This is an entry to the Battleborn Quest request as referenced by @battleborn here and here.

This is my first go ever at trying to design a quest and I wasn't sure how much detail to include. I'm also very new to Steem and I don't see any way to hide spoilers, so if you don't want to ruin the story, you'll want to stop reading once you reach the end of the overview.

I didn't name any characters or classes and so it's a bit vague in that respect but it came together nicely as a story. Or maybe it just seems that way because I just put the whole thing together when I should have been going off and sleeping.

Overview with minor spoilers

You've been hired by a wealthy family to steel a particularly titled work of art from a local gallery that has advertised they will be showing it. You don't meet any of the nobles directly and the task is handed out by a steward at the residence of the noble doing the hiring.

The original piece was not officially commissioned and there is no certificate or receipt to prove ownership and therefore no legal recourse for recovering the artwork. The steward assures you it is owned by the family and that it must be recovered before the gallery puts it on display.

The quest will ultimately land the players at a very large estate that is owned by an eccentric noble whose fortune was obtained through inheritance, but little is actually known of the noble. The estate is tremendously large, surrounded by walls and featuring one gated entryway. The mansion in the center features an enclosed courtyard with a hedge maze and a vault at the center. Construction was handled by different teams of local contractors working on different sections in shifts, so it may be possible for the players to get more information about different parts of the estate, but not everything is known by any one guild. The rumors about what different teams were responsible for building are numerous, but nothing can be confirmed by any one person. Each team working on the project was not allowed by the contract to discuss any of the construction with anyone outside of their own team, so naturally this fueled even more rumors.

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Serious Spoilers

Don't read beyond this point unless you're ready for some serious spoilage.

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At the Noble’s home (spoilers)

• The steward does not revel it, but the piece is a nude portrait of the Noble’s daughter, done with the consent of the subject, but definitely not that of the family. The existence of the portrait was revealed to the family after the daughter ended the relationship.

• Players may or may not notice the subject of the paining in the family portraits, or perhaps with local knowledge of politics they may know who the members of the family are.

At the gallery (spoilers)

• The piece held by the gallery is a forgery, desperately commissioned by local riff raff to hastily cover the absence of the stolen piece because of some sort of political implication of the piece.

• The forgery is quite poor, and that's why it isn't on display.

• If the players realize it's a forgery, they can get more information from the curator.

• If the players are caught, they might be able to bargain with the curator to attempt to recover the piece for the curator. Alignment considerations here as they would need to decide if they're deceiving the curator or if they're double crossing the noble that hired them.

• The curator can reveal that the actual piece is likely locked away by a local private collector and direct the players to the estate.

The mansion (spoilers)

• The owner of the mansion is shrouded in mystery, people assume the owner is a man, but no one actually knows.
• The owner is suspected to be some sort of magic practitioner.
• People do not know the source of the owner's wealth.
• There has not been any noticeable activity at the mansion for what the towns folk believe to have been weeks, but they don't really know.
• The owner is rich and eccentric, so the real portrait is kept in the middle of an expensive magic vault.
• The vault is in the middle of the hedge maze in the enclosed courtyard of the mansion.
• The place is a series of vast libraries that are trapped with some particularly nasty spells that are supposed to drop intruders into a dungeon of unspeakable terrors.
• The traps need to be up-kept or they start to leak.
• Generally this would just mean that the traps lose effectiveness, but due to some magical experimentation that has gone awry, the portals aren't just leaking magic, they're leaking creatures.
• Minor twisted creatures, dire rats, on up to whatever will be a fun challenge for the players are getting through the leaks. In whatever abundance would be challenging and fun for the players.
• The owner is trapped in the vault with no way to get help, instead they just wait for the magic on the traps to bleed off to nothing.
• The inner vault is really a sort of retreat for study, but its assumed to be a vault full of treasures. The owner has it stocked so that they really can last there safely for a few weeks.
• The players can bargain with the owner of the mansion to provide safe escort, or if the magic is nearly depleted, just to clear the grounds of any remaining pests, in exchange for the painting.

Bringing it all together (more spoilers)

The owner of the mansion was having a relationship with the daughter of the noble. The painting was produced as a celebration of that love. The owner of the mansion was willing to trade that painting for an artifact that would let them wield real magic. The purveyor of strange and expensive goods didn't actually want the painting, they just liked the idea of turning the lovers against each other by dangling an offer the other could not pass up. The seller then arranged to sell the painting to a local gallery for a mere pittance in order to leak information of the sale back to the daughter. This sparked the breakup, the parents hiring the players to recover the portrait, and started the original quest. One of the feats of magic that the estate owner attempted was to create a portal, reach through, and retrieve the painting from the gallery, which resulted in the artifact shattering and causing the ripple that made the wards go haywire and trap the owner in their own home.