Adventure Ideas

[Esquire]

Hey all - I have to run a game for a party of 5 7th-level players soon, and haven't had time to do as much preparation as I usually like to. Any suggestions for general plots/themes? They're an established adventuring company in a large trade city. There's an ongoing plot related to elemental artifacts but I hadn't been planning on using that for this adventure. I'll take anything; I'm hoping this will help me short-circuit my brainstorming process. Thanks in advance.

[Fizban]

The party is hired to guard a shipment of some sort along a trade route. It's a smaller, faster ship, for an important delivery of some heavy thing. Along the way, their ship is capsized by a Dragon Turtle and sinks. The survivors are rescued by Merfolk, Tritons, or some other friendly underwater race, and are now stranded in the surfacer friendly rooms of their benefactor's palace (either airtight or Airy Water for weirdness). The PCs must salvage the cargo and bring a ship back to rescue the survivors, which will involve getting past the Dragon Turtle, a nest of hungry Hammerclaws, and maybe something else (I was thinking the Dragon Turtle has the cargo, then run into Hammerclaws while dragging it across the bottom, but if they go for a ship first then they can run into the Hammerclaws at the cargo instead, though they'll still need to take care of the Dragon Turtle so their second ship won't be wrecked). The distance to shore can be whatever your PCs can handle, and their benefactors could front them a scroll of Airy Water if they aren't strong enough to fight underwater with just their own spells.

More complicated/talky: the Dragon Turtle could have been set on them by an angry Nereid. The ship was fast because the captain had stolen a Nereid's shawl to make her speed the ship, so the rest of her splash hired the Dragon Turtle. The initial attack could have the Dragon Turtle leave immediately, while the splash of Nereids attack and attempt to kill the captain, and the PCs could need to negotiate safety for the survivors from the Merfolk/whatever first thanks to the captain's misdeeds. If the party has a Paladin, the captain will of course ping as evil at the start.

[Cruiser1]

They're an established adventuring company in a large trade city.Look up the free official D&D adventure "Desert Sands", which involves a trading guild hiring your party to find and recover goods from a missing caravan. It's designed for a somewhat higher level, but the encounters should be easily modified.