Building an Adventure & Environs: 1

When I'm taking notes I'll put a "?" in front a thought to indicate uncertainty or incompleteness. 

I'll be referencing the Tome of Adventure Design, Gygax-75, and AD&D DMG. 

Inspiration:
• Electric Wizard
  
• Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Dying Earth
• Anomalous Subsurface Environment

First a quote from the DMG pg.86:

"To belabor an old saw, Rome wasn’t built in a day. You are probably just learning, so take small steps at first. The milieu for initial adventures should be kept to a size commensurate with the needs of campaign participants (. . .) This will typically result in your giving them a brief background, placing them in a settlement, and stating that they should prepare themselves to find and explore the dungeon/ruin they know is nearby. As background you inform them that they are from some nearby place where they were apprentices learning their respective professions, that they met by chance in an inn or tavern and resolved to journey together to seek their fortunes in the dangerous environment, and that, beyond the knowledge common to the area (speech, alignments, races, and the like), they know nothing of the world. Placing these new participants in a small settlement means that you need do only minimal work describing the place and its inhabitants. Likewise, as player characters are inexperienced, a single dungeon or ruins map will suffice to begin play."

I plan on creating several locales but will start by outlining the background, settlement, and dungeon. I tend to work by jumping around haphazardly between topics and will keep the current info here. (TODO)

 Word Vomit

With EW playing, I searched archive.org for (black metal, science fiction, poetry) and spewed: 

chromium dragon, comet, phosphorus, blackened tablet, the abolition, blood-sick sword, wolf-scream, deepest hollow, dire leech, vivid jungle, toxic, carrion, skin, dirt, otherwhere, riven, bone raven, fire-tender, basket-weaver, weary, berserker, dreamgod, starfire, crags, gulch, fault, mesa, wadi, basin, vale, heap, hillocks, goldlust, doom-monger, cursespitter

Background

I'm in love with the MISSIONS table in the ToAD, so I rolled on that and got: 

Mission: Capture or arrest

Subject: Saboteur

Patron/target: Legislator (suspicious)

Patron motivation: Gain status over . . . parent

Hook:

Player motivation: Increased STR or other ability score

How players learn: Potent employer contacts party to offer the opportunity / A person offers to trade information about the opportunity in exchange for money

So a shifty town councilman offers money to capture or arrest a saboteur. They wish to get one over on their parent (?another politician/diplomat, local witch or sorcerer). This could tie into the locale if the saboteur is hiding there, perhaps they're monstrous enough to blend in with the other denizens. The reward is a mutagenic serum that increases strength (?CRISPR steroids)

Villainous plan: Destroy Good-Aligned Group – the villain seeks to destroy a good-aligned group, either because their morals offend him, or as the first step in a larger plan

Group targeted: Military order affiliated with good alignment but no particular faith

—I'm leaning toward the group being some sort of wasteland wardens. We'll call them Carrion Soldiers as they're rumored to eat foul meats on their travels and use trained vultures.

Methods of destruction:
• Alter effects of the group’s activities, turning the results into something deleterious instead of beneficial (poisoning new wells, appointing cruel masters to run the new orphanage, etc.). Less creative villains might just be sabotaging the projects once finished (burning the orphanage instead of turning it into an evil training ground, for example).
• Giving dangerous gifts that do something than what they appear to do. Snakes hidden in gifts are a very simple example. (possible lesson for players about the dangers of magic items)

Unusual minion/Lieutenant (secret coconspirator): Witch doctor, witch, or druid—Insane (schizophrenic)—Unwilling minion (villain can ruin his reputation or bankrupt him at will)

—The Insane Druid is forced to transmogrify the saboteur into a large white rat (Fast moving; more difficult to hit than one would expect)

Some other things I'm quite sure the adventure needs are: a megalomaniac computer striving to establish a cult & horrors/demons that come out at night (spewing from some fissure).

Locations

For the settlement, I'm thinking a small council-led town call Galen's Well nestled against the windless hills. 

The adventure site will be ruins bisected by a river. Ages ago, the river (dubbed the river Brack) was cursed to flow backward carrying sea water inland to the Brackwater Lake. The area surrounding these salty waters are ecologically fucked—a mixture of oil-slicked mangrove forests and salt plains were only razor grass flourishes. 

In summary: The adventure starts in Galen's Well. The town sits on the Wolf Scream river, some 70 miles inland of the Bellowing Sea and bordered to the SE by the Windless Hills. A shifty councilwoman, Katonya Denes, offers the PCs money to capture the saboteur who is attacking the Carrion Soldiers and planting cursed items around town.

The PCs can discover that:

• A speedy cat-sized white rat can be seen near the instances of trouble.
• An insane Druid (Carmag Rotmouth) is involved: seen with the rat, large rat tracks lead to shack, mutters clues under breath, general rumors.
• Rotmouth is being blackmailed by a third party (saboteur) 
• The saboteur is hiding in a ruined city on the River Brack.

This somehow appears to be turning into a detective game. I think I'll make the white rat incredible difficult to nab to encourage the PCs to investigate his hideout.