DM Help [Eberron] In Need of an Insidious Plot... [Archive]

Afgncaap5

2016-07-19, 03:54 AM

Church of Onatar in Sharn, and possibly involving a relic from Xen'Drik? How about...

A mysterious warforged begins stalking the night, murdering seemingly unrelated Sharn residents. The warforged itself appears quickly and vanishes almost without trace, and is usually wreathed in fire and flame. The victims are always found with large portions of their body simply turned into ash or, at times, sometimes only ash is found and the victim is assumed to be dead. Some poking around leads the players to realize that all the victims are either gnomes, or members of Dragonmarked Houses (usually Cannith, but a few Orien or Lyrandar deaths can be sprinkled in with possibly one other unexplained death tossed in (see below).) When the players catch up to the Warforged, they find it unresponsive, in a state that would be similar to somnambulism or sleepwalking for a creature that needed sleep. It wears a helmet that has a khyber shard affixed to it, and two thin wires stretch from the helmet to the spiked gauntlets that the warforged wears. During the examination (not TOO long since players tend to cause havoc when left to their own devices in a scene), have the warforged's helmet's khyber shard begin pulsing with a dark purple light. Make fire start at the gauntlets and stretch to cover the warforged entirely. For the fight, treat it as a level 2 or 3 (scale up or down based on your players' skill level) Warforged Warrior or Fighter, but with the burning ability of a fire elemental and the glide-through-earth ability of an earth elemental, and make the fight automatically end if the players sever one of the wires connecting the helmet to the gauntlets or crack the khyber shard in the helmet. Whether the players go for that quick end or fight the Warforged to the death (poor guy...) have the light leave the khyber shard and a bluish, purpley mist flow from cracks (either in the gear or in the warforged.) Have it form into a humanoid shape with dozens of eyes while a voice in a mixture of Elvish, Ignan, Giant, and Quori says something to the tune of "Free! Free of the giants! Free of the sulatar! Free of the Promise of Fire!" (Have players understand an appropriate percentage of the message based on languages known.) The mist's humanoid shape is a very, very minor Quori spirit trapped since the war against the giants; use stats for a Shadow Sibling (from Magic of Eberron, modify it to be an Outsider instead of an Aberration and have anything that might exclusively affect Quori-style outsiders affect this as well if the players have anything like that), but don't have it overtly fight the players; instead, 1d4 rounds later it will fade from reality, back to the banished plane of Quori. If the players managed to win the fight without destroying the Warforged, reveal that he's been having strange sessions of lost memory that he'd been growing increasingly concerned about ever since it returned from the church's missionary expedition to Xen'Drik. The players can decide how much to tell the city watch (if anything) or the Church of Onatar (if anything) about the Warforged's activities depending on how they feel about things; either way, the Warforged doesn't want anything to do with the helmet and gauntlets, and while they're now broken certain parts can be salvaged from them, allowing the players to get khyber shards that have been infused with fire elementals (treat them as Phoenix Ash Threat crystals from the Magic Item Compendium, but with the change that anyone killed with them will have their wounds burn like ash, eating away a good portion of their bodies; a worshiper of Onatar or The Promise Of Fire killing someone with a critical hit will have the entire bodies of the target immolated, leaving nothing but ash behind.)

This adventure can stand on its own, or if players have unanswered questions they can poke around and later be charged with locating someone who was thought to have died during the killings committed by the warforged. The players find the assumed-dead, and learn that he or she tried faking her own death to get out of paying debt to a casino owner (I can't remember his name, I think he's in the Sharn book, loves making outlandish bets and deals, and is secretly a doppleganger). Amid the research, players can also discover the source of the warforged's somnambulistic madness: a haunted statue brought back by the warforged's missionary trip that had the spirit of a powerful Sulatar drow spellcaster, one who had pledged, even in death, to eventually find the descendants of those who stole the elemental binding secrets from her people, which is mostly gnomes descended from the original thief but also, in her mind, includes people who profit from the technology (such as House Cannith, House Orien, house Lyrandar, and the like.) Reveal that those deaths... and the more recent, more subtle ones... were part of a ritual designed to cause much of that stolen magical knowledge to simply stop working, leading to an explosion of confused elementals, failing vehicles, and in a few unique cases even falling buildings. This planned disaster is orchestrated by the ghost to occur right when the Fernia, the Sea of Fire, is entering alignment with Eberron; she's hoping to engulf Sharn (and if successful with that, everything else in Eberron) in a portal to Fernia, something that she believes will hasten the fulfillment of the Promise of Fire that her people hold so dear.

BowStreetRunner

2016-07-20, 01:35 PM

When dealing with plots within a church a solid go-to option is always going to be something related to a heresy that is potentially true. For instance, the PCs are charged with rooting out the individuals responsible for the spread of some heretical claims, but the PCs themselves encounter evidence that the supposed heresy may in fact me a cover-up by the church.

For instance, there is a cult dwelling in the mountains who follow the teachings of a half-dragon mystic that has been causing problems for the church for many years. Now someone has been writing graffiti on the exterior walls of the temple alleging that the mystic is the actual offspring of Onatar. It starts out innocent enough as a mere errand to help the local church apprehend the miscreant graffiti artist, who has been traced to one of the tougher parts of town where the local authorities have little power. It grows into something else though as the party discovers a cache of religious documents stolen from church archives that support the idea that Onatar may have sired a half-dragon son at about the same time that this mystic was born.