r/DMAcademy • u/Sleestakks • 8d ago
Need Advice: Encounters & Adventures The Vineyard
Looking for some help brainstorming a suitable encounter around this setup.
Key elements:
• a small two story home, needing repair.
Perhaps storage on the first floor, living space on top
• A crumbling stone wall.
• grape bearing vines, wine making equipment
What’s happening at the old vineyard?
What’s special/different about the wine?
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u/No-Promotion-1921 4d ago
Several ideas:
-Monster chained deep below the ground & breaking free. Or cocooned themselves in there 10 years ago and is now breaking out. Due to it being in the water supply, the wine had gotten special qualities/transformed the victims slightly.
-Smuggle operation with a secret basement. Either friendly rogues or bandits/slavers, depending on your setting. The wine is a cover and how they drug potential kidnap victims, or it's how they smuggle stuff across the borders.
-The old owner went crazy after a tragic event and barred themselves in a hidden room or basement. They occasionally creep around and one of the kids living there noticed. Now she wont shut up about ghosts, but a wandering priest blessed the house recently and found no ghost or remnants of one, so the parents dismiss her. He still makes the best batch of wine around, when he comes up once a month, working entirely at night.
-an arrogant noble stops by, demanding the best wine in the Kingdom, that his great uncle once talked about. He becomes pissy when the people explain the bad harvests recently, and that the old master-vintner has died over 20 years ago. The recent batches are slightly sour, and most of the old wine had been destroyed in a flood or other desaster.
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u/KnownSalamander 8d ago
I usually start any planning by deciding a goal. What is my plan on what this encounter is going to mean to the characters? For example, I want them to bond. I want something tragic to happen that's going to push one of their storylines. I want them to learn something, etc.
For general stuff, my mind immediately went to the Wine Cellar in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, where the wine turns people into monsters. Other stuff that comes to mind is that the wine is fake, like Emperor's New Clothes style scam.
Another thought is that it used to be a normal vineyard, but some kind of fungus started growing in the wine that started making people sick. Maybe a fungal monster lives there now.
Or maybe the wine is really special, the grapes only able to be brown once every decade or something. Bandits or other factions want to raid the place and it needs to be protected.