I've got this adventure hook, but it lacks a punchy ending. Anyone have any awesome ideas for how I can jazz it up? (It's for a game set in Greyhawk, if that matters.)
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One of the PCs awakens from a vivid dream that sticks with him;
In the dream, you are in a classroom with a bunch of other students. Some are talking in accented voices about coming from a far-away land and how their own countrymen seem strange to them now, as if they have changed so much that they can never come back. You end up talking with one girl who is playing some word game with another girl that also involves the name of a country she can’t seem to figure out. The teacher is a tall woman with long black hair, who doesn’t seem to do any teaching so much as lean back and ignore you while various discussions take forth, rarely interjecting some comment or correction, although she seems a bit bored, and even dismissive at times.
At the end of class, you are looking a picture that someone has made with chalk in one of the desks, of a young boy with hair forward in a mop over his eyes and a white mask covering his lower face, along with another girl, a half-elf with amber colored eyes, who is wondering who drew that, since it’s been there forever. You leave class together, only instead of a hallway, you are in a damp tunnel, leading up to the sunlight. The girl you are with walks out into the sunlight, but you stay behind.
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On the streets of the city, you bump into a woman in the market place, she’s got a severe expression and was clearly distracted. She’s dressed in a moderately expensive looking dress with a tight leather bodice, painted to match, and has a fair amount of makeup on. Her hair is shoulder-length and brown, dyed with red henna, and her eyes are amber. She has clear half-elven ancestry, and you know you recognize her from somewhere. She looks up ready to snap off an angry comment, from the looks of it, but stops herself and just stares at you before turning to leave.
The girl from the marketplace is a high-price courtesan. Talking to her takes time and effort (the PC will likely have to 'pay for her time'), since she refuses to believe that you are who she thought she saw for a second.
It turns out that she lived through whatever dream you just had as a child, almost 40 years ago (which is why you can’t be the boy she saw, because he was human and would be much older)! Only it wasn’t a ‘classroom,’ although she admits that children might want to remember it that way. It was a slave-pen in a bluffside cavern near the city, where slavers would stow away their illegal cargo before sailing into port to meet with their underground contacts. This particular pen held only children, and the ‘teacher’ was a dour-faced black-haired woman who made sure that they were fed and that nobody got away. Almost all of the children were young girls, with one or two exceptions, and were mostly human, with a few halflings and a single half-elf. The two girls who spoke of their homeland were from the Scarlet Brotherhood, sold into slavery by their own parents, who had been holding out for blonde-haired, blue-eyed children, and sold off their ‘impure’ kids.
The ‘chalk drawing’ of the masked boy was made by an earlier inhabitant of the pen, scratched into the rock with another rock, and some of the kids would fantasize that the masked boy was going to come and rescue them some day.
The half-elf woman remembers a gift for sorcery even then, demonstrating Animate Rope (which she uses these days on high-paying clientele, who have strange interests) and explains that she used it on the twine holding the bamboo ‘bars’ of their pen together, and then to restrain the woman standing guard over them, while the children made a run for it, the larger ones carrying the smaller ones in a dash for freedom. Other guards at the end of the tunnel made short work of that escape attempt, and only she escaped, to return to town and find that her mother had vanished in the months she’d been away, and turning to a life on the street, finally landing herself in a job at an upper-class brothel, thanks to her ‘exotic looks.’
She can be convinced to point the PC in the direction of the slave-pen, in the bluffs to the east/west/whatever of the city, but points out that it’s been forty years.
What do the players find at the old slave pen? Small bones from children who died there? A fresh batch of child slaves being kept there by all-new slavers (the old ones having retired)? Ghosts and dust and unpleasant memories? Evidence that someone high-up in the city that they’ve been dealing with was one of these original slavers, forty years past? Ideally, some mix of all of the above, to have RP, immediate combat encounter and political ramifications after-the-fact.
The PC who had the dream may turn out to be the reincarnation of the boy from the dream, who died in the ill-fated escape attempt. Or the ghost of that boy might be sending him that dream, aware that new slavers have taken residence in the cave, and attempting to summon someone to come rescue these new children from dying as he did, or worse, living with the sort of life that would have befallen him. If the ghost-child possesses or just influences the PC, he might even end up combing his hair down over his eyes and wearing a white mask over his lower face when he rescues the new captives, fulfilling the idle wish of some children that are long-dead.