Darkon is a tough nut to crack.
Possibly the largest of the Domains of Dread (other than crazy cosmic ones like Klorr,) Darkon is also gradually wasting away because Azalin (seemingly) accomplished what Strahd could not - escaping his position as a Darklord and leaving his domain.
The problem for the people who live there is that, having failed as a domain, it's now starting to fall apart. While some would-be Darklords (unaware of the cost of taking on such a role) vie to succeed Azalin, I don't know that any of them are likely to do so.
In theory, eventually, Darkon will just vanish, its people evaporating and becoming one with the Mists (perhaps those with souls will go on to be reincarnated elsewhere in the Domains).
Darkon is so vast that you could do an entire campaign set there, but we're here for a short, 1-4 session adventure. The challenge here is that we have an embarrassment of options in front of us.
I think for our adventure, we're going to try to look at the destruction of Darkon in microcosm. I think, to let the horror really land, we're going to go bleak.
I've recently (as detailed in this blog) been re-playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game begins with a stark and painful scene, in which the people of the city of Lumiere gather for the Gommage, where everyone above an ever-shrinking age limit dissolve away, nothing remaining but red rose petals. Each time the age limit goes down (once a year,) anyone of that age or higher is lost. The horror is both this moment of approaching death, but also the way that the culture has just had to sort of adapt to this and normalize it.
I don't know that we're going to crib this word-for-word, but I think that the party comes to a town where people are spontaneously dissolving away. I don't think this is one of the major cities - it's a somewhat remote town in the Mistlands, maybe north of Maykle. Our village, we'll call it Vadrikar, was once one of a series of farming hubs in the region, connected to similar villages by a network of roads.
One by one, as the Mists encroached, the other villages were swallowed up, and nothing but eery silence and the consuming Shroud to be seen.
But Vadrikar was saved - a mendicant priest from the church of Ezra in Il Aluk, Father Gregor Talbot, arrived and set up a number of blessed runestones that would hold the Shroud (as the now-ravenous Mists in Darkon are known) at bay. And for years, the stones, blessed daily by the elderly priest, have kept the Shroud from approaching at all.
However, a month ago, something bizarre and terrifying began to happen: villagers, in the midst of their daily routine, would suddenly begin to dissolve, their bodies collapsing into heaps of black ash. And it seems to be accelerating - only one person "departed," (as the villagers euphemistically describe it) the first week. Two did on the second and third week. But this past week, there were three, and as the party gets to town, they see a fourth.
The general opinion, espoused especially by the village tavernkeeper, a burly human woman named Tabitha, is that Father Talbot's wards are failing. Talbot himself is sequestered at the rectory of the local church. He was already an old man when he arrived at the village, and his health seems to be failing.
The party can investigate the runestones, most of which are placed in barrows out around the village where the ashes of the dead are interred (they favor cremation in Darkon because bodies rise in undeath).
In each barrow, incorporeal undead can be found - specters, shadows, poltergeists, maybe wraiths if the party's a bit higher-level. The undead are maddened and incoherent in their ramblings, and visually, they look bizarre - great big holes where their faces should be (here I'm taking some inspiration from the appearance of the Curator in Expedition 33.)
It becomes clear to the party that these beacons seem to be drawing the undead here, the souls rooted to them, but as the spirits are defeated, they seem to fall horizontally toward the village itself, as if gravity turned 90 degrees for them (and, you know, they suddenly were affected by gravity).
Triangulating the spirits' bearings will be one way the party can discover that all of them are going toward the Rectory.
Going to see Father Talbot, they find him lying in bed with deadly poison dripping from his lips. He shows all signs of being dead, but using something like Divine Sense or Detect Evil and Good will show that he, very faintly, is actually undead.
Searching his belongings, they'll find some mad writings - Father Talbot writes, with a regretful tone, that he has been able to find only one longterm solution to the Shroud: That he must gather the people of these villages into his "ark," and when it is full, cast it through the Mists to arrive in some happier place, where their souls will live on within him.
In fact, Talbot is in the process of becoming a Lich, and his efforts to "save" the people of Vadrikar have actually been to feed their souls into his phylactery, which now sits hidden in the basement of the church rectory. The party can make their way into the hidden chamber in the basement that holds it, a reliquary holding some of Talbot's bones (we'll say maybe he was always missing a finger). It's guarded by some challenging undead creature - depending on the level of the party, maybe a Wight or a Revenant.
The downer ending we get here is that while the party is fighting the guardian, Talbot completes his transformation. He steps down into the basement, and offers forgiveness to the party, who he thinks simply do not understand the "sacrifice" he has made for these people. He takes his soul jar and teleports away, not taking any offensive action against the party. When the party emerges from the rectory, Vadrikar has been wiped out, every person in it reduced to ash.
Now, ok, a proscribed ending - and one in which the players lose - might not sit well with your players. I honestly think this would be a very solid kick-off for a campaign. Maybe Talbot becomes the big bad that the party is chasing, or at least a major antagonist. But lest we feel like this is too rail-roady, we might give the players some opportunities to save the village.
Perhaps, for example, we have Talbot's lichy ambitions revealed earlier. He surrounds the Rectory with a Wall of Force or similar magic, but the party can disrupt his soul-siphoning runestones by destroying them at the Barrows, forcing a confrontation with the old priest while he's still mortal.
The Priest stat block is CR 2, so you could use that if the party was just level 1 or 2. You might still want to use that for him, but make sure that there are a lot of undead monsters between the party and him, because he won't last super long. I could also imagine giving him the Mage stat block, but understand that that's going to be a really serious fight before tier 2 - which might be fine. In fact, I'd be tempted to make him an Archmage given that he's about to become a Lich, but in that case, he's going to obliterate a low-level party. As such, I might play up the idea that he truly holds no ill will toward the party: the Archmage stat block mostly has offensive spells, but using Counterspell and maybe giving them an upcast Hold Person (say 7th level, which would almost certainly hit the entire party) could let him overwhelm the party without slaughtering them.
Next up, we'll figure something out for the deadly masquerades of Dementlieu.
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