The Murkmire Malevolence - Keys from the Golden Vault

The Murkmire Malevolence. An Adventure for 1st-Level Characters Unbeknownst to anyone but a disgraced academic, the Varkenbluff Museum of Natural History is in grave danger. Archaeologists at a nearby dig site recently unearthed a curiosity: the Murkmire Stone. This object is actually an eldritch creature's egg, and it's about to hatch. The characters must infiltrate the museum, steal the egg, and return it to Dr. Cassee Dannell to be neutralized before it releases an eldritch horror. Adventurers navigate around one of the more fearsome exhibits in the Varkenbluff Museum of Natural History Adventure Background Dr. Cassee Dannell, a brilliant academic, long ago learned to hide her interest in the occult. She instead built a career gaining expertise in the peoples and cultures of the region surrounding Varkenbluff, continuing her occult research in secret. By age twenty-four, Dr. Dannell had earned her doctorate in anthropology from Varkenbluff University, a prestigious institution in her home city. Her ability to connect local archaeological objects with their cultural context was unrivaled, so after her graduation, Dr. Dannell became a Varkenbluff faculty member and field scientist, accompanying the university's archaeology crews on digs in the area. On a recent expedition into the nearby Murkmire, the archaeologists unearthed a strange object. Light green, opaque, and with a gemstone-like sheen, this ovoid stone was covered in strange furrows. The stone seemed ritualistic in nature, but it matched no recorded historical practices, and no one could identify its composition. The more Dr. Dannell studied it, the more she became convinced this object, which the archaeologists dubbed the Murkmire Stone, was not created by any known civilization-and might be dangerous. Dr. Dannell tried to convince the dig's archaeologists to isolate the Murkmire Stone until she could learn more about it, but word of the discovery spread quickly. When the Varkenbluff Museum of Natural...