Cult of Undeath Front #3: The Bitter wood of the Bitterwood or something

Here's the Cult of Undeath 5x5 Front as it currently stands:

Front #1: Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, etc. Already done.

The Shadow Over Inns... uh.. .Eltdown meets Against the Cult of the Reptile God(dess). Already done. 

Ghouls and other "savage" proto-vampires are also coming out of the swamp in the other direction, westwards into the Bitterwood, and are attacking villages, hamlets, and even hunting lodges frequented by wealthy and powerful. This will replace the werewolf and/or swamp witch idea that I had previously, which was loosely based on one of the adventures of the old Carrion Crown adventure path. Y'know, who whole reason Cult of Undeath was originally created.  This may replace the vampire threat, since I'm going to be treating ghouls as savage proto-vampires, probably ruled by vampires or at least near vampires, not unlike Age of Sigmar's Flesh Courts vampires.

The Frankenstein monster stuff in Mittermarkt. This is the sad and tragic fate of one of Alpon von Lechfeld's academic correspondents, and important clues to the murder need to be found here... while also dealing with the obvious problems of a rampaging yet cunning monster. (I already have this in Front #1! But that's OK; this is the one I'm going to replace with my X-files front.)

A mundane threat of highwaymen and bandits making travel between the Copper Hills and Mittermarkt (via Eltdown) dangerous; not to mention all of the crap going on in Eltdown mentioned above. Maybe this one can get up into the Sabertooth Mountains itself, and at least have a different environmental theme too.

Feral vampire

This front is probably best "started" by assuming that the PCs need something to handle the problems from the other fronts. If there is a monster that needs magical assistance to defeat (and there are, in plenty of the above) then Gaskarfells is the obvious place to go. Maybe even to stop the Werner Otten Beast outside of Mittrmarkt, which I alluded to earlier is generally not very vulnerable to regular combat. I may need to have a look at the fronts I've already done; I feel like Front #1 has half of the original plan embedded in it. I may be a bit too scatterbrained to be doing these fronts in a logical sense, and I need to go back and rewrite them once I get them more done. That said, so the PCs go to Gaskarfells, looking for some magic items that will help them handle the Otten-beast. While in Gaskarfells, they will find that the town is in a bit of trouble, and is somewhat under siege. Ghouls and even proto-vampires are assailing anyone coming or going from the city. Even the farmers are struggling, and most are now living inside city limits. The pseudomage necromancers of Gaskarfells have redirected some of the undead workers to work on the farms so that the city isn't starved out by these attacks, but that, of course, impacts the production of magic items, which is Gaskarfells main economic activity.

What exactly is going on, and what's driving these attacks? Well, there are ghouls, of course. Where else does a proto-vampire come from? These ghouls are mostly coming from the western edge of the Eltdown Fens, and have "seeped" into the Bitterwood both because they're drawn by more plentiful prey, and are drawn by the corruption of the fellshard ore, although this is subconscious. The leader of the ghouls is not just a proto-vampire, he's now advanced to becoming an actual vampire, but because he's a feral one, he's completely outside of the hierarchy of Timischburg's vampire population. This individual, the feral vampire, is Velgar Tzarnik and he has a small hierarchy of proto-vampire lieutenants; Rask, Kroven, Morvak, and Volach.

However, there is a minor noble vampire in Gaskarfells already, and he's not amused at the rise of this feral vampire attempting to destroy Gaskarfells, which is an important strategic resource for the vampires and the human nobles alike (remember, that the vampires operate kind of like a Deep State. Most of the nobility at least suspect their existence, if not actually know it, but they don't really interact directly with it. Plenty of people in Timischburg think that the idea that a cabal of vampire deep state agents actually run the country is a wild conspiracy theory. It just happens to be true.) This vampire is Dietmar von Hohenstahl and he could actually be a patron of sorts for the PCs, since he needs some help ending the threat of Tzarnik's attacks on shipments out of the town.

Of course, the head of the pseudomage/necromancer/artificer's guild is actually less happy about an overbearing vampire noble (who's being coy about being a vampire, but this guy knows) in "his" town attempting to run things his way when Gaskarfells was running smoothly without him before than he is about the feral vampire attacking from the countryside. This is Roderich von Szarad, and he's a powerful mover and shaker in his own right, without being a vampire (in fact, he's researching turning himself into a lich instead!) Although none of these three is a "good guy"; but what's best for the regular folks in town? That's up to the PCs to decide, I suppose. Probably letting von Szarad get back to running things the way he used to. But maybe taking him out so a successor who isn't so obviously crazy that he wants to become a lich is the way to go? This three way power struggle means that either of the two in town could be seeking to have the PCs as agents against not only the feral vampire and his ghouls, who have increased in numbers tremendously in the last few weeks (or so it seems).

Potential sites of interest: A) a camp or lair or something in the woods on the swamp boundary where Tzarnik and his ghouls are.  B) von Hohenstahl's lair in a manor in town, or at least near town. C) the necromancer guild house, where von Szarad is trying to turn himself into a lich. D) deep lairs under the city where Orridathis, the Watcher Beneath the Clay, made somewhat self-aware or at least awake by the corruption of the fellshard ore. The undead are being drawn subconsciously by this Elder Evil wanting to essentially birth itself into "undead fullness", which is the real threat lurking behind the feral vampires and the cultured one both, as well as part of what drove von Szarad to undead related madness.

Anyway, this entire front's write-up needs to be seen as a draft that's subject to even more revision than my last one when I do the supercut consolidated post on it.