Adventure Hook for Rappan Athuk

 

Eventually (hopefully) someday I would like to run the epic mega dungeon, Rappan Athuk, the Dungeon of Graves. I think the major issue for 5e for doing a dungeon delve of this magnitude is providing a compelling or unifying hook for player characters. Otherwise why risk your life in the dungeon. Fortune and glory aren’t worth much when you’re dead.

As I work on my own personal homebrew setting to place my games in, which is where Rappan Athuk and Slumbing Tsar will be used, another theme I want to include is religion. I want to use portions of the Great Church described in Green Ronin’s Book of the Righteous, with my own takes. I have a custom pantheon of nine gods when I will have the church worship. This idea also ties in well with the mythology of Rappan Athuk and the Army of Light. 

The Hook

The party members are agents of an Archdeacon and Archbishop of the Church. Deacons are powerful political operatives working to further the church’s position, while clergy carry out its ministry and oppose evil. This allows characters of any type because they either have faith based ties to the Church, or are agents (perhaps unsavory ones) of the Archdeacon. 

The agents are dispatched to the region to investigate reports about the dungeon of Rappan Athuk. But their secret overall mission is to discover what happened to Zelkor, the leader of the mythical Army of Light. Zelkor and the tale have been lost to history, but church scholars have recently rediscovered lore about the events. The Archbishop desires that the agents investigate the dungeon and cleanse it as the final resting place of so many lost heroes. They are to collect holy relics like the bones of the fallen if possible and find evidence as to Zelkor’s life and death so that the Archbishop can submit him for canonization. The Archdeacon shares these goals, but also instructs his agents to conceal or destroy any evidence of corruption of the Army of Light by evil forces because he fears it will undermine the Church’s standing with the masses of faithful and its political clout. The Army of Light must be a story of triumph, not loss, defeat, or corruption to enable the Church to continue it mission of good. The ends justify whatever means necessary.

Justifications 

Providing a patron with unified goals enables easy incorporation of new characters—when old ones die, new agents are dispatched, or they are sent with messages from the patron. The competing goals introduce the possibility of some character drama depending upon who the characters each align themselves with. The Archdeacon also allows the characters to play less noble characters motivated by their own enlightened self-interest if they desire that too. Non-church entities could have influence over these players too. 

For those serving the Archbishop, I can create suborders and church factions to which they belong (I.e. a holy order of heirophants for a wizard, divine or holy orders for paladins and clerics, etc) that can also be an interesting way to provide additional motivation or even side quests that will give them a break from the megadungeon.