Welcome to How Not to Host a Murder, a short D&D experience that captures the details of Mike Krahulik (Penny Arcade)'s adventure run at the Acquisitions Incorporated live game at PAX East 2016. The wizard Elminster is hosting a murder mystery party, and you are invited. When you arrive at his demiplane home with the other guests, however, the night quickly turns sour as it is discovered that Elminster has truly been killed! It falls to the party to investigate the death and identify the culprit before they can escape the premises. When they've been identified, it's a race to apprehend the murderer before they can escape amidst the kooky chaos of Elminster's sanctum in this comedic adventure for sub-optimal 7th-level adventurers.
Elven Tower presents a compilation document of all the content for DMs running Out of the Abyss module. This guide has been very well received by the DMs community. I have gotten great response during the creation of this content. The guide is over 60 pages long and contains hoards of information, guides, suggestions, and general information for DMs running this module. It now has clickable table of contents and bookmarks for all the different chapters for easy navigation. There are maps for Gauntlgrym, Sorcere Tower, Vizeran's Tower, Karazikar's Maw as well as some very needed flowcharts and infographics to better understand the adventure. The guide also features some maps drawn by me (Elven Tower) to supplement the missing illustrations for important locations.
You hear rumours of an unclaimed wizard's tower, a worthy prize for any practitioner of the arcane arts! Do you have what it takes to face its challenges and claim it as your own? This is a one-to-one adventure designed for one player of the wizard class and one DM.
Peren, a guildless Devkarin collector of obscure relics has gone missing. The elf of shadow is in deep debt to the Orzhov as well as to the Rakdos performer, Ophyira. To discover Peren’s fate the party must descend into the Undercity of District Four, within the territory of the Golgari Swarm. Continuing the story which began with Off to a Weird Start, and picking up where The Palace of Pain’s Pleasures left off, this adventure is designed to be part of an ongoing campaign. For Dungeon Masters who wish to incorporate The Felicity Triskelion independently from the ongoing story, 10 Adventure Hooks (one for each guild) are included, giving The Felicity Triskelion flexibility for one-shot play or for inclusion in your own campaign!
A storm brews on the cliffs, and thunder takes wing. Near a remote coastal village, livestock vanish and tempests rage without warning. Locals whisper of a legendary beast: the Stormwing—a massive eagle wreathed in lightning, said to nest high among the windswept cliffs. But is the creature truly a menace… or merely a misunderstood force of nature? Dare your party scale the perilous cliffside, brave elemental hazards, and confront the Stormwing atop its thunder-blasted perch? Inside This Adventure: ✅ A lightning-charged dungeon crawl through cliffs, caves, and stormy ledges. ✅ A dramatic final encounter with the Stormwing—can your party fight, negotiate, or outwit it? ✅ A thunderous environment with gusts, static surges, and dangerous terrain challenges. ✅ Unique rewards, including the Gloves of Conducting, a magic item that crackles with power. ✅ Multiple adventure hooks for easy campaign integration. This adventure is part of Thirsty Tiger Tales, an ongoing collection of thrilling one-shots for D&D 5e! Perfect for a one-shot or a side quest in any elemental, coastal, or storm-themed campaign. Pay What You Want until the end of May! Suggested price: $1.00 Will your party tame the skies—or be cast down by the storm?
This guide describes how to run a one-session festival for your players. It combines a black market, costumes, and various activities suitable for different PC skills. The setting is a beach at night near a coastal town or city, but it can be easily adapted for other locations. It is suitable for players with little experience, and characters of any level. It makes a good first session for new players since they can try various skills without risk.
Outside Briar Glen lies a dangerous swamp, and deep within it runs the Weeping River. Those who venture too far into the swampland near the river are overcome with grief and cry until their tears turn to blood. If they’re lucky, they die quickly. Lately, however, women in town disappear into the swamp near the Weeping River at night... and return in the morning, entranced but unscathed. Their families want to know why they return at sunrise with no memory of the previous night. These women found themselves a friend in the boo-hag, angry at the townsfolk for damaging her swamp. She initiated the women into her coven and tasked them to drain the life energy from their families to help the boo-hag heal the swamp.
Ducklings. It's not too late too close this page, and go and find an adventure about happy-go-lucky halflings, or emotionally stable young adventurers. This is not that story. You can still walk away, and find some other engagement that your players will forgive you for running. Open this little document, and you will be introduced to the wretched streets of Elysium. Home of aberrations, mystery and futile quests for meaning in the drowned streets of the tortured city. Escape is unlikely. Enjoyment fleeting. I implore you, turn away and don't look back. Mind flayers stalk streets plagued by invisible death. Curses bubble from ancient evils sleeping beneath the water. Questions lead to questions, which evolve into answers you will only regret asking for. Go whilst you still can. There is nothing here for you but death. Prologue: Welcome to Elysium Chapter One: The Crooked House Chapter Two: The Broken Prison Chapter Three: The Temple of the Gaunt Silhouette Chapter Four: The Grand Library Chapter Five: The Adamant Asylum Chapter Six: The Dancing Spider Chapter Seven: The Undercity An adventure for characters of level 15+ Contains: An introduction to Elysium, a Ravenloft domain filled with eldritch mystery and drowned secrets, including Life In Elysium, The Rule Unspoken and the Marks of Horror that set Elysium apart. Guidance on Madness in Elysium, with Elysian Madness tables for your horror/amusement. A list of Elysian locations, some of which will be expanded in later releases. Elysian random encounter tables, day & night. An Elysian Wild Magic table, miserable magic items and tragic trinkets. The first installment - The Crooked House, in which we meet the Duchess and her parade of dead husbands. The seconf installment - The Broken Prison, where the shadows of gods walk amongst men The third installment, The Temple of the Gaunt Silhouette, where broken fragments of reality are reached by strange avenues. The fourth installment, The Grand Library, where the things we wanted to forget prove impossible to truly banish. The fifth installment, The Adamant Asylum, where medicine and madness meet. The sixth installment, The Dancing Spider, in which there is no rest for the wicked. The seventh installment, The Undercity, where your worst suspicions are confirmed. Three new character backgrounds: the Eldritch Detective, the Information Broker and the Tempter of Fate. The long-suffering Elysian character race, with two subraces. The first One Page Woes collection, included here for your convenience, which contains thirteen reasons to be thoroughly miserable.
Nightmares that kill, a mysterious thief that only steals knick-knacks, tales of a huge beast terrorising fisherfolk, an inn with disappearing guests, discoveries of hidden magic portals and rumours of an assassin at large: None of these things are enough to stop the ever-flowing tide of traders and travellers crossing the Bridge of Fallen Men, but its protectors - Cormyr's Purple Dragons - are short on time, and courage... ...will adventurers answer the call?
The Hag's Hexes is a 66 page guide designed by Dungeon Masters Guild luminaries like JVC Parry and Janek Sielicki alongside rising stars and old stalwarts like Matt Butler, Matthew Gravelyn, and Tim Bannock. It was created with one thing in mind: to make hags more than the sum of their (often meager) Challenge ratings, giving them the mechanics, roleplay potential, and weird magic that can inspire campaigns, lay low kings and warlords, and potentially ensnare unwary Player Characters into campaign-changing curses or long-term bargains that force them into terrible moral quandaries! Split into five chapters, the authors have provided everything a DM needs to terrify their players for years to come. The Bestiary features over a dozen monsters; some are new hags, some are their minions or even their mobile lairs, and one of them -- the Shaitan AKA Desert Hag -- was featured in Monsters of the Guild! Bargains & Curses is a chapter filled with ideas that can kick-start campaigns, threaten valued NPCs, or put Player Characters' very existence and morality at stake. Chapter 3 includes two dozen items of wonderment, weirdness, and dread, ranging from fairy tale-inspired items of whimsy to terribly cursed items of horror. Chapter 4 is titled "Filthy, Vile & Downright Dirty" and provides dozens of roleplaying tips to make hags come alive, new mechanics inspired by and expanding on Volo's Guide to Monsters (coven spell lists, aunties, grandmothers, alternative coven members), and ends with useful combat tactics for each of the hags from the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide, as well as tactics for covens. Finally, Chapter 5 presents five encounter groups (with sub-encounters) to give you quick story seeds and monster lists that you can put together in minutes to create a single encounter or to inspire a full campaign, and ends with three full-length adventures -- each with 3-5 encounters -- that showcase many of the new monsters, rules, magic items, and so on that appeared in earlier chapters. Each of these adventures comes with an encounter map meant to act as inspiration for hag lairs, and they include useful mechanical ideas for terrain effects and descriptive keywords listed directly on the map for added inspiration and easy customization! Designed by Tim Bannock. Written by Matt Butler, JVC Parry, Janek Sielicki, and Tim Bannock. Edited by Matthew Gravelyn and Tim Bannock. Cover Art by Elena Naylor. Cartography by Tim Bannock using Inkwell Ideas' Dungeonographer (Dungeonographer is copyright Inkwell Ideas). Layout & Graphic Elements by Elena Naylor with Tim Bannock. Interior Art by Arcana Games, Bruno Balixa, David Lewis Johnson, Dean Spencer, Earl Geier, Filip Gutowski, Jacob E. Blackmon, Joyce Maureira, Petr Kratochvil, Jayaraj Paul, Brian Brinlee, and Wizards of the Coast.
Twenty years ago, the humans built a dam and flooded Gormelin Valley. They drove the Cinderborn goblins away from their land. But now the Cinderborn are back and they want vengeance. The dam must fall and the human towns must drown! Damnation is a set of two parallel adventures that cover the same events, locations and characters. In The Heroes' Tale, the players control a traditional heroic party. They get to attend a wine festival, save a town from a flood, dive to the bottom of a lake, choose between retaliation and negotiation, and face a demon atop the dam as he attempts to demolish it. The Goblins' Tale tells the other side of the story, allowing players to take control of a party of goblins. As the Cinderborn, they must deal with human spies, sneak into a wizard's tower, trigger a catastrophic flood, choose between peace and vengeance, face their own demonic leader, or aid him in breaking the dam. Also included: maps and goblin pregens!
Eberron Gothic: Curse of the Thornwood is an intricate, character-driven mystery set against the sins of the past. On a journey to Arythawn Keep at the edge of the Mournland, the adventurers stop for the evening in the Thranish village of Brightdawn where they discover that there are dark secrets hidden in the wilds nearby. . .
𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐝𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟗𝟕𝟕 𝐁𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐜 𝐑𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤, 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐙𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐮𝐬. It includes the hinted at, deeper dungeons and darker secrets of Zenopus. This adventure details the Tower of Zenopus located in the map found in Ghosts of Saltmarsh and is a quick side bar for adventurers level 1-3. It has been 50 years since anyone has seen or heard from Zenopus. Rumors abound concerning cultists and marshland creatures roaming near Portown. Could it be that Zenopus is behind it all? Return to the dungeon that started it all. Additional material based on Dr. J. Eric Holmes’ original sample dungeon. More levels, more monsters, more treasure await under the Tower of Zenopus! 4 new dungeon levels included!
DC-POA-PND-5 What Stalks the Night? (Fourth and Final Part of the Strange Case of Erland Forsk) Many residents of Easthaven were woken in the early morning by an explosion. One of the houses near the Wet Trout tavern exploded, and a trail of large, webbed footprints were left in the snow leading off into the wilderness. Two-Hour Adventure for Tier 2 Characters. Optimized for APL 8 Using the DungeonCraft seed My, What Big Feet You Have Don’t Go Outside! The Strange Case of Erland Forsk is a four part series of DungeonCraft adventures, each 2-hours long. DC-POA-PND-2 What Skitters Beneath? (tier 1) DC-POA-PND-3 The Watcher in the Attic (tier 1) DC-POA-PND-4 Eateat Go Home? (tier 2) DC-POA-PND-5 What Stalks the Night? (tier 2) ``` Now is not the time to go outside Crawl back into bed and close your eyes Now is not the time to go outside Lock the doors and find a place to hide — Poppy - Don't Go Outside ```
A cleric has tirelessly tended to the medical needs of his fellow villagers for decades. There have been occasional cases of madness among his charges over the years, enough to cause rumors, but now there is an outbreak, including people known for years to be quite sane. Can you discover the source of these terrible troubles and return the village to normal life?
This adventure has been designed as a one shot adventure for 4-8 players, pregen 5th level characters included, in 4-6 hours. It tells a classic story of the "good" races oppressing the "dark" races, with their warlike expansionist ways.
About: This encounter was cooked up in the Write your First Encounter workshop by the Storytelling Collective. It CAN be slid in as a side quest in any urban or sub-urban context, or be adapted to add confusion to any rescue mission you are presently running. Synopsis: Through the doorway a young woman shackled to the wall matching the description of Helena can be seen. Though disheveled and looking to be in great discomfort, her beauty is remarkable. But on closer inspection, there are other people here — three identical Helenas! Noble woman Elize Cleron has hired the party to infiltrate the catacombs under the Schaefer Estate and free her twin sister Helena. Helena is being held captive by the Schaefer family, trade rivals rumored to have ties to the underworld. Elize has been unable to free her sister herself because of her identical appearance. Rather than pay an unrealistic ransom, Elize has provided the party with what they need to break her out. This encounter is intended for 3rd level characters.
Ever been on a long running campaign and in one of the sessions one or a few players couldn’t make it? This adventure was made to be used as sort of a filler episode to fix that. Made for a small party of 1st-4th lvl characters and to be played in a single session. Story summary - The Gold Knife Bandits, a gang formed by a former army squadron that deserted. They are remarkably loyal to each other and are known in the area for attacking army caravans and camps. However, after several months of unfortunate loots. They decided to house a cultist of Beshaba and do what he asks to take away the curse of misfortune the gang is obviously under. Unfortunately, that includes using some members of the party as a sacrifice. The party will find the bandits cavernous hideout, clear through it, face the cultist, the Bandit's old boss, or both! All in a day’s worth of adventuring.
This is a trapped corridor which can be dropped into any castle, dungeon, ruin or underground adventure. It features full rules on how to scare the living be-jesus out of your adventurers and have sone great fun with them too. Get ready... as the 'Umber Eyes' is ready to receive you...
This quest is for a party whose members all perished in the same encounter. The loss of an entire party is hard to recover from and often spells the end of an adventure. However, with the assistance of the enigmatic Raven Queen, the party’s tale might not be over just yet. The characters must wander through the Fortress of Memories; confront their pasts, present selves, and possible futures to return to life. Includes a quest-related NPC that a player can control if they're waiting for their character to be resurrected.