I recently ran a 4e campaign using the Fantasy Grounds VTT. My campaign was thematically titled
Venturing into the Vale and was set in the Nentir Vale. It involved a party meeting at my homebrewed Twenty League House, which if you know the Vale, is on the Trade Road about midway between Five League House and the Thunderspire.
The party has been sent a letter from Copernicus Jinx -Alchemist of Fallcrest- contracting them to adventure to the Necropolis of Andok Sur and retrieve a mysterious substance. The party was supposed to be receive a follow-up message from a courier, which would reveal what the substance is. Due to unforeseen events, said courier never arrives and part of the challenge -maybe even fun-
of the early adventuring is investigating and sleuthing out what the substance might be.
At that adventures conclusion, I had about 5 other locations around the Vale that the party could adventure to. Most of which are discovered through follow-up offers in letters from Copernicus Jinx. I homebrewed most of those, but 2 were pre-writtens that I found out about in some Points of Light document I stumbled upon. The best of my homebrews was a journey to the Temple of Yellow Skulls, which was a temple in one of the Abysal Plague novels.
The campaign was for a group that really likes playing 4e combat encounters, so the whole thing was combat heavy. They really didn't want to do a lot of social roleplay, so I went with the gimmick of a patron sending them a steady stream of offers. In some ways it resembled a hex crawl, but location crawl would probably be a better description - used the Journeying rules from Adventures in Middle Earth.
This is the map I created for the early campaign. There were lots of lairs and threats the party could stumble upon or seek out on their journey from 20 League Hose to the the Necropolis. So many points were revealed on that map and many encounters were fought.
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