D&D Quest Generator

Level 3 · one session

Read aloudA grain wagon rolls into the yard of the Heron and Hook inn at midnight with its driver slumped dead on the bench, soaked to the waist from crossing the ford. Tucked under the seat is a waxed oilcloth sack holding eleven letters sealed with a river-barge mark.

Quest giver

• Wenna Gallack, Sister of the Heron and Hook's innkeeper, runs the kitchen and the books — Really wants: She asks the party to deliver the letters to the Toll Office by sunrise. She really wants them burned before anyone reads the seals, because her husband Pell Gallack is named in the third letter as the man who paid the courier to carry them. Full NPC →

Stakes

If the letters reach the Toll Office unread, a magistrate's clerk will open them and Dunmarrow's lock-keepers will be arrested for smuggling grain stolen from the Crown's storehouse, and the village's only ferry license goes with them. If the letters are burned, the courier's murder stays unsolved and the real buyers keep using the lock at Drowned Lock to move stock upriver under false tolls.

The path

1. The Heron and Hook inn yard — The party examines the dead courier, Joss Varley, and finds river mud packed into his boots past the knee, which means he crossed the ford in deep water, not on the road.
2. Toll Office on the north bridge — Clerk Orin Hasp will accept the letters only if the party can name the barge mark, and he sends them to the old lock if they cannot.
3. Drowned Lock — Three lock-hands armed with boathooks guard a sunken gate; behind them a barge is loaded with sacks stamped with the Crown's storehouse seal, and the foreman Nell Ruddock wants the courier's pouch back.
4. Saint Ebba's chapel ossuary — A second copy of the letters is hidden in a reliquary niche under the altar, and a dying priest, Father Dace Aldous, reveals Varley came here to confess before he died.

The decision

Do the party deliver the letters to the Toll Office as Wenna asked, knowing it will ruin the lock-keepers who are only the hired hands, or do they hand the letters to Father Dace so the chapel can send them to the Crown's assessor in Vell instead?

• Deliver the letters to the Toll Office and let the magistrate's clerk open them, exposing Pell Gallack and the lock-keepers together.
• Take the letters to Saint Ebba's chapel and send them to the Crown's assessor in Vell, sparing the lock-hands but forcing Wenna to confess her husband's part first.

Reward

150 gp from the lock-keepers' pooled savings, plus a bronze lock-pass from the Dunmarrow Lock-Keepers' Guild granting the party free passage through every lock on the river between Dunmarrow and Vell.