Campaign Starter: Tales From The Bonecart

Campaign Starter: Tales from the Bonecart

Whether it's due to superstition or a distaste for a toilsome and muddy trade, folk tend to pay little attention to gravediggers. This makes for an awfully convenient cover for your travelling troupe of tombrobbers as they tour around the realm's backroads filling their pockets with mementos purloined from the dead.

Planning adventures for "evil" campaigns can be tough, but sometimes you and your players just want an excuse to get your hands dirty. What better opportunity to get DEEP down in the dirt than to hand out shovels and have them start out as a group of travelling undertakers/thieves?

Setup: A handful of crews have run the bonecart scam over the past several generations, tempering their skullduggerous actions with a bit of honest gravemaking. This dichotomy is no better represented in the current heads of the operation: Dour and hardworking Heliana, who minds the cart's reigns and keeps the crew on track, and the knavish academic Benjamin Eelpot who loves delving into things that should best stay buried. These two have taken the party on for a series of jobs that will likely require a cold heart and a strong stomach, stealing from both the living and the dead and hoping not to get caught in the meantime.

Adventure Hooks:

The party's first outing on the bonecart should be a meat-and-potatoes sort of job, used to set the tone of the campaign, which happens to sound like "Someone old and rich and lonely has died, leaving their house haunted and their valuables unguarded".

While being stewards of the dead is a great cover, it sometimes attracts the wrong sort of attention, such as when a nobleman offers the party a great reward to investigate an abandoned necropolis and the source of the terrifying dreams that haunt him. Gold is gold though, and surely this couldn't have too many long reaching complications for them.

Irony of ironies, Shortly after one of their scores the party is setupon by a group of bandits disguised as dead men, who manage to make off with a good portion of their illgotten gain. There's no way to recover their goods through official channels, so they'll have to do it themselves.

Throughout their early adventures the party will need to avoid the attention of the heavy handed sheriff hired by the local nobility to quietly and brutally dispose of criminals like themselves.

You get a lot of weird jobs being a gravedigger, but "limo service" is not usually one of them. Still, money is money, and when a bloodsoaked countess offers to pay the bonecart well to defend and transport her coffin across the lands so she can attend a gathering of the great and the ghoulish who are they to say no?

Heliana will eventually approach the party once they've gotten enough shared time , experience, and nightmarish close calls under their belts. She's got some personal matters to attend to, which involve a list of names belonging to an old secret society and a series of graves across the countryside that may contain clues to the locations of some great treasure. Its a bolder job then the crew usually pulls, and will draw unwanted attention, but they can rely on eachother to pull through, right?

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💎 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Trick Knot
Wondrous item, uncommon ___

This knotted ball of hempen rope weighs 5 pounds. A loop extends from it for easy carrying. While holding the ball, you can spend 10 consecutive minutes untying the knot. At the end of that time, the ball comes untied, duplicating the effects of the “rope trick” spell and extending upwards as a 30-foot length of floating rope. If there isn’t enough space above you, the rope rises as far as it can before disappearing into the extradimensional space created by the spell.

The spell lasts for the full duration or until the rope is pulled from the space. When the spell ends, the rope magically ties itself into a new knotted ball, and this property of the ball can’t be used again until the next dawn. ___

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Bracers of Technique

Prerequisite: 1 level in monk

Wearing these gives you advanced skills in martial arts. Months of training given the moment they are equipped. While attuned, given a +2 on any unarmed attacks and gain 1d4 ki points that can be be expended from the bracers instead of your ki pool. Also get access to three new maneuvers:

Rush: whenever you perform furry of blows, you can choose to sacrifice your movement. If you do, you can choose a new target for each attack as long as they are between 30 feet of each other. You move in the most efficient path towards the next target, stopping at the last one.

Critical blow: after landing a hit, you can expend one ki point and launch an elbow into a targets weak spot. Target must pass a dc 16 constitution saving throw or suffer one status effect from this list of your choice: blinded, deafened, prone, frightened. On a crit, you can also choose between stunning or paralyzing the target.

Tetsuzanko: a shoulder tackle that creates space with an aggressive opponent. 1 ki point, On a reaction when a target misses an attack on you, set your feet and bash your shoulder again a target. They take 1d6 force damage and are pushed 10 feet away. Their movement speed becomes zero for the rest of the targets turn.

(Monk is one of my favorite classes so I decided to make an item that gives off the older fighting game vibes.

Villain: The Gleebringer Battalions

Gallard Gleebringer only ever wanted to make people happy. By using his skills as a toymaker and inventor he sought to fill the world with devices that would bring wonder, and save people from the drugery of labor to give them more time for play.

Seeking to save his neighbours from the horrors of war, and under the patronage of the battlehungry local margrave, Gallard has a constructed an autonomous army of toy soldiers that in some weeks time will go berserk and begin rampaging across the land, playing out an inexplicable war-game that will leave villages sacked and the entire region destabilized.

It’s up to the party to notice the looming crisis and do something about it before the toys begin their march, As the powers that be are not only blind to the looming crisis but actively dismissive of any

Adventure Hooks:

Scraping together enough coin to fund a construct army has left the margrave’s treasury more than a little tight pursed, leading them to skimp on things like repairing infrastructure, public festivals, and resupplying their garrisons. There’s plenty of opportunities for adventurers as bandits and monsters propagate through the wilderness, and the lesser nobles rely on mercenaries to guard their holdings. Its only so long before the cracks begin to show however, as roads wash out and the realms defenders turn to brigandry. 

The party end up in a tavern drinking with an old military officer previously employed by the margrave. She’s iresome and illtempered, but she’ll crawl out of her cups long enough to tell the tale of how after twenty years of loyal service she was let go for protesting when some of the troops under her command were killed in a training exercise.  If the party press a little she might just let it slip that it wasn’t training so much as a field test of Gleebringer’s machines, which her boss insisted be against real troops. Later on, they’ll find an official bounty posted for the woman, who’s rallied some of her fellow discontented soldiers and started on a campaign of sabotage. 

For his part Gleebringer is quite blind to the looming threat, having been carried by his ever shifting attention to yet another new project once the design and manufacture of the armies were complete. The party might get a chance to talk to him however if they manage to sneak into the excursive exposition he's hosting in the province's capital, either by riding in on the coattails of a wealthy patron, or by sneaking in among the serving staff. Actually getting an audience with the toymaker will be even more difficult as the margrave has set his agents to watch and protect Gleebringer, and it's only so long before they notice the uninvited guest have crashed the private function.

Setup: While many gnomes dabble in artifice, it was early in his apprenticeship with the village toymaker that a young Gallard discovered both his love and prodigious talent for the technical arts. It wasn't just a magical knack, it was an eye for detail that had people saying that the gnome's creations seemed to be alive long before he figured out how to make them move on their own.

Soon Gleebringer toys were in demand across kingdoms, and Gallard found himself not only patronized by innumerable wealthy merchants and nobles but sought out by engineers and craftsfolk of all kinds who realized the genius packed away in his creations.

Gallard didn't let the fame or the fortune go to his head, instead using his growing connections and commission budget to experiment with even more complex designs. For example: scaling up from music boxes to clockwork bands, and eventually an automated opera house.

As a man who dreamed all his life of building a flying town, it was safe to assume that Gallard had his head in the clouds. He hated to see people suffer but seldom thought through the implications of his inventions, Such as when an automated lumber mill intended to supply materials for his projects put an entire town of foresters out of work. This penchant for distraction was only encouraged by the margrave, who saw the military applications of Gleebringer's gifts from the moment a clockwork dragon bought for one of his children ended up badly maiming one of the servants who saught to tidy up the toyblock castle it had been charged with guarding.

Over the past ten years, the Margrave has become Gallard's most generous patron, supplying him with workshops ( staffed by apprentaces who's loyalty can be counted on) and an endless series of new projects ( which always end up increasing the margrave's power and standing at the cost of the common good).

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A pop-up book that summons random monsters? Yes. Isn't that super dangerous for all involved? Also yes. If you put this in your campaign, please tell us how it goes.

Pop-Up Monstrous Manual

Wondrous Item, legendary

“A thick tome filled to the brim with information on all types of creatures scattered throughout the multiverse. The information is far from complete, and more is constantly appearing in the endless back pages of the book. When this book is opened, a pop-up display of a creature folds out of the pages.”

Whenever you make a skill check to discern information about a creature, you can consult this magic tome for 10 minutes, and gain advantage on the roll. As an action you can throw this book to a point you can see within 30 feet of you and summon a random creature from its pages. This creature is not under your control and acts in a fashion appropriate to its nature. The GM determines the creature at random from the pages of the monster manual. The creature lasts for 1 hour or until it is reduced to 0 hit points. Once you use the book to summon a creature, you cannot do so again until you have finished a long rest.

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Villain: Ardos, Pillager of the Lost Shore

The pirate walked down the seamless marble stair and held his prize to the light. Just like the city itself, the bauble was beautiful and delicate wirework, the product of generations of craftsmanship that bent and smudged at the touch of his ash covered hands. “Wait until the folks back home get a load of this” he thought, too enraptured by the glimmering of treasure to smell the scent of burning temple on the wind. 

Setup: A hapless smuggler all his life, Ardos lucked into becoming pirate of the century after guiding his ship through an ocean spanning storm and discovering an unknown continent full of riches to plunder. After filling his hold with riches stolen from a foreign land, he sailed home, recruited a small fleet of other seadogs to help him in his theft, and sailed back to the forgotten shore to plunder again. 

Heady off his successive contests, rich with holy artifacts wrested from foreign temples, and at the head of what might be the most well provisioned pirate fleet in history,  Ardos is looking to settle some old scores against the maritime nations that harried him during his humble beginnings. 

Adventure hooks: 

A vessel of Ardos’s fleet wrecks on a beach nearby the player’s home, scattering odd treasures and marooned pirates across the shore.  Apparently the pirates are driven into factions: The Captain is dead, the navigator and many others have become obsessed with the worship of an arcane idol, the quartermaster and her men are scavenging what they can to get a boat back in the water, and the rest of the crew is happy to maraud on dry land for a bit and wouldn’t mind pillaging the player’s village on the way. 

Just as peacetalks are underway between the home nation and its cheif seagoing rival, Ardos’s fleet rolls in with an offer to side with the highest bidder. The goverments of both sides are slow to overcome their grudges and oust this interloper, while agitators within both nations begin to court the pirate’s favor.  Should the offer sit on the table too long, Ardos will send out saboteurs and agitators of his own, hoping to push both factions to the brink of war once again in order to encourage them to deal. 

After making an enemy of the Pirate lord, the players will be approached by a towering figure who speaks little common but shares their emnity against Ardos. If they trust him, this goliath (Starcounter is his name) will lead them and their ship across the ocean to the lands the marauder plundered to fuel his assertion.  

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