Traveler’s Adventures – A Stranger’s Funeral

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Scenario by Muqarnas Games

A STRANGER’S FUNERAL is a self-contained, atmosphere-driven Sword & Sorcery one-shot adventure designed for 3 to 5 characters of 1st to 3rd level, playable in 3 to 4 hours. Fully compatible with the 5th Edition Systems Reference Document (SRD 5.1).

The characters arrive in a village in time for a funeral. They do not know the dead man. The village acts as if they do. Saying otherwise, they quickly understand, would be dangerous.

Deep within a secluded valley, three days’ ride from the nearest town, lies the tiny settlement of Drev. When the adventurers cross its thresholds mid-afternoon, they accidentally walk directly into a slowly moving funeral procession for a man named Wolt. Before they can speak, the village elder, Hett, steps forward and greets them publicly as Wolt’s long-awaited, mourning friends from afar.

The truth is entirely fabricated. Wolt was a quiet, reliable resident who built the very walls of Drev over the past eleven years, but he carried a dark past. Before arriving, he was a city courier who exposed a massive corporate fraud operated by a ruthless merchant consortium. Eleven years later, the consortium’s investigators have finally tracked his courier route to this valley.

To protect the memory of a man they loved and shield their tiny community from corporate retribution, the forty-three people of Drev have staged a permanent fiction: Wolt was merely a peaceful, lifelong local peasant who died of natural fever. When the consortium’s cold, professional agents arrive that very evening to systematically search the village for Wolt’s missing documentation, the party is thrust into a tensed, high-stakes diplomatic bottleneck where they must defend a village that lied to them.

Key Features:

• A Psychological, Non-Combat Thriller: Step away from traditional dungeon brawls. Engage in a highly nuanced scenario where your primary weapons are observation, social credibility, and tactical truth-telling.
• The Anatomy of a Lie: Explore a setting where the grief is real but the ceremony is entirely staged. Interrogate a devastated, oblivious stonemason apprentice, a highly uncomfortable village healer, and a clunky-lying miller to piece together the real conspiracy.
• A Haunting Absente Profile: Though Wolt is already buried in the eastern field, his presence is felt across every room. Scour his clean, meager living quarters in the mill house to uncover a hidden, waxed canvas cache holding his final ledger notes.
• Tense, Conversational Stakes: Confront Rel and Vorn, the corporate recovery agents who arrive with polite, business-like efficiency to search the town. Use deep insight to target Vorn’s visible moral discomfort or feed Rel highly specific historical metadata to convince them the search is mathematically redundant.
• No Clean Moral Closures: The adventure places the ultimate choice in the players’ hands. Decide whether to expose Wolt’s true identity to his grieving proteges, hand over his original personal confessions to the corporate agents, or hide his final gold savings to slip away cleanly into the night.

Traveler’s Adventures – A Stranger’s Funeral is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.

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