Can any D&D vets help me with a quest idea?

[Strain42]

Okay, so I'm putting together my first campaign for some friends of mine who have never played before (and I haven't played in like 5 years, so I'm pretty rusty myself)

It's just a small campaign, but I'm having trouble coming up with some events with this particular quest.

The idea is that they're all at a party held by the local lord of the city. This is an annual party that brings together both the upper and lower class, provided they are dressed in "the color of noble blood." (so most folks are dressed in red, save for a few snobby nobles insisting on wearing blue)

Buuuttt...I'm not really sure what happens from there. The idea behind the overall campaign is to keep it in a gray area whether the lord is actually a good guy or not, with rumors spreading that he wishes to wipe out the lower class, but wanting to make it just that, a rumor.

I've considered a few different approaches to what happens at this party, Doppelganger showing up, or a Gargoyle picking people off, but none of it seems to be working...I'm just kinda at a loss for ideas right now.

This is just supposed to be a small quest for a group of four level 4 adventurers.

If anyone has any suggestions for a good Fancy Party Themed quest, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[Little Woodsman]

Weeelll, depending on how well I knew the players and which way I thought that they'd jump, I wouldn't use a monster at all. I'd have an obviously one-sided, obvious which side is in the right conflict break out between two people or groups of people at the party....so long as I was sure which group the players would intervene for/side with. And as long as I was sure that all the players would take the same side....
I'd give it potential for the conflict at the party to end w/o violence (though a brawl at a fancy party could be really fun..) then the next day I would have the adventurers contacted by an adviser to the local lord who says that he observed what happened at the party and wishes to hire them for a small job.....
If you are looking to put a lot of dungeon crawls in to the campaign I'd have the job offer be asking them to go to a particular ruin & search it for a particular item which they would bring back to the adviser for a handsome reward. Then when they find the item they could discover it was something possessed of very evil magic or qualities...the caveat in this is that they get to wonder, does the person who asked them to retrieve it want it for him/herself, or to prevent it falling in to the wrong hands? And was the adviser acting under direct orders from the lord or his/her own accord...
If you don't want there to be as many dungeon crawls have the job being carrying a letter and payment to another locale, and bringing what the person who they give the letter and payment to gives them in exchange back. Can throw similar idea of a weird/questionable item items as above (maybe have it be a rare poison or something...whoever receives it can claim they wanted it for an alchemist who is trying to find an antidote)...
Hope those ideas help,
Happy adventuring!

 

[Strain42]

Hmmm...I was planning on having the next quest being the lord hiring them to wipe out some assassins, but I do really like the idea of introducing an advisor character to send them off on a different quest.

I do like the idea of having perhaps the party focus more on out of combat skills like bluffing or persuading. I've already got some quests set up full of battles and stuff, but not too much going on in regards to more personal skills, so perhaps having the party be more about settling disputes and preventing combat would be a good way to go.

Thanks I really appreciate the help.

 

[Tzatziki3301]

I ran a long campaign that covered various different scenarios a while back. Around lvl 15 the party got involved with a peace conference between two different Elven nations, so there was the obligatory ambassador's ball (complete with Ferrero Roche) for them to attend as guests of honour due to their fame and achievements so far.

The ambassador was poisoned by a master assassin (female Drow Assassin 10/Rogue 8, Alter Self/hat of disguise) who disguised themselves first as a member of the serving staff to get to the Ambassadors wife during a break in the party before the food, murdered her and took her place so that she could return to the table and take a seat next to her target.

Played up the paranoia, had food testers checking everything, had arguments and tensions between the two Elven nations (Sea elves and High Elves in this instance) break out throughout the evening as mini-encounters the party could interact with if they wanted to, or just let blow over (if the party showed no interest in interfering, had polite coughs and guards step in to cause them to back down and just got on with the evening). When the actual poisoning occured, used a slow-acting ingested poison and basically had the ambassador die with no one around him to be the obvious culprit.

From there, the party sprang into action, did some interrogation, used some investigative skills, went looking for the wife, found her body, realised there was a waitress missing, and then ended up chasing the assassin over the rooftops to the Ambassador's ship, with the final fight taking place upon it as the Ambassador's Wife-disguised Drow ordered the ship to return to their homeland and start planning for war.


Another thing that is easy to drop into a noble party setting is intrigue to do with various noble houses. Is your noble house responsible for something like major shipping or caravan trade in the area, are they the main producer of arms and armour, are they a small family that found success crafting jewellry that became the 'must have' accessory of other nobles and thus earned a seat at court for themselves, or something else entirely such as birthright or family fortune? Such a setup (remember to record what each family does on a piece of paper to keep easy track of for yourself) allows you to create scenarios where perhaps the party are being asked covertly to sabotage another noble's operations, or perhaps their holdings are being constantly raided by thieves the party would be useful to root out for a reward, of course.
Such small hooks can evolve into larger scandals and quests, where the party slowly uncover a web of lies, cover-ups, back-stabbing, fraud and other unsavory practices that may lead to the downfall of one or more nobles in the eyes of society.

Watch a few episodes of the Borgias, or even Game of Thrones to get a feel for that kind of weighty intrigue. look at the subtle stuff, rather than the combat side of things. Perhaps your lead noble has a Varys of his own, or a Littlefinger, secretly running everything for their own ends under the nose of their lord. Perhaps the lord knows exactly what they are doing, and runs the facade of being kind and benevolent when actually he is cruel and malicious, running the town/city with an iron fist behind the scenes.


Bear in mind if you go for the intrigue root, you will need to make sure your party is ready for it. No point in trying to have subtlety if your party is a Barbarian, a Fighter, a Druid and a Ranger, because chances are they will lack the skills for it (or wouldn't ordinarily be welcome in polite company). However, for said part a 'fish-out-of-water' scenario is a potential quest in and of itself, where the party are well out of their comfort zone for some reason, and have been deliberately brought into this because someone believes them to be dumb brutes incapable of seeing through their schemes, the perfect scapegoats, and pins the blame for something heinous on the party's shoulders. Clearing their names without living up to the reputation they have been lumbered with could be quite exciting, and allow for some good roleplay and out-of-the-box thinking (it also means that some skills like Knowledge (Engineering) get used in creative ways)

Hope that gives you something more to think on.