Adventure help: redesigning From the Shadows

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I've got a sketch of an adventure brewing, and I need a bit of help. Next session coming up in early June. My plan is to replace the headless horseman bit that opens From the Shadows with a new plot of my own devising, and then run the rest of the module from there. Trouble is, my plot needs work:

Rather than using the Headless Horseman to collect heads and bodies for his experiment, Azalin is using a much more convenient option: his own Kargat. A Kargat cell is dispatched to a large town/small city in Darkon (Viaki, maybe?) to root out dissidents and other troublemakers, behead them, and ship them off to Avernus for use as test subjects.

The PC's enter town and find out something is wrong. People have been disappearing and the authorities haven't done anything about it. (having been dominated by the Kargat agents). The party will hopefully be convinced to investigate, eventually figuring out some connection to the town undertaker, under new management as of recently. (The Kargat have been shipping the subjects out of town in coffins, with the cover story of exporting coffins to another town due to a crimson fever epidemic.) Once ready for the showdown, they will enter the mortuary. After a few encounters with trap or guardian minions, they will enter the morgue proper. They open the door and...

Cut to an "interactive cut scene" where the players will be given pre-generated NPC's to play for a bit, so they can see what's been happening to the disappearing townsfolk. They play From the Shadows from the head-on-shelf part through the wedding, the escape, and up to the library, where they find that they are not pre-gen characters at all, but actually their real PC's whose memories have been altered. Reading their books, and crossing out their names, their memories flood back....

flash back to the undertakers, where they enter the morgue. Once inside the darkened room, they see that the ceiling is covered in bats. After a moment, one "bat" flies down, shifts to humanoid form, and gives some evil banter. (Tavelia, maybe?) Then dozens of the other bats swarm around and resolve themselves into vampires as well, all around the room, blocking all exits. The party is surrounded by an overwhelming amount of vamps, and is subdued, beheaded, and shipped out to Avernus. Flash forward to the castle and proceed with the adventure.

Now, the issues:
1) The town adventure needs fleshing out, big time. I need clues that lead to the conclusions that a) the new undertaker is involved. b) the people are being beheaded before disappearing (how can I make this clear with no body left behind?) c) the seemingly unconnected victims are all in some way subversives or law-breakers. Also, I need some townie NPCs. Some with information, some victims (with reasons for them being marked for abduction), some red herrings/obstructions. It's important that the clues lead to the Mortuary, but not IMMEDIATELY to the Mortuary. I'd like to have a bit of build-up and connection between clues.
2) Do I dare run the "flashback" vampire fight in-game, forcing them to lose, but letting them "Go down fighting" and choose the way they lose? A pack of 30 or so vamps should be able to take them down with a minimum of cheating, but players can be unpredictable, and who knows? they might find a way to escape when they've already been told that they didn't. Or do I just tell them what happened, and face possible resentment that they didn't get to play it out?
3) some minions would be nice, to allow for some succesful fighting before the doomed battle. What's good and fits the story? dominated animals? maybe some werebeast Kargat?


Here are some scenes I've thought about including:
1) as soon as they enter town, a woman runs up, thinking her son has returned, but upon closer inspection, sees that the PC she was running toward is not him.
2) tracks at one of the abduction sites indicate a scuffle, and lead toward the mortuary.
3) the ghostsighted PC catches a glimpse of a ghost in the water served at the inn. Investigation turns up a body dumped in the well, fangmarks, drained of blood. (One of the vamps got hungry. this was not an authorized kill. Is it the only one? Aren't the other vamps hungry too?)
4) One of the missing is a woodsman, who was beheaded with his own axe, which can be found as a clue.
5) the dominated guards blame some fey creatures of the woods for the disappearances. (dare I copy the monsters from the movie The Village?)
6) some NPC contact arranges to meet with some information but never shows up, since they are the latest victim. Paranoia sets in as people they've met start disappearing.
7) maybe a Head Hunter is involved somehow? or is that too much of a red herring?
8 ) speak with dead and/or speak with animals always come up in my group. What clues can I feed through those channels?

Any other ideas that can make this prelude adventure last a couple hours or so?

[cure]

Perhaps the new undertaker is proficient at keeping Azalin happy but has atrocious coffin side manner (so to speak).

Have the party attend a funeral where the utter lack of professionalism and complete disrespect for the family and the dead culminates with the coffin being overturned and the body spilling out. Of course the head and the body have been severed and perhaps even mixed up with those of another client. Fighting relatives could acheive the same effect, with the party being hired as protection by one side. Or an Anna Nicole Smith scenario . . .

Alternatively, give the party a reason to dig up a coffin only to find it intact (no ghouls about) but filled with dirt. Now who might know about that? Well the undertaker would be a good place to start. Then again may be it is that of a vampire. A clue and red herring in one. Perhaps the person in said grave is someone they need to have a chat with via a speak with dead spell.

[Sorti]

Remember that speak with dead works only if the body has a way to speak (its mouth, for a humanoid), so beheaded corpses without the head do not speak.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Remember that speak with dead works only if the body has a way to speak (its mouth, for a humanoid), so beheaded corpses without the head do not speak.

Good point, although, since the character in question is a spiritualist, I sometimes allow him to use the spell on spirits/ghosts/geists, etc. to compel them to answer.

Thanks for the funeral idea... I hadn't thought about how the undertakers would handle the actual undertaking that would be going on. Probably very brusquely and as expediantly as possible, with little regard for comforting and such. Now to figure out how to get the PC's involved.... They aren't locals, and wouldn't know anyone well enough to attend a funeral. the protection angle might work.

So here's the issue there, though. In the original module, the horseman dumps the pc's dead bodies in Darkon, and Azalin uses a wish to revive them, headless. I'm not sure I like that. Seems like a rather wasteful use of a wish, and if they're dead and revived, he could really use any dead body, of which he has a fairly large supply. And why would the Kargat be bothering with the pre-shipment beheading, when Az surely has a sword lying around the house? I'd prefer some sort of preservation, that makes the beheading important. Maybe a magical embalming oil that must be applied to both sides of the wound soon after beheading?

So given that, the victims must be killed by beheading. They can't die of other causes. You wouldn't have a funeral for someone who just disappeared, and as soon as they behead someone and apply the magic oil, they wouldn't just leave the body around to be brought to the mortuary and buried. They'd jsut take it like the others. So who is this funeral for?

Maybe I need to involve the town doctor, as another agent, or dominated thrall. He can pronounce people dead early, and have them shipped off to the mortuary, where they are beheaded... Maybe the "epidemic" should be White Fever, not Crimson, as the vamps feed from the victims a while before having the doc pronounce them dead. (stealing ideas from Valachan, though. Don't like diluting the flavor of the domains like that. Maybe a magically induced disease fits Darkon better?) :/ not sure what to do here.

I do like the "decaptated body falls out of the coffin" idea, and the unerathing empty graves idea, though....

[cure]

Perhaps Vaaki, or where you want to set this, has a hot springs popularly reputed to have remarkable curative/preservative/temporal powers. And this is largely true. But these very powers or others that have escaped popular notice make anyone who has bathed in the water very temporarily fit for Azalin's experiment. Hence cut off their heads and lock in that fitness with a Preserve spell, or something of the sort, in Vaaki, then ship the remains to Castle Avernus. The PCs, for example, catch some disease and a trip to Vaaki and its hotsprings becomes a necessity. Or the waters might even take away aging or negative levels resulting from misadventures with the undead.

Bureaucracy and the division of labour may solve some of the problems. Not everyone who dies in Vaaki, and perhaps especially those dying of natural causes, is fit for the experiment. But the person charged with the beheading is probably not the person who decides who is fit. Hence more corpses get beheaded than are actually necessary. The person in charge of deciding who is fit was out of the office, and the person who was charged with the beheading did not want to take any chances. Thus having decapitated heads and bodies available for funerals poses no problem.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Note that, if the decapitation thing gets too contrived and/or silly, you can always change that. In the original module, using test-subjects who'd been beheaded seems to be Azalin's literalist interpretation of "the bodiless will journey to the time before", but you could easily rule IYC that he interpreted "bodiless" another way. Perhaps the PCs' spirits could be sucked from their bodies, leaving their corporeal forms as vacant husks, and the now-incorporeal PCs have to find the means to manifest (just like ghosts do) in order to reverse the effect?

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Regarding the flashback fight where the players have already learned that they lost:

If you're up for it, try jumping from crossing out names straight to the fight without dropping the bombshell yet. If anyone manages to escape the fight through extraordinary creativity, reward them by declaring that the "cut scene" PC was truly a temp (probably a Darkonese native) and that the real PC went into hiding after all of his/her friends were killed. Allow that player to continue playing the temp while all the others get their PC's back, and then bring the remaining PC out of hiding after they escape the castle.

What's the clever guy get that the others don't--besides keeping a point of Con? He had to stay hidden, so don't give him XP after the fight with the Kargat. The others wouldn't get that XP, but they have the XP from Avernus, so that should even out. No, the real reward for survival is how the PC stayed hidden. It probably required help from a major NPC or secret society working against Azalin--the Vistani, Andres Duvall, perhaps even the Carnival or the Tribe of Hyskosa, with a little tweaking of timelines.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Hey guys, thanks for the great ideas. I re-read FtS and RoE this weekend to get up to speed. Time for some MASSIVE re-writes.

I'm gonna stick with the beheading, because I like it. I don't think I'll use the hot-springs idea, but I do like the division of labor. Escpecially since the vampires are powerless in daylight and can't enter homes uninvited, it's problematic for them to kill specific targets without luring them outside.

Here's what I'm thinking: since the town guard is dominated, and the vamps need food AND daylight muscle, there's a handy way to kill two birds with one stone: prison inmates. The vamps feed on them at night, and the dominated guardsmen look the other way. Then the vamps use the dominated prisoners to do the dirty work. This has the added benefit of providing a red herring stop between the crime scene and the morticians. And even when dominated, it's not unheard of for a convict to get carried away, leaving some extra corpses around.

One of the guardsman who made his Will save can be the contact that disappears after giving some clue.

I do like the idea of jumping back to the flashback before knowing exactly who's who. That gives me some wiggle room. (Andres Duvall is quite different in my campaign and will be playing a larger part in the later parts of FtS, but I definately would love to work in the Tribe of Hyskosa if possible. Not sure exactly how yet. This is post-conjunction, by the way, another big change to the module. My idea is that Azalin is trying for a second chance by completing the prophecy in the right order this time, sending the PC's back to prevent his last recruits from removing the holy symbol. Of course, he's doomed to fail, so I won't be following with RoE.)

Any more ideas on the town adventure? cool clues and such that you've used in the past for other purposes?

[Joël of the FoS]

Note that, if the decapitation thing gets too contrived and/or silly, you can always change that. In the original module, using test-subjects who'd been beheaded seems to be Azalin's literalist interpretation of "the bodiless will journey to the time before", but you could easily rule IYC that he interpreted "bodiless" another way. Perhaps the PCs' spirits could be sucked from their bodies, leaving their corporeal forms as vacant husks, and the now-incorporeal PCs have to find the means to manifest (just like ghosts do) in order to reverse the effect?

Or their spirit could travel back to Barovia to enter a corpse. Then, Azalin's magic change the appearance fo the PC's corpse to real, alive people, to enable them to enter the castle.