Adventure Ideas: Page 1

The following pages are filled with adventure ideas the Host and various house guests have written for use in your Beyond the Supernatural home games.

We hope you find these ideas both inspirational and horrifying!

This first adventure is titled “Under the Red Sky”, and was submitted by Mephisto.
This adventure was written for a contest on the Forums of the Megaverse, which upon winning said contest, Mephisto submitted it to the House for everyone to use and enjoy.

Introduction: “There exists in the world rare, strange events that defy explanation. What the Red Sky is, 99.9% of the time, is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is entirely natural, and based on astrological movements. However, it can also be the result of another rare situation,
one that is an atmospheric result of something much more profound.
For you see, the Red Sky is simply the visual association of something much more remarkable, a specialized Rip of Magic.”

Click on the image to download the PDF. Note: This file has been updated with an illustration of The Xorn by krateworx, who drew the creature as a prize to Mephisto for winning the contest. My thanx to both Mephisto and krateworx for sharing their talents with the House of BTS.

This next idea is a simple one, but its one of my favorites. It's ideal for “low level” player characters and has them going to a “haunted” location that's making the lives of the family living in or near it more and more unbearable. It has many ear marks of a haunting: creaking footsteps in the dead of night, chills down people's spines and feelings of being watched or that something isn't right, electrical problems and similar phenomena.

But instead of finding ghosts as expected, they find things much more dangerous lurking inside the walls, and these creatures only get more agitated/excited by the presence of psychics being present and are a threat to the family just as much as they are to the PC's, especially considering the characters probably packed more for ghost hunt than a monster hunt.

The same basic idea applies for another story, only this time the ghosts/entities begins to hunt them back... or they all stay quiet during the ghost hunt, but they leave with and follow the investigators back to their homes to haunt and hunt them.

Condemned

The player characters are in high pursuit of some supernatural baddie in the middle of the night (like a vampire or similar creature of the night) until it slips into an old condemned building. The group should keep going after it (if need be, the thing may be carrying a small child or something of value to encourage the players into pursuit).

The angle here is that the fiend has prepared for this situation and the building has been rigged with hazards and traps in an effort to slow down, injure, maim or even kill its would be chasers. Some events that could happen in this adventure:

-They find a sprung trap at some point with a dead man in it. Perhaps it's a hunter they recognize or knew, someone who's helped the group on occasion. This scene raises the tension and the stakes of their situation.

-They find an injured hunter/investigator, or perhaps a homeless man who's sought shelter in the wrong place. This person sprung a trap earlier that night and needs professional medical assistance to survive (paramedic efforts will only slow the blood loss, he needs a doctor). The patient should already look weak and fading... can the group move on and leave him here? Do they take the effort to help the injured person out of the building? Do they split up the party and let someone help the injured person get out of the building? Note: If helping the man get out, for an extra challenge the original entrance could have since been blocked off.

-They might discover a person (or group or people) who lives in the building with the creature, and THEY are the ones who are building the traps! Are they possessed?
Are they just sick individuals? Do they support the creature for whatever ungodly reason? Does the creature provide for their needs in return for their help in the building?

-They eventually hunt down the creature they were looking, but then discover it's a subservient creature to something much stronger than the group expected (and probably isn't properly equipped or prepared to encounter it).

-The PC's destroy the fiend and rescue whomever needs saving, but the fiend had set a “self destruct” trap of some kind before its demise and suddenly, small explosions are going off and fires are spreading all over building! It will all eventually level the several story building, burying the PC's alive if they don't get out fast!

-The traps themselves can only be limited by your imagination at this point. Weak floor boards, spike traps, trip wires, mazes, poison dart traps, contraptions right out of the “SAW” movies, nail bombs, fire bombs, ceilings caving in's... the works. Taking place in the dead of night while in a building with no lights should only make this scene much more terrifying and dangerous.

This one was designed with the spirit of the House of BTS in mind. ;)

 The players investigate a “haunted house”, but its the house itself is actually the problem (as opposed to ghosts/entities). This can be explained in whatever way you like (or left as an unexplained mystery), but the important thing is for the players to discover the secrets of the house in order to escape it. Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention that they can't escape the house until they solve the mystery or a riddle of some sort.

To escape the house, the group will face things like never ending corridors, rooms they've visited before that keep showing up randomly in other rooms, doors and objects disappearing and reappearing, outdoor windows and exits can't seem to be found anywhere (or they look like exits, but they lead to another room or corridor), sudden temperature changes, etc. Think of the short story and movie 1408 for some inspirational moments.

Throwing in iconic horror bits like walking skeletons, aimlessly wandering ghosts, people who have been trapped in the house for years and their sanity is broken (or at least cracked), evil psychic beings, and more would be appropriate as well.

You're free to your own devices to come up with whatever puzzles or solutions the players need to escape the house.

In the middle of
“œNo Whereville, USA” is a small town and farming community. The town has been dealing with random abductions for months and is calling for help, and the undermanned and unprepared county sheriff's or police department is looking for any help they can get at this point. Enter the player characters.

The town has nothing noteworthy about it
(not even a Starbucks or Applebee's or even a Wal-Mart to be found), and one of the few mildly interesting bits of town is a wax museum that was fashioned out of an old ice factory. To the locals, the owner seems to be out of his mind for opening and operating a wax museum in such a place as tourism is minimal, not to mention that all of the pieces or wax art have been all created in “œbad taste” to create a menagerie of horrible, monstrous looking things.

The low hanging fruit angle: The wax museum is housing creatures in the guise of monstrous wax pieces during the day, but at night they come alive and hunt for people to capture, drag back alive and alter them into other wax monstrosities. It can be as simple as that for the player characters to confront. For those looking to dig deeper...

The town thinks the eclectic proprietor is to blame, but he's not, he's simply a spoiled rich, artist kid who ran away from his rich, stuffy parents and the big city he lived in, wandering his way here by happenstance, discovering the giant fridge of an ice factory and had a wild idea: start up a wax museum of monstrosities. Being a trust fund baby allows him to not have to worry or care if the museum makes money or not. He likes it and that's enough. But the local find the newcomer with strange artistic eccentricities to be an easy scapegoat and if things don't change soon, he's going to be arrested, end up taking the fall for whoever is responsible for the kidnapping,s or may end up lynched one night or shot by an angry relative of friend of someone who's gone missing.

The real threat could be a cult, a coven of witches, other artists who are supplying pieces of wax art to the museum; people could be the culprit or it could the someone/ something supernatural; maybe a demonic being is be the mastermind behind the abductions, collecting the souls of those he kidnaps and shackling them within the “wax menagerie monsters” as his minions. It could be a problem with tectonic type entities possessing the wax monsters, making them come alive at night to hunt humans.

Whatever the reason, if the characters get captured, they'll be turned into a wax creature by morning unless rescued (this is a great angle if playing a Victims adventure). Killing the monsters means destroying private property (a rich kid's private property with a hot shot lawyer on speed dial no less) as well as destroying the small town's only real tourist attraction (tourist numbers have gone up since the museum opened) and is therefore one more nail is placed in the nearly dead community's coffin.
The locals have begrudgingly accepted that the museum is bringing in more tourism than before and so the diner, the local bar and grill, the steak house, the farmer's market and the convenience stores are seeing more income and don't want to lose that. Some locals might seek retribution or restitution on the player characters before or as they are leaving town for œdisrupting things.

An alternative to the wax museum setup: the museum is not the problem, it's the town itself that infested with killers and murderers, and while they have an unwritten truce amongst themselves, they're free to do as they please to all the tourists and those passing through. The killers could have possessed folks amongst them, a minor occultist dabbler who has a few hell hounds at his command, a Devil Ghost that's has taken up residence here as he enjoys all the sick minds congregating so close together, etc. 

One of the player characters wake up one morning to prepare for the daily grind, and when they turns on the news while getting ready, they hear something to effect of the following:

(Reporter): According to the police report, the cause of death was determined to be due to “extreme starvation” and added that Adam Johnson appeared to have not eaten in the last several weeks. Adam's son, a Mr. Thomas Johnson, had this to say concerning his father's cause of death.

“This is impossible; I had just taken my dad out to dinner two nights ago. He was in good health. He always eats like a horse, and has been getting a pot belly since retirement. I don't care what the autopsy says; dad didn't die of starvation!”

(Back to the reporter): With no further explanation available for what seems to be an extremely unusual occurrence, the police have considered this a closed investigation.

If the PC's don't see this as enough of a reason to investigate, more bizarre occurrences like this will keep happen until they do. Eventually one of them will start quickly losing weight, becoming emaciated and gaunt overnight.

What's behind these strange starvation deaths? Black magic? Energy leeching monsters? A freak natural occurrence in the area? Bizarre side effects of some new experimental drug the pharmaceutical company doesn't want anyone to know about?

“There's things worse than alligators in those sewers!”

Those silly reports of alligators in sewers are making the rounds again (happens every summer), but this time there's a twist: the alligators are coming up to the surface to snatch up people and are dragging them drag back to their lair. That last part is only being reported in more tabloid oriented news groups, mainstream wont touch that angle. However, after several weeks of people going missing and the angle of sewer alligators keep coming up, the PC's should consider that its worth investigating.

When they get to sewers and investigate further in, they find a lot more than they bargained for! There are man-gator biped looking beasts roaming around the sewers, jungle foliage is growing over every surface and even stranger things like atmospheric changes and even rain is taking place in these sewers! What's behind this bizarre scene, and how do the players deal with it?

Antagonists: Could be a Jungle spirit / entity / minor godling, or a cultist plan in motion, a completely unexpected and mysterious anomaly of magic energy, some kind of bizarre time warp or rapid mutation of people and plants , a perhaps a science experiment gone badly and is spiraling out of control, etc.

Whatever the cause, people are mutating into gator beings and foliage is growing and expanding by about half a city block every hour or two. It's only a matter of time before this mess makes its way to the surface and overwhelms the city and beyond!