So I'm in the process of writing my Dark Treasury AS&SH/Labyrinth Lord cross-over campaign and thought I'd share this musically inspired encounter.  The adventure itself, as described elsewhere on this board, is essentially a sandbox style fetch quest.  So to provide some connections between the main encounter locations, I'm creating a mass campaign random encounter chart that includes random encounters, natural and unnatural weather events, clues, helpful NPC interactions, appearances by the various factions in the campaign, and mini side quests.  Like many of you, I often incorporate pop culture, especially musical, references into my game.  This is one of the latter, tied to a side quest.

A small, remote village has been plagued for time by a pair of manticores.  So along come a trio of rather snobbish bards, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, by name.  They assure the locals that they can drive the beasts away.  After securing a hefty advance on their hefty fee, they proceed to go to the monsters' lair.  They then perform a long and enormously complex musical ballad, full of references to pirates, and ancient witches, and cities and places no one has heard of, augmented with dancing lights, walls of fog, etc.  Sure enough, the manticores are driven off.  The trio collects the remainder of their hefty sum and departs.

A few months later, however, the manticores return and they are more cruel and violent than ever.  This is around the time when the PCs show up....

P.S.--I actually like ELP for the most part, but this idea just came to me last night when browsing old rock videos on youtube.