Adventure idea: I have a general idea, but details are hazy. Help me?

[Arkhios]

My group has been investigating a murder and their own involvement as scapegoats for the act itself, trying to identify and locate the person responsible.

My idea is that the person (known to my players only as The Reverend) is the high priest(ess) of a former, now considered dead, god(dess) of death, trying conduct a ritual to revive the deity. The players probably won't come into blows with The Reverend him-/herself anytime soon, as I figure (s)he might be of quite high level, while the group is still at around 3rd-4th level, so I think it more likely they would encounter a (level-appropriate) sub-ordinate.

The adventure should include a fair share of undead and undeath worshiping cultists, but anything that fits the locales are fine. The adventure takes place in an abandoned district of a very old city, with the majority of it underground in the ruins of an older city.

Anything beyond that is still just a mass without form.

Oh, and it would be ideal if the players would reach 5th level by the end.


All help is welcome!

[Honest Tiefling]

To be silly, the god being revived isn't actually evil. Maybe a bit on the cold side of things, but is a goddess of death, order, and knowledge. Sure, people come back, but in very controlled ways! Better to raise grandpa as an undead then to let all of his grandchildren and knowledge die, after all.

But the reverend is. And something is backing her to screw with the ritual to make her more to their liking.

This city has rumors of treasure, as it was recently uncovered by an earthquake, so treasure hunters are flocking there. Thing is, there is treasure...But someone has the idea of hunting the treasure hunters instead of the actual treasure. Perhaps the cult needs some money to continue the ritual, which is really just one part of the whole revival process.

The PCs are either captured, or asked by another treasure hunter (who might tag along as a healer, torch bearer, or pack mule) to rescue a friend slated to become a sacrifice for the ritual. The cult could have also seeded rumors and maps indicating that more treasure is to be found. I would actually put in a real treasure vault, but one that the cult couldn't get open. So they decided to simply kill anyone who wandered by near their lair, and if someone DOES open it, well...They can just swoop in and kill them and take their stuff.

The older city could have died in a catastrophe, perhaps one that petrified people. So there's all of these lovely statues that look like people out of the corners of people's eyes.

[Arkhios]

I think I should provide a bit more framework to work with:

The dead goddess is actually neutral evil, Raven Queen having taken her mantle as the overseer of the dead.

The city is a bustling hive of corruption and crime where the adventurers belong to an adventurer's guild doing all sorts of odd jobs while not onto something bigger (like now). Though the city is ancient, the common people that live there now likely have no knowledge of the old cities buried under their feet. At all.

There's an abandoned district which is rumored to be haunted - which it might as well be, given the current state of it. It's likely that the cult has taken advantage of this and has been hiding in there for years, if not for decades, planning for this ritual all along.

The adventurers were first given an unrelated mission to the location where the murder took place, a mission which later turned out to have been a decoy and an attempt to frame them and more importantly - the guild for the deed, by none other than the reverend. However, the adventurers were much more capable than (s)he initially anticipated.