A recent earthquake has unearthed a standing stone inscribed with cryptic ogham runes, unleashing an ancient curse upon a troubled village — and awakening the spirit of a long-dead tyrant.
Welcome to “The Unquiet Stone” 5E adventure! Within these pages, you’ll discover everything necessary to embark on this thrilling quest, complete with detailed descriptions of locations, encounters, NPCs and stat blocks, maps, and handouts.
This adventure also features a versatile and scalable system, allowing Game Masters to easily adjust the difficulty and complexity of encounters to suit their players’ preferences and skill levels. Whether you have a party of advanced players or beginners, you can tailor the challenges to ensure an exciting and engaging experience for everyone involved. The scalable system guides modifying creature statistics, making it simple to customize the adventure to fit your party’s level.
In “The Unquiet Stone,” a party of 4-6 characters (levels 5-7) arrives in Dunshelm, a village gripped by nightly terrors, spectral attacks, and a creeping blight that is killing crops and livestock. A recent earthquake unearthed a standing stone etched with ogham runes — the ancient seal of a druid conclave that bound the spirit of Abhartach, a legendary undead tyrant. With the seal broken, Abhartach’s corruption spreads, and a cult known as the Disciples of the Abyss races to bring him fully back to the material plane. The adventure is divided into three parts.
Part 1: Gathering Shadows
The players arrive in the eerily silent village of Dunshelm, its doors barricaded and its streets deserted. They meet with a worried village elder who recounts the spreading blight and the nightly spectral attacks since the earthquake. At the Unquiet Stone itself, a visiting scholar helps the players decipher a hidden message in the runes, confirming Abhartach’s awakening and pointing them toward an ancient Circle of Druids as the key to stopping him. The village’s one inn offers a brief respite — and a cultist spy’s ambush — and as night falls, the specters emerge to attack Dunshelm once more.
Part 2: The Cursed Wildlands
Venturing beyond Dunshelm into a forest twisted by necromantic blight, the players navigate corrupted terrain and face the restless, ruined things that now hunt there. Deep in the forest they find the Circle of Druids, a sanctuary where an archdruid offers guidance and crucial resources — but only to those who prove their respect for the natural balance. Earning that trust means defending a sacred ritual site against the corruption pressing in on it, and the path onward demands one last confrontation with a blighted guardian of the woods before the party reaches its destination.
Part 3: The Ancient Crypt
The players descend into a centuries-old crypt — Abhartach’s resting place — now crawling with Disciples of the Abyss, who have already completed a ritual to manifest the tyrant. The crypt’s many chambers present a gauntlet of escalating threats, from a stone guardian at the sealed entrance through trapped passages, animated dead, statue-bound spirits, and cultist patrols, all the way down to the necromantic heart of the place. There, Abhartach himself rises from his sarcophagus in a clash of necrotic power — and the party must find the way to strip the tyrant of his unnatural resilience and end his curse for good, restoring Dunshelm to life.
Release Date: 2024 Format: Digital (PDF)
Items Included
- The Unquiet Stone 5E (PDF)
- A B&W Printer-Friendly Version (PDF)
- Maps
- Illustrations (Generated with Midjourney)
- Monster Stat Blocks
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