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View Full Version : Please help me (DM) with details for my gladiator spy mission scenario



Baldm
2016-05-02, 09:04 PM
I have what I think is a great idea for the next stage of our campaign. 5 players, 4th-6th level. 3.5e

The party has made their way to a continent overrun by an industrial slave empire. In this world there is very very little metal ore, other than what falls from the sky in the form of bolides. The continent that the lawful evil slavers have overtaken has far far more metal on the surface that anywhere else. So the baddies are expanding fast, enslaving people along the way.

The empire is kind of Romanesque, in that there are many densely packed cities connected by an extensive road network, with a sort of steam punky moderate tech flair to it.

These baddies come from another continent where virtually all of the humans are lawful evil, due to invisible devils that hang around childbirths and breath the first breath into almost every newborn babies nose, turning them LE for life.

This new continent has exotic metals, and the baddies have figured out a way to make collars our of metal combos that turn anyone LE after a few weeks max. (Fort save to resist, DC 1 for each day the collar is on, if the character fails, they can hold off on the alignment change with will saves of the same increasing DC).

Since they have so many millions of slaves, they are able to select high stat elite humans to turn LE and make soldiers of.
So, lot's of high stat fighters with glaives, fighting in formation. Almost all of the metal weapons are masterwork due to the advance metallic compounds available.

When the empire first came to the continent a few hundred years ago, there were a small number of Dwarven communities, which the baddies quickly learned made very good slaves. They came to prefer the dwarves as slaves, and started trading with fire giants on another continent which giants dominate for dwarven captives. The giants coveted the exotic metals they were getting in exchange for the dwarf slaves, and this caused such a huge demand that the giants went to war with the dwarves and almost nearly wiped them out on that continent. So now most dwarves in the world are slaves. This all happened kind of quick, historically speaking, just a single dwarven generation.

In this setting, in the last two decades, a slave revolt has started on the continent with the industrial slave empire. There are pockets of rebellion, and one city and surrounding area (~100 mile radius in delta region) that has been overtaken completely by the rebels. The rebels are a loose coalition of LG (led by a half-celestial dwarven paladin and his 6 paladin underlings) with CG humans, elves, and centaurs in the wild forest and swamp areas around the city, and a few powerful druids, and some neutral aranea in the buffer areas. The LE baddies have the area under siege with a huge wall around most of the area.

Inside the free city area, there is a powerful, eldery, CG human fighter with a big following due to her history of coming up with amazingly bold military tactics and strategies. Her genius is a big part of why the slave uprising has succeeded. Due to her unwillingness to obey the LG power structure, she is an outcast from the main city, and has a keep of her own on an island in the swamp, down in the delta. The party is on the way to her now.

When they get there, the idea is for her next huge bold plan to be to send a group undercover as a gladiator that gets sold to a handler in the LE empire. This, of course, is the party. She has spies among some slaves, and informants among some of the few non-evil, neutrals among the baddie's empire. One of these is one the owners of gladiators who fights his possessions in the coliseums.
Her plan is to "sell" a group to him, and have them wait until the premier of the city is in attendance in the front row of the Colosseum during a combat, and have them jump the wall and assassinate the premier and make a getaway (possibly with a teleport scroll, or maybe dimension door to make it harder, the party's sorcerer has rope trick to hide them).

Here is the twist: according the the lawful customs of gladiatorial combat, each gladiator is allowed a handful of attendents who are of the highest class of slaves (overseers). Obviously this will be the rest of the party. They live in big heavily guarded underground prison like barracks. Because of the laws of the contest, they are left of their own devices to train and attend to the gladiator. So as long as they can disguise themselves to seem plausibly like they could be high class slaves, it will be easy for them to pass undetected.

But: the gladiator himself will have to go through a screening. By an anti-paladin. Who will be able to detect his alignment. So the party will have to use one of the captured slave collars to turn one of their own members lawful evil! And then keep him locked in a cage. And somehow figure out how to ensure that the newly LE gladiator doesn't tell the anti paladin of the plans. (? haven't figured this part out yet..feeble-mind?)

This is supposed to be a super bold, kind of insane, highly dangerous operation, the kind that the powerful elderly CG fighter is famous for. If successful, word of it should spread, inspiring widespread further uprising among the mostly dominated and scared slaves, most of which are not evil. 50,000 or so of them and their owners will be in the coliseum to witness the assassination, so there will be no way of keeping the incident silent should it succeed.

The premier will be much more powerful than the party, but will not be expecting the attack, and will probably be without the usual protections that he would normal have (armor/spells/items, I haven't figured out what class he is yet).

We have a good group of experienced players, and this seems like a great high risk high reward scenario that will challenge them well.

I have thought of all of this, the skeleton of the adventure, as of a few weeks ago, but now I have reached a sort of writes block, I just can't seem to think of any more good details. And I know that if a few of you experienced DM's lend me your brains for a few minutes it will break the log jam that I am stuck in and make it a much better adventure.

Thank you in advance!

And if one of my players happens to be reading this, you better not have read this far. You know I will find out. I always catch cheaters, and I don't even bust you. The monsters you fight will just always just happen to get super good rolls from here on out.

suburban
2016-05-03, 08:08 PM
I'm not a DM (yet), but I sometimes play one on TV in my mind...

What if the party, once they make it into their destination (while they are training, acclimating, etc.), discover some other plot to kill the premier? Or maybe not to kill the premier, but to cause some other form of disruption - even maybe something as 'simple' as a mass escape....the point being that if the 'other' plan is allowed to move forward, it will make it impossible for the party to succeed. The party would then be faced with a choice of options:


Abandon their plan to help the other conspirators, whose plan is perhaps not terribly well thought-out, or very complicated, so that the party's assistance would be necessary in order for it to succeed
Convince the other conspirators to abandon their plan, so that the party can move ahead with their own
Expose the other conspirators - this would of course lead to their near-immediate deaths, but might be necessary to serve the 'greater good'

Baldm
2016-05-03, 08:12 PM
I love it! That's a great twist.

I am totally incorporating this.

Thank you so much Suburban, I really appreciate your assistance. You are going to make my players next two sessions much more interesting.