Death In The Cornfields

When I first started running for the kids, it was during the summer when my nephew (who plays Tijitsu) would come and stay with us for a week or two. So I was sometimes running for a couple consecutive days and scrambling to keep up with enough material. This "hey, let's play D&D for a week" was a new thing and I wasn't really prepared. I wasn't running online yet (which would have helped), so I was scouring Firefly and the internet just to keep up with the demand. 

So one of the things I picked up was Death In The Cornfields, which I was able to download. It's a short side quest, and isn't really enough material for an entire session by itself, but it makes for an interesting side adventure. 

It's basically a bleak, rural village where the characters end up stumbling upon a tragic situation where a family must deal with their belief that their son will become a vampire. 

Honestly, when I first looked it over, I wondered what I was missing. There wasn't much to it. It was basically a rather contrived short story and there's not much for the players to do other than observe the events unfolding. 

Don't get me wrong, it's still more interesting for what I'd call an "overnight encounter" than, say, your basic "players are set upon by giant spiders while they are trying to sleep" scenario. But only barely. And the story is just sort of pointlessly depressing. So to be honest, when I got finished with messing around with it, it wasn't the same adventure. 

My players are very much into hands-on stuff in their games. So instead of just presenting the events as written, I re-wrote the story and the objective. 

Upon reflection, I didn't need the module for this. I guess it just jump-started the idea. 

Anyway, so the "vampire" had been cursed and the way to remove this curse and save him and the village was to find three artifacts that had been lost. I don't remember what the artifacts were, but it doesn't matter. I wrote a series of rhyming riddle verses to hit at where the artifacts might be hidden. Then I went out in the backyard and hid actual items in the areas the riddles referenced. 

One was hidden in the edge of the woods, where they encountered twig blights and had to fight them (we went back inside for the combat rounds). One was hidden in a large bush of lavender growing in my herb garden. And one was in a "broken down, abandoned Gurrish caravan" (yeah, no kidding, I have the base of a dismantled Romany style vardo in my yard). So the kids spent some time hunting in real time for the artifacts. They found them, participated in the cleansing ritual, and saved the boy and the village. 

Which was a heck of a lot more fun and less depressing then the story as written. 

So I guess this post is less about Death In The Cornfields and more about homebrewing a quick sidequest on the fly.