#treasure hunt

Golden Jackal

Adventure: The Doomsday Book

“If you don’t like how it’s done, do it yourself” is very bad advice for someone with a god complex

Setup:In life, the mage Varner of Boltzford was fascinated with the complexity of the world, the seemingly infinite inter-connectivity of all things in a web so complex that one mortal mind could never understand all of it. In death fascination transformed into obsession, as Varner was driven to extend his existence to perfect what he saw as the art of the gods: Genesis, the act of bringing life out of nothingness.

Decades of experiments with astral constructs and transmutation eventually led Varner into the a philosophical and theological haze of “ontology” and “ideal forms”, along with a lot of other prattle that allowed him to convince himself that the things he could create things so beautiful they could redefine beauty, so perfect they could improve on perfection, and so real that they made other things less real by comparison.

He created the Renascent Tome, an artifact that ate up the matter of the existent world to produce things that adhred to Varner’s vision of perfection, small things at first that were mere pretty trinkets, through which he learned that the more he wanted form his creation the more he had to feed it

It was shortly after the lich turned an entire town and its surrounding valley into dust that Varner fell victim to the bane of so many promising omnicidal visionaries: meddling adventurers. The heroes did what heroes did best and though they made a proper mess out of the perfectionist’s plans they were unable to keep hold of his Tome, which slipped through their grasp to cause problems in the wider world to this day, diminished in power but no less a threat.

Hooks: 

• Varner went through a number of research facilities/evil lairs in his time before he was felled by heroes, and any one of them could be a resting place for his tome. Such lairs are often dumping grounds for the lich’s escaped or failed experiments: creatures and constructs so beautiful they sear or corrode things around them, eerily stagnant wilderness, the soulless progeny of attempted “master races”.  Such oddities would draw all sorts of adventurers, or at least the collectors and conservationists looking to study these anomalies.
  
• A foolish and famehungry apprentice found the Renascent Tome at his local book fair being sold  ( at a discount no less) by an unwitting salvager. After discovering its ability to transmute things into idealized forms, he began using the book to mend broken objects and “heal” local livestock ( no matter the fact that things the book abzorbs are effectively disintegrated with a new thing made in their place). Tales of his wondrous talents reached the ear of the ailing local countess, who requested the apprentice bathe her in the books healing light and restore her to the glory she once possessed.  Now her lands are ruled by a nightmarish “perfected” tyrant, and patrolled by her inhumanly “idealized” soldiers. The thing that took the countess’s place brings the captive apprentice out from his cell every week or so to illuminate her increasingly crystalline castle, each interaction getting crueler and more alien.
  
• Cultists of an outergod dedicated to ego destroying perfection have come to see Varner’s work as a holy relic of their faith, allowing them to perform miracles that they could have never dreamed of otherwise. They seek it always, putting a target on the party’s back should they come into possession of the Renascent Tome. When pushed to extremes, these same cultists will unleash the relic’s power without any heed for who or what it consumes, gleefully sacrificing themselves to become the foundation of the world it will create.
  

Item stats: The Renascent Tome

artifact

Dormant: while dormant the tome serves as a +1 arcane spellcasting focus.

A creature attuned to the Renascent tome gains the 2nd level wizard school feature: Minor Conjuration, save that the items created always have a +1 magical bonus to any rolls they were intended to make. Conjuration wizards treat both the focus and the items conjured as if they were a +2 bonus instead.

When this feature is activated, the book’s pages glow and begin siphoning in dust and small unattended objects from its surroundings. The effect is otherwise harmless.

Awakened:When awakened, the Renascent tome gains 10 charges, which may be used to cast the following spells: Discorperating light (1 charge as tasha’s caustic brew, but dealing radiant damage) Conjure Barrage ( 3 charges) or Fabricate (4 charges). Items created by the fabricate spell are of exquisite quality and retain the +1 magical bonus from the minor conjuration feature.  The tome regains 1d6+4 charges at dawn. When the last charge is spent, roll a d20, on a 1 the tome consumes itself in a blast of siphoning radiance. All creatures in a 20ft radius must make a save vs the bearer’s spell save dc ( or int+proff if they are not a caster) or suffer the effects of a successful gravity sinkhole spell

Exalted: The bonus the focus provides grows to +3 and the tome gains 10 extra charges.   The spells that it can cast now include disintegrate ( 6 charges), mirage arcane ( 7 charges) and blade of disaster (9 charges). Spells can still be cast if the item lacks the prerequisite charges, but this increases the number rolled on the no charge roll to go up by 1 per missing charge. 

Curse: Once exalted, Each spell cast from the book now also requires an extra 1d4 charges. If the no charge roll occurs, in addition to triggering a gravity sinkhole, the Tome begins to act as a sphere of annihilation from that moment onwards. 

Further Adventures:

• Removing the curse from the Renascent Tome requires access to Varner’s research notes, requiring the party to either seek out a source of great knowledge of attempt to seek the imprisoned lich himself.
  

• Varner has had a lot of time to think after he was imprisoned, and has concluded that the current material world is too corrupt and messy for any of his perfect creations to truly take root. Though his reemergence into the land of the living will bring with it a tide of new horrific experiments and dangerous objects released upon the world, his ultimate goal is to find a nice enough place to use as raw material for the eden he’s going to build. Given that he’s spent long enough as a lich that many of his own feelings have begun to atrophy, he’ll reach out to those closest to him ( like the meddling adventuring party that woke him up) to see what they think of as ideal. Say, the starting town of the campaign or wherever the heroes have decided to make their home.
  

• Should the Renascent tome fulfill its purpose it’s safe to say that the party will have very little chance of undoing what its done, muchless surviving the process should they have been caught within its mile wide blast radius. However, with the slightest bit of divine intervention from whatever spirits are watching over their adventures, the party might just be able to turn that slim chance into a fighting one. They find themselves trapped inside the grotesque Perfection of Varner’s world, a grotesque parody of a place familiar to them with all the personality and imperfection scrubbed away.  At its center is the Tome, its own less than perfect existence protected by an enchantment Varner made to protect his magnum opus from devouring itself in an act of sentimental self sabotage. The perfect world is contained inside the book while the book is contained within the world, this paradox, if inverted, might allow the party to reverse the flow of the Tome’s reality devouring magic, deconstructing the demiplane it’s constructed and reassembling the world that was in mostly the right order. All that’s required is to brave the maze of hyper-real nostalga and face off against a perfected Varner, alive again after a near century of lichdom, ignorant of any of his previous failings, but master of his domain.
  

Dungeon: The Veiled Palace

Sorrow pervades this valley, the painful ache that remains after tears and screams have exhausted themselves and the body can only linger on in faltering surrender. You can feel it in the rain, in the rocks, in the chill of the wind as it pulls the mirth from your bones.

Setup: Forlorn and forgotten thought it may be, the Veiled palace was said to have been constructed by a besotted celestial and played home to a succession of demigod warlords before it and the surrounding lands were reclaimed by nature at the end of the last civil war, transforming into a vast hinterland ripe for exploration.

Hooks:

• Though the warlords have been gone for generations, their most cunning servants, a coterie of assassins live on, location concealed by ancient enchantments that cloak their fortress and their movements in near impenetrable mist.  They now sell their services to the innumerable nobles and merchants of the lowlands as the “Serpent-Unseen”, a group the party will only hear of after taking an innocuous job that sees their prospective employer killed half way through and the party hastily pinned for the crime.
  
• In addition to the isolated human villages in mountains, there are also encalves of aarakocra and jaguar-tabaxi in the region, both of whom retain scraps of lore about the palace and its formation, but have become increasingly unfriendly towards outsiders of late. Someone has been wandering their territory and ensnaring their people through the use of a bewitching flute, and all those who try to rescue the ensorceled are never heard from again.
• Tales in local roadhouses tell of Tamha, a long vanished village in the mountains that once traded in heavenly treasures, some beautiful or powerful beyond beleif. While these rumors may incite the party to start combing the rainforest for trinkets, they’ve also inspired the Serpent-Unseen’s latest leader, Janbek the collector,  aspirations for his organization far above being petty cutthroats. Having found a few of these trinkets ( such as the flute), the collector realizes that the Veiled palace is a storehouse of powerful enchantments that could lead him and his people to true power far beyond the swords and poisons they currently wield.
  
• Those traveling high into the mountains should be wary, as to hear the locals tell it a soaking wet ghost that appears wandering the roads in the area dazed and confused, bloodless save for the silvery ichor which drips down from a bone-bearing gash in his head. As the ghost story goes, should the specter clasp you in his deathly grip, you’ll start to drown on land, all while he pleads with you to help him find his way home, dissolving into tears should his victim fight their way free.
  

Background:As the story goes, the celestial noble Rindal’jar was traveling the mortal world  admiring the beauty of the mountains when he fell in love with a mortal girl from a tiny little village by name of Sya. This was a problem, as Rindal’jar was already married to the local goddess of rain, and so cloaked the surrounding valley in a never ending mist so as to hide the affair from his betrothed. Rindal’jar likewise concealed his true nature from his beau, claiming to be a wandering noble in search of poetic inspiration as he lavished gifts upon her and her people. Sya for her part figured out Rindal’jar’s ruse when such gifts icnluded bundles of gold or a bridge over a valley she was forced to cross every time she went to gather fruit, but she and her people were poor, and she feared offending this fanciful stranger and all the power he seemed to wield.
The affair continued for years, and eventually saw Sya living like royalty in a palace conjured by Rindal’jar, waited upon by a staff of animals transmuted into servants: brilliant birds for her ladies and courtiers and a pack of leopards for her honor guard. Her people were forced to stay in the village below, but she smuggled them whatever riches she could to trade for food and proper tools.
Having long suspected her husband’s unfaithfulness, the goddess of rain eventually used her trusted agents to track him to the valley, giving them a bronze vessel empowered by years of bitter hurt and resentment to unleash upon him when he was alone in the valley.  Unstoppered the vessel unleashed monsoon storms and flooded the valley in an instant, washing away the unfaithful Rindal’jar as well as Sya’s village in an instant of divine spite. Watching from above and hidden by the palace’s enchantments, Sya watched her people destroyed, and afterwords retreated to the depths of the palace, living out the rest of her life like a ghost. Her and Rindal’jar’s children, raised by magical convenience and their sorrow-broken mother came up spoiled and wrong, eventually declaring themselves as warlords and raising successive bands of jaguar folk and mountain bandits as they use their father’s gifts to carve out territory for themselves. This pattern persisted over generations, until Rindal’jar’s line got tangled up in a brutal civil war and ended up extinguished for their troubles, their territory falling back to the wild.

Further Adventures:

• Once and orphan and petty thief, the aasimar Janbek (perhaps correctly) sees himself as the heir to the warlords’ legacy, feeling pulled to collect the trinkets and treasures a celestial noble carelessly bestowed upon a hapless village girl so long ago.   While many of these trinkets are merely valuable, others possess powerful abilities that have gone long unobserved, but seem to blossom in the collector’s grasp allowing him to ascend the ranks of the Serpent Unseen faster than anyone in the organization’s history.   His ultimate goal is to uncover the origin of these wonders, and bring the valley under his control as a new reigning warlord to which surrounding territories must offer their allegiance.  To this end the party may end up doing battle with Janbek over treasures they do not know the true origin of, or even inadvertently passing a few into his hands in the early game. 
• Of all the magical items scattered throughout the hinterlands and the surrounding region, perhaps the most dangerous is the stormbearing vessel, which was washed downstream and into the plunge of a violent waterfall and stuck in the rubble beneath the crashing water ever since. The party may only come to know of the vessel thanks to the locals telling them the sad story of Rindal’Jar’s transgressions, and connecting it with their earlier ghost sightings. 
  
•  If one held the wrathful vessel, one could bring rains in times of drought, or summon hurricanes to ravage armies and scour fleets at sea. One could even use it to summon the wrathful goddess, which Janbek may attempt to do if the party closes in on him. What this scornful rain-god will do with the descendant of her philandering husband is anyone’s guess, perhaps smite him on the spot or take him as a consort, elevating him to terrible power. The gods are inscrutable after all, and it would be impious to try to predict how they would act next.
  

N4 — Treasure Hunt (1986) is the stuff, an actual novice adventure aimed at teaching both players and the DM how to play! There are lots of modules that purport to do this (B1 — In Search of the Unknown is probably the most well known and gets the job done well enough) but this one is the best of them by a larger margin. It is also, to my knowledge, the only explicit teaching module for AD&D.

The big innovation here is starting players as zero level normies on a slave ship, torn from their regular lives and tossed upon the seas of fate to chart a new destiny. There are lots of guidelines for the DM to determine both class and alignment based on player action. I think this is super novel for starting players (not so much for experienced ones) and it reminds me a lot of the basic philosophy and framework of Dungeon Crawl Classics’ funnels.

The slave ship gets wrecked early on, but the players must find their way through a conflict between two pirate groups (goblin pirates vs. orc pirates is pretty wonderful) before reckoning with other issues on their castaway island. The module is divided into chapters to make it more manageable for new DMs and, perhaps most interestingly, provides incredibly detailed guidance on how players can pull the plot off the rails while suggesting ways to get things back on course. The whole thing is well done and thoughtful — consider it if you’re going to introduce new players to D&D!

Nice, if not spectacular, Jeff Easley cover. Interiors are all Stephen Fabian, still in his stipple mode. <3 <3

Fiesta of Five Flags treasure hunt

(Thomas McAvoy. 1958?)

The future is now. Find the city’s treasure and secrets today: playtwo.do/ts

Fierce warriors and beautiful treasures await in Longship Landing. Set sail now: playtwo.do/ts