Fairy Tales
Welcome back everyone to Grave Plots, where I strive to provide you with new plot hooks and adventure ideas each and every week. This week I would like to set you up with two new scenarios involving the mysterious beings known as fey.
The Deal
In popular literature fey are often depicted as liking to strike deals and bargains with mortal beings in exchange for aid in some form or another. Fey often demand future favors from those desperate or foolish enough to bargain with them. To set this one up, you have two options depending on the time available and your preference. Your first option is to have a fey creature approach the PCs early in their career, particularly if they seem in over their heads, and offer to solve their problems for them in exchange for a later favor. There are three major advantages to doing things this way: first, negotiating deals with otherworldly entities can be a great roleplay experience; second, when you call in the favor later your players will appreciate the consistency of your campaign and will they will probably feel more committed to the adventure that follows; third, you can abuse this set up several times, each time adding more and more debt, giving you an interesting campaign feature and a whole ton of readymade plot hooks. The other way to go about the set-up is to say that one or more of the PCs have inherited a debt owed to the fey in question. This approach really only has one advantage: speed. It’s quick and lets you use the plot hook without a lot of planning or set-up.
However you choose to do the set-up, the hooks goes like this: out of thin air appears a tall, lithe and hauntingly beautiful woman with skin the color of moonlight and eyes like polished jade. She has an almost musical tone to her voice as she addresses your group (the PCs), “Greeting mortals, my name is Suri’aria. I have purchased your debt from a dear friend of mine and I’m afraid that I have need of your services.” The woman pauses briefly to close her eyes and draw in a deep breath before continuing. “The diadem of Vernus Siltre has been stolen and I would ask that you recover it before it’s too late.”
Okay, from here it’s up to you what you want to do with this one. You should first decide who stole the diadem. Personally, I like rival fey since the creatures are well known for being treacherous little buggers, but if you have a better candidate in mind use them instead. Next on your to-do list should be figuring out if Suri’aria knows who took the diadem. If you’re just looking for a little dungeon crawl, have her tell the PCs what’s up and where they need to go; but if you want to add a more investigatory element to the adventure make sure you have plenty of clues scattered around so that the PCs can figure out what’s going on. Finally, you need to pick an end-game. Consider Suri’aria’s motives – perhaps she wants the diadem for reasons the PCs don’t want anything to do with, or maybe “stolen” may be a loose interpretation of what happened. Perhaps the person who stole the diadem is planning a ritual to destroy the world or some such and the PCs are now on a ticking clock. PCs who try to ignore this adventure should be punished for breaking their deals with the fey; geas/quest is a good place to start, but feel free to get creative.
The Child
Another common portrayal for the fey is as dangerous and feral thieves who are liable to up and snatch village children out playing past their bedtime. This is exactly what happened in this hook. Jon and Ellie have just had their child snatched in the night by a gang of pixies, and are at a loss as to what to do. So of course they hire the PCs to confront the monsters, smash them, and bring little Jon, Jr. back home. In case the PCs aren’t moved by the plight of this family in trouble, they’re offering up one of their family heirlooms as a reward: a magic amulet of natural armor (whatever bonus strikes your fancy). As it turns out the pixies aren’t hard to find and the PCs meet up with them and the child. The pixies claim that the child is theirs, because the parents made a deal with the family a long time ago that in exchange for some fey power they would take their firstborn son; the fey have only made good on their deal. While the devolvement from here is more in the hands of your players, the details are all down to you. Are the pixies in the right? Does it matter? Or are they lying to the PCs? Where is the child happier? And what happens if the PCs do decide to smash the pixies - do they just stand there and take it or do they use their prodigious abilities to evade detection and flee? For added fun remember that pixies have memory loss arrows and that those things can have a real fun effect on your game.