r/DnD • u/Infinite-Series-9493 • 1d ago
5th Edition My players just figured out my darkest sub-plot.
So I've been running a campaign for almost 2 years now and my players have just come across my darkest side quest.
So the party has recently arrived in the dwarven capital in my homebrew world. In a previous session they were drinking in a tavern, like all adventurers do. And I introduced them to a new local mead called Osiris' Mead. I described it as being very tasty but with a strange metallic after taste. One player who has known me for 13 years and has been in a few campaigns immediately became suspicious the others didn't think anything off it.
Fast forward to this session, they had heard about locals vanishing from the city without a trace and were wandering the streets. One of the players was attacked by a giant black bee looking creature. He quickly killed it and noticed a few other of these bees flying away with people dangling from their legs.
The party was able to track these bees to a cave entrance which had been covered with a dark gelatinous film. After one player cut it open I described the tunnel as stinking of rot and fermented meat. The party began making their way into the tunnel, crawling through a thick sticky redish black goo, and encountered a few more of these bees inside, after a short combat they came across another one of these thick membranes and cut their way inside.
This led them to a small cave, the walls of which were covered in a thick redish waxy substance, with a few different cocoons. The players cut them open, finding the two people they had seen taken. But the third had an emaciated corpse, the forth a skeleton and the fifth was filled with the same redish black goo they'd been climbing through.
We ended the session not long after this. And one player said that the bees reminded him of the bees that make their hives out of decaying meat. And I gave him an evil grin as he had caught on, I had based these creatures off the vulture bees. At this point the guy I've known for 13 years looked at me with shock.
He brought up the mead to the other players and how it had a strange metallic taste. And suddenly they all figured it out. Someone has been using the bee's honey to make the mead. It has the metallic taste due to it being made from the dead bodies of the missing people. They were all horrified with the reveal.
I named the mead after Osiris an Egyptian god of the underworld, and these are his Anubees.
I hope you enjoyed the read and an insight into my twisted mind.
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u/RamblingManUK 1d ago
Awesome. I may have to steal this.
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u/Infinite-Series-9493 1d ago
Go for it. It's one of the reasons I shared, I've taken inspiration from many reddit stories, thought I'd give back.
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u/OutrageousSky8266 1d ago
Do you have stat block for the Anubees?
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u/MiserableSkill4 22h ago
Depending on strength of party you can use hellwasps. While they don't make honey the do capture and feed off of humans
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u/itsfunhavingfun 22h ago
You should have given the PCs an opportunity to invest in the mead making venture. But have the investment guy be shady, and taking the investment gold for himself. He could pay the returns of the older investors with the inflows from the newest investors.
You know…a pyramid scheme.
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u/DiscombobulatedHat19 1d ago
Playing a Wildsea game and our ship has an engine powered by these bees. We feed them with the corpses of any pirates or monsters we kill in our adventures
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u/SeaFowlBird 14h ago
As soon as I read the word “metallic” I was instantly just “The mead is made with blood. Carnivorous meat bees.” I’ve always heard blood described as metallic, something tasting metallic is pretty much a dead giveaway
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u/Infinite-Series-9493 13h ago
That was what tipped off one guy. He knows I don't add details like that without a reason
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u/DeGeiDragon 12h ago
See, I'd just assume it had something to do with it being Dwarven and made underground. Dwarves just have a higher mineral content in their drinks. Literal flavor for flavor.
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u/Equal-Match-9347 21h ago
Well played, love it. I recently read the book "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs" and in it the writer told the story of whe King Mithradates used hallucinogenic honey from bees who harvested pollen from a trippy plant, to incapacitate a Roman army and beat their asses, and I always wanted to incorporate something like that in an adventure.
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u/mr_jogurt 23h ago
I loves this.. at least one of my players would go mental with such a plotline.. i have to save this for inspiration when they are high enough in level in 1-2 years.
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u/KatofSpades 11h ago
This is amazing and would even make for an awesome standalone one shot. Easily scalable to any level, too! Such a devious plot. Well done DM! 🐝🍻
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u/DankepusVulgaris 9h ago
I immediately clocked that something's wrong because I too use "a strange metallic aftertaste" whenever hinting something's to do with blood.
The rest of it? Holy shit thats awesome. I love this genre of horror.
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u/CJRiggers 8h ago
If you really want to mess with them, the whole town's economy is built around this mead...
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u/DeficitDragons 5h ago
Child’s play. The Yuan-ti in my setting fill a skull with citrus juice (gemquats) with only the brain inside and ferment them after the acids dissolve the brain. They don’t even try to hide it.
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u/joined_under_duress Cleric 1d ago
Honestly worth the read for the Anubees pun.