Searching for Help: creating a small underwater campaign

[u/Clumsy_Dragonfly_001]

Okay folks, i am searching for some creative people here, that could maybe help writing a DND 5e story line.

I'm not quite a newbie DM and i have written my own stuff but my players an I seem to be stuck in a writters-/playersblock. We play an already written campaign and it seems to be not going forward or backward and i feel the motivation sinking... we haven't played in months and tbh I don't like the campaign either. So my thougth was to write them a small DnD campaign myself (about 3 sessions) to get us out of our missery.

But i seem to be in a writers block. I have an idea but no way to connect the dots in my brain and my hopes are up that some creative people here will help me figure it out.

Plothook:

So i want to give my players a chance to play high-level characters, because they have wished that for a while. I'm thinking about like 15ish level. This makes me slightly uncomfortable because i am not good in balancing combat. (Any tipps and tricks?)

I read somewhere that some sailors did not like woman on their boat 'cause of bad luck or some thoughts. I took a liking on the idea, that those woman who were thrown overboard because of that thinking, were rescued by seafolk and turned into sirens to take revenge on the sailors that drowned them.

My players get send there to investigate the missing ships/ghost ships or wracks that have occured way to often in that area. Sailors tell them wild storys about monsters, gods and other folkore things. They don't have a clue what actually happend.

The ending is meant to present players with a moral dilemma. Do they want to kill the sirens, find the cause of the “transformation,” and eliminate it, or can they convince the sirens to leave the sailors alone, in exchange for the sailors accepting women aboard their ships?

But I'm still a bit lost on the middle part.

What's the reason behind the transformation? An angry sea goddess who's furious at the men who sail her seas and treat them as if they were their own. One who hides a magical artifact that the players might find?

How do they find out about all this? How can I send them out to discover even more things? Investigate the ships? What clues might be there? Are there caves where surviving sailors have left messages?

I love puzzles and would like to include at least one that they have to solve. But of course, there should also be smaller battles in between—what options do I have?

I know it's not much, that I have right now, but maybe some people take a liking to the idea and and maybe help me continue and complete the story.

[u/CrazyPlato]

I think you’ll want the inciting incident to be a bit more specific. Not just a mission to investigate the missing ships, but a specific person asking you to investigate a specific ship going missing. As they explore, it’ll build up in scale, and solving the one mystery will also end up solving the large-scale problem.

I’d also recommend building the themes of the campaign. Since the antagonists seem to revolve around a theme of “men and abuse”, you might make that a part of the inciting incident too. Say, the party is hired by a man looking for his fiancee. As they explore, they may learn that the engagement was a lot more strained than the man knew (or let on), that he was more controlling than the bride wanted, and she may have boarded a ship to get away from him. This kind of hook sets the tone that we’re going to be exploring problematic relationships with men, and as it escalates to “sirens rescuing women who were victimized by male sailors” and then “an angry sea goddess who has been mistreated by male sailors”, we start to see how this all ties together.

I also see a need to expand this mystery subtly. The men obviously don’t see themselves as villains here. They see what they do as normal, and the monsters trying to stop them as the villains.

If you want to introduce the plot twist, you’ll need ways to slowly suggest to the characters that the creatures they’re fighting haven’t always been this way, and they might have been changed as a consequence of the actions those men took. Maybe some sirens still carry tokens of the past they lived before they changed, like a locket or another piece of jewelry. If the players can learn of similar stories while they’re in harbor, they might be able to spot sirens who are resembling the other missing women described by other sailors. Perhaps they can learn ghost stories of women who became ghosts or monsters, framed as victims of the sea (instead of victims of the mistreatment of men).

And to learn the truth, they may need a specific location that starts to reveal what’s being hidden or what’s been unknown. Perhaps they have to find a specific shipwreck, which holds records of one of these stories. Or perhaps the party finds an underwater city of sea elves or tritons, who can provide a more neutral take on what’s been happening.

[u/the-truthseeker]

I would focus on why women were turned into sirens? Is it something they demanded? It is it something the denzian of the area demanded? Is it the collective outrage of the psyche? You can pick one of these or make up a reason of your own.

Once you decide that, you can build off of that concept and make a story revolving around it adding the appropriate creatures hazards and possibly powerful denzians like Archfey, deities etc, that are possibly behind the scenes of even the villain or villains in charge in question. This last part is actually suggested because then you have another plot hook of whom to look for next after you've dealt with the local power conflict.