In Dark Legacy of Evard — and the rest of 4e's Encounter series — the adventure is designed to be played in quick, 2-3 (or less) sessions and focuses primarily on a single encounter each session. This adventure, however, is not linear, which presents a lot of room to play with when you aren't running it the way it was designed. In Session 1, the characters find themselves in an inn (of course), and at night, one of the other patrons sneaks away to the graveyard and triggers some sort of magic that shifts the inn, the graveyard, and the entire town into the Shadowfell. The party wakes up and runs downstairs where they find monsters running around. In Session 2 the party runs into the first fork: they can either track down the missing patron — a suspicious scholar investigating Evard, a very powerful wizard and expert of shadow magic — or to help the guards and militia in town by cutting a path to the armory. If they chase the scholar, they will run through the woods and into the graveyard while the town marshal and guards are left to get equipment on their own. If the players take this route, what will happen to the guards?
I see this as a great opportunity for a secondary antagonist to show up. But not as a Big Bad Dude, as a typical townsfolk: A man in his thirties with a short beard and mustache in plain clothes, comes from around the corner. They carry a sword and are sweating from fighting, and call for someone else between breaths, "Over here! The guards are over here." Garren and Lilia, siblings, wearing simple clothes and a handful of scars and worried looks just like everyone else tonight, join the group entering the armory and help distribute the equipment among the other militia that made it. The marshal, named Grimbold, and a few guards talk to them about the creatures they've all met so far while they don their armor, and they show gratitude to the pair.
Garren had hoped to catch one of the townspeople alone — they're starving — but the opportunity to make more allies is well enough. And later, when Garren and Lilia go with a guard to patrol the streets, they'll have time for a quick snack...
Garren is a well-learned illusionist and enchanter and a vampire who wanders between this world and the Shadowfell, and who just happened to be caught in the middle of the events surrounding Duponde. Lilia? Here she is an elaborate illusion of Garren's sister, long dead by now, created from stitching together souls of the dead wandering the Shadowfell and his own memories of Lilia. Garren needs to feed, just like any vampire. Unlike just any vampire, Garren doesn't like killing his meals, he deeply enjoys watching them suffer and fall over the course of months, when he can.
When he feeds on a guard in town — which he will easily get away with if the party of would-be heroes isn't around — the guard will collapse, as if attacked by one of the shadows, and get a fever. Soon they wake up, thankful to Garren for "saving me back there, I don't know what happened..." but find they can't sleep. If they do sleep, they have chaotic dreams and wake up parched and aching all over. Awake, the night seems to take days to pass. They have trouble staying hydrated and feel hungry and paranoid all the time, but of course Garren or Lilia shows up to help them fall asleep with a few kind, enchanting words to at least help them get some rest and, more importantly to Garren, make it easier to feed. After a week or two, or a couple of nights in the Shadowfell, Garren's curse will have developed enough that it becomes difficult or impossible for anyone in town to remove. And very soon after that, the poor soul will need to feed.
Eventually, one threat or another will make itself apparent. The poor guard could easily be thought to have succumbed to the Shadowfell's dark desires and turned into a monster. If other accursed people are found in town, "it was that guard... How many have they bitten, you reckon?" "Who do you think it is?" "Marshal... It's you? It's you, isn't old man?!" Or, maybe one of the party members is accused. After all, they were "missing" that one night, and the other night. And this whole thing started when they got here, didn't it? "I suspect them over that kook scholar, myself."
After that tiny idea, the stories writes itself, really.
Continued in Part 3
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