This week’s post comes courtesy of something I disliked.
Fuss! Fume!
I was reading an article about low-level encounters for Dungeons & Dragons groups, encounters which weren’t just ‘go kill the rats in my basement,’ and, while I appreciated the sentiment, the suggested alternatives were … dull.
Unbearably dull.
As in, I would leave the campaign if you tried that crap on me, dull.
The big difficulty Dungeons and Dragons has is that it’s still dragging around Chainmail’s corpse. At heart, it’s a skirmish wargame. Its mechanics, spells, equipment and ethos is all about reducing the other fella’s hit points to zero as quickly as possible.
Other fantasy games do this. GUMSHOE’s Swords of the Serpentine does this. But the difference between Dungeons and Dragons and Swords of the Serpentine is, Swords doesn’t start you off at level 1 and say ‘go forth, hero, and do great deeds.’ With Swords, and games like it, your character starts pretty much at the peak of their career and things can only get better. Whereas in D&D and its iterations you start with a handful of hit points and a gleam in your eye.
A gleam which is quickly extinguished if, say, a goblin punches you in the unmentionables. Fury of the Small is not to be sneezed at.
Other games choose other solutions. Ars Magica deals with this problem by giving you a half-dozen characters or more per player, so if one gets chewed up by a rampaging beast there’s another four or five behind them to fill the gap. Ars also focuses on story goals rather than combat goals, because it didn’t start life as a skirmish wargame with dreams of grandeur.
But Dungeons and Dragons is a skirmish game which means the solution to any problem posed in the campaign is often ‘hit it till it falls down, then hit it again.’ It’s the wargamer mentality. Nobody asks a Civil War tabletop gamer to hug it out; Lincoln didn’t defeat Davis in a spelling bee. Though it would have saved a lot of lives if he did.
Which is why ‘kill the rats in my basement’ is such a popular trope. Rats are small. They have almost no hit points. Their damage output is minimal. It’s a quest that can reasonably be achieved by even the most incompe … the most inexperienced group.
Still, there are only so many basements to go around. Eventually your band of pest controllers will run out of rats. Or get bored hitting them. What to do?
Before I start talking about scenarios, let’s nail down some basic principles.
1) Keep the combat to a minimum.
Yes, there will be combat. It’s still a combat-focused game. But the characters only have so many hit points and short rests plus clerics working overtime is not going to solve that problem. Plan for one or two thrilling fight scenes, not The Game Of Death.
It’s fine if the combat is nonlethal. Particularly in an urban setting where there’s active law enforcement and the death penalty (also known as hanging, drawing, quartering and there goes your weekend) it’s perfectly reasonable for the average ne’er-do-well to prefer nonlethal over lethal violence.
2) Make sure there are exciting things to do.
This ought to be obvious but time has taught me that the obvious is anything but. These are heroes. They need to be doing heroic things. Sure, Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables, but he did it in a heroic way and it was one of his twelve heroic tasks. It wasn’t his Sunday second job.
3) Make it fantastic.
This is a fantasy world where Gods, Devils and things beyond imagining walk the earth. Where physics and chemistry take a back seat to mystics in tune with the mythic forces of the universe. One of the reasons why busting rats in basements gets boring is that it’s just rats, just a basement. Where’s the drama in that?
With all that in mind, let’s talk scenario ideas.
The Laughing Cat
Type: investigative; murder mystery.
This adventure location is a burnt-out travelers’ inn on the high road. When it was still an inn, it was a popular spot for wayfarers on a well-traveled path. The reasonable thing to do would be to rebuild it but it has a bad reputation. Word is, it’s haunted. The [guild/monastery/family/noble house] which owns the land would appreciate it if someone deals with that problem before the inn gets rebuilt. Generous financial reward offered.
Journey: 2-4 days across forest terrain to get to the Laughing Cat. The heroes may encounter a faerie dragon on the way there which, if treated with respect or properly entertained (it likes music) can provide a clue as to what might have happened at the Laughing Cat. Otherwise, combat.
The Laughing Cat is a burnt-out shell. Preliminary investigation (DC10 investigation, history, perception) indicates arson. Someone set the main room on fire while everyone was asleep upstairs. If History is successful, the heroes remember that this happened about ten years ago and there were three survivors; everyone else perished, including the Awakened cat which gave the inn its name.
A DC15 check remembers that the three survivors were Myria Whispermouse, a roguish Halfling who’s gone on to become a renowned hero; Aramil Caerdonel, an elf paladin (now fallen) whose whereabouts are unknown, and the innkeeper Bron, who was badly injured in the fire and now lives with family far away. Among the dead were Proserpine, a renowned Tiefling bard, and her half-orc companion Morg.
That’s all that can be seen during the day. At night, the Laughing Cat comes back to spectral life once more. All of its people go about their business as if no time had passed – which, to them, it hasn’t. It’s always and eternally the last night of their lives. To them, the characters are just other guests at the Laughing Cat. The survivors are also there, as their dream selves; a nightmare none of them can escape.
At which point the Cat enters the picture. Peridot is the only one out of all of them who knows that they’re all dead, and Peridot has a proposition: if the heroes can find out which of the three survivors did it and why, the haunting will stop.
Was it Myria, whose greed for the party’s loot got the better of her?
Was it Aramil, whose unrequited love for Morg tempted him to do something catastrophic?
Was it Bron, whose drunkenness finally had disastrous consequences?
By talking to those present, finding out what they saw and how they died, the heroes can gather the clues needed to reveal the killer.
Potential combat encounters:
Skeletal rats in the cellar (they guard a clue to the villain’s identity, a fossilized memory that will only reveal itself once they are destroyed)
Bar-room brawl with the dead (nonlethal, but Morg has a punch like a mule’s kick).
The imp Pazzu, whose temptations pushed the killer over the edge. Pazzu has a stake in the game; if it can drag the killer’s soul back to the infernal regions, it gets the soul coin that the villain’s misdeeds will mint. But until the killer dies, Pazzu is trapped at the Laughing Cat with the rest of them. If the heroes reveal who did it, the killer will die that night of a heart attack and Pazzu will be free to collect the coin. If the heroes squash Pazzu before that happens then Pazzu won’t have time to collect. Pazzu is a ‘hide-in-the-shadows, rely on invisibility’ kind of miscreant, but Pazzu can’t resist boasting about their clever scheme. This may trip them up in the end.
Immortal With A Kiss
Type: social, romance, urban
The heroes are hired as extra guards at a rich man’s villa, one week only. The eldest daughter Olympia is getting married and valuable wedding presents are arriving every day. It’s the heroes’ job to make sure those presents don’t go missing and that Olympia’s privacy is respected before the big event. No visitors, no scandal; everything’s being coordinated to create the big event of the social season and there cannot be even the slightest hint of hijinks.
This is particularly important to the family because Olympia is magically Blessed; all her life she’s had the Bless spell effect as a permanent, but according to fortunetellers and prognosticators that Bless effect will pass to her true love, when she kisses them for the first time. This story is well known; how true it is, is anyone’s guess.
The villa is besieged by wedding tourists daily. Bards looking to try out their latest ballads; dressmakers wanting Olympia to wear their designs; cake-makers and confectioners who want Olympia to choose their treats for her wedding; ‘friends of the family’ who haven’t been seen in decades who turn up unexpectedly looking for a place to stay, or a short-term loan, or just a quick word with the bride-to-be. The heroes have to manage all of this discreetly.
Among the wedding tourists are a peculiar band of warlocks and astrologers who, day in, day out, prognosticate the wedding based on Olympia’s birthday and that of her husband, Kairon, the handsome and famous Ranger whose exploits and treasure retrieval bought him instant access to high society. These guys just won’t go away; they fulminate and gibber in the street, producing alarming magical effects, incense, smoke, dancing mice – you name it, they’ve got it. Their omens and portents cover the entire wedding from break of day to the last breath of nightfall.
The heroes soon realize (DC10 insight, perception, deception) that Olympia’s younger sister Callistra is up to something, but it’s not clear what. She’s seen chatting with the astrologers and passing them insider information – but to what end?
Further investigation (DC15, and this can involve bribing Callistra’s cat familiar with treats) reveals that wizard Callistra plans to use Disguise Self and Friends on the day in question to pass as her sister on the wedding day. She figures she can get away with it because she physically resembles her sister (size, bodyweight) and most of the day the bride will be wrapped up in veils and dresses. The heroes may work this out when they realize that she’s feeding the astrologers her own date of birth and personal information, not her sister’s.
She thinks she’ll get away with this because Olympia’s planning on skipping the wedding and embarking on her own heroic career as a Thief. Her lover is an important member of the local Thieves Guild who taught her a few tricks. [The guild member may or may not be her true love; they may just be a seducing scoundrel.] The family would be appalled if they knew, and it’s exactly this kind of hijinks that the heroes were hired to stop – if they want to stop it, of course …
Olympia intends to make her getaway on the wedding day, as that’s when there’ll be the most confusion.
What nobody appreciates (except possibly the heroes, if they’ve been paying attention to those astrologers) is that the prognosticators are actually burglars. They’ve been casing the joint all week under cover of magical hoodoo. They know how to get in and how to get out without getting caught, which is exactly what will happen if the heroes don’t intervene.
Potential combat moments:
Brawl with drunken aristocratic youth who think it’s funny to sing romance ballads under Olympia’s window every day up until the wedding.
Chase/combat with the astrologer-thieves as they make their getaway. They prefer nonviolence, ball-bearings and tanglefoot bags to cover their retreat, but they may confuse things by running through a rough tavern hoping that the ensuing bar brawl will help them escape.
Pilgrim’s Passage
Type: Negotiation/Problem Solving, Insight, Perception, Animal Handling
Near the village of Three Hills there is a magical well that has become a popular spot for those on pilgrimage. (Life, Light, Nature). The village is within the fief of [noble/church/monastery] and its patron rakes in a small but not insignificant amount of tolls from those on the pilgrim trail. A nice extra comes from the sale of trinkets and medals organized by a small hermit community near Three Hills. It’s also a well-known fact that horses bred near the well have special properties, and the sale of those horses is a nice earner for the family that breeds them which in turn pays the fief holder a tidy sum for the benefice. In short, there’s a fair amount of cash at stake, which becomes a problem when the pilgrim trail is shut down by druids. Angry pilgrims complain to the fief holder, and the fief holder reaches out to reliable third parties to investigate and (hopefully) solve the problem. Enter our heroes, stage right.
The druids, a trio of halflings, (Garth, Morrin, Gynnie, all novice members of a far-off circle), say that they have the right to shut down the trail when it is clear that the balance is negatively affected, and further that this right is in writing. Three generations back the fief holder agreed to this is negotiation with the druids’ circle, when a blight threatened the land. The druids cleansed the blight and extracted this promise as payment.
The druids say that the horses bred near the well do not have special properties; quite the reverse, in fact, which hasn’t stopped the breeders from selling them at inflated prices based on reputation alone. Animal Handling DC10 shows this to be true; DC15 shows that this condition is being disguised by the breeders who use magical feed mash to pep up the stock before sale. The feed makes the horses seem great for a week or so; after that, not so much. The DC15 also shows that the older horses, which the family keep for breeding stock, are still as magical as ever; it’s only the current sale stock that is affected.
The druids say that this shows the well is being over-used, threatening the balance. They demand that the well be given time to recover – perhaps a year or more. This proposal will not please the fief holder, which conveniently lost the paperwork on that druid deal as soon as possible after it was signed. The fief holder isn’t pleased to hear that the druids kept a copy.
What nobody realizes is that the source of the problem is the hermits, who have become warlocks, tempted to more-than-mortal power by a devil who wanted access to the well for its own purposes. The hermits knew how to bypass the magical wards put there by the druids and they let the devil in. The devil did what it wanted and then left a few infernal serpents behind to watch over ‘its’ property. The serpents allow the devil to come and go as it pleases, bypassing the wards. The serpents can be defeated in combat but can also be instantly defeated by one of the magical horses, if that horse is brought to the well (Religion, Insight).
If this is revealed then the druids can restore the protective wards and, after the serpents are dealt with, the well will recover. If the devil is left in place then the well will become permanently affected within a year.
Potential combat moments:
A fight against infernal, poisonous snakes.
A nonlethal brawl with the horse breeding family, or angry pilgrims.
A potentially lethal scrimmage with the druids, or the warlock-hermits. The warlocks are likely to take to their heels if discovered; they got into this for power, not to get stabbed.
The devil, if encountered, will insist on a battle of wits (Arcana) – a riddle challenge. If the heroes win, the devil promises to leave. If the devil wins it will remain at the well for a month. This challenge can be attempted more than once; the devil likes playing games.
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