High Level Adventure Ideas

[Aval Penworth]

A kobold with a broken short bow, could get lucky and kill someone in Rolemaster or as we used to call it... DeathMaster

In theory that's true. But the dude has made it to 29th level, despite the miriad kobold attacks.

[torstan]

@tilt: Yep, I have glacier adventures, fights on ships, whirlpools. I think my players are going to come back in their next life as hydrophobes...

[jfrazierjr]

5. A beautiful lady steps out of the sea... oh.. that was a commercial... *lol*... but lets go with that anyway... Her charms seduces and dominates people around her as she have them working on pulling down a huge damm. The whole valley below are at danger.

Sort of a twist on this one.... have someone (a woman or child even) with the ability to control minds BUT the person is actually good and being chased by person X(who may be a very prominent and well respected personage but is actually very evil). The mind controller just does not think anyone will help him/her without the mind control. Think of what would you do if you were "the boy who cried wolf" and then all of a sudden you had a REAL problem such as being hunted by someone evil who wanted to kill you. In a very RP heavy game, this could be built up over the course of many sessions so that the players don't trust the "good guy" and perhaps are patrons of the "bad guy" and they have to learn the truth and switch alliances.

[Juggernaut1981]

I am a big fan of the Horror Mystery type plot. Blame it on excessive HP Lovecraft.
One long plotline I was developing for a group/convention setting was roughly this:

There are a group of Mindflayers attempting to establish an Elder Mind/Great Mind/Hive Mind. They were approached by an evil dragon who wanted to become a Dracolich. They agree, create the dracolich but abduct the phylactery to use to blackmail the dracolich. Separately the Mindflayers are attempting to find out how a civilisation reacts to various strange events (serial killings, mass murders, etc, etc). Dracolich wants to screw mindflayers, mindflayers want to overthrow society and mentally hijack the government.

[Gidde]

I doubt my players are reading this, but just in case .... ***** SPOILER ALERT *****

I'm running a game right now where the PCs will eventually have to chase the villain through time to "correct" the timeline. Until they do, the world will keep flipping from the world they know to the bizarro world induced by the time-traveling villain -- at shorter and shorter intervals, until it's too late and the flipping stops which leaves them in bizarro-world. I'm incredibly curious to find out whether they'll manage it or get stuck in the crappy altered timeline permanently.

[tilt]

yep... time is always fun. Had a game where the characters find a magic sword that is important for the campaign, and the sword is personalized for them. Later on they travel to the past where they have to save a city to get the famous weapon smith to ever create the sword

[Aval Penworth]

Okay so Thanks everyone.

I ran a big session on the long week end (HRM's BD) and incorporated some of the ideas.

It was quite a good session and I did freak the players out quite a bit.

I am going to try the mindflayer hive near one of the players' castle.

So in the session a little boy with innate mind powers.. a kind of idiot-savant, could sense the problem. But he could not communicate normally, only through using mind powers.

He approached the characters smiling, and started following them. When they asked him questions he would just smile. Occasionally they would feel an odd sensation.

While the boy was nearby, a spilled cup of water flowed the wrong way. Previously unlocked doors suddenly would not budge. I think I managed to get that fantasy-horror mood going. The boy kept trying to re-direct the characters so that they might discover the sinister hive.

But the magician had had enough.

He demanded the boy disclose his true identity. The boy just smiled and a raven took flight to the west. This was all too suspicious. The mage cast a sleep spell on the boy, but the boy just blinked, yawned and smiled.

"No normal boy could resist my magic! He must be a demon! Get him!"

Soon the boy had been teleported into a sealed room, 200 feet underground in caved-in dungeon 100 miles away.

"He was really bugging me. Lets go and steal the frost giant's Magic Axe of Sundering. My plan is to summon an animal guide to take us to his lair, cast detect object so we know exactly where it is, passwall, through the walls, fly in invisible and teleport it and ourselves out before anyone notices..."

[tilt]

well... players never go where you want them... perhaps the boy whas to subtle... he should have conveyed fear more... (his own) ...
now for putting your players in place *evil grin*
1. Have the someone point out the players as the last persons to have seen the boy - and fine them HEAVILY to ease the mothers pain, and keep them out of jail.
2. Passwall is always a problem (or sometimes the solution) - of course, sometimes magic works going in, but not out - an anti-teleport field perhaps - a devious trap on the axe - gargoyle guards that screams (both damaging and summoning). Or the axe it self could be a fake with a spell on it that either curses it, or just makes it like a beacon to the giant (low-jacked axe)

[NeonKnight]

Here is how I dealt with high level players for an adventure I wrote for the RPGA's Living Greyhawk campaign a few years back.

Put the player's in a pseudo planar adventure. The dungeon had anti-teleport (i.e. permanent dimensional anchor), was constructed inside a constructed environment that intself was built where a large chunck of solid earth was plane-shifted to the ethereal plane. As a result of this bags of holding/plane shift/passwall and other forms of travel/access that needed to go through the etheral plane would no longer function due to the 'blocking' plane shifted earth. To further throw some fun into the mix, the area was located underwater with some areas submerged and others not. One of the more clamactic battles was against an Iron Golem that would grapple and slam player repeated into an altar with a Dispel Magic/Mordenkainen's Disjuntion trap on it....while entirely submerged in the chamber.

[Juggernaut1981]

Nah, seriously ramp up the horror.

#1 Kill the head staff in castle in a VERY strange manner (skinned completely, missing blood, hung upside down and drained of blood)

#2 Have members of the staff go missing and turn up as undead or thralls beating on the doors.

#3 Possess various villagers and have them perform bizarre things

#4 Strange animal deaths/attacks (Druids are unaware/confused)

#5 Cult Preachers start appearing talking of strange religions

#6 Large arcane/demonic symbols painted in blood in the village green

JUST RAMP UP THE RANDOM STUFF... Then start pushing it until they start really searching. When they start to try figure out why, give them objects covered in Mind-flayer-lish... keep on dragging it back to the bizarre. Don't give them breathing space. Every time something seems "sorted" you turn around and "unsort it".

And so on...