Rescue the Scholar-Priests of Thumis
From Torg Adventure
Rescue the Scholar-Priests of Thumis
The characters gather in a meeting with their superiors in the Temple of Thumis (and probably their superiors' superiors). The characters can be members of the temple, clan-relatives of members of the temple, or hirelings of members of the temple (here's where your 'Fresh off the Boat' characters go).
"We are missing a group of scholar-priests that entered the Tsuru'um to investigate a newly uncovered area, probably opened by that quake we had last month. We need you to find them, figure out why they went missing, and bring them home. One member of that party returned and will be going with you. She knows where to go and what to look out for," the highest-ranking priest begins.
The characters enter the underworld, battle wandering monsters (use any underworld creatures you like), and going deeper below the surface.
The back-story on this is that the original party found an area of many nexus points. They got into a fight and members of the party separated. The priestess who returned came, back with a badly injured warrior, who died before he got medical attention. She thinks that the others wandered into one of the nexus points or were killed by whoever attacked (Ssu in my scenario). This is indeed what happened. The remaining party went through a nexus point that leads to the Tsolei archipelago, a no magic area. They could not cast a spell to open the other end of the nexus point. One other problem is that the nexus point dropped them 100 years in the past. Livyanu is attacking the island they are on, as they do often, but the magic-dependent legions of Livyanu cannot really make any headway on conquest. When the new party arrives (if they arrive), it has been a couple of years since the first party arrived (the nexus point on this end shifts through time), but only a week since they left in the original timeline.
So, if the new party manages to find the same area of nexus points (pretty good chance) and find which nexus point they went through (much harder -- My PCs used divination, I think, and ended up sticking their head through a couple before they found the right one), their next big hurdles are: fighting against the Livyani attackers (a condition of their hosts in Tsolei) and figuring out how to get back to the empire at the right era. They may be able to cast one spell with energy stored in their bodies (psychic spell?) or some object the Tsolei'i give them or whatever you and they can come up with. Maybe the nexus point opens periodically and they just need to experiment. When it comes time to come back, some of the original party won't go, since they've 'gone native' and have Tsolei'i spouses and babies.
This adventure was actually a sequel to a previous adventure I ran at Con of the North many years ago. They were the original party.
