tonight the foxes hunt the hounds

Settlement: Nisk Under-the-Wing

Ok, Sure its a sodden, swampy valley, but you have to admit can’t beat the view

Setup: Existing for decades as little more than a desolate peat farming settlement on the edge of a bog, Nisk became the staging ground for the last stand by a group of heroes against an ancient dragon, who saved the kingdom by working a great act of magic and petrifying the wyrm in the middle of its pre-rampage monolog. Decades and innumerable tourists later, Nisk has become a major artery of trade for the kingdom, as well as a place for younger adventures to come and learn from the legacy of their forebearers. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Defeating an ancient dragon will make anyone’s reputation, but the wizard Everett Paliisar who worked the petrification  magic has made it into an identity, opening a renowned magical workshop and taking the stone dragon as its sigil. The only problem is that even decades after his triumph,  Paliisar has NO idea how he managed his magical miracle, and into his old age has barely managed to stave off questions and requests to repeat his great trick.  When the party comes looking for some tutoring or help with their own problem in need of petrification,  expect Paliisar to make them jump through innumerable hoops in hopes of dissuading them.

In addition to the swampy waterways, Nisk is surrounded by ancient rainforest that once provided shelter and hunting grounds to the dragon. The forest also contains the ruins of a nameless kingdom, lost in ages past to some unknown catastrophe. Notoriously haunted by monsters and spirits so old that their identities have worn away, these vine choked structures have a siren song that have called to adventurers for generations.

During their adventures in the region, the party obtains a coded treasure map that once deciphered guides them to climb the cliffs behind Nisp, make their way out onto the dragon’s head, and rappel down into its mouth. Apparently some daring group of thieves had been using the cave that’d formed from the dragon’s gullet and foremost stomach to store their ill gotten gain. What happened to these thieves, and and what they left behind to guard their treasure is a story for another time, but the party will need to watch themselves regardless. The elemental energies of the petrified dragon have begun to manifest as spiny crystalline growths, which can have unpredictable effects if exposed to magic or stabbed into a clumsy adventurer’s flesh.

Adventure Seeds: The Royal Drake Riders

Civilizations that lay claim to wide stretches of desert territory require some means of traversing it, traditionally by chariot, camel back, or river travel. In a fantasy world, domesticated beasts capable of flight would prove invaluable to such a culture, as they would be able to carry a rider from one far off settlement to another, allowing communication, scouting, and military pressure to be spread across vast distances.

The royal drake riders are seen as the living will of the kingdom, carrying the pharaoh’s dictates to the far corners of the realm along with news from afar. They maintain a fortress in every major city, and only recruit the best and most loyal of soldiers. When the heroes come across a critically wounded rider and their dying mount, it’s up to them to deliver an important message to the local governor before those who grounded the courier catch up.

Feeding beasts capable of traversing the horizon in a single day takes a lot of logistics. When the air cavalry’s reserved food supply suddenly falls prey to illness, problems quickly begin to snowball after a hungry drake breaks free of its pen and goes on a rampage in a nearby caravansary. Angry merchants must be appeased, farmers must be negotiated with for a new supply, and it’s impossible to rule out sabotage as the source of the feedherd’s sickness. It’s all too much for the garrison commander to deal with on their own, so they put out a call for help to an old friend of theirs that happens to be an adventurer.  

Dungeon: The Grey Gallery 

“does anyone else feel like they’re being watched?” 

Setup:  Queen Tasenka came to power in a time of great loss, when plague ripped its way through families highborn and low, and the only prosperous souls in all the realm were the cadaver-cart drivers.  Originally an unlikely twelfth in line for the throne, the ashen wasting scythed down her relatives one after another, till lonely tear-sodden Tasenka was left to take up the crown, a few scant years transforming her from a happy young girls surrounded by family to the “Orphan Queen” history books still recognize her as today. 

The Grey Gallery was her summer palace, a place where the queen indulged the painful weight of her nostalgia when court was adjourned during the season’s high heat. Built upon her family’s ancestral holdings and overlooking the ruins of numerous other fortresses her kinsmen had once held, it earned its name from the endless statues filled its grounds with: stone taken from local marble quarries and sculpted to evoke those closest to her heart, living or long passed. Year by year the collection grew till the castle boasted more statues than servants, with favored courtiers invited to spend the summer vacationing with their monarch and posing for their effigy. 

When Tasenka died, all agreed that the gallery should be sealed, monument that it was to the grief of a great woman and a tragical moment in the kingdom’s history.  Since then the castle has gently settled into obscurity. the realm moving on to brighter and better things while the gallery remains the source of ghost stories and ominous tales. 

Adventure hooks: 

Though the ashen wasting plague brought great loss to the kingdom, it also provided the opportunity for enrichment, as all the wealth and holdings that had been divided up among the realm’s large populace consolidated with their surviving kin. With so many dead nobles in her family line, Tasenka was said to have ascended to the throne as the richest monarch in the kingdom’s history, wealth that many believe she secreted away somewhere in the Grey Gallery or one of the many surrounding ruins.  Treasure hunters routinely make expeditions to the old Queen’s estates, hoping to stumble across secret clues or hidden vaults that had gone unnoticed by other ambitious looters. 

Dungeon: Lynzel’s Candle

“I mean, you’d expect a pyromancer to live near a volcano or something, but I suppose if your main trick is setting things on fire it’d pay to have a lot of water on hand.” 

Adventure Hooks: 

The Beacons atop the ruin known as Lynzel’s candle have burned from time immemorial, letting ships navigate the surrounding shoals and treacherous seaclifs with ease. When these lights suddenly go out, the elders and shipping magnates of local Rhysport search for a group of adventurers to brave the treacherous wilderness surrounding the dungeon, and discover what magical force managed to snuff out the candle. 

Investigating the source of several fires that have burned down stables and carriagehouses across the city, the party encounters a flummoxed celestial pouting among the ashes of their most recent crime scene. This burning demi-god insists that they are a spirit of a local comet, and that their apparent arson spree has all been in an attempt to find a worthy conveyance to bring them back to the firmament. They are overdue for their appearance in the night sky by several months now, but have been strictly earthbound ever since some presumptuous sorceress by the name of “Lynzel” stole from them their divine chariot. If the party wants to stop the celestial’s misguided mischief, they’ll need to figure out who exactly this Lynzel person is, and what her intensions are with such a potent artifact.

Sometimes a party just needs a good dungeon to delve, so while traveling through a sleepy fishing hamlet the party hears tell of the ruin and all the wonders that may be contained within it.  

Setup:  Though the Sorceress Lynzel did not build the eternal pyres and warded walls of the ruins that bear her name, her occupancy made quite the impression on the locality. People tend to notice when a burning figure goes streaking hither and yon across the sky, out on mage’s business like a meteor with errands to run. 

Less eccentric than her flagrant use of fire magic might suggest, Lynzel was interested in the esoteric nature of elemental fire: its ability to purify, to consume, to reveal the future by eating the present. Her sanctum ( known far and wide as the candle for its everburning towers) was the center of her experiments, a nexus of all primal sources cultivated by ancient elvankind as a basis for their great, continent spanning spells, left to molder as their empire of immortals crumbled, and mortal civilizations grew up in the gaps.