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#1 apophenia Aug 22, 2010 21:40:55

So I've been mapping out an adventure path for the Eberron game I just started. I've gotten a bit ahead of myself - we're playing online and we just started "The Mark of Prophecy," so it will probably be a, er, little while before we hit epic level. But I've been doing this anyway, as it's fun and I'm a dork.  This will contain SPOILERS for E1-E3, as well as a few vague spoilers for the new Tomb of Horrors super-adventure. (Also, if you're part of my group, Adventure Inc., seriously stop reading right now.)  Anyway, here are my basic thoughts on adapting E1-E3 for Eberron. Please feel free to leave feedback and criticism - any ways you can see to improve it, or problems with how I have it laid out, are welcome. * So, the first big problem in adapting E1-E3 is the Raven Queen. As has been discussed in previous threads, the major focus on gods in most of the published epic level content is a real sticky point for using it in Eberron. I hit on the solution when I got to thinking about the closest thing the setting has to a personified god who you can go talk to: the Voice of the Flame. She will be taking the Raven Queen's place for our purposes here.  This also shifts the story away from our currently-unfilled Antagonist trying to take over death, but trying to take out the Silver Flame is every bit as much an epic level threat. * So, the Bad Guy. The immediate and obvious solution was simply to make Orcus an Overlord, but this presents some obvious problems too. Like the fact that an Overlord getting free is practically the apocalypse right there, let alone his going after the Silver Flame. Then I got to thinking... The imprisoned primordial Timesus is presented as, at full power, being rather a lot more powerful than Orcus; but Orcus is able to subvert him to his own purposes. What if it's not Orcus who's the Overlord in the story, but Timsesus? I'm including the new Tomb of Horrors super-adventure in my campaign. If I were to replace the dead god from the last adventure there with a captured and bound Daelkyr she's managed to remove from Khyber, I can transition nicely from the end of their Paragon level arc (defeating Erandis d'Vol in the role of Acererak). She had meant to sacrifice a Daelkyr in the process of reaching apotheosis and becoming a Dracolich/demigod; by preventing her, the heroes have inadvertantly freed the Daelkyr. Whoops.  So you've got a single Daelkyr, now free to roam Eberron. He assembles his army of aberrations and goes to lay siege to Flamekeep, for inscrutable Daelkyr reasons. The heroes fight through a modified version of the adventure from E1 to get through the sieging forces and speak to the Voice of the Flame, only to be informed that the worst has happened. Using the insane powers of Xoriat, the Daelkyr's forces have managed to breach the Silver Flame itself - specifically, the pocket reality inside the Silver Flame, where is bound at least one of the Overlords.  I don't know if such a place exists in canon; but for our purposes here we posit one. It takes the place of Death's Reach - a divine prison built to contain one (or all?) the Overlords, littered with remnants of the war between the Dragons, the Coatl, and the Fiends.  Our Daelkyr manages to take an inert (still imprisoned in a Khyber shared?) Overlord out of its prison, and off we go into the airship chase portion of the adventure.  * From here, a lot of it writes itself. The Lords of Dust going to war with the legions of Xoriat to free their captive rajah, the Daelkyr trying to take the inert Overlord back to its citadel in Khyber to corrupt its mind, drive the being mad while it is still weak, and bring it under its own power.  And at this point, I see the story forking in two possible ways. 1) The default path laid out in the adventure. The Overlord is bound to the Daelkyr; it goes to Khyber's heart and starts breaking off bits, which the Daelkyr will use to kill the Voice of the Flame and transform the flame into an aberrant force (unless the PCs stop it). This leads into the Final Twist (below).  2) The alternate - I don't want to just assume the PCs can't disrupt the Daelkyr's plans until the end. If they catch up with the Daelkyr and stop it before it drives the Overlord insane, the plot changes gears a bit. The Overlord, free from the Daelkyr's influence and the Silver Flame, awakens to its full power. This time it dispatches a suitably terrifying Lord of Dust rakshasa to be the one ripping bits off the Heart of Khyber, and goes after the Voice of the Flame to destroy the Silver Flame entirely, and awaken all the Overlords (unless the PCs stop it).  * The Final Twist - Throughout the game, every time they had any dealings with *any* Cult of the Dragon Below, Aric Blacktree was involved. Daelkyr cults? Aric was involved somehow. Fiend cult? Aric was there. He was driven utterly mad by what he saw in the Draconic Prophecy on the eve of the Mourning, and he's been acting in bizarre, inscrutable, and often seemingly contradictory ways ever since, but always with a connection to Khyber.  Well, it turns out it was all to bring about this final event he saw in the Prophecy. No matter who it was that went after the Silver Flame with a shard of Khyber's heart, that was the key thing he's been trying to bring about. And so he reveals what he's been doing all along - helping the Daelkyr, helping the Lords of Dust, all to get *somebody* to go start hacking away at Khyber's heart. What, you didn't think that would wake up Khyber? And just coincidentally, do so at a time when there's a vast crack in the surface of Eberron? That's right - the Mournland is an open wound in Eberron's cosmic body, and Aric plans to call Khyber itself up through that wound, ending Eberron in the process. ...and here's where I really need some advice. The two obvious ways to handle that are - the heroes kill Aric before he completes his ritual/eldritch machine/whatever to call up Khyber, or they fight Khyber as it tries to rise from the glowing chasm. Neither option really works for me, though. Just fighting Aric after all that is a bit anticlimactic; fighting Khyber is making one of the progenitor wyrms a bit too base and material for my liking.  My thought is perhaps to have whatever the final, climactic encounter is take place with the beginnings of Khyber's rise in the Mournland as a background set-piece and environmental hazard for the encounter. Pretty much the apocalypse happening in the background. But I haven't quite worked out yet how to make that final encounter itself live up to the hype.