A Dragon Flies Into a Bar

Adventure Pitch

It’s a beautiful day in the fishing town of Leilon, but the players—a group of newbie adventurers—are down to their last coins and without a job to earn more. But when the anxious silver dragon wyrmling Flax literally drops into the players’ inn seeking help finding his stolen hoard, can the players track down the culprit and recover the hoard before Flax's sister arrives at noon?

Adventure Specifications

Party Size & Level: This adventure is designed for five 1st-level player characters, but includes balancing information for parties of two to eight players.

Expected Runtime: This adventure is expected to take between three and six hours to complete.

Themes: This adventure focuses on the following themes: independence, anxiety, confidence, childhood, maturation, and trust.

Content Flags: This adventure contains or touches on:

• potential violence against animals (the Rat Pack, the flying snake)

• mild fantastical child endangerment (Flax against the giant rats and Mud Pie Gang)

• cartoonish emotional abuse and bullying (the Mud Pie Gang targeting Flax)

• mild death and decay (Fenrick’s skeletal remains)

• mild claustrophobia (the Rat Warrens)

• references to grief and parental death (Flax’s and Iomandra’s parents)

• references to mild body horror (the desecration of Flax’s parents)

• references to mild imprisonment (the Mud Pie Gang’s past captivity)

Adventure Summary

The players begin this adventure in the Green Goat Inn, an inn and tavern for adventurers visiting the town of Leilon—even inexperienced, down-on-their-luck adventurers like them. 

After ordering breakfast and exploring their surroundings, the players’ peaceful morning is shattered when the silver dragon wyrmling Flax crash-lands in the inn’s kitchen, creating panic and bedlam amongst the innkeeper, Renna, and her two pets, Cake and Ruby.

If the players calm the kitchen’s occupants, Flax can share that his hoard was stolen by an unknown culprit last night and that he’s traveled to the inn to seek help from a friend—the dwarven miner Gundren Rockseeker. Whether by Gundren’s request (and offer of payment), Renna’s suggestion, or their own initiative, players who agree to help Flax can follow him out of Leilon to the Sleeping Tower, a tilted tower that houses his lair—for Flax’s older sister, Iomandra, is coming to visit him at noon, and if Flax doesn’t find his hoard by then, Iomandra will make him come back to live at home.

After speaking with Flax and potentially racing him down the final stretch to the tower, the players must explore the tower, deal with a local pack of hostile giant rats, and reach the (initially inaccessible) second floor in order to investigate the scene of the crime. All clues point in a single, unambiguous direction: the gray-brown Mud Pie Pond, which lies a short distance to the west of the tower.

Upon reaching the pond, the players find themselves drawn into a confrontation with the Mud Pie Gang: a trio of mean-spirited mephit bullies that have inhabited the pond for centuries, and who stole Flax’s hoard in an attempt to drive him away from the Sleeping Tower. If the players have encouraged and supported him, Flax can also unlock his cold breath in this fight, using it for the first time to protect his new friends.

If the players defeat the mephits, they can recover Flax’s hoard from the mephits’ burrow beside the pond, as well as an assortment of other treasures that the gang accumulated over the years. When noon arrives, Flax’s older sister Iomandra arrives to decide Flax’s fate—and, if the players helped Flax master his breath weapon, to reward them for their efforts.

How to Run this Adventure

We’ve written this adventure to try to reduce your work away from the table while empowering you (and your players) to tell your story at the table. That means:

• Compendium-First Design. We’ve placed all location and character information into a separate Compendium, which you can pull up as-needed to familiarize or remind yourself of the details within. (You can find the Compendium at the end of this adventure.)

• Light-Touch Scaffolding. We’ve provided a sequence of narrative scenes meant to guide and inspire your play at the table—especially when roleplaying NPCs—without straightjacketing you with long read-aloud text or sprawling contingencies.

• At-the-Table Execution. We trust you to narrate scenes and descriptions, adjudicate rules interactions, and improvise character dialogue without memorizing particular scripts and outcomes, but have planted seeds in the text that should make your job easy.

• Scene-Agnostic Frameworks. We’ve broken social and stealth mechanics down into simple, universal, fiction-first systems that (like combat) can be applied in any arbitrary scene, allowing for flexibility when players do the unexpected.

If you’re running this adventure for the first time, we suggest you:

1. Read or skim the Narrative to familiarize yourself with the adventure’s expected structure, referencing the Compendium as you go, and

2. Read off the page at the table, pulling up Compendium entries in the sidebar as-needed to recall specific details.