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View Full Version : Cultbusting, advice for a newbie



ApatheticDespot
2010-01-11, 01:56 PM
Hi all, I'm a relatively inexperienced DM starting a new 3.5 campaign this weekend, and I'm looking for some input on a more investigative adventure than I've done before. One thing I've learned from previous campaigns is that everything is better with murderous cults worshiping Lovecraftian abominations, and so my players will be uncovering a cult of Aboleth worshiping crazies operating in a mid sized port town. My question is two fold, to the DMs out there: how much info on the cult's workings and hangouts would you give your players to start with? And to players, given a general sense of the cult's large scale and murderous intent what do you do? Look for rumors at the tavern? Ask the watch about disappearances? Storm the local fish market? I understand that these are infuriatingly vague questions to be asking, but what I'm trying to get a handle on is how best to balance my desire for the players to use their wits and resources to figure as much of it out on their own as possible with out just throwing them to the pseudonatural wolves.
Any advice you can give would be appreciated.

TheCountAlucard
2010-01-11, 02:00 PM
how much info on the cult's workings and hangouts would you give your players to start with?How many skill points did they invest into Knowledge skills related to the cult? Arcana and Religion (and likely even Planes) can conceivably help out for knowing their workings; as for hangouts, that'd likely be Local.

dsmiles
2010-01-11, 02:01 PM
Personally:

1. There is a string of unsolved muders with occult markings on the bodies.

2. Local Police haven't been able to catch the muderer.

3. Knowledge (Arcana/Dungeoneering) to identify the markings.

Off the characters go on a grand adventure! :smallbiggrin:

Sipex
2010-01-11, 02:06 PM
Take into account, investigating one thing and uncovering something else has an awesome affect.

You could start the PCs in one direction, looking into something routine or simple and they uncover something more to it.

Maybe some guy is mugged and murdered and the PCs catch his assailants but also they find he has some strange tattoos/journals/whatever. In the end it turns out he was a cultist all along and if he handn't gotten mugged they may never have found out.

ApatheticDespot
2010-01-11, 02:11 PM
How many skill points did they invest into Knowledge skills related to the cult? Arcana and Religion (and likely even Planes) can conceivably help out for knowing their workings; as for hangouts, that'd likely be Local.

Actually if I'm remembering right, since Aboliths are aberrations it would be Knowledge: Dungeoneering to learn about typical Abolith cults, but I meant more along the lines of specific details about how to find this particular cult or who might be members. The players are likely to be capturing coded messages between cultists in the process of first encountering the cult, I'm in the process of working out exactly how much those documents should say to give the players a fair start at bringing down the cult.

Aldizog
2010-01-11, 02:11 PM
You have Lords of Madness, right? That's a great resource.

As to how much knowledge to give the PCs, let it depend on their skills, abilities, and in-character actions. If one plays a bard with a high Int, the Obscure Lore feat, and high Gather Information and Sense Motive skills, then the party should get much more information than they would get otherwise. If they only ever get what they need to know to advance the plot, then you make those abilities useless. Make it so that having the skills and abilities lets you bypass certain obstacles or fights, but lacking those skills and abilities doesn't mean the adventure dead-ends -- you just have to take the hard way.

Likewise, if they make an effort to be cautious and poke around, let them find the crazy old man spouting stories (like in Shadow Over Innsmouth) or catch glimpses of a mysterious stranger poking around town (perhaps a Keeper of the Cerulean Sign, though they wouldn't know that at first). As to what I would do, I'd investigate because it would be more fun. "Kick in the door and hack things" has its place, but if the DM has bothered to make an investigation-based adventure, the investigation can be a great deal of fun.

Edit: as to your coded messages, a use for Decipher Script! Awesome! Note that it might involve both a code and a cipher. Ciphers are letter-substitution kind of things for which Decipher Script should work. Codes are word-substitutions that can't normally be broken. The cult leader might be referred to as "The Shrouded Truth," and the headquarters is "The Shrine of the Black Candle," and neither really tells you anything. Nevertheless, some clues might be gathered, since not every word can be encoded in that way.

ApatheticDespot
2010-01-11, 02:39 PM
Thanks for all the replies, they're very helpful. I do have Lords of Madness and I love it, it's a wonderful book. My current plan is to start the players out on a conventional dungeon dive, because I'm hoping to have a few new players who are entirely new to D&D and they'll need some time to get up to speed. So after clearing undead out of a tomb complex which has recently been deliberately opened they come across a hastily (and recently) burned diary which leads them to a hidden building where they stumble upon a dread ritual of come sort. This leads them to a less conventional dungeon run where things get more and more unnatural, culminating with encountering Skum, and finding a cache of coded documents making suitably cryptic and ominous references and making it clear that the cult is far larger than the few cultists they'd seen so far.

With the right knowledge checks the players will suspect an aboleth connection (I'm okay with giving that up lightly, because there's a bigger plot point waiting in the wings), but I intend to leave it entirely up to the players to track down and break the cult itself.

Edit: As for the code, I and several of the players I've invited are Computer Science majors, it's not an opportunity I intend to pass up. :smallbiggrin:

Sipex
2010-01-11, 02:43 PM
With this, especially since your players will be investigating, it will be very important to stat up any key npcs. Not only do you need combat stats but you'll need personality, likes, dislikes, family, job, places of occupancy, the works.

You'd be amazed at what your players will come up with if they can get access to the proper intel.

dsmiles
2010-01-11, 02:44 PM
Thanks for all the replies, they're very helpful. I do have Lords of Madness and I love it, it's a wonderful book. My current plan is to start the players out on a conventional dungeon dive, because I'm hoping to have a few new players who are entirely new to D&D and they'll need some time to get up to speed. So after clearing undead out of a tomb complex which has recently been deliberately opened they come across a hastily (and recently) burned diary which leads them to a hidden building where they stumble upon a dread ritual of come sort. This leads them to a less conventional dungeon run where things get more and more unnatural, culminating with encountering Skum, and finding a cache of coded documents making suitably cryptic and ominous references and making it clear that the cult is far larger than the few cultists they'd seen so far.

With the right knowledge checks the players will suspect an aboleth connection (I'm okay with giving that up lightly, because there's a bigger plot point waiting in the wings), but I intend to leave it entirely up to the players to track down and break the cult itself.

Edit: As for the code, I and several of the players I've invited are Computer Science majors, it's not an opportunity I intend to pass up. :smallbiggrin:

You could write your coded messages in ASCII...:smallbiggrin:

ApatheticDespot
2010-01-11, 03:06 PM
With this, especially since your players will be investigating, it will be very important to stat up any key npcs. Not only do you need combat stats but you'll need personality, likes, dislikes, family, job, places of occupancy, the works.

You'd be amazed at what your players will come up with if they can get access to the proper intel.

Excellent point, I think I'll focus most of my preparation on that sort of thing.

Brue
2010-01-11, 03:13 PM
And don't forget, if this is a large cult that they merely stumble upon at first, the cult is likely to notice and react to them, proactively even. Don't always let the party dictate the action, have the action come to them. Even if that action might be using political influence to make it harder for the party to get supplies or information, or possibly have disinformation deliberately leaked to the party to lead them into an ambush or something of the like.

Geez, now I'm starting to write this up in my head for my guys. Thanks.

pasko77
2010-01-11, 03:16 PM
You must put there some mindflayers.
There is no bloody cult without mindflayers.

Aldizog
2010-01-11, 03:21 PM
Any time you have the party up against a powerful and intelligent evil, there has to be an in-game reason why the evil doesn't just kill them. And here I'm thinking of the aboleth as much as I am thinking of the cultists.

The way it works in most stories is that the BBEG either wants to use the PCs in some way (the Shadows on B5, the Peacekeepers on Farscape, Emperor/Vader in Star Wars, etc.), or it is constrained so that it can't lash out with its full force (Sauron).

So perhaps the cultists want to recruit the PCs? Exceptional individuals with powerful magic at their disposal would make better allies than corpses, after all. Or one or more of the PCs has some aberration blood? (Suggest to the players the Aberrant Blood feats, as they can be both moderately powerful and very good for the story.) Perhaps the aboleth can't help the cultists against the PCs because it's imprisoned in some way, and the cultists are trying to free it?

Edit: as to mind flayers, I like the suggestion I once saw that mind flayers actually are aboleths from the far future. Tentacles, mental powers, aquatic life stage...

hamishspence
2010-01-11, 03:23 PM
Mind flayers and aboleths hate each other-

except maybe in Eberron where most aberrations are creations and minions of the daelkyr, which come from Xoriat, the Eberron equivalent of the Far Realm.

ApatheticDespot
2010-01-11, 03:49 PM
Illithids are my favorite monsters in all of D&D, they WILL appear at some point, but even though they have a lot in common Illithids scare the mucus out of Aboleths, so they almost never work together (Aboleths remember every single thing that has ever happened in the hustory of the universe, except the birth of the Illithid race, that's gotta be a bit unnerving, right?).

Physics_Rook
2010-01-11, 06:51 PM
If it helps, I found that the article on the "Three Clue Rule (http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/three-clue-rule.html)" written by Justin Alexander to be of particular use.

Your cup of tea may vary (YCoTMV), but it does bring some useful information and tricks to light. Most importantly is to never assume that the players will make the same reasonable connections that you do, when investigating clues.

Many a GM has been undone because their players took their clues and ran off in the opposite direction. This of course is only worsened when the players find out the truth and feel that either the clues were too vague, or the GM was being unfair.

Don't be afraid to spread clues liberally around the town. Give some reason for why the usual authorities are not able to solve the case (they're busy with an upcoming event, they're in the cult's pocket, or maybe they're just really incompetent), and then set the players to solving it.

When GMs are stingy with clues, it leads to tightrope walking for the players. Either players progress on the exact path the GM has laid out for them, or they fail (which is frustrating for both GMs and players).

Make note of how your players solve the mystery, what tools they use, what methods they employ, and so on until you've got a good grasp of the process they use to come to conclusions. This'll help you out when you want to plan out future mysteries for them.