Some adventure ideas ...

[alhoon]

A friend was asking me for some help with an adventure she was planning for her 4th level party. 5th edition D&D.
In short, we ended up with this idea that people may find interesting, especially in Sebua.

Villa near a small oasis that the nomad guides shun and consider cursed and haunted (hint: they are right!). Employer wants them to retrieve McGaffin. Family heirloom, or whatever, worth more to the Employer than the PCs. In the case of my friend's adventure it was a "part of a competition" of sorts. Something like "starting adventurers do stuff and the winner takes a prize. The losers... well, they are probably dead."
1. Turns out the nomads were naughty and were stealing things from travelers. Not very very bad, but bad. I.e. they don't attack on sight, but they will steal from you. The nomads' daughters, wives and concubines are the ones that do the stealing - a lot of men die in the profession of nomad-robber and nomad-thief you see.
2. The nomad boss - either under intimidation if he and his concubines are caught with their hands where they don't belong or just while sharing scary stories around the fire, tells the PCs about the story of the place.

In short: a rich, self-centered local noble died. Her son was a real mommy's boy, her husband was a priest. You get where this is going, I guess. Her son brought back mommy as a mummy using the daddy's wealth and powers. He was cursed for that, becoming a ghoul. The daughter in law that mummy despised, didn't want to help and was sacrificed and was a spectre (D&D spectre) but bound to the area like a ghost would and unable to raise zombies.
The other children and in-laws ... I don't remember what happened but in my suggestion (I don't think she used it) were skeleton support.
Anyway, the mummy and ghoul combo is two monsters that can paralyze people, and in 5e, a hit on a paralyzed creature is auto-critical. And mummies hit hard. I had advised my friend to not crit-kill a player (a mummy could easily do 30-40 damage) and she agreed. Long story short the "Advice for the DM" there is to make the Players sweat, by leaving them stranded at 5 hp, but not kill them.

3. The villa had some traps, and trap-like encounters. There was a room with junk and rusty things. The PCs were supposed to get there after the encounter with the mummy and the ghoul. I remind you that mummies have mummy rot = you cannot heal. Specters have energy drain = hp maximum drops.
If the players disturbed the junk looking for treasure, a swarm of beetles would come out of an old, rusty decorative armor. And the armor would animate and attack. Again, remember that there's a good chance the PCs are "locked" at low hp here.

4. According to the nomad there was a way to break the curse in the villa. And there was. There was a place with six urns, each holding a potion. 4 of them, were poison. 2 of them were "Remove curse" potions (wink, wink).
There were runes on there and knowledge religion would reveal (and it did in my friend's game) that two of the runes were for patrons of mother and son.
Now, you may ask "Why didn't the cursed undead people there drink those potions?" Well, because removing their curse would turn them from undead to dead.


Here is a link for the image (AI generated) for the mummy mommy and her cursed with hunger, loyal son (not the disloyal ones that were skeletons).