So my mind's been back on the idea for a dark fantasy setting I shared here a while ago, and specifically I have a short adventure idea in mind.
Players would be mercenaries, interested citizens or similar, going out to a collection of villages and hamlets that have been been getting raided by bandits and accosted by highwaymen. Not much killing, but a lot of looting and arson. People have been going missing though, and the bandits are being blamed so the villages have pooled some money together to hire someone to deal with it because the local authorities are being weirdly slow about it.
The bandits are in fact mercenaries themselves, hired and protected by a Witchhunter to ransack the locals in search of evidence of a fleshcrafter coven in the area. The coven is thought to have fled a relatively nearby town when other Witchhunters failed to corner them all before being noticed, and has now set up shop within the area and started abducting and experimenting on the local people, wildlife and livestock. If the Witchhunter makes their presence known too soon the coven will just flee again, and if they manage to flee it gives them more opportunities to spread their forbidden instructional texts and methods, so they're using the bandits as a cover to sieze and investigate people's property, and abduct the odd person to interrogate.
The coven is in fact local, at least in part, a member did flee the town with research materials and victims and hid among the seasonal farmhands, but the chief agents of the coven are residents of the villages. A doctor, a farmer, a priest, and a miller, who together have the knowledge, money and access to bodies and vulnerable people to perform experiments on the melding of different creatures for various reasons. The doctor wants to learn for the sake of it, the farmer wants to make a docile species of labourer, the priest thinks fleshcrafting will help him know the mind of his god, and the miller is wealthy and bored and turned to the coven as a way to pass the time that just got out of hand. The cultist from the town is frightened of being burned at the stake and regrets ever having gotten involved with the fleshcrafters, but had originally joined in the hopes that the coven he was in could help him and his wife deal with infertility problems (they did, it didn't go well.)
The logical endpoints I see are the players siding with the witchhunter to stop the fleshcrafters as more subtle agents than the existing mercenaries, or not believing there is a coven and fighting the witchhunter and mercenaries and then leaving. Or possibly siding with the fleshcrafters, that's always an option but I doubt many would take it given the experiments I have in mind.
Primary enemies would be a mixture of about a dozen well armed bandits, each with a name and personality, the odd guard dog or feral animal, and some experiments that are fusions of multiple animals or animals and people.
One monster I have in mind is the remains of Timothy Derrich, formerly aged eleven, kidnapped and fused with the living body of a wolfhound through a combination of surgery and alchemy to graft the head and part of the upper torso of the dog to his own upper body in place of his head, neck and collarbone. A twisted and suffering creature with a distended neck, supurrating flesh held together by magic and stitches, Derrich is used to track and help abduct subjects for the coven's experiments. He has massively reduced mental capabilities and is unable to speak as a result of having his constituent skulls cracked open and fused together, with some cranial matter from both heads being discarded to save space.
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Topic: Re: Dungeons & Dragons / PNP games thread: COBRA!!! (Read 941557 times)