JackRackham
2012-03-26, 10:10 PM
An infinitely powerful Kobold named Tik-Tok has my adventuring party geased into gathering some MacGuffins for him as they go about their travels. Does anyone have clever ideas for some undeniably powerful artifacts (they're explicitly millenia old, hidden by heroes, gods, or demigods) that somehow wouldn't be all that attractive to PCs?
I mean, I guess I could just make them really hard to use, in a pinch, but I'm looking to do this without flexing any DM muscle. And, while they are ostensibly gathering this for Tik-Tok the all powerful, I don't want them to be railroaded indefinitely, so I intend for Tik-Tok to just kind of lose interest and go away.
Basically, I want to maintain some shred of realism (ie, an item an all-powerful being might desire, if only for vanity-sake), without giving the PCs some world shattering, unbalancing power.
BACKGROUND: (Should be mildly amusing)
Ok, I'm running a very open-world campaign in a custom world. A few weeks back, in only the second or third session, I allowed a player - a friend of a friend, who turned out to be a very bad fit - to join a pretty familiar group. This went very, very badly at exactly the wrong time, as the party was en route to kill a pre-ascension Pun-Pun and the Kobolds Pun-Pun was associated with were prepared.
Specifically, I incorporated that big boulder trap from Indiana Jones into the entrance to the cave - with a slight variation. Now, I should mention that I rarely use traps in my campaigns, so the PCs (ECL 3) were caught completely off guard by the boulder, even moreso by the pit trap 25-30 feet in, and more still by the other pit trap 10 ft after that one. However it happened, our wizard attacked the newb, who got lucky and passed his saves, and killed the wizard. Without any crowd control, the already-very-weakened PCs got overrun and TPKed by a bunch of Kobolds controlled by a very annoyed DM.
Faced with the idea of restarting a campaign with all new characters and the implication of an ascended Pun-Pun in the world that nobody was aware of save the omniscificer who gave them the mission and prophesied that ONLY they could stop his ascension, I improvised something more palatable. Pun-Pun resurrected them several months later and cast a custom, epic geas on the party, preventing them from fighting amonst themselves and requiring them to gather these magic doodads for him - as they go about their normal adventuring careers as a party. (Of course, new guy wouldn't let things go, kept picking fights, despite literally not being physically able to IC and second-guessing the other PCs and myself. That's actually not the issue, though. That's handled.)
I mean, I guess I could just make them really hard to use, in a pinch, but I'm looking to do this without flexing any DM muscle. And, while they are ostensibly gathering this for Tik-Tok the all powerful, I don't want them to be railroaded indefinitely, so I intend for Tik-Tok to just kind of lose interest and go away.
Basically, I want to maintain some shred of realism (ie, an item an all-powerful being might desire, if only for vanity-sake), without giving the PCs some world shattering, unbalancing power.
BACKGROUND: (Should be mildly amusing)
Ok, I'm running a very open-world campaign in a custom world. A few weeks back, in only the second or third session, I allowed a player - a friend of a friend, who turned out to be a very bad fit - to join a pretty familiar group. This went very, very badly at exactly the wrong time, as the party was en route to kill a pre-ascension Pun-Pun and the Kobolds Pun-Pun was associated with were prepared.
Specifically, I incorporated that big boulder trap from Indiana Jones into the entrance to the cave - with a slight variation. Now, I should mention that I rarely use traps in my campaigns, so the PCs (ECL 3) were caught completely off guard by the boulder, even moreso by the pit trap 25-30 feet in, and more still by the other pit trap 10 ft after that one. However it happened, our wizard attacked the newb, who got lucky and passed his saves, and killed the wizard. Without any crowd control, the already-very-weakened PCs got overrun and TPKed by a bunch of Kobolds controlled by a very annoyed DM.
Faced with the idea of restarting a campaign with all new characters and the implication of an ascended Pun-Pun in the world that nobody was aware of save the omniscificer who gave them the mission and prophesied that ONLY they could stop his ascension, I improvised something more palatable. Pun-Pun resurrected them several months later and cast a custom, epic geas on the party, preventing them from fighting amonst themselves and requiring them to gather these magic doodads for him - as they go about their normal adventuring careers as a party. (Of course, new guy wouldn't let things go, kept picking fights, despite literally not being physically able to IC and second-guessing the other PCs and myself. That's actually not the issue, though. That's handled.)