Horror One-shot

[kieza]

So, I'm considering running a one-shot for a few friends over Thanksgiving. Now, in the past when we've played, they always come to the table without characters made, so I'm thinking about running something a little bit different.

The setup for this campaign is that the players are not heroic adventurers, but simple villagers. During a harvest festival in their remote mountain village, people start turning up dead. The villagers need to use their meagre resources to survive the night in the face of a vastly powerful threat.

The twist is, the players won't have regular characters. Instead, I'll have around a dozen "level 0" characters that are more like monsters. Before each scene, each player draws one of these characters out of a deck (they should be simple enough to fit on an index card). They play that character until it dies, and then draw a new one. If all of the characters are killed...

This way, I can bang out a dozen or so characters in a couple of hours, and then feel no guilt at all about killing them off like it's a B-horror movie. I figure a single game of DM vs. Players might be an interesting break.

Intended Plot
The monsters are a party of fugitive dark elves just passing through. The first people they killed were just so they could pick up some travelling supplies, but when the marshal (an available character) organizes a posse, they decide to stick around and have a little fun.

The dark elves are disorganized, as they're competing to see who can rack up the most kills, but even so, they're massively more powerful than the party. Each one of them should be capable of killing 2-3 characters. A couple of the contestants are arcanists, who can summon shadow constructs that aren't quite so powerful, but they just keep coming.

At first, the villagers will have no clue what's killing them or why. My goal is to make it seem like they can hole up at first, but once they figure out the dark elves' motivations, it should be obvious that that just delays the inevitable.

The villagers need to survive in one of a few ways; the "bad ending" is that a few of them (whoever's in the party at the time) flee and leave everyone else to die, but a lot of the characters have perks which would allow them to survive some other way--if they can get the rest of the villagers to help them.

Character ideas

Each character has a "perk" of some kind that would help them survive. Mostly, this means that if they can get somewhere and do something without being killed, the chances of survival are improved. None of them are particularly good combatants, but the Preacher, Baron, Magus, and secretly the Kid are better than most--they might survive more than one encounter.

The marshal: Defender. Has the key to the armory which contains enough rifles to arm most of the village and form an angry mob.

The ne'er-do-well: Melee Striker. Is a smuggler with a small cache of illegal weapons that would make killing dark elves a cakewalk.

The kid: Ranged Striker. Is secretly a budding sorcerer. He also knows what the attackers are, but only because he led the dark elves to town by suggesting that they could find supplies here.

The magus: Controller. If he can get to his ritual book, he can send for help and put up some spell defenses.

The tinker: Leader. Has a supply of explosives in his workshop.

The preacher: Defender. Is the most powerful combatant, due to serving a god who specifically dislikes dark elves. His temple can serve as a sanctuary.

The elf: Ranged Striker. Knows what the attackers are, but is forbidden from discussing them. He is caretaker of a special grove that can also serve as a sanctuary.

The veteran: Leader. Is crazy prepared and has built a signal fire on a nearby hill. He can use it to contact some old army buddies stationed nearby.

The merchant: Melee Striker. Is secretly a foreign agent; he has a Sending Stone and a bunch of scrolls for creating teleport circles stashed in his wagon, which would allow him to call in foreign soldiers to save the village.

The baron: Defender. Has an heirloom magic weapon.

The doc: Leader. Has a supply of healing potions in his surgery.

The dwarf: Melee Striker. Can rework farm tools into weapons for the other villagers to form an angry mob.

The hermit: Ranged Striker. Can construct traps for the dark elves.



Winning
As mentioned, the easiest but least rewarding way to win is for whichever characters are in the party to cut and run. But, there are other ways:
-The PCs can try to hunt down and kill their attackers, but this will likely end in tears as they get slaughtered.
-The ne'er-do-well can lead the villagers to his cache of advanced weaponry (I'm thinking a bunch of guns that fire lightning bolts), allowing them to stand up to the dark elves.
-The marshal or dwarf can venture out to the armory or smithy and arm the villagers. An angry mob can then swarm the dark elves at a terrible cost in lives.
-The merchant can go get his teleport scrolls, explain why they're in the language of an enemy nation (he's constructing teleport circles for foreign spies to enter the country), and help the villagers to escape.
-The villagers can hole up in the Preacher or Elf's sanctuary and wait for the Magus or Veteran to call for help (about 8 hours).

EDIT: Forgot what the point of that was. Anybody have any ideas for spicing this up?

[Treblain]

You could have "item cards" that can be found by the players, basically giving them one-use powers that they can obtain. The items might have odd and situational effects that they have to figure out how to use properly. They can exchange them with each other, so that if one character dies, another can pick up the item they were carrying.

[Rosstin]

This sounds like a kickass scenario! You should let us know the results after you run it.

[kieza]

It went...okay, I guess. I made two changes in how I'd planned to run it: 1) I let the players "collect" characters: after they completed a scene, they could either keep the character, draw a new one and play it, or swap out for a character they had already played. 2) I told the group that one of the characters was a traitor, and would win the game if he could get all 4 other players killed in the same scene. There wasn't any such traitor, but it made them distrustful of each other.

So, the plot went like this: The townsfolk find someone dead, and the sheriff forms a posse from the people close at hand to go out and bring in people from outlying farmsteads. Twice, the posse arrives too late and finds a black-armored figure departing the scene. They fight him both times; the first time, he kills a member of the posse (the Ne'er-do-well) but the second time, the other posse members manage to wound him and he runs for it. They head back to town, and everyone (except the guy playing the Magus) draws a new character.

Now, a different figure in black armor shows up (they can tell he's different because he's got different weaponry) and just starts marching towards the center of town killing everyone he meets. Two more players lose characters (the Kid and the Baron), and they decide to run for it and hole up in the town hall with a bunch of other townsfolk. They draw new characters, and get a little lucky: someone draws the Preacher.

Now they know to get to the temple, and they have muscle to back them up. While escorting the townsfolk to the temple, it gets dark and some kind of monster (a sort of shadow elemental) starts attacking from the darkness, and carries off the Dwarf. That player draws the Elf once they get to the temple, and everyone notices the Elf acting funny (a really bad Bluff roll). They proceed to torture the Elf for information, and he dies after revealing what he knows. That player now draws the Veteran, and the party now consists of the Preacher, Veteran, Magus, Doc, and Merchant.

Now that the party knows what they're up against, the Magus, Veteran, and Merchant start arguing over how they should try to escape: the Magus and Veteran each want to call for backup, but the Veteran is worried that using magic will attract the dark elves, and the Magus doesn't think they can make it to the Veteran's signal. None of them trust the Merchant, since he's an outsider and a spy. Eventually, the Veteran decides that the Magus is the traitor and shoots him. That character draws the Tinker, and the remaining characters agree to go with the Veteran's plan.

The posse now heads out into the woods to try and reach the signal fire. The tinker's workshop is on the way, so they decide to pick up the explosives, but get ambushed by the shadow creature and the Doc bites it before they bring it down. They can't get a replacement, so the four of them keep going. They now run into the sorcerer that summoned the creature, and he kills both the Merchant and Tinker. The Preacher and Veteran reach the signal and light it, but it attracts the very first dark elf, who kills both of them but is blown up by the Tinker's explosives.

In the epilogue, the army arrives around dawn, and finds the temple full of survivors, guarded only by the Marshal and a crazy old Hermit. Nobody ever finds out how many of the dark elves there actually were or what they wanted.



So, plot-wise it turned out like a decent horror movie, which is what I was aiming for. Mechanically, though...the players just drew characters until they got one they liked. The Magus never switched, the Preacher never switched once he got that character. I think if they hadn't gotten killed, the Kid and Baron wouldn't have switched, either. So...not quite what I intended. Also, the fights were maybe a little deadlier than I'd intended; the players got killed so quickly that they figured things out quicker than intended. I had a lot of material prepped (dark elves breach the sanctuary, one of the dark elves impersonates a townie to get invited into the sanctuary, the dark elves attack en masse, etc.) that I didn't get to use before the players completed an objective. But, overall, everyone had fun, even when one of them was getting his character tortured by the others.