Epic Silliness
April 12th, 2011
Hello everyone and welcome to another exciting Grave Plots, where we bring you new plot hooks and adventure ideas each and every week. As you may have already heard, it is Epic Week here at Necromancers of the Northwest. You may also be aware that there are no epic rules available for Pathfinder; as a result, this week we will be looking at a few new adventure hooks for that last level 20 adventure. Should you feel that level 20 just isn’t epic enough for you, don’t fret – all of these plots are compatible with characters of any sufficiently high level. Now, odds are that if you had a campaign where the PCs reached 20th level, you probably have an adventure already in mind, but just in case, here are some neat sample ideas for things to do at the highest level of adventures. This week we will be looking at some fun, silly, epic-style adventures.
Silly Epic
These adventures are all about doing really amazing, but kind of silly, things. They’re a great choice for very casual groups, or for groups who have just finished a long string of very serious emergencies and feel they’ve earned a chance to just sort of flex their characters’ awesomeness muscles. These are also fun one- or two-session games between long campaigns, and groups who have always wanted to be 20th level but never seem to get the chance and just want to abuse that excellent 20th level power can take advantage of these adventures. As you’re reading these plots, remember, these are supposed to be a little on the silly side.
Lord Iven’s Three Impossible Tasks
The PCs have triumphed against the odds time and time again and are considered to be the heroes of all time, a fact that no peasant, noble, or king disputes – save one. Lord Iven is a bitter little man, who has managed to convince himself, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the PCs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Bitter and jealous of the praise the PCs receive from his peers, Lord Iven, unabashedly pleased with his own cleverness, has issued a public challenge to the PCs, demanding that they prove to the world their greatness by performing three tasks of his choosing. Should the PCs refuse, there will be no other consequences – other than having to hear the noble community talk for the rest of their lives about how the PCs, while great, couldn’t perform Lord Iven’s three tasks. Besides, what more motivation should they need than putting a fop like Lord Iven in his place?
Indeed, Lord Iven has asked three tasks that no ordinary man could ever perform, and what’s worse, he has insisted that they perform each of the three tasks within a time limit. Firstly, he asks the PCs prove to him their skills as a diplomat by bringing a great wyrm red dragon and a great wyrm gold dragon here to his castle, where they will stay under his personal supervision for 24 hours. During this time the PCs are to stay at least a mile from his estate. The PCs will pass his first task if neither beast harms the other during this stay. The PCs will have a week to complete this task.
After the first task, Lord Iven explains that a new atlas is being printed in 60 days and demands that the PCs demonstrate their skills as great warriors and allies to a lord by ensuring that Scramphos, his chief rival’s capital city, does not appear on his new atlas. They have 59 days to complete this task and bring back proof of their deeds.
Frustrated that the PCs managed to complete two of his three impossible tasks, Lord Iven chooses a third task he feels will be truly impossible. He demands that the PCs cross the entire breadth of the Great Eastern Desert (a distance of nearly 500 miles) before sun set in two hours, without use of any magic.
Should the PCs manage to complete all three of Lord Iven’s impossible tasks, say by bringing the corpses of two great wyrm dragons the PCs slew, convincing the lord of Scramphos to rename his city, and calling in some favors with the world’s deities to hold the sun in place while they crossed the desert or something similar, Lord Iven is forced to back down and acknowledge the PCs’ greatness in front of all the world.
Save Perdenhaven
Life is bad in Perdenhaven. The town has a lot of problems: horrible gangsters extort the citizens, a mining consortium works the populace nearly (and sometimes not just nearly) to death, religious organizations use faith to convince the people to do horrible things to members of other factions, addictive substances are produced and distributed to the citizens in order to control the population, and the local government has long turned a blind eye to the suffering of the people. No communication is allowed in or out of Perdenhaven and no one escapes the town’s grasp – until now. A young girl named Talia managed to escape the town through the woods surrounding it and has made her way to a massive keep located just a few days’ travel from the town. Talia convinced the keep’s guards that she was harmless and just wanted to be somewhere safe. Smiling, the guard said she was in luck because not only had she happened upon a safe place, but also the home of the greatest of the world’s heroes. After feeding Talia, the guard presents her to the heroes of the keep (your PCs).
Talia tells the PCs all about the foul things going on in her hometown and explains that the oppressors have many powerful enforcers and allies. As she goes on, it becomes clear that without intervention this town will perish under a torrent of CR 7-14 problems. Fortunately, the town has just earned the intervention of a group of outraged level 20 PCs, who, after assuring Talia that they will handle everything, head out to stomp some evildoers and set wrongs right.
For those of you who are wondering, yes, the most difficult proposed encounter is about 6 CRs lower than the PCs – this is what makes this adventure fun. With the PCs so wildly beyond the enemies, they can just sort of walk around smashing the bad guys into goo and rescuing people, a classically entertaining adventure for anyone who wants to just show off how great their level 20 guy is. For those of you who want to make this more challenging, consider that without all these evildoers around there is a terrible power vacuum in Perdenhaven and plan a subsequent adventure or series of adventures where the PCs, now responsible for Perdenhaven, have to organize the town, provide for their government, and ensure that things don’t go to hell five minutes after they mopped up the bad guys.
The Royal Jewel Collection
For bored or just plain roguish parties, this simple adventure idea could result in a great deal of fun nights of scheming and endless fond memories. One night, a god of thievery appears to the PCs and asks them what their next big thing is. When they answer that they don’t really have anything planned for the future, this god of thievery suggests that they steal the royal jewels from each kingdom’s royal family.
Though the PCs might be reluctant at first, they decide to start in on this life of dangerous and exciting cat burglary as way to counter super-mythic status boredom, to great effect. Before long the word gets out that someone is looting royal jewels and so the world’s great kings are setting up ever greater countermeasures, forcing the PCs to address the situation with increasing degrees of cleverness.
Well that’s it for this week’s Grave Plots. Until next time I would like to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.