For the adventure prompt thing: How about an inland city with a towering lighthouse dominating the skyline? Instead of warding ships from the coast, the lighthouse projects a magical field of energy every night to keep out the hordes of monsters in the wilderness. People need to venture out of the city for supplies, but woe to anyone caught outside the ward after sunset.
Oooh, lots to work with here, let me see what I can do:
Adventure: A Fading Memory of Light
“On that terrible night when the beacon tower died, the whole city’s hope went with it. The Corpse-king’s ghostly legions, long denied the promise of conquest that bound them to the living world, were able to march against the fortifications that had so long kept them at bay.
In a single night, the city was swept clean of life, drained to feed the corpse-king’s armies or tolled to the well of darkness from which his power sprang. Only a score of survivors managed to flee the fall of their home and cross the haunted waste to civilized lands.
may this account teach us that there are limits to what we can accomplish under our own mortal power, and that there is some darkness in this world that not even our brightest light can withstand.”
-A history of the strongholds of humanity, volume IV: Southeastern continent
Setup: The party comes into possession of a most unusual object: the diary of a refugee who fled Svivolda, a magocratic city as it was overtaken by an army of undead. So traumatic were these events, that anyone who reads the journal ends up bodily transported into a dreamlike memory of the days leading up to the conquest, able to live and relive the city’s trials before being returned to their previously unconscious body, no worse for wear and only a few hours having passed.
Little more than a ruin reclaimed by the wilderness in the present day, Svivolda was once a city ruled over by a powerful mages, that for all their power failed to prevent the rise of a conquest hungry necromancer called “The Cadaver-King”. Whatsmore, when the threat presented itself, the masters of the city refused to heed the call and join their neighbors in dispatching the foe, trusting instead in their walls and wards to ensure the safety of their holdings. This isolationist attitude saw all of Svivolda’s contemporary settlements wiped out, as the corpse-king’s influence spread and turned the surrounding landscape into a haunted wasteland. They held out nearly a generation, before some agent of the corpse king snuck into the city and managed to destroy the city’s protective beacon tower in an act of cataclysmic sabotage.
Today the city of Svivolda is known mostly for its tragic end, spoken of by sages and skalds as one of the most obvious examples of what happens when good does nothing but bide its time in the face of an overwhelming darkness.
Adventure Hooks
- The party starts their first loop awakening in a disused tavern (as the isolated city has little need in way of hospitality for outsiders) after the conclusion of some kind of festival the previous night. they are granted a few days to explore the city before, at sunset, the city’s beacon tower explodes, leading to a night of furious resistance as the corpse-king’s forces appear out of the mist to besiege the now unwarded city. After the defenders fall, its a few days of panic and nightly purges as the city either flees into the wastes or attempts to hide from the phantom army. After a few days of carnage, the loop suddenly ends, kicking the heroes back out to the real world.
- It the players are wise, the book can be more than just a historical curiosity: as the rumors have it, the final, deepest vault of the magisters, with all their riches and wonders survived the corpse-king’s plundering, as well as his defeat some decades later. A smart band of treasure hunters can follow likely suspects and perhaps ascertain the location of the vault and perhaps a manner to circumvent its defenses. After that, all that’s left is to plan an expidition to the city’s ruins, through the blasted wasteland left by the corpse-king’s defeat.
- The barrier beacon of Svivolda is perhaps one of the greatest works of abjuration magic ever developed, and was thought to have been lost to the ages when the city fell. If the party can somehow steal its plans or otherwise reproduce its function, they may be able to shield their own holdings or vessels from powerful opponents as well.
