Café de Nuit

Hey everyone,

I'm happy to say that I'm going to try DMing a new group and hopefully starting a new campaign. Since my life is a lot busier now than a few years ago, I'm goign to try doing an episodic campaign, based on individual adventures with lots of hooks that may allow me to expand them in the future, so I can do one at a time.

Also, if I can, I'd like to reuse pre-made adventures, to save me time, either running them entirely or canibalizing parts of different modules to make one single adventure for my group. My players are inexperienced, in the sense that they don't even conceive of what an RPG is. So, I'm toning down on horror, but I'll be using Ravenloft because it's such a cool setting and more suitable to adventure that are not too juvenile (otherwise I'll lose my players).

So, to start, I've decided to go with a topic that seems popular in the Café de Nuit: the PCs attend an inauguration party in the museum of Port A-Lucine (such a wonderful coincidence that Lostboy's map has just been made available!!! =) )of a series of artifacts brought from Hara'Kir. Overnight, though, one of them is stolen, a minor idol, or a tablet with strange writings. This is still to be decided, but it conceals a clue for further adventures and much larger things.

And, while the folks at the museum and the university don't know of this, they know they have much to study and so attribute it more significance than to other more popular pieces.

But so does someone else. The PCs are called the next day (I don't yet know why the PCs exactly, and not some other random people) to form a task force that will have to go and retrieve the stolen art.

This is just what I want for now. A small, self-contained adventure, that involves low risk (1-level PCs), a decent dose of investigation, lots of foreshadowing, with mysterious writings or objects, and an allusion to a secret group. I'm planning to have the Brain behind the theft or as a competing group in search of the stolen artifact, for whatever reason, but I haven't detailed anything more yet.


so, the question now: is there any adventure already done, or mix of adventures, that goes about searching for an archaeological artifact in an urban setting, with a bit of intrigue as described above? Something I can plunder and use, even if it's from outside Dementlieu and even Ravenloft?

Thanks all.

Dungeon Issue 105 (with Warduke on the cover) has a great dungeon crawl calles The Stink which takes place in the landfill area of a large city. The primary villians are fiendish Locataths but with a little twiking they could easily be modified into something else also there are some wonderfuly wicked diseases located throughout the adventure...

I always enjoyed the old adventure Secret of Bone Hill-for a low level group, it's a fun romp and the Big Bad-a wraith-is easily driven off with a shake of his vaporous claw and a cry of "I'll get You next time, Gadget...Next Time!" that the adventure can easily extend into a further campaign. You can find it on this page: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/downloads

http://www.talesofterror.net/section01- ... facts.html

That is the arcane artifacts area of Tales Of Terror. Although written for a modern horror campaign it can easily modified for Ravenloft.

My idea. The night after the grand opening, two guards are found ripped apart and a massive marble idol of an ancient long forgotten demon God is stolen. But the law is puzzled because the idol was practically worthless and other much move valuable artifacts were not touched. Through investigation the party discovers a horrible secret cult. The party confronts the cult, only to discover the idol was not stolen. The idol was the slumbering demon God itself!

Nukdai wrote:Dungeon Issue 105 (with Warduke on the cover) has a great dungeon crawl calles The Stink which takes place in the landfill area of a large city. The primary villians are fiendish Locataths but with a little twiking they could easily be modified into something else also there are some wonderfuly wicked diseases located throughout the adventure...

Twisted thought-- though probably not suitable for a low-level starter adventure: could such an epic pile of filth spontaneously become a Mistway to Nosos?

the adventure is set up for four 4th level adventures should be pretty easy to just use the map and change the baddies around. I used it for an urban campaign for second lvl characters and just kinda dolled everythingdown