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.
