure what kind of defenses to put in place. That being said, the founder is going to have been a wild covenant witch (probably Druid levels) so something more nature oriented makes the most sense to me.

Then why not refluff the Twig Blights? They work well as druidic minions, so have them hidden in the tomb, and if the necromancer makes it there first, have them fight the Invaders; knocking out villagers or killing zombies and rooting in the corpses.

[Breltar]

Necromancer wants power over more undead and possibly lich hood which he can get if he attains enough power.

Under the church is a tome of unearthly evil that has been locked away for centuries but is warded by a shield of holy purity (big light column that pushes back shadows in a round room). Maybe the book of Vile Darkness or something?

To open the shield the necromancer has to find a key item that will lower the shield. He has tried scaring the peasants in town through the pumpkin patch, converting their lord to a vampire to be able to pick what peasants he wants to torture info out of and has a charming fog around town to keep the peasants relatively dumb about the whole situation.

What he didn't count on was a werewolf interrupting his plans and actually helping the villagers. Immune to the fog and realizing what is going on the werewolf teams up with the adventurers to save his village.

A helmed horror shows up trying to stop anyone from entering the western woods... but why? The horror is the embodiment of the spirit of a local lord who is buried with the key to the book and vowed to guard it for eternity, not realizing it literally meant that and dooming his soul to his task. He died centuries ago and his tomb is long forgotten deep in the western woods. He sometimes haunts the roads around the time of the harvest festival, for that is the anniversary of the shield going up around the book.

The players need to figure out what the necro wants, keep the villagers safe from the horrors the villagers are suffering from and keep the necro from the key and the book. Who knows what evil the necro will summon forth if he succeeds?

Maybe the book has a map to the location of the eye and hand of Vecna as well, so if you want to continue the adventure you can have the necro escape and the adventurers have to track him down.

[Joe the Rat]

So you are putting scarecrows in somewhere, right? They're delightfully creepy mooks. You can up their threat (and creepiness) with a scythe, and they have a minor mind whammy, but they still drop like a sack of straw.

Blights are a good add-in for plants, and versatile. Vine/Tendril blights looking like dangling roots in an underground passage (possibly to the tomb), and burst out of the earthen walls to strangle interlopers?

Also make sure that you have multiple ways to get to your clues. The werewolf should make things easier, but killing him won't make things unsolveable.

[XianTheCoder]

Just some points for clarifiaction purposes:
-Since I didn't want character creation to take forever given it's just a one-shot, the intended player starting level is 4 (and there will likely be 3-4 players).
-The whole game is intended to take place across 3 game days (although that's arbitrary and can be changed)
-I actually prefer the use of triggering events as opposed to linear player positioning (for a fixed location game I find it a lot easier to manage). So there will be quadrants of the village, and I'll have stuff planned to happen in each with clues in each, but as the GM I'm rather indifferent as to where the players go and what they interact with... no matter where they go there will be clues. Then, at some specific time I'll have something happen to draw their attention to the first subplot (in this case I'll have someone screaming about a monster in the woods and a dead cow.. or something... which leads them on the chase for the werewolf). Then we're back to the quadrant/events scenario until the next triggering event.


Re: Scarecrows - I intend on having them in the corn field and corn maze (Yes, there will be a corn maze... for those not in the New England USA area... you're missing out :) ).

Re: Blights - I haven't looked at the plant/nature encounters yet, but I'll keep them in mind

Re: What the necromancer is looking for - I think I'm just going to make it simple and have it be some kind of nexus point that the founder managed to control. The nexus point would effectively give him god-like power. The "Key" would be the mechanism for controlling the nexus. This is easy, and since the game won't continue past stopping the necromancer, I don't need to worry about what the players do when they gain control of it.

Re Fog - I actually really like the concept of Fog being the method of the necromancer's curse upon the locals... I'm going to go with that.

Re: Werewolf: I intend on having him help the villagers, but also plan on having the necromancer know he's around... this should add a level of political intrigue to the game as the locals think they are being attacked by their protector.

[Osrogue]

I'm just wondering why/how the village is pulling off a festival in the first place when they are supposed to be enslaved. That would take a lot of time and resources. The second thing that confuses me is why the necromancer would use live workers instead of dead workers that work without distraction, need of food or rest, and don't throw parties or really need guarding.

The necromancer must want to keep all of them alive for some reason, but doesn't care about how they spend their time (or he could just be one of those really nice necromancers I've heard all about, and thought his minions could use a break). I support the idea that he is pursuing lichdom, and plans to use the remote, isolated village for his batch of souls required for its creation.

The horseman could hunt down and kill anyone who leaves A certain radius from the center of town (an arbitrary distance), but lets anyone enter, since more souls the merrier, acting as a warden. If you wanted, you could make two headless horsemen, or more. No one would expect two of the headless horsemen.

A second option regarding why everyone just doesn't run away is that all the children are held hostage at the castle. This would lead hopefully to the question as to why there aren't any children around, and would keep villagers from giving too much information away.

A third possibility is that the necromancer attacked the castle, and set his Horseman(en) loose in the countryside to scare away/kill curious individuals and adventurers who got to close to the castle as he did his research. The vampire the necromancer created would create vampire spawns who could only go out at night to hunt. Soon the village would be too afraid to go out at night or risk vampire attacks. Most of the livestock that can't be kept indoors is dead, and the closest town is more than a day's travel away, so they can't make it to the next town. The festival in that case would end at sunset without anyone cleaning up as they all rush to get inside.
The lycanthrope can effectively defend against the vampire spawns since he has immunity to their attacks, but won't be able to break through their defenses either. He would try to scare away people from the area so they don't get killed by vampires. The werewolf would keep the vampires off the PCs, fighting them in the distance the night before the PCs arrive at the village.

So ultimately I'd suggest that necromancer not have the town enslaved, but instead have their children as hostages to keep them captive while having the horseman/horsemen prevent anyone from leaving the area, say like within a hex of the village. The Necromancer needs living people as sacrifices for a dark ritual, but however many living souls were left after he took the castle was not enough for the quota, so instead he decided to cull them from a nearby, isolated village. The dark ritual isn't ready yet, so he needs to keep the townspeople from running off in the meantime.

Mostly just a bunch of brainstorming for an interesting idea.

[Breltar]

Fog could keep them doing what they are doing, but ignore most other things.

"Oh that skeleton that walks around the alley? He's always been there." *blank stare*

"The necromancer watches over us, he is really a nice guy." *head turns slightly, eyes don't blink*

[hiiamtom]

CABIN IN THE WOODS IT.
Seriously, you're already mashing together tropes. Make the Necromancer a "good" guy trying to stop the end of the world through a convoluted ritual to appease evil gods that will awaken under the Earth is an adventuring party lives through the night.

[XianTheCoder]

I'm just wondering why/how the village is pulling off a festival in the first place when they are supposed to be enslaved. That would take a lot of time and resources. The second thing that confuses me is why the necromancer would use live workers instead of dead workers that work without distraction, need of food or rest, and don't throw parties or really need guarding.

The festival is an annual festival that the village performs each year as a sort of thanks to the gods for a good harvest (they are the areas largest supplier of corn and pumpkins which is a major crop in the region). The feeling I am going for is that the normally jovial festival has turned dark and ominous. The locals aren't enslaved as much as they have been bewitched/charmed/etc, and they are rather quickly being corrupted by the dark magic around them causing them. The locals still have the mental capacity to rebel, and there is still the potential for merchants, etc to come to the village, so the lack of a festival would be a very large indication to anyone familiar with the village that somethign was amiss. Why use living workers? The necromancer doesn't want to draw attention to himself. The reason the PCs end up in the village in the first place is because the crop hasn't come out of the village so the local lord's brother (who these PCs have worked for in past campaigns) is sending them in to investigate the cause and to make sure there isn't banditry happening.

[Coidzor]

You need your PCs to have a reason to go to the pumpkin patch?

Obviously Linus convinced some of the other children to go with him to wait for the great pumpkin. And the necromancer wants to sacrifice them in a perversion of their desires by killing them with pumpkinhead for power or some unique undead minions made from their betrayed, child spirits or something.

The headless horseman might be the lord's murdered son/brother/wife/husband that is an unwilling servant of the necromancer that they can turn on the bbeg by finding the had of and give it back to them.

As for the lake, obviously there's an island with standing stones or whatever and a coven of witches meets there to double, double, toil and trouble. Now are they another enemy faction? Enemy of my enemies? Potential allies? Part of the necromancer's posse?

[ChelseaNH]

Darn it, someone got to the Linus reference first.

For the pumpkin patch: Somebody decides that the adventurers are being too nosy and wants to eliminate them. So a stooge pretends to have some information; can't talk right now, meet me in the pumpkin patch at midnight so I know I'm not being followed. The stooge doesn't show because it was just a ruse to lure them into the reach of PumpkinHead.