#taskmage

In addition to the usual scavengers, the dungeon has seemingly been remade into the lair of a necromancer, skeletons moving about on sentry patrols and also....tidying? Investigating further, the party are shocked when one of these undead servitors comes walking out to them with a heavy box and a letter clutched between it's yellowing teeth. The box is full of treasure, and the letter ( written in a sporadic hand and bearing a number of unpleasant stains) proclaims that the master of the dungeon is delighted to see them again, going on to say that the treasure is theirs to keep, but if they would hear its offer of further "collaboration" it would be delighted to meet with them within.

What the party didn't know going into the dungeon is that they were being followed by a death shroud, a symbiotic scrap of necromancy infused fabric that uses dismembered corpses to build a body of its own. Needing a constant supply of "fresh" parts to keep their corpse-raft from rotting out from beneath them, these creatures frequently attach themselves to bands of sellswords, growing in strength and mass as their bodycount rises. When the party cleared out this dungeon, they ended up leaving behind a buffet of death that their stalker couldn't bring itself to abandon, which ended up being a problem in the long term as it has exhausted its grisly larder long after the party had moved on to distant lands, leaving it with no new source of parts.

Despite being a repulsive gore-orgy under a tarp, the Shroud is cordial and diplomatic, fully aware that it can't go around killing animals or people without risk of getting hacked to bits by other adventurers. To that end, it's wondering if the party would be amenable to working together again, helping it to secure a steady stream of new corpses to retain its current size and power.

Adventure Hooks:

The Shroud has the ability to speak to the dead, and is willing to use this talent to point the party in the direction of caches of hidden wealth or other dungeons and has already stockpiled a number of these leads to use as bargaining chips. Likewise, if the heroes need to get information out of a particular body, the Shroud can ferret information out of them over the course of weeks, shedding light on a villain's plan or the hidden lore of the world. This can be a dark road to travel down, as the party may stop considering the well being of their captives if they need to perform an interrogation.

Like many exotic pets, the logistics of keeping the Shroud may prove difficult. If they're not going to take it with them (because that will end badly at the very first bordercrossing or city gate) they'll need to find it a lair secret enough to avoid detection but central enough that they can easily bring it bodies. This is likely to get your party thinking like low level villains, and I encourage you to let them run when it comes to discovering their new evil lair.

Already boasting a spark of necromantic talent, the Shroud has an interest in developing its magical abilities, growing in power without needing to grow endlessly in size. By offering it the remains of spellcasters, the shroud will be able to piece together the basics the arcane arts, becoming someone the party can rely upon for magical services. At level appropriate intervals the Shroud will reward the party with gifts to help in the recovery of bodies: of a wand of gentle repose, a bag of holding, and eventually a portable hole.

Adventurers are usually given quite a bit of leeway when it comes to acting strange, but getting caught once too often transporting bodies will have the party drawing the attention of the local authorities, in all likelyhood whatever temple in the region usually keeps an eye out for would-be necromancers. These inquisitors will observe the party's activities then choose one of them to single out and interrogate before questioning them (possibly helping to explain a player's absence one session) before swooping in and throwing the adventurers in a warded cell for further interrogation.

Merchant:  Taris of Fourcorners and his avian assistant, Flyt

I know I left that codex around here somewhere. Flyt, remind me to organize all this mess.... sometime after I finish those translations.... or after we finish the Mezlat Commission... 

Setup:  Out for a day on the town, the party is sought out by a tittering bird who harasses them until they enter (read: break into)  a seemingly closed bookshop in the nicer end of the market.  The space inside is far larger than the cramped storefront might alow, and is not only full of a library’s worth of volumes but also workshops and numerous defenses to prevent such an incursion.  In the center of this arcane maze the party finds a reedy wizard who’s spent the past two days buried under his immense collection of books. 

This accident prone arcanist is Taris, a knowledge seeker who realized that the easiest way to afford all the rare tomes and materials required for his research was to start getting other people to pay for it, hiring himself out as a taskmage and convincing his patrons that his particular obsession of the moment was the key to their ills.  

As it turned out, the patrons were lining up to have their problems magic’d away, and soon Taris found himself buried ( literally and figuratively) under his workload. 

Wares & Services: 

Cantrip Curios: the Mainstay of Taris’s magical trade is placing minor enchantments on objects to make the life of their bearers easier. Brooms that do the sweeping up, kettles that fill and boil when commanded without need of flame, keys that return to the hand when needed. While he’s happy to sell to whosever buying, Taris’s desire to expand and experiment means that he’ll pay the party richly if they bring him other such objects that he can backwards engineer, providing a great place to sell early game loot. 

Bookworm for hire: have an ancient manuscript that needs translating? Obscure prophecy that needs to be cross-referenced with different historical accounts?... is the party solely made out of dumb bruisers and overdramatic fops who can’t be bothered to do their own research? Taris is available to do the party’s homework for them, and has a %90 greater chance of detecting whether a work happens to be cursed... %85 if it’s REALLY interesting.  

Ally:  Relv Abbasi, Steward of the Tangled Palace  

“ A little bird told me you were having a problem and that I could help. No, really, a sparrow saw how badly you and your friends messed up and is guilting me into helping you. Lets get this mess dealt with soon, it got all its little feathery friends together and I won’t be able to get any work done if they keep tweeting at me all day.”

Setup:  What gets lost in all that "speaks for the trees" stereotyping is that druids serve a vital purpose for any settlement that lives close to nature, whether it be a town on the edge of the forest or a frontier desert settlement. Mortals are fragile creatures compared to the destructive power of nature, and the fragile societies we built are easily brought to ruin when the natural rhythms upon which we depend are knocked out of balance. Druids are Emissaries between the needs of people and the environment that sustain them, and work to prevent oncoming droughts and field blights as much as they do overhunting and the reckless clearing of woodland. 

None of these responsibilities weigh more heavily than on young Relv Abbasi, an aggravated and overworked scholar of the natural world who had a whole kingdom’s worth of obligations heaped upon his shoulders when several years ago the elven archdruid he was apprenticing under was murdered by a rival, leaving Relv to pick up the pieces and carry on the work of ensuring that the land and the people who live upon it don’t end up destroying one another. 

Forced into near constant activity as he heads off one crisis just in time to circumvent another, Relv works tirelessly to uncover the centuries of wisdom and primal lore stolen by his mentor’s murder, his work largely unseen and unappreciated by those of more civilized lands to whom the young scholar seems nothing more than a mystical eccentric. 

Adventure Hooks: 

The party is likely to meet Relv when seeking out a healer, cursebreaker, or authority on the natural world, after hearing tell of the traveling sage from nearby townsfolk. Druid Abbasi is likely to help them with no charge and only a little snark, but is unlikely to let them leave his care without doling out a share of his own troubles upon them. Would they mind looking into those livestock disappearances in the town one stop over?, what about the drumming noise coming from the old fort in the woods?  There’s an old well in some village ruins nearby that people keep getting lost down, and a bear friend of his was recently ousted from the forest cairn that was her home by some rather rude individuals, could they perhaps have a word on her behalf? Satisfying these delegated obligations are keys to earning Relv’s trust, as well as freeing up more of his time to deal with some of their responsibilities. 

Before he was a druid, Relv was the eldest daughter of a pair of out of touch but loving minor nobles who wondered why their child spent so much time sneaking out of their home to wander the woods “in disguise”. Concerned both with their social standing and with their child’s flighty nature, the couple arranged Relv’s betrothal to the son of an ambitious noble family who’s lands bordered their own. Relv wanted nothing to do with this arrangement and fled to the wilds, but the family of his “jilted” suitor peruses him to this day, eager to acquire the Abbasi lands and integrate them into their own holdings. The players are likely to encounter bounty notices looking for a woman vaguely of Relv’s description, as well as meet with a few hunters paid off by the spouse’s family looking to drag Abbasi back to the altar whether he likes it or not. 

Adventure: The Biomancer’s Bounty

“It all started with that damned eye, sold it to him a month ago and now I see it staring back at me from the face of the thing making a meal of my neighborhood. I’ll tell you if I live through this, that egghead alchemist is going to have some explaining to do!” 

Adventure Hooks: 

There’s word going around among the mercenaries and hunters in the realm, a mage in a prosperous nearby settlement that’ll pay top gold for select monster parts: Claws, poison glands, eyes, “Anything interesting”, with even greater bounties for select cuts from rare creatures. Hungry for any additional income streams, many of these adventuring bands have already received payment for dripping, freshy harvested donations. 

In addition to paying for the retrieval of particular monster parts, this biomancer: Vitor Osmos also works as a doctor among the town’s populace treating their various illnesses and even outfitting amputees with new, alien replacements. An unusual figure to be sure, but a dedicated healer should the party ever need some surgeoning. 

Though he has little idea of where they may be obtained, Vitor’s desire for such rarities as basilisk bonemarrow or the optical nerves of beholders means he’s willing to help equip a party’s hunting expedition should they bring him the prize he seeks. In addition to equipping the party with the tools and training required to properly harvest the materials in question, the biomancer will also supply them with countermeasures to their quarry’s primary offensive abilities: anti petrification pills, countervenoms, hypnosis blockers, and the like. 

By SHEER CONINCIDENCE monsters have begun to appear in the town’s canal systems over the past few months, mutant creatures with diverse abilities that seem better suited to fighting than actually surviving in nature. The town watch has done its best fending off the first few of these attacks, but each creature seems more dangerous than the last, and no two fight the same. Perhaps some now professional monster hunters who just so happened to be in the area could help investigate this problem.  

Setup: When it comes to manipulating the flesh of living beings, there is perhaps no one alive to day with a greater talent than Vitor Osmos. A scholar who’s used his extended high-elf lifespan to the fullest in the pursuit of nature’s secrets, plundering her archives for every adaptation and genetic quirk that might give his creations a leg up in the evolutionary ladder. He is also, supprisingly, an arms dealer: using his genius to create warbeasts specifically bred to overcome the limitations of traditional soldiers in a variety of conflict scenarios.   Osmos has these past few years been retained by the local nobility for aid in an inevitable border conflict, and has used their funding to equip a sizeable labratory and retain the services of various gatherers ( such as the party). 

Boredom never suited the biomancer and as the months stretch on with no opportunity arising to test his creations in the laboratory of war, Osmos has moved to dabbling with increasingly more elaborate creations the way a chess-master might seek increasingly elaborate and esoteric games to keep his skills sharp. These projects have begun to crowd his lab, the chaos occasionally allowing one specimen to every so often escape from captivity and grow to size in the city’s underbelly. 

Patron: Lady Dione

Adventure Hooks: 

Having reached a new town and seeking out some magical services, the party is referred to a reclusive noblewoman locally famous for her wisdom and skill with the arcane. She hosts the party graciously, but there is an unshakable sense that there is something oddly distant about her. Later, the party is approached by a grizzled monsterhunter, who asks prying questions about their time in the lady’s presence. 

A thief ( possibly a party member) is tasked by their fence or guild to sneak into the manor house of a toff rumored to have a grand cache of valuable magical items. What they stumble across during their burglary drives them half mad with terror, and has them fleeing into the town’s darkest recesses in the hopes of finding some place to hide....though hide from what? that’s the question. 

After raiding a particularly notable ruin once belonging to a necromancer, alchemist, or other fool who attempted to cheat the mortal coil, the party receives a rather formal invitation for tea in a nearby town. Should they accept, they’ll meet with a sagacious elvan woman in her middle years very interested in their recent discoveries. Teatime may however be spoiled when one of the players spies the woman’s ghastly reflection in the silverwear out of the corner of their eye. 

Having kept up a long correspondence with another scholar of magic, the party’s wizard ally is concerned when letters from their pen-pale abruptly cease. Occupied with the matters of magic, they send the party to investigate, only for them to discover the second scholar’s abode ransacked and partially burned. Sifting through the rubble reveals a concealed locket, one that calls to the heroes with subtle whispering pleas. 

Setup: An introverted litch has grown dissatisfied with the numb existence of undeath and seeks the party’s aid in returning herself to life. In exchange for them doing the leg-work, she’s willing to lend her considerable arcane acumen to their personal cause.  Will the party trust this seemingly innocent corpse, or does her calm exterior hide dark machinations in keeping with her unnatural nature?