Temple Trouble – Steal this Adventure

Location: A temple at least half a day’s travel from the party’s current location.

Situation: The normally unassuming and quiet priests of a nearby temple have started to cause incidents in the neighboring town.  Their once-a-week visits have been nothing but unwelcome.

Problem: The villagers have become scared of the temple’s  priests, clerics, and acolytes, as they have started to threaten them with eternal damnation and “pain upon this land” if they do not start “donating” to the temple.

Tasks: The players need to

1. Protect the villagers
2. Find out why the priests have gone greedy/evil
3. Find out who is heading the priests
4. Find out how to stop them

Things to explore:

1. The party may need to speak to several people in town to get the full picture of what the priests are doing, and how much of a change it is for them.
2. The party may need to do a skill challenge in which they move for control over the village’s small guardsmen, so that they can set up proper protection for the villagers.
3. The party may find that the priests have fallen under the control of an evil necromancer/wizard/demon/devil/magic crystal, or whatever flavor of bad guy you choose. Of course, they will need to neutralize it.
4. The party may find that the priests have come under the new leadership of an ambitious priest that feels he is doing the right thing.  They may prophesy the end of the world or a large war, and only be trying to “prepare” the town for its own protection.
5. The party may find that the temple leaders are buying off the village leader – he looks the other way while the temple acolytes sneak in and steal small amounts of valuable goods from the village.  The priests then sell these goods to other towns for inflated prices (the goods can be rare and only available in a few places, one of them being the village).  The bad behavior of the priests is a red-herring, designed to keep the focus on their zealot-like activities, and away from the thefts.