Plot twist: Help sought! (Players: keep out!)

[Inevitability]

If you are participating in, or hope to one day participate in, my 'Don't go into the woods' campaign, please do not read any further. I'd like to keep this a secret. Thanks in advance.












Now as for my question:

The players in my E6 campaign will be providing food for their village, as the merchants who used to sell the village food have suddenly stopped visiting. As the settlement is cut off from civilization, the people find themselves forced to go hunt for food themselves, despite the many dangers of the woods.

If the players ever travel along the road to civilization, they'll find that around where the forest is supposed to end, it simply continues, but with the road ending. Inspection reveals that along the exact line where the road ends trees have been cut in half, hills have collapsed, and rocks show weird cracks. Imagine someone using a colossal knife to essentially 'cut away' part of the world, then replaced the removed part with more forest. If the players push on, they find no signs of civilization, only more dangerous woodland (this part may be subject to change).

How should I justify this having happened? Should I just go 'divine intervention' or make it a bit more interesting?


TL;DR: Civilized lands next to village have mysteriously been replaced by wilderness. What could have caused this?

[Feddlefew]

How about sudden, violent termination of an ancient spell that literally shuffled the region? Maybe the spell maintaining it has worn out from old age, or perhaps the runes and ruins binding have been disturbed.

As for why this happened in the first place I would say that the village is built on the ground where a great and terrible army once made camp, and the local magi and/or druids decided the best way to save a city just a few day's march away was to tear up the land, army and all, and move it to the middle of nowhere. Of course, several thousand years later, the civilization that originally cast the spell has fallen, and the new civilization founded by the invading army has grown and flourished in the location they were moved to.

Edit: This would provide an opportunity for the players to discover the ruins of a city long swallowed up by the forest, if that suits the campaign.

[Extra Anchovies]

The village is near the edge of a massive, slowly rotating circle of land that only started to spin after the road was cut.

Also I'm sad that I read this thread because that sounds like a really fun campaign! I love survival-based games and have wanted to play E6 for a while now :smallfrown:

[Brendanicus]

Somewhere, deep in the wilderness, a powerful portal to the Feywild has become unstable, causing elements of that plane to leak onto the Material. The wilderness surrounding the town is but foreshadowing for the fantastical forests and creatures it will soon be swimming in.

As to why the town has forest on ALL sides, just say the the Feywild-energy can't convert civilized land very easily. The conversion energy simply wrapped around the town, not through it. EDIT: That being said, the town itself can't be safe for long...

[General Sajaru]

Inexplicable (or at least not easily explicable) "divine intervention" may not be a bad idea; after all, should the players wish to find out what happened, then perhaps they'll embark upon a quest for the answer. And it's certainly present in fantasy and sci-fi literature; the Island in the Sea of Time series and the series starting with 1632 come to mind.

[BilltheCynic]

If you want to make the players care, make the reason for the cutoff tied into the plot.

Personally, I would go with time travel. Someone or something has taken that little patch of land and a) sent it flying pack in time b) sent it flying forward in time or c) kept it static while everything else went on normally. If it has gone forward in time, perhaps the world has gone through an apocalypse that has wiped out civilization as we know it and nature has reclaimed most of the Earth. The cutoff is the edge of the 'time bubble' and the forest is what would naturally be there. The reason the merchants are no longer coming to the village is because it is no longer in the same time period.

Possible reasons for the village being sent through time:

1) As you said, divine intervention. For some reason one or more deities need someone or someones from the village (most likely the PCs) for some great task. Perhaps one of the PCs is the descendant or ancestor of some great hero.

2) An enclave of mindflayers live deep below the surface directly under the village (the people never encountered any illithids because the twisting nature of the underdark meant that although the were geographically stacked, the nearest path from the illithid city to the surface is several hundred miles away.) The illithids are attempting to perfect time travel in a way that they don't have to sacrifice hundreds of Elder Brains to travel through time should the need arise again. In this case they are traveling back in time to prevent the Gith from ever rising up and rebelling. If you go this route then perhaps it will be less of a 'bubble' and more of a pillar, originating at the illithid city. This is done because, since the city is several miles below the surface, they don't want the possibility of some difference in the geography between time periods to bury them on arrival (oops, this area used to be an active volcano. Our bad!)

3) An ancient civilization (possibly the Sarrukhs) were attempting to bring back a city from the future so that they could steal some of the technology and magic that would be developed thousands of years later. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of transporting things thousands of years through time and the relatively new nature of the spell, they screwed up and transporting your little hamlet hundreds of miles off course. Now you must deal with the events in the past, perhaps helping to either support or bring down this ancient civilization.

4) Some sort of terrible rift in the planes placed the whole village in a limbo for thousands of years, though to the people inside it seemed like no time had passed at all. Now the village has finally returned to the prime material plane, but thousands of years have passed. Something happened to bring civilization to its knees (a wight apocalypse, perhaps? or maybe some great war between the gods or the celestial and infernal realms) and now the landscape has been radically altered and the PCs must deal with surviving this new landscape.

[Inevitability]

If you want to make the players care, make the reason for the cutoff tied into the plot.

Personally, I would go with time travel. Someone or something has taken that little patch of land and a) sent it flying pack in time b) sent it flying forward in time or c) kept it static while everything else went on normally. If it has gone forward in time, perhaps the world has gone through an apocalypse that has wiped out civilization as we know it and nature has reclaimed most of the Earth. The cutoff is the edge of the 'time bubble' and the forest is what would naturally be there. The reason the merchants are no longer coming to the village is because it is no longer in the same time period.

Possible reasons for the village being sent through time:

1) As you said, divine intervention. For some reason one or more deities need someone or someones from the village (most likely the PCs) for some great task. Perhaps one of the PCs is the descendant or ancestor of some great hero.

2) An enclave of mindflayers live deep below the surface directly under the village (the people never encountered any illithids because the twisting nature of the underdark meant that although the were geographically stacked, the nearest path from the illithid city to the surface is several hundred miles away.) The illithids are attempting to perfect time travel in a way that they don't have to sacrifice hundreds of Elder Brains to travel through time should the need arise again. In this case they are traveling back in time to prevent the Gith from ever rising up and rebelling. If you go this route then perhaps it will be less of a 'bubble' and more of a pillar, originating at the illithid city. This is done because, since the city is several miles below the surface, they don't want the possibility of some difference in the geography between time periods to bury them on arrival (oops, this area used to be an active volcano. Our bad!)

3) An ancient civilization (possibly the Sarrukhs) were attempting to bring back a city from the future so that they could steal some of the technology and magic that would be developed thousands of years later. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of transporting things thousands of years through time and the relatively new nature of the spell, they screwed up and transporting your little hamlet hundreds of miles off course. Now you must deal with the events in the past, perhaps helping to either support or bring down this ancient civilization.

4) Some sort of terrible rift in the planes placed the whole village in a limbo for thousands of years, though to the people inside it seemed like no time had passed at all. Now the village has finally returned to the prime material plane, but thousands of years have passed. Something happened to bring civilization to its knees (a wight apocalypse, perhaps? or maybe some great war between the gods or the celestial and infernal realms) and now the landscape has been radically altered and the PCs must deal with surviving this new landscape.

Time travel is something I considered, too. Thanks for your good ideas!

[Jay R]

Don't bother yet. Listen to the players' speculations, and pick the idea they come up with that you can build an adventure on.

[PraxisVetli]

How about sudden, violent termination of an ancient spell that literally shuffled the region?

Verdigris Tsunami, ELH, does exactly that, but it might be a wee bit intense for an e6.

[Telonius]

I actually had something similar happen in the campaign I'm running now. There was a planar juncture ritual going on, but it went wrong somehow and ended up flinging a five-mile-sphere ahead in time by a few thousand years.

[mashlagoo1982]

Listen to the players' speculations, and pick the idea they come up with that you can build an adventure on.

This is typically my method. However, I do always have a legit alternate reason, incase none of the reasons the other players come up with make sense or I don't want to play the adventures build on their speculation.

[Seruvius]

Maybe use it as a clue to some greater evil where their plan went wrong. Say take inspiration from the gates of slaughtergarde module. Some nasties from the Abyss/Hell are planing on swapping a fortress in their realm for the citadel of the capital or some other powerful location. They have either made some mistake that caused this event or this was them experimenting, swapping regions within the material plane before trying an inter-planar swap. This arrow straight line clearly points to something not natural/normal going on, so your party might discover some confused cultsits arguing about what is going on, or be informed in some other way. Say if it is tied to Demogorgon, have some Lizardmen arguing about what went wrong loudly for the party to overhear. Demogorgon is powerful enough to try this and his lizardfolk minions tend not to be the brightest, so that might work out.

[justiceforall]

Don't bother yet. Listen to the players' speculations, and pick the idea they come up with that you can build an adventure on.

This style of GMing kills me as a player. Half of the fun is reasoning out the scenario/adventure/arc/etc, which you cannot do it if it's always in flux and heavily dependent on what you as a player say out loud.

If your players don't care though, have at it.

[goto124]

Inspection reveals that along the exact line where the road ends trees have been cut in half, hills have collapsed, and rocks show weird cracks. Imagine someone using a colossal knife to essentially 'cut away' part of the world, then replaced the removed part with more forest.

http://i.imgur.com/M0yXL.jpg

[Jay R]

This style of GMing kills me as a player. Half of the fun is reasoning out the scenario/adventure/arc/etc, which you cannot do it if it's always in flux and heavily dependent on what you as a player say out loud.

If your players don't care though, have at it.

If the players ever know I've done it, I did it wrong.

And the players are reasoning it out. But they are not guessing what one solution I came up with; they are reasoning out what could have done this sort of thing. I will choose the best reasoned answer, modify it enough that they don't know what's happening, and run with it.

I don't do it often, but if they have the best idea, I'm not egotistical enough to throw it out just because they came up with it before I did.

I was once in a super-hero game set in Gotham City. We had uncovered some clues: the words chess, match, and clock. One player looked at that and said, "The clock used at a chess match has two faces. I'll bet Two-Face is involved."

That wasn't what was going on, and it led to nothing. But I thought it was a great piece of reasoning, and if I'd been the DM, I'd have quickly tried to figure out how to introduce Two-Face.

This changes the player's activity from guessing what I have in mind to reasoning out a compelling conclusion.

But as I said, the players cannot know I did it, for the exact reason you gave.