Greyhawk: Shadows of the Horned Society

Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild

Greyhawk: Shadows of the Horned Society — Nerull's Chosen Rise Again

The wars are over. The Horned Society is broken. That is what everyone believes.

They are wrong.

This is a full adventure module for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, set in the World of Greyhawk and designed for four to five characters of 3rd through 5th level. It runs 8 to 12 hours across multiple sessions — long enough to matter, tight enough to finish.

The premise is simple and old: evil is patient. The Horned Society, that dread coalition of mercenaries, death priests, and the genuinely devout followers of Nerull the Reaper, did not die in the Greyhawk Wars. A single survivor — a priest known as the Deacon of the Black Scythe — has spent years rebuilding in silence. Now he is ready. The Ritual of Nerull's Veil requires nine sacrifices, nine nights, and one location consecrated to the god of death. He has all three. Your players have days to stop him.

What makes this adventure worth running is not the dungeon at the end. It is the road there. The characters must move through a refugee settlement where the Society is recruiting the desperate and the broken. They must decide how far to go undercover to get the information they need. They travel through the Horned Lands — burned farmsteads, cold silences, the smell of something wrong on the wind — before they ever see the fortress walls of Var-Khal.

The final encounter is a split-party race: someone fights the Deacon, someone closes the rift, someone gets the prisoner out. The clock is literal. If they are too slow, an avatar of Nerull arrives — and the adventure tells you exactly what to do with that.

Inside the module you will find five distinct acts of structured-but-flexible content, four named NPCs with full personality and secrets, three adventure hooks that can be combined or swapped, two custom magic items including the Harrower — a +1 dagger that vibrates near the undead — full Greyhawk lore primers for groups new to the setting, custom stat blocks for the Horned Society's ranks, a worked encounter table for overland travel, and detailed Dungeon Master guidance on pacing, infiltration, and scaling the final encounter for your specific table.

This is a Greyhawk adventure in the truest sense: morally serious, historically grounded in the setting's tragedy, and completely playable without any prior Greyhawk knowledge. The lore is context, not homework.

: $1.99