Daily Adventure Prompts

The Daily Adventure Prompts Masterpost

After several years of running this blog, it’s become more and more evident that I need some central reference where people can access all my different DM advice posts, important tags, and ongoing series. Sharing my ideas with people and helping to improve the art and craft of being a dungeonmaster was always the point of DAP after all, and its of no help to anyone if the answers to important questions are buried under a hundred or more pages of my rambling.

To that end, I present this post as an ever expanding catalogue of my thoughts. Something that you can page through at your leisure in hopes some of my hardwon lessons will be of use to you.  

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dailyadventureprompts:

Villain: Ohlzelth, Visionary Parasite

“…it was then that the gods granted me a vision, the revelation of the burning tree, that I knew meant I was meant to drive the heathen faiths and their paganistic worship of nature from our lands. For so long I had awaited their sign, to cleanse the world for their coming. Don’t you see? The gods wanted this! How am I to be condemned? “

Brother Valdius Reannt, lay brother of Stillbrook monetary, last testimonial before execution for the murder of eight.

Setup:

Those who seek conference with the greater mysteries of the multiverse would do well go guide their mind, as there are all manner of tricksters and hazards that would gladly prey upon them as they travel the uncharted paths of the cosmos. Ohlzelth is one of those hazards, an entity somewhere between a virus and an idea that infects the minds of those with oracular gifts in an attempt to propagate itself across the multiverse. From there it takes root, binding itself into the material of the plane as it spreads through the minds of others.

Adventure Hooks:

• A villain casts “modify memory” on one of the party members, instilling in them a terrifying vision and an alien compulsion nested within it. Will they be able to fight off this entity’s influence, or will they succumb to the purpose and the powers that it offers?

• Investigating a cult lairing in a nearby dungeon, known to participate in abduction and intimidation to swell their ranks. After fighting their way past a few crazed, desperate defenders (as well as the other hazards id the dungeon) the party enters the inner sanctum to find they are too late, and all that remains if the cult’s leadership are a few twisted, resinous treethings, their roots spiraling down deep into the earth. The cultists have corrupted the local laylines, and soon many others will be receiving peculiar visions while indulging in magical practice. 

• While recovering from a bad fever inflicted by a nasty wound, a bandit leader has seen a vision of a particular village’s central-square tree on fire, and is now mustering their strength and their forces to put the whole town to the torch. Bonus points if this is a villain the party faced down before, and  they’re suffering from a wound the party gave them. 

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dailyadventureprompts:

Villain: Devil lord Oppbithonn, The Manifold Duke

Yes, yes, can we move this supplication along? You’ve no idea how busy we are down here in hell. Who could have expected eternal torment to be such a chore?

She appears as a colossal mold covered skeleton, bearing a mantle of fungal blooms and a golden crown that hovers above his shattered skull. Oppbithonn is known as The Shambler or “she of the strings that rot”. Not the most ambitious of hell’s princes, she claims only a small infernal fiefdom where he can entertain supplicants and collect tribute. Oppbithonn’s great infernal power is her mantle of mold, which infests other corpses and allows the devil lord to possess them. Unlike other infernals that can only possess one host at a time, Oppbithonn possesses all of her victims simultaneously and exerts unilateral control over all of them. They are in many ways a hive mind, save that there are no wills or thoughts in the amalgam save those of Oppbithon.

Setup:

• Fifteen years ago, the powerhungry ruler of a small nation became a tyrant by having one of his arcane advisers enter into a pact with Oppbithonn: All the riches he could ring from his lands in exchange for a legion of mold-possessed corpses to work the fields and defend their borders. The devil assented, and over the next decade made that small nation a force to be reckoned with, conquering many of its neighbors and using thier subjugated citizens to feed the endless need for treasure and bodies.  That was up until month ago, when the “Drudges” stopped in their tracks, when that arcane councilor died very suddenly of respiratory distress ( mold will do that to you), leaving the tyrant almost completely powerless save a small army of mercenaries. Now a revolution brews, and the party is caught up in the middle of it all.
  
• Oppbithonn is not a creature of ambition. she does not want to spread across the multiverse and remake everything in her own moldering image. Being an ever present hivemind means she must do all the gruntwork of his multitudinous bodies, which has given her a withdrawn and slothful disinterest in the politics of the other devils. She stopped the drudges because the deal she made with the adviser was open to renegotiation upon the adviser’s death, and Oppbithonn doesn’t want to take any actions that a potential new contract might let her slip out of. She is willing to give the party what they want ( the dissolution of the dredges, or their continued use in defending their nation) if they pledge to him sufficient gifts and a year of service each.  A year of busywork in hell for the fate of their home? that sounds like a pretty good deal to the Manifold Duke. 
• If the party or the sovereign delay on the deal ( or if she just feels like making things a little more interesting) Oppbithonn will allow the drudges to bloom spreading a pestilent rot all over the kingdom which will not only blight the fields and make people sick, but will give rise to all manner of fungal monstrosity.
  

dailyadventureprompts:

Villain: Entombed Celestial, Srolhizar

Lore: Once the right hand of a powerful and righteous deity, the angel/burning wheel of eyes now known as Srolhizar was privy to millennia of the god’s secret doings and innermost thoughts, The application of subtle miracles, where great evils were bound, and the secret words to invoke or dismiss either with a whisper. An endless tenure of dutifully acting as council and spymaster for the divine led to him hoarding a vast cache of secrets, including the secret faults of other angels, fallen and otherwise.  Influence begat coercion which begat blackmail which begat conspiracy, and even as the celestial spymaster tried their best to push the heavens into alignment for their patron’s aims, he betrayed them through the use of underhanded means. 

When Srolhizar’s underhandedness was exposed, the divine flayed him off all honors and hurled them to the mortal realm with force enough to bury their former council in the deepest caverns of creation, imprisoning the now fallen angel beneath the infinite crushing weight of the earth.  

Goals: 

• Confined in their tectonic prison, Srolhizar has undergone endless agonies, their wheels crushed, their eyes blind, and their fire smothered. Above all Srolhizar wishes to escape, though what happens after that is obscured by the veil of pain and madness imposed by their isolation. 
• Though his patron god ordered all knowledge of him purged, the rites to summon the fallen spymaster survive in scraps of forbidden texts favored by occultists and historians. Known in such circles as “The Broken Wheel”, or the “Keeper Beneath”, the angel manifests in such rituals as a violent fissure which gives way to a peering inhuman eye.  In this form Srolhizar offers up the divine secrets he once horded in exchange for promises of fealty and aid. Above all the fallen celestial demands that the summoner eventually share the summoning rites with others, as to be forgotten would mean being trapped forever beneath the earth. 
• If bargaining fails, the broken wheel can inflict mental torments on those within his influence: the crush of claustrophobia, the ceaseless urge to dig or to compel others to do so, to impart the terror of prophecy and psyche rending visions of the divine. These harsher gifts are reserved for those who’s influence Srolhizar wishes to make use of, those that can weild earth-rending magics or enslave kingdoms to the task of quarrying.  

Adventure hooks: 

• Across the continent, it’s become a curious habit that some rare scholars and booksellers begin suddenly to turn to stone. Such happenings are quickly covered up by the church, who whisk the bodies off never to be seen again. As the petrifications become more common, rumors spread of a vast vault beneath the great temple, of a curse of divine disfavor besetting the land. In fact, it is an agent of Srolhizar’s patron at work in secret, imprisoning those who stumble across lore that could lead to the fallen angel’s escape. 
•  A vast vein of precious crystal was created as a byproduct of the angel being cast beneath the earth. Through its agents, it will send visions of this wealth to avaricious rulers, in the hopes that decades of greedy mining may break its prison and unleash it upon the earth. 
• Repeated raids by slavers lead the party to be chained together and walked across the badlands. Word from other captives is that there’s a warlord out across the wastes behind it, forcing all those captured to excavate some ancient temple or ruin and deep into the earth. 

dailyadventureprompts:

Settlement: Rotbottom

Background & Environment: A goblin fishing hamlet located in the center of a vast and fetid swampland, Rotbottom considers itself to be a haven for outcasts, scoundrels and the unsociably odd. Rotbottom is a ramshackle place, built of salvaged wood and stolen nails, and against all odds operates under a spirit of optimism despite the overwhelming sense of decay. The people there are ramshackle too, the many goblin families accepting and even adopting those found monstrous or maligned by other settlements. 

Mood & Themes: Moral degeneracy and acceptance, the entire settlement is “the wrong side of town”. 

Who’s Hiring:

• Despite Rotbottom being ostensibly lawless, someone has to prevent the all the malcontents from terrorizing the innocent fisher folk and instituting some kind of stabbing based hierarchy of thugs. That’s where bugbear Thumbscrews McThunk comes in. Thumbscrews ( or “Screws” to his friends) is the settlements self appointed enforcer of the common good, Maintaining that order in a place like Rotbottom is about three things: 1) Respect, 2) Kindness 3) Gutting anyone who doesn’t respect you alive and hanging them out by their noodly-bits over the dockside to send a message. McThunk has recently been laid up in a brawl with a local gang interested in throwing their weight around and he’s willing to pay the party to do some legwork ( read: kneebreaking) for him. Doing so will not only net the party some coin, but respect around Rotbottom for outsiders such as themselves.
• Aside from the goblins and other wretches who trawl the swamp’s waters netting and spearing as they please, the biggest employer in Rotbottom is the Wiggleworm Distillery: an industrious operation that produces a number of uniquely gobbish goods and hawks them all along the waterways of the swamp. Easy to spot by its hook & worm branding and mismatched chimneys belching foul miasmas out over the already polluted lake, the distillery spends each day producing bottles of rotgut, wormwood heavy absinthe , and a surprisingly artisanal selection of spirits distilled from the local root/berry/algae species.  Frozen out by more “respectable” rivals in towns outside the swamp, Wiggleworm is happy supply the players as bootleggers, with the intention of creating a public demand for their products to use as leverage in future trade negations. 
• Castigated and exiled after delving into heretical knowledge, an occult scholar has made a begrudging home in  Rotbottom, residing in a skeletal wooden tower as far away from the village’s stink as they can. Willing to trade spellcasting services for coin and civilized comforts, the occultist can also send the party on numerous missions in the hopes of gaining enough power to “make those fools rue the day…. (yada yada)”. Regardless, they pay well, and if their attempts at revenge don’t end up causing the end of days, they’re sure to be entertaining to watch.

Rumors & Goings on:

• In an effort to curb street violence (and have something more interesting to bet on) The Rotbottom chamber of commerce has introduced the “Rotbottom Bugball League”, a completely fictitious sports bracket for a competition they made up in the moment. Rules are fluid, but generally involve two (or more) teams trying to move a ball down a dock, jetty or quay that’s been roped off for the event. As if the game needed any more chaotic elements, the ball itself is infact an oversized woodlouse native to the area, which after being thoroughly tenderized by numerous kicks and slams is to be devoured by the victorious team.
• Anyone around Rotbottom can tell you that Catfish Cait is the most trustworthy of riverguides. Unlike most who come to the hamlet, Cait isn’t a criminal at all, and simply grew up in the swamp and loves ferrying people through it on her proudly maintained skiff. An old hand at avoiding beasts, robbers, and the shifting banks of the fen, its supprising that Cait hasn’t been seen in some weeks. Folk are starting to worry, as even though they might be a town of cutthroats and outcasts, the people of Rotbottom have hearts, and truly do care for their own.
• As a fishing community, respect in Rotbottom is often held by the one who can bag the biggest whopper, though there’s lot of debates as to whether or not that solely applies to fish. Those with a desire for acceptance and a lax regard for fishing & game law could put themselves on the path of crocodiles, dire catfish, the king of the bullywugs or even a legendary kelpie that’s said to haunt the surrounding swamp. Provided they can hook the beast or spin a good enough yarn, one could get quite the adulation among Rotbottom’s populace.