Hi there!
I come back with a nice plot idea!
In the last campaign, my DM let us find people travelling in the desert. It was an expedition sent by the Arch-Mage for investigate about some strange magical accidents. Our PCs joined the expedition, but 2 days after we realized that the people we met was evil and they weren't sent by the Arch-Mage, but by someone else (we haven't discovered it yet). We had a nice fight, we won, and found some papers in a box. Here come the genial idea: the DM really gave us about 7 papers. They were a previous group's notes about some different dungeons, maps of forests and inventories with notes about how to use some powerful magical items; and he burned them a little, put part of them in the water and also put some red paint on them. So that papers weren't completely readable because of that treatment but also because they were just notes written during a game session by another group. We continued our quest, we eventually found the other party's skeletons (very old) and other papers. The DM treated them like the others, but they were written in another alphabet (probably he wrote those papers with his computers and then he changed the normal letters with Greek letters). Obviously the mysterious papers contained vital information about traps, monsters and so on..., so we translated them (it took 1 hour and an half)
This adventure was really beautiful and it passioned all of us (we spent hours examining the papers... it was exciting!).
bye bye
Gabriele Ferri - fif3336@iperbole.bologna.it
Uh, sorry for my bad English! I'm sure I've made a lot of mistakes!