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Sorry for the wall of text but I’m really struggling with my storyline. I can fill in any gaps if needed. This is what’s known by the players: - Henry’s Heroes was an incredibly tight-knit party of adventurers approx. 100 years ago. - Vibram the Dwarf betrayed them leading to Nikki Eyes death. This occurred in what she called “a dank hole” as she died. - Fingers McGraw went insane with grief and rage, left and was never seen again (wrestling turk’s great-grandfather). - Henry Nipples and Sweet-Lips the halfling searched for Vibram for years, until old age caught up with them and Sweet-Lips died. Henry returned to the town where they all met and buried him on his sister’s farm (halfling rogue’s great-great-uncle). - Henry intended to carry on his search, but couldn’t do it. He still lives in the town and the players know and like him. He’s a half-elf and a drunk. Separately: - The Black Spider is controlling all kinds of brigandry in the area. The players have guessed correctly that he wants to keep people away from the lost mine. They know he’s a drow (only one of them knows what a drow is but nm). - the dwarf that employed them to come here is missing, he has a map to the mine. The story has it that he is held prisoner at a castle under the control of the Black Spider but the players don’t know this as a solid fact. - Storyline goes “rescue the dwarf from the castle, learn where the mine is, learn his brothers are being held there by the Black Spider, go kill him and reclaim the mine, end”. I have three locations left for them to visit - a ruined town with a baby dragon, the goblinoid castle where the dwarf is, and the lost mine itself. They already know where the mine is so don’t need the dwarf map. Things I can’t work out: - why Vibram betrayed the heroes if they were such a tight-knit bunch of dudes. - what form this betrayal took, bearing in mind it needs to kill Nikki Eyes (but give her a chance for final words), let the rest of the Heroes get out with her body, and allow Vibram to get away. - if the dwarf that employed my party is Vibram, what is he doing back in the area now? Why does he have a map to the mine and what does he want there? Is he working with the Black Spider or against him as per the book? - If that dwarf isn’t Vibram, then where is he and what’s he doing? It would be nice if whatever caused him to betray the Heroes included a “for 100 years” clause as it would link the betrayal to the current era, and also perhaps give a reason he’s in action now. Also, he could always be the Black Spider; I can easily explain away someone saying he was a drow. Can anyone please give me some suggestions to start bringing this all together? We’ve got a session on Friday where they will probably reach the castle and I don’t want to set more plot in stone without knowing where I’m going.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:22
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The betrayal could easily have happened in the mine itself, Vibram wanted to make off with some especially powerful artifact and Nikki specifically got in his way, so she was maimed in a scuffle and bled out in that "hole in the ground." Why he's returning? The artifact's power is tied to the mine, and/or now the Black Spider is a threat to it. Maybe it needs to be renewed once a century and he's coming up on the anniversary of the betrayal. This leaves room for him to be the Black Spider if you want to combine the characters.
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Dec 13, 2017 20:47
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The Black Spider blackmailed Vibrum (gambling debts, could be his or a family member's, depending on how sympathetic you want him to be) into getting some artifact that the group was hunting, and when Nikki confronted him about it, he stabbed her and ran off while the others tried to save her. Then he was forced to accept the Spider's "protection" to hide from his former friends. He held onto the map in part to try to hide his shame, but also because he hoped that there might be something else there that he could use to either buy his freedom or maybe even get his revenge on the spider for putting him in that position so long ago. Him hiring the party was part of his attempt to psych himself up for the return. But, now the Spider's found out, so he's going to sell him off for harboring disloyal fantasies. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 21:06
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What if Vibram is thousands of years old and kept alive solely by a spell spun by the Black Spider? In order to keep the spell working, every 100 years the Black Spider needs to toss "fresh blood spilled from a true hero" into some portal/lake of magical goop hidden in the mines. And so, Vibram has been luring adventurers to the Black Spider in the mines for ages (Henry's Heroes was the last batch of heroes, but there were many others before them!). Why doesn't the black spider just do it himself? Maybe, using the same spell, he's now so old - hundreds of thousands of years - that he can't even leave the mines or else he'll disintegrate in the sunlight. And so, he has a lackey (Vibram) do it in exchange for semi-eternal life. Polo-Rican fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 21:27
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Vibram found something terrible in the mines, and it changed him. He has since lost it, or it has been stolen. He believes The Black Spider has it. He will do anything to get it back. Twist: There is no item, he just believes there is because of the side effects of a charm (or something) spell. Twist Twist: A charm spell cast by none other than The Black Spider! (crash of thunder, divers alarums) 3(Twist): There is an item, something he already had that allowed him to partially resist the charm (8(Twist)/2): The item has since been lost but is vital to the PCs success. Return of the living twist: The item also has a different curse. e: The curse reverses the greatest virtue of the item's bearer, thus Vibram's loyalty to the group (or friendship with the group) was inverted. The real bad guy is a former good guy who's currently holding the item. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 21:54
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Sanford posted:Sorry for the wall of text but I’m really struggling with my storyline. I can fill in any gaps if needed. This is what’s known by the players: It sounds a lot like Nikki's death took place in the mine itself, so maybe the original party, Vibram included, found something of great value down there -- but something with a terrible downside that was enough to drive a wedge between a tight-knit bunch of dudes. My suggestion: The mine was abandoned because it accidentally tunnelled into a chamber connected to the Underdark. Specifically, the mine now connects to the dungeon where a powerful mindflayer is imprisoned. The mindflayer greatly wishes to return to the underdark and wreak horrible revenge on the city of drow (one of whom is Black Spider) who imprisoned it. Henry's Heroes found the mindflayer. While imprisoned, it could still talk; it was willing to swear an oath that it would never return to the surface if Henry's Heroes freed it, and they believed that it would be forced to keep to that oath. Vibram believed that the party should carry out the ritual to free it: Vibram has a grudge against drow, and argued that if the bindings broke of their own accord then the mindflayer would be under no compulsion to steer clear of the surface once it was done enacting its revenge. The rest of the party believed that they should go away, level up some, and come back with the power to re-seal or kill the mindflayer. The rift was enough to split the party, and both sides came to believe that members of the party were being influenced by the mindflayer. At that point, the Black Spider's drow showed up to kill everybody, everybody got separated, and all sides were lucky to get out alive. Henry and Sweet-Lips have been trying to track down Vibram because they believed him to be a threat. Vibram's plan has been simply to go to ground and out-live them, while keeping an eye on the mine: halflings and humans get old much faster than dwarves. He knew the Black Spider couldn't take down the mindflayer himself or he'd have done so long ago. The fort is only vaguely under control of Black Spider: the goblinoids respect his power and get along with him, but don't know about his real agenda. They might betray him if there were something in it for them. They are particularly interested in expanding into the ruined town: it's close to a main trade route and they can use it as a staging post for robbing travellers, but they can't defeat the baby dragon. The baby dragon is rebelling against its parents by setting up a lair in an abandoned town, rather than a cave, and making its hoard out of knowledge instead of gold. (NO DAD, YOU SHUT THE gently caress UP.) Amongst its treasures include the notes of the drow who initially bound the mindflayer, which will make freeing -- or imprisoning -- it easier. Vibram knew this, and was planning to enlist the goblins' help in getting hold of them, but he fluffed his diplomacy roll and they imprisoned him instead.
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Dec 13, 2017 23:19
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I've been coming up with ever more complex ideas as to how he killed her and escaped, it literally never occurred to me it was as simple as "he stabbed her and ran off". Thanks for the help everyone, I'm going to throw all these ideas into a mixing pot and lay something out tonight. I think I have to make him the same dwarf, and the place Nikki died the mine they're looking for - it's just unnecessarily making myself a load more work to do anything other.
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Dec 14, 2017 09:07
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Sanford posted:I think I have to make him the same dwarf, and the place Nikki died the mine they're looking for
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Dec 14, 2017 09:21
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Right, here’s what I’ve got. Henry is currently helping the party fend off a hobgoblin raid so he can tell them this next time we play. 100 years ago Henrys Heroes were exploring the lost mine. They planned to reopen it for mining, but destroy the forge of spells (magic item creator) if they found it because it’s too dangerous. The mine is full of undead guardians. While they rested Nikki stumbled on Vibram speaking with someone via a magic stone, saying just let these fools kill the rest of the undead and we’ll do the ritual to activate the forge. She went whoa wtf, Vibram panicked, stabbed her, and fled. By the time the others found her it was too late. Henry doesn’t know the way to Wave Echo Cave but if the party come back in a few days he will draw them a map of the dungeon, as far in as they reached. When they go to the goblin castle, instead of finding the dwarf held captive the bugbear boss will be arguing with one of the black spiders minions that he should be allowed to go to the mine “because the dwarf and the spider are already there”. The minion will be trying to mollify him, saying he is still needed to control travel along the road but he is, of course, an equal partner in their venture and will be treated as such. When they get to the mine, I’ll make sure they overhear Vibram and the Black Spider discussing the once-in-a-hundred-years opportunity to reactivate the forge of spells and make some serious weaponry. The Black Spider will chastise Vibram that if he hadn’t messed it up 100 years ago they wouldn’t be here now. Vibram will respond that the Black Spider was meant to have cleared the mine of undead months ago, ready for the ritual, and it’s still crawling with them. Then the party can burst in and kill everyone, and then decide what they want to do with the forge of spells. Anyone see any problems?
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Dec 14, 2017 23:05
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Have you thought about how much magic gear you're going to let them make once they control the Forge of Spells? Or what you're going to do if (when) they want to pivot the game to focus on how they now own the world's only magic item factory? No snark intended here. It sounds like a great storyline and your game sounds like it'd be fantastic to play in. Players will inevitably want to focus on stuff that's cool and/or interesting, and the forge of spells sounds like it's both. You should have at least a vague idea about what to do if they latch on to it really hard and don't want to let go. e: I don't necessarily mean "how to take it away from them again", controlling and protecting that kind of thing could be a great focus for a game. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Dec 14, 2017 |
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Dec 14, 2017 23:11
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We’ve already agreed a “soft reset” after this campaign, because we all know what we’re doing a bit more now and they’re currently using the pre-built characters from the starter set and want to build their own. So we’d probably have a session where they can stomp around smashing stuff with their new toys, then start afresh. We’ve discussed either Storm Kings Thunder or Into the Abyss as our next adventure, if anyone has any advice on that front. Edit: I guess I’ll start thinking about a side quest to deal with their old characters stomping around smashing stuff. VVV Oooh I like that though. They are still very trigger-happy and that would be a brilliant “well, you’ve really done it this time!” moment VVV Sanford fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Dec 14, 2017 |
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Dec 14, 2017 23:21
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Set up the Forge of Spells to be limited-use. The reignition went wrong from the party interrupting it, and since they'll probably kill the Black Spider & Vibram, anyone with any knowledge about the workings of the forge will be dead. That way you can limit the magic they get from the forge, and you can even set up an action movie run-from-the-explosion if you're so inclined.
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Dec 14, 2017 23:21
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The forge of spells is magically tainted with evil magic. It creates cursed weapons/destroys life/needs sacrificial blood to operate/something else horrible. If that’s not enough to keep your PCs from using it then I guess your party does a heel turn and now they’re the BBE.
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Dec 14, 2017 23:44
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HatfulOfHollow posted:The forge of spells is magically tainted with evil magic. It creates cursed weapons/destroys life/needs sacrificial blood to operate/something else horrible. If that’s not enough to keep your PCs from using it then I guess your party does a heel turn and now they’re the BBE. The power of the forge is that it quickly, easily, cheaply, allows you to add a basic +1 enchantment onto mundane weapons or armour. You don't need any magical training or skills, you just hammer on the weapon a bit and it's done. To a party of adventurers, that's a tasty bonus but not a complete game-changer. To anybody looking to kit out an army, it's an immensely powerful strategic resource. The dilemma becomes not "what do we do with it?" but "whose hands do we leave it in?" And if the answer is "ours, and we open a magic sword shop" -- brilliant! Now the PCs are themselves a strategic resource for armies. Multiple individuals want to negotiate exclusive rights to retain the PCs as their outfitters, all of them possess armies, and all of their long-term plans involve conquest of some kind.
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Dec 15, 2017 00:08
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Whybird posted:The power of the forge is that it quickly, easily, cheaply, allows you to add a basic +1 enchantment onto mundane weapons or armour. You don't need any magical training or skills, you just hammer on the weapon a bit and it's done. To a party of adventurers, that's a tasty bonus but not a complete game-changer. To anybody looking to kit out an army, it's an immensely powerful strategic resource. The dilemma becomes not "what do we do with it?" but "whose hands do we leave it in?" We play with very different groups. Sometimes I wish my groups were more like yours.
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Dec 15, 2017 00:19
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HatfulOfHollow posted:The forge of spells is magically tainted with evil magic. It creates cursed weapons/destroys life/needs sacrificial blood to operate/something else horrible. If that’s not enough to keep your PCs from using it then I guess your party does a heel turn and now they’re the BBEs Actually, this would be perfect for resetting, too; instead of a pregenerated campaign, have them pick up 99 years later, living under the rule of a group of mad adventurers who are plotting to do the ritual right this time. Vibrum and the Black Spider thought they knew what the forge was capable of, but if the new owners can gather all of the (appropriately evil) ingredients by the turn of the new century, the world's going to see some real loving magic items. 
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Dec 15, 2017 00:20
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HatfulOfHollow posted:We play with very different groups. Sometimes I wish my groups were more like yours. Honestly, one of my top rules of GMing is "give players more rope". You find out the truth about a character in two situations: when they're about to die, and when they have everything they want. PCs in adventuring games are always about to die, but it's much rarer that they have everything they want, and when they do you can guarantee the first thing they'll do is find a way to ruin it for themselves. Thinking about it: that's something I might start asking players at chargen: "If your character gained ultimate arcane power, what would they do with it? What would they do after? How would it end?"
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Dec 15, 2017 00:53
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Whybird posted:Thinking about it: that's something I might start asking players at chargen: "If your character gained ultimate arcane power, what would they do with it? What would they do after? How would it end?" That's a great chargen question, I'm gonna start using it.
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Dec 15, 2017 07:30
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Sanford posted:Henry doesn’t know the way to Wave Echo Cave but if the party come back in a few days he will draw them a map of the dungeon, as far in as they reached.
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Dec 15, 2017 09:06
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Yeah, the old map the PCs have being accurate for the time it was drawn but now outdated can be a really good idea. It can be quite immersive in that it shows that the world "lives", and it can worry or scare a group when they come across new construction that's not on the map of the supposedly abandoned temple.
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Dec 15, 2017 11:09
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Hey thread, I apologize in advance if this post goes on too long, but I was hoping to get some ideas for what could be haunting a forest. So, in the land my party has just gotten to, I made a location called Second Son Grove, a haunted forest. I named it so as a joke about having multiple kids handy, cause the forest is haunted and kids go missing there. Classic spooky poo poo. Now, one of my players is a tiefling monk. His father / creator is a godlike Rakshasa that was torn into seven pieces by rival demons, and each previous incarnation of this PC was an evil as hell dark messiah type figure bent on bringing Dad back. This PC is the seventh and final seal of the Rakshasa, and if he dies before breaking this cycle then devildad is going to be reborn on the material plane. My players, having seen the name Second Son Grove, all assume with absolute confidence that it has something to do with the second iteration of our tiefling. I don't want to totally cockblock them because that connection was totally accidental and I think it was very perceptive, but I also don't want them to just have solved it in one go with no twists or snags. So do any of you, given this information, have any suggestions on what the big conspiracy or twist could be? I can provide more information if needed, I just didn't want to ramble on for too long. Tl;dr: Players think they know what's up with a haunted forest. How do I validate their suspicions while still keeping them on their toes?
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Dec 18, 2017 18:35
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quote:Tl;dr: Players think they know what's up with a haunted forest. How do I validate their suspicions while still keeping them on their toes? Why not first play it like they're completely off base (it's actually haunted by the souls of the children who went missing and there's no apparent connection to the previous incarnation), until the very end when it's revealed that the whole thing started because the second incarnation passed through long ago, and a child eating demon appeared in his wake. The demon was killed decades (centuries? Not sure what your timeline is) ago, but it's presence perverted the forest enough that people who get lost in it can't ever find their way out, and anyone who dies there is trapped for all eternity. So in short, the previous incarnation started it unintentionally, but it outgrew it's origins in short order.
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Dec 18, 2017 18:51
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Some ideas, varying degrees of cock-blocking. Mix and match and ignore at your pleasure. The forest name is quite literal, and only the second male child disappears into the forest. The second tiefling iteration was female. The forest name is a misnomer; deep into the forest there's a wide verdant clearing with a rough-hewn altar to Lathander (or whoever your equivalent to a second iteration of the Sun God is) where parents would bring their children to be consecrated. Over time, language/phonetics happen and people start to only consecrate their second child; as Lathander (or whoever) loses his people's faith as fewer and fewer are consecrated in his name, the altar becomes corrupted by lengthening shadows and the forest slowly turns into a dark image of what it once was, fueled by the mounting fears of the villagers close by. The party was not the first one to think of this. The fifth iteration of the tiefling made the same connection and ventured into the forest to unearth more information about his ancestors. Tiefling #5 dies due to exposure/nasty critters/the ghost of Tiefling #2 before figuring a relevant plot point out. His body lies propped on an ancient birch, eerily undecayed; his features twisted into an undying scream and emaciated hands grasp a satchel tightly. His grip and pained expression both relax when Current Tiefling approach it. In the satchel are mostly-preserved notes about his findings, pointing out that some of the party assumptions are red-herrings, but a surprisingly detailed and heavily annotated map may prove to be just what the party hoped for.
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Dec 18, 2017 19:06
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What if there are ghosts/monsters in the forest, but those are a red herring because the forest itself is the second son? The forest has been luring people in, eating them (living trees are creepy and great), and using the ingested bodies to "rebuild" the father. Underground, at the center of the forest's root structure, the players can find the half-built Rakshasa body... imagining a Tetsuo-looking monstrosity of meat being served by vines and roots
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Dec 18, 2017 19:56
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Its a trap laid by rhe second Tiefling. They foresaw the current incarnation and laid a trap to extend their time as the prodigal son. All the kids and ghosts are collateral damage that the second Tiefling doesnt fare about. As the party ventures in they eventually succumb to the enchantment of the forest or take a long rest. Then the Second attacks them in a mental/dream realm for control of the Tieflings body. Also have the Second inhabit bog mummies and skeletons of "unworthy" hosts its killed over the years. When they hit 0 hit points the bodies just kind of burn into nothing.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:08
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Goddamn, thanks everyone. I'll probably be cutting slices out of each suggestion and stapling them together in my own little way. Great inspiration here!
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Dec 18, 2017 22:33
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Any cool tips for running a game with Fae?
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Dec 19, 2017 01:13
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Danger Diabolik posted:Any cool tips for running a game with Fae? Promises and statements of intent are serious business. Fae treat promises and wishes like Elizabeth Hurley in Bamboozled. Casually saying "I'd kill to have a set of that armor." Will end in the player receiving a suit, "For a favor." Heap "free" magical gear and boons on the party and then establish a rotating door of NPCs that can compel them into doing things they don't want to or seeming innocuous stuff that has huge repercussions later. Escort a little old lady between towns and learn later that lady was contracted by the Fae to ensorcel the wells and turn the towns into extensions of the Feywild. Plant pretty flowers in the Royal Gardens, later find out that they attract Hellwasps that sting people and trap them in a nightmare state. Steal a perfectly ordinary bronze mace from a city hall and unknowingly create a 5 side war.
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Dec 19, 2017 02:04
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I was formerly involved in writing an interactive show involving Fae, and I came up with a lot of rules and descriptions for the society for the actors to work within: 1. Fae are magically compelled to make it completely impossible for them to tell a lie. This doesn't mean they can't be dishonest, just that they can't directly tell a falsehood. This has made them experts in using loopholes, exact words, or contradictions between the letter and spirit of the law. Consequently their society is extremely backstabby and basically an entire civilization built around court intrigue. 2. Fae society has a strict honor code. Any insult must be responded to in kind and you risk losing face if you try to let bygones be bygones without getting something in return. Even if the insult was a complete accident and you had no way of knowing it was an insult, a social faux pas can result in anything from a fairy hit squad coming after you to being forced to complete a job for them. 3. Because Fae society is so backstabby and intrigue-happy but their honor code and magical inability to lie hamstring them, they commonly make use of humans and other non-Fae beings as proxies in their little wars. Some Fae treat their human aids as disposable, but rather than killing them they'll just magically mindwipe them and send them on their way thinking it was all just a half-remembered dream. I also came up with a Dresden-inspired governmental system and lifespan for the Fae, where the Winter and Autumn Courts were ruled by a Mother, Queen, and Daughter (all one generation apart from each other) and the Summer and Spring Courts were ruled by a Father, King, and Son. The Queen and King handled the main leadership duties of their courts, the Daughter and Son did more direct interaction for royal business and learned how to lead, and the Mother and Father provided guidance while preparing for their passing. There were also Day and Night Courts that had no connection to royalty and acted as regular workers for Fae civilization. At certain points in time (our original script had it approximately every 100 years), the royalty would age up: a new Daughter and Son would be selected from the courts, the current Daughter and Son would become the new Queen and King, the current Queen and King would become the new Mother and Father, and the current Mother and Father would die (which would simply seem to be them disappearing into thin air, presumably moving onto the Fae afterlife though nobody is quite sure what happens to them). If one of the court leaders died early, the resulting balance would be thrown into chaos and magically correct itself by rapidly forcing an age-up within a day and granting new Fae the powers and stature of the Daughter and Son (which nobody would be happy about because it immediately shortens their lifespans, in the case of the Mother and Father to about 24 hours). The magical nature of their aging had some repercussions on Fae, both as individuals and on society as a whole. Because their aging up was a magical process at certain times rather than a slow and gradual progression and they had magical restrictions on their behavior, many Fae are fascinated by the concept of childhood and the inherent flexibility and mutability of other races like humans. Rather than acting like perfect representations of their position, the royalty all had personal spats and their own issues to deal with (the Daughter of our time was upset about her impending turn into the Queen because she liked spending a century as an eternally young party girl, and the King was a hothead in a flashy Miami Vice-style suit who saw insults in everything). We also developed a Shadow Court as a sort of underground revolutionary faction that wants to overthrow the courts and the stringent rules of Fae society (we threw around the idea of other non-human beings like werewolves, vampires, trolls, etc. being mentioned in the background as part of it). Our script went through numerous revisions before our break-up resulted in the show's cancellation after we had already begun photo shoots and marketing, but one of the scripts involved the Shadow Court murdering the Queen to gently caress everything up. The very first script I wrote had the Shadow Court just killing a nature sprite that was acting as a neutral party during a meeting, resulting in both paranoid leaders starting a war with one another after blaming the other. I deleted pretty much all of my setting notes after the production ended, but I remember most of it.
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Dec 19, 2017 04:15
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Do you mean faeries or Fate Accelerated edition?
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Dec 20, 2017 03:43
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Thanks for the cool tips! Yeah, I meant fairies.
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Dec 20, 2017 05:43
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Yeah just make your fey creatures relentless dicks, like they were in old mythology. Stealing babies, cursing your milk, bringing you bad dreams, loving your spouse, it's all a good time to them because they're weird aliens. The Tolkein elves have become so normalized that going with classical renditions of sprites, elves, and pixies feels weird and shocking. I like the idea of fey creatures being extremely wrapped up in ceremony and formality. Kind of like those strange touches of old vampire stories where they're magically compelled to count grain or whatever. Anything that makes them operate in a way that is decidedly not-human.
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Dec 20, 2017 14:46
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One of my favorite little things to do with Fey is to make them deathly afraid of a mundane flower or something because: A) in their court giving someone a peony is a promise to murder their family. Or B) in the Feywild peonies have razor sharp petals and swarm travellers like pissed off hornets.
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Dec 20, 2017 17:25
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One other thing we came up with was some Fae who used humans as guinea pigs for science or proxies for their internal conflicts treating the humans like tools. They wouldn’t just waste them for no reason any more than you would intentionally break a good Leatherman to see what happens, but a human dying on their job holds as much meaning as having to go spend another goddamn $100 on one. There were some ideas of them holding humans for a long period of time through magic to keep using them for either pleasure or business, again kinda like you’d just throw your toolbox in the garage or your toys in the drawer until you needed them.
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Dec 20, 2017 17:36
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I'd just finished watching the new Twin Peaks when my players started dabbling in the fae realm, so I started taking a lot of inspiration from how the Black Lodge is portrayed in that. The idea I came up with is that the human mind can't process the utter alienness of what fae actually are, so whenever a human encounters fae their brain replaces them with familiar analogies and metaphors. The plan was for my players to meet a group of fae called boggarts, beings that collected and hoarded everything they found. I was originally going to have them be giant talking cockroaches living in a fortress of junk. What I did instead was have the players find what was on the outside a tiny, abandoned shack and on the inside a giant hoarder home with corridor after corridor of decaying floorboards, peeling wallpaper, and filing cabinets stuffed with everything they could find. The boggarts were these evasive, shifty men and women in greasy, ill-fitting brown suits wearing dark glasses and clinging to the walls at all times. It worked really well. The cockroaches would have come across as gross and kinda silly, but having these things which looked like people but acted completely off managed to sell the Fae realm as something you really, really do not want to mess with.
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Dec 20, 2017 19:14
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Along with the music for the show, I also came up with some tracks that would have strange noises in the background to give the impression of unusual and terrifying magic-related things occurring just out of sight of the audience as they walked around. Here's one of them as I left it when production was canceled. A lot of the music I made had a somewhat cyberpunk slant to it, since it was set in modern day.
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Dec 20, 2017 21:21
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I'm GMing a game where my two players are beat cops in a fantasy city. The first player thought it would be fun to play a relatively down-to-earth person who is heroic in the way we want cops to be. So they have a beat they keep to, and one of them is going to testify in court about a thing that happened a week ago in-game. Early on plot-wise, a house was marked with thieves' cant. It was removed. The player (it started off as one-on-one) kept in contact with the occupants but otherwise couldn't do much. A week later fey attacked the house, he found another mark, and the owner discreetly mentioned a plant was stolen. When pressed the owner revealed it was a dryad. The dryad is part of a peace pact the wild bands outside the city have with each other. It going missing has thrown a wrench into the peace and also attracted fey. The fey are playing hell on the police beat. What the players don't know is that the thieves' guild did it on behalf of an empire to the south who wants to exert political leverage by causing a ruckus at the city's doorstep. I think that's a good setup, but that kind of big picture stuff doesn't really lend itself to the day-at-a-time police procedural format. Every day A Thing happens, and the players react. Sometimes there's a maritime accident, sometimes horses go missing (and reappear in improbable places.) So how do I square that circle? Their boss has put out a bulletin for adventurers to find the stolen property (the City Watch is being coy about it being a dryad.) I'm thinking adventurers cause some kind of mess (of course they do) that inadvertently gives something away, but I'm otherwise kind of stumped.
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Dec 23, 2017 08:48
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If the empire is trying to unbalance the city then wouldn't it stand to reason that it has other agents in the city aside from the thieves? You could set up encounters with other saboteurs with more direct connections to put them on the empire's trail. Maybe the adventurers, feeling no need to obey privacy laws, stumble on something big and it explodes into a diplomatic incident? Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 09:07 on Dec 23, 2017 |
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Dec 23, 2017 09:05
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You could have other problems show up that genuinely have no connection to the overarching plot and are just there to split their attention. Hot-shot adventurers who think they're above the law just because of some ridiculous 'quest' they're on. Corruption from within their own ranks. Bear-baiting rings that have upped their game and gone on to use halflings instead.
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Dec 23, 2017 09:15
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 19:32 |
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Hobo By Design posted:I'm GMing a game where my two players are beat cops in a fantasy city. The first player thought it would be fun to play a relatively down-to-earth person who is heroic in the way we want cops to be. So they have a beat they keep to, and one of them is going to testify in court about a thing that happened a week ago in-game. Your PC Beat Cops should regard the hired adventurers with roughly the same esteem as real cops regard Dog the Bounty Hunter. Make the adventurers vainglorious, self-centered, homicidal assholes. They are scum, and the PCs should view them as scum. Which will make it all the more rewarding when they turn up after a tavern brawl and one of them drunkenly mentions that they were contacted by someone from the southern empire's embassy to turn the plant over to them instead of the PCs' boss. Whether they actually did or not, you can play by ear - hell, maybe this was their last bash before setting out and they haven't even found the thing yet - but making the adventurers the wild card that ends up borking the southerners' plans will only reinforce the PCs' impression that adventurers are Not To Be Trusted. This will make it much more interesting when their boss cuts a deal with the adventurers to drop all the charges for the tavern brawl so they can go find the dryad - but only if the two PCs are sent "undercover" to join their party.
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Dec 23, 2017 09:16
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