Swords & Sorcery Six-Pack

Inspired by the adventure generators in the Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells RPG by Old Skull Publishing, I generated a half dozen Swords & Sorcery adventure seeds. These aren't full adventures, so you'd need to flesh them out with your own stats and stuff, but I love playing around with random generators, and I thought I'd share them with you all.

Heck, if you changed out some of the names, you could probably drop them in Lankhmar (the DCC or Savage Worlds versions) easy enough.

 And pick up Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells. It's a rules-light swords & sorcery RPG that is Pay What You Want right now on RPGNow. Can't beat that price.

The Treason of the Draconic Clock

A traveling skald known as Sigmar arrives on the town’s shores with word of an impending invasion by the Dread Pirate Redsea. The heroes are rallied to fend off the pirates with the aid of the townsfolk, to stall until Duke Deverast’s personal detachment of soldiers can arrive. The pirates are clearly targeting the now dormant tower of the sorcercess Melthina, and soon the battle turns into a mind-bending battle between the heroes, the pirates, and the tower’s still-active defenses. When the Duke’s guards arrive, he reveals his betrayal: He hired the pirates so he could remove the Draconic Clock from the tower and accelerate it, awakening The Sleeping Death Under the Sea. If the heroes are victorious, the skald reveals himself to be a divine messenger and casts their tale into a poem that will echo through the dimensions.

The Whispers of the Crawling Receptacle

The heroes awaken inside a moving prison after a night of carousing. They get to bear witness to their fellow inmates being dragged away and returning as savage, mutated monsters with little of their own personality remaining. A deformed mutant who isn’t filled with bloodlust explains that the monstrosity is being used as a dual-purpose prison/troop carrier, and when it crosses the desert, the mutants will be unleashed on the City-State of Revir…and the heroes will be part of that mutated army. The mutant helps them escape, and the heroes wind up on the run from these mutant soldiers across a desert crawling with vicious raiders. If they beat the troop carrier to Revir, they can warn the City-State’s forces and repel the attack, after which they are hailed as heroes.

The Lotus of the Pulsing Hive

The heroes are tasked by the local militia commander of venturing into The Forbidden Valley and destroying the settlement that is growing there. People have been departing in the middle of the night and venturing through the valley, abandoning homes, jobs and responsibilities. When the heroes arrive in the valley, they find that the town is working as one, catering to the every need of festering, pulsating, undulating Old God. Unfortunately, the town was waiting on the heroes because the commander’s sergeant is a cultist of the Old God and has prepared the town to fight as one against the heroes. Luckily, the spellbook used to awaken the Old God can be used to send him back into slumber, and if the heroes succeed, they can take the spellbook away from The Forbidden Valley and peruse it for whatever eldritch secrets it may hold for them.

The Heresy in the Shadow Hovel

The heroes are tasked with an unenviable goal: Find the physical entrance to the Land of the Dead. Their goal? To banish the demon-forged sword known as Original Sin to the depths of eternity forever. The problem? The sword calls out to those around them to find it and liberate it from the heroes. While fighting off foes who would take the sword, the group is stalked by a hideous mutant beast that tracks them on their journey, striking when they least expect it, but vanishing away before it can be killed. Arriving at the gates of the Land of the Dead, the heroes find a shadowy hovel barring the way, and a strange being from another world, unnatural in appearance and existence, and stranded, making its home at the barrier between life and death. Whether through parley or through violence, the heroes must open the barrier to the other side and cast Original Sin to eternity forever, but through bloodshed or through bargaining, can take away an alien relic that can render magic obsolete when trained on its holder, through the force of a Pure Logic Field.

The Hovel of the Artificial Eyes

A wizard summons the heroes to his home, begging them to protect him from a demon that is coming to take a treasure from him: A pair of eyes that can see the truth in everything. As the heroes battle the demon with the assistance of the wizard, they are visited by The Tribunal, beings from Beyond who keep balance. They tell the heroes they are on the wrong side of this war, and that the wizard stole the eyes from the demon. If the heroes turn on the wizard and deliver the demon’s eyes back to him, he peers into the horizon and tells them the location of the Lost Treasury of King Malthius, a long dead king whose heirs fell into poverty when he hid away his most valuable possessions once he knew he was cursed with death.

The Emerald Citadel

Sir Percival Telford was once a legendary knight, but he gave his life stopping the Encroaching Entropy, a necromantic wave of death and destruction that threatened to consume the land. Unfortunately, 13 years later, he has now arisen as a Dark Knight, an undead crusader of death. The heroes are tasked with tracking down and destroying him once and for all, guided by a Holy Crystal of Light, a living piece of Life that can fend off the worst of the necromantic stain. At the Emerald Citadel, a temple dedicated to Mot, a forgotten God of Death, the heroes are forced to battle Sir Telford…only to find that he is not backed by the energies of entropy, but that a powerful lich has instead raised him. If the heroes fail, the dead will march on all reality and extinguish all life. But if they succeed, they can take the lich’s spellbook and gain access to magics that have been lost to the sands of time.