I've made a Harry Potter homebrew based off of 5e at Hogwarts. I wanted to give my players the experience of seeing Hogwarts for the first time so they are first years currently. I'm struggling to come up with a good mystery for the beginning of our campaign. I have some ideas for later when they are a higher levels, but having them being so low and at school is giving me a lot of trouble. Any ideas for a good mystery at a school?
I've made a Harry Potter homebrew based off of 5e at Hogwarts. I wanted to give my players the experience of seeing Hogwarts for the first time so they are first years currently. I'm struggling to come up with a good mystery for the beginning of our campaign. I have some ideas for later when they are a higher levels, but having them being so low and at school is giving me a lot of trouble. Any ideas for a good mystery at a school?
Perhaps school supplies and other trinkets have gone missing. The players must track down the thief, a niffler. However, no one knows how it got into the school...and with the niffler causing a distraction, who knows what else might've gone missing?
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All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
The paintings in Hogwarts are stepping out of their portraits and are uncharacteristically attacking the teachers. Our sleuths are trying to figure out who is doing this dastardly deed before a teacher is killed.
Note: The Villian is a student who is trying to get a teacher to leave the school because of an upcoming exam that he does not want to take. The problem is the spell/cauldron he keeps on trying to cast backfires and causes other teachers to be attacked by the paintings.
Maybe an ambitious student stole a book from the Restricted Section of the library, and the book is full of powerful and forbidden magic that the thief cannot control and is sewing chaos. In order to end the chaos you have to unravel who stole the book and where it is now, then possibly fight through whatever horrors have been conjured from its pages.
For classic HP style mystery, you can include things like multiple interested parties (maybe a evil teacher who *knows* how to work the book and wanted it for themselves before it went missing), mystery-adjacent red herrings (a la Fred/George/Ludo Bagman side-plot in Goblet of Fire) and straight up unrelated antagonists that just don't like the PC's and act as rivals, but have nothing to do with the main plot (but maybe the PC's think they do for a little while). You can even make the "bad guy" sympathetic in that the chaos is unintentional, and every subsequent Bad Thing that's happened has been a result of them trying to use the book to fix their mess, and ultimately the players need to save them from themselves (and possibly the secretly Evil Teacher).
The paintings on the walls are pretty cool for magical twists.
Students are going missing and turning up in the paintings on the walls without any memory of what happened. The party have to try and work out from clues as to the location of the magical item (perhaps a mirror) which is trapping them in the paintings. They then have to work out how to undo it (perhaps holding a painting of the missing people in front of the mirror?)
Strange, abstract monsters are appearing in the paintings and attacking the inhabitants. You need to find out who is making these paintings and how to stop them (it turns out to be an arty student who is using the magical photo development spells to try and make her creations move, not realizing they are linked to the paintings in the school)
you could have the mystery run from levels 1-3/4if you are doing milestone levelling it is easy to have them simply level as they discover new clues and information, or hand out XP for the things they find. I do like the idea of this kind of a campaign in a school setting. each tier of the campaign could run a school year, so by the time they graduate 5 years have passed and they are level 10-12.
But back to your adventure, you could have a series of small events take place, maybe a quidditch game is sabotaged meaning the players have to get one of them into the team that won to see if one of the team members carried out the sabotage. Then another event happens, maybe the baby mandrakes are dying off from some disease put in. Slowly the players unravel that these small events are all to cover up a bigger issue.
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I've made a Harry Potter homebrew based off of 5e at Hogwarts. I wanted to give my players the experience of seeing Hogwarts for the first time so they are first years currently. I'm struggling to come up with a good mystery for the beginning of our campaign. I have some ideas for later when they are a higher levels, but having them being so low and at school is giving me a lot of trouble. Any ideas for a good mystery at a school?
Perhaps school supplies and other trinkets have gone missing. The players must track down the thief, a niffler. However, no one knows how it got into the school...and with the niffler causing a distraction, who knows what else might've gone missing?
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
The paintings in Hogwarts are stepping out of their portraits and are uncharacteristically attacking the teachers. Our sleuths are trying to figure out who is doing this dastardly deed before a teacher is killed.
Note: The Villian is a student who is trying to get a teacher to leave the school because of an upcoming exam that he does not want to take. The problem is the spell/cauldron he keeps on trying to cast backfires and causes other teachers to be attacked by the paintings.
Maybe an ambitious student stole a book from the Restricted Section of the library, and the book is full of powerful and forbidden magic that the thief cannot control and is sewing chaos. In order to end the chaos you have to unravel who stole the book and where it is now, then possibly fight through whatever horrors have been conjured from its pages.
For classic HP style mystery, you can include things like multiple interested parties (maybe a evil teacher who *knows* how to work the book and wanted it for themselves before it went missing), mystery-adjacent red herrings (a la Fred/George/Ludo Bagman side-plot in Goblet of Fire) and straight up unrelated antagonists that just don't like the PC's and act as rivals, but have nothing to do with the main plot (but maybe the PC's think they do for a little while). You can even make the "bad guy" sympathetic in that the chaos is unintentional, and every subsequent Bad Thing that's happened has been a result of them trying to use the book to fix their mess, and ultimately the players need to save them from themselves (and possibly the secretly Evil Teacher).
Just a few spitball ideas.
The paintings on the walls are pretty cool for magical twists.
Students are going missing and turning up in the paintings on the walls without any memory of what happened. The party have to try and work out from clues as to the location of the magical item (perhaps a mirror) which is trapping them in the paintings. They then have to work out how to undo it (perhaps holding a painting of the missing people in front of the mirror?)
Strange, abstract monsters are appearing in the paintings and attacking the inhabitants. You need to find out who is making these paintings and how to stop them (it turns out to be an arty student who is using the magical photo development spells to try and make her creations move, not realizing they are linked to the paintings in the school)
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you could have the mystery run from levels 1-3/4if you are doing milestone levelling it is easy to have them simply level as they discover new clues and information, or hand out XP for the things they find. I do like the idea of this kind of a campaign in a school setting. each tier of the campaign could run a school year, so by the time they graduate 5 years have passed and they are level 10-12.
But back to your adventure, you could have a series of small events take place, maybe a quidditch game is sabotaged meaning the players have to get one of them into the team that won to see if one of the team members carried out the sabotage. Then another event happens, maybe the baby mandrakes are dying off from some disease put in. Slowly the players unravel that these small events are all to cover up a bigger issue.