PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Homebrew campaign just revealed a huge twist - looking for creative help!



JLCook50
2016-08-11, 10:19 AM
Hello all, I've come to this forum for ideas and read plenty of the work of so many posters but this is my first post.

I've been running a homebrew campaign for a party of 6 that are now 6th level. We're using Forgotten Realms and have based our adventuring in the Sword Coast region. Recently they were sent across the Sea of Swords to the Outer Reaches (a small group of islands that doesn't actually appear on the official maps - since its homebrew I'm not terribly concerned with being exactly accurate to the official FR world).

My party ended up entering a tomb and set off literally every trap I had put together (I was hoping for about 50% to be triggered...our barbarian is more reckless than I gave him credit for) and ended up causing a cave-in of the entrance so the only way out was to find a secret passage (which they did find) that took them further underground and into a sacred crypt. I had designed this with some fun nasties - both ancient magics and a more recent necromancer who had taken up shop there to build his undead army, using his doppleganger comrades to wreak havoc on the small establishments on the island.

The necromancer knew the party had been on the island and had been monitoring their exploits for almost a week...he knew where they had their boat docked (their primary way back home) and so when they entered the tomb he dispatched his dopplegangers to go to the party's boat (disguised as the party) and to direct the boat's crew to take them back home.

My intention was to get them into a "chase down the fakes" situation and make them do a little bit of damage control when they got back to the mainland (the dopplegangers would have committed two or three moderate crimes or maybe one major crime disguised as the party, damaging their reputations). To give the dopples a head start I had designed the underground crypt with a time-altering spell (time passes much slower in the crypt than in the natural world - 1 day inside = 1 year outside) and set up several traps to keep the party moving so they would leave the crypt relatively quickly and not spend too long there.

Unfortunately, my party used some very creative methods to circumvent or overcome my attempts to speed them through and chose to take a couple extended rests underground (they had very poor rolls in consecutive encounters and lost a TON of HP...took a lot of spells to recover). So instead of spending a couple hours underground they spent more than two days underground, which means the dopples have had a couple years to have run rampant through the Sword Coast doing bad deeds in the name of the Heroes.

So here's where I need help: once the party finds another way back home (there will be several options for that) I need to figure out how to set up the reception. There will be warrants for their arrest from every major city but certainly they can hide/run to avoid immediate arrest. Most likely I'll set up a couple situations for them to offer significant help to a city they adventured in earlier in the campaign and by providing help at a critical time they may sway the governer/ruler of the area to lift the warrants. This will give the party a safe haven, so-to-speak but they will still want to clear their names and track down the dopples. Plenty of opportunities for recurring villains there, but I want the encounters to be memorable. Also I've never run any kind of political intrigue situation before so I'm not quite sure where to start. I don't think this will be a problem the party can solve by killing someone, it will take diplomacy and I want to make that just as exciting for them as combats and dungeon delving has been.

Sorry for the super long post but I'm hoping some of that will help you all come up with brilliant, intriguing, and hilarious ideas for how I can proceed from here!

Mutazoia
2016-08-11, 10:33 AM
Hello all, I've come to this forum for ideas and read plenty of the work of so many posters but this is my first post.

I've been running a homebrew campaign for a party of 6 that are now 6th level. We're using Forgotten Realms and have based our adventuring in the Sword Coast region. Recently they were sent across the Sea of Swords to the Outer Reaches (a small group of islands that doesn't actually appear on the official maps - since its homebrew I'm not terribly concerned with being exactly accurate to the official FR world).

My party ended up entering a tomb and set off literally every trap I had put together (I was hoping for about 50% to be triggered...our barbarian is more reckless than I gave him credit for) and ended up causing a cave-in of the entrance so the only way out was to find a secret passage (which they did find) that took them further underground and into a sacred crypt. I had designed this with some fun nasties - both ancient magics and a more recent necromancer who had taken up shop there to build his undead army, using his doppleganger comrades to wreak havoc on the small establishments on the island.

The necromancer knew the party had been on the island and had been monitoring their exploits for almost a week...he knew where they had their boat docked (their primary way back home) and so when they entered the tomb he dispatched his dopplegangers to go to the party's boat (disguised as the party) and to direct the boat's crew to take them back home.

My intention was to get them into a "chase down the fakes" situation and make them do a little bit of damage control when they got back to the mainland (the dopplegangers would have committed two or three moderate crimes or maybe one major crime disguised as the party, damaging their reputations). To give the dopples a head start I had designed the underground crypt with a time-altering spell (time passes much slower in the crypt than in the natural world - 1 day inside = 1 year outside) and set up several traps to keep the party moving so they would leave the crypt relatively quickly and not spend too long there.

Unfortunately, my party used some very creative methods to circumvent or overcome my attempts to speed them through and chose to take a couple extended rests underground (they had very poor rolls in consecutive encounters and lost a TON of HP...took a lot of spells to recover). So instead of spending a couple hours underground they spent more than two days underground, which means the dopples have had a couple years to have run rampant through the Sword Coast doing bad deeds in the name of the Heroes.

So here's where I need help: once the party finds another way back home (there will be several options for that) I need to figure out how to set up the reception. There will be warrants for their arrest from every major city but certainly they can hide/run to avoid immediate arrest. Most likely I'll set up a couple situations for them to offer significant help to a city they adventured in earlier in the campaign and by providing help at a critical time they may sway the governer/ruler of the area to lift the warrants. This will give the party a safe haven, so-to-speak but they will still want to clear their names and track down the dopples. Plenty of opportunities for recurring villains there, but I want the encounters to be memorable. Also I've never run any kind of political intrigue situation before so I'm not quite sure where to start. I don't think this will be a problem the party can solve by killing someone, it will take diplomacy and I want to make that just as exciting for them as combats and dungeon delving has been.

Sorry for the super long post but I'm hoping some of that will help you all come up with brilliant, intriguing, and hilarious ideas for how I can proceed from here!

Easiest way to handle this is to retcon things and start the "chase down the dopple clock" when the PC's actually leave the tomb and head back out toward the boat (since they don't know any of this is happening anyway it effects nothing).

NRSASD
2016-08-11, 10:49 AM
The problem with giving the PCs the option to bail out the allied city is that they might not decide to help them, or (more likely) help in such a way that the city is no longer grateful. One way to guarantee the allied city's help is to have them catch and kill a doppleganger (disguised as a PC of course) off screen, so that when the party shows up the city is very confused initially. A quick jaunt to Gallows Hill or the local cesspit quickly confirms that the doppleganger-ed PC is not back from the dead and that should clue everyone (at least the city officials) in to what's going on.

A couple questions though:

Why are the dopplegangers (and the necromancer for that matter) bent on assassinating the party's reputation? As a bit of a lark on the Outer Reaches that makes sense, but a two year smear campaign requires some serious commitment. Why haven't the dopplegangers morphed into someone else by now?

Do the PCs have any allies on the mainland who wield power of their own? If they exist, why haven't they stopped the dopplegangers themselves? Did the dopplegangers deceive or eliminate them?


About political intrigue: I tend to give the PCs a list of people associated with the intrigue in question, and let them pursue their own investigations. This leads to lots of fun because they wind up infiltrating and raiding manors of rich and paranoid people, which results in lots of chaos and running from the local police. As far as diplomacy goes, make sure you have a contingency for them failing to spot something or reach the right conclusion! This (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule) is a pretty decent starting point for how to make investigations not fall flat because someone rolled a 9 when they needed a 10.

TheYell
2016-08-11, 10:53 AM
How are you getting them back home? Are they goody goody adventurers?

I would have a war going on. That could be their first clue they been gone a long time. "We aint had good fishing since the war started. What war? Where you been mister?"

When they get back home it is conquered and oppressed. Everybody they meet starts crying and begging for mercy. They are starving and ragged. A squad of enemy soldiers arrives and the officer orders the execution of the party and everybody talking to them. The party is cheered as folk heroes for fighting them.

So the party spends the first night in the woods with what passes for resistance. They learn the old king is beseiged but still holding out. They learn they are wanted in every nearby country for capital crimes. They are probably stuck. They have a lot to do to restore a level of justice where they can clear their names...

Cernor
2016-08-11, 03:02 PM
First off, it seems odd to me that a necromancer would set up somewhere where time moves slower than the rest of the world. Why would he not set up somewhere it moves faster, so that if it takes three months to make a magic item or raise a horde of zombies, it takes him about six hours in the real world?

More on topic, however, the major problem you seem to be facing is that you committed yourself to "one year in the world = 1 day in the crypt", forgetting rule 1 of DMing: if your players don't have proof, it isnt true! You can change it around so that the doppelgängers return to the mainland, say, ten days to a month afterwards. That gives you enough time for them to drag the PCs' names through the mud in a major city, without such huge complications.

JLCook50
2016-08-11, 04:02 PM
You guys have a lot of good questions there...honestly I've ended up in this situation because I don't like to punish good role play by back-tracking or railroading. I want their decisions to have consequences, good or bad. This of course leads to a lot of DM-ing by the seat of my pants when my group goes way off the predicted paths.

I don't really want to take back the time lapse because I think it creates a lot of wiggle room for me...the details from earlier in the campaign, the personalities of the people they worked with before...if I recall something a bit wrong or play an NPC incorrectly I have the easy excuse of "people change over time".

My reasoning for the Necromancer holing up somewhere with slowed time was more out of happenstance than anything else - he came across the place just because he was looking for a good source of bodies, the slowed time was just a quirk of the place that he didn't initially notice and then didn't care about once he did realize...it doesn't directly impact his plans.

I don't think the dopples will have spent the entire two years on a smear campaign...I think they will have done enough in the first 4-6 months to smear reputation and then probably took on another appearance after that. The comment about recurring villains was sort of just a random thought. Now that you've brought it up it doesn't really make sense for them to use the party's identities for a terribly long time...just long enough to use up any good favor they may have had and then switch out when too many people started looking for them.

The party is a bit of a motley crew - one lawful good paladin but the rest are mostly neutral good or chaotic good. I would not call them "goody-goody" as they have done some less-than-savory things when the paladin was not around or otherwise occupied. They will have options of stealing a ship (there's a small dock on the island that will have a small sailing ship) or building one (the island certainly has enough resources for it and they've spent a fair deal of time sailing so I'll give them a decent chance to build a serviceable craft). The island they're on is part of a small archipelago so they may try to just get across to another island in which case I'll have a larger dock with a better sailing ship and a crew for hire (very expensive).

They actually do know already that their reputations are ruined and that time has passed because after leaving the crypt they contacted the leader of the boat crew they originally hired using "Sending" so the retcon idea doesn't work unless I just tell them I screwed up and overstated the time lapse (not gonna happen! lol).

The ideas about political intrigue and diplomacy are good - just being prepared with half a dozen or more key individuals is going to be the key...preparation has been a challenge for me, I tend to start working on something for them and get ideas I like and next thing I know I've researched something they'll face in a couple levels and not done anything for the next session (did I mention I'm a bit of a newbie as a DM?).

The war going on is a very interesting idea and there's even a key political figure whose life they saved right before leaving for the island. At the time he was the governor of the largest town in a small region...he could have risen further in power in the past four years and could be the most likely person to believe that they didn't do the things everyone else thinks they did.

NRSASD
2016-08-11, 05:21 PM
They actually do know already that their reputations are ruined and that time has passed because after leaving the crypt they contacted the leader of the boat crew they originally hired using "Sending" so the retcon idea doesn't work unless I just tell them I screwed up and overstated the time lapse (not gonna happen! lol).

Once you say something to the players, I agree, it is set in stone. That being said, don't be afraid to say "Sorry guys I goofed" if (and only if) it completely devastates the plot line.


The ideas about political intrigue and diplomacy are good - just being prepared with half a dozen or more key individuals is going to be the key...preparation has been a challenge for me, I tend to start working on something for them and get ideas I like and next thing I know I've researched something they'll face in a couple levels and not done anything for the next session (did I mention I'm a bit of a newbie as a DM?).

Haha I do the same thing all the time! I try to reign my attention in, but it doesn't work all the time. That's why I've got three campaigns rearing to go but only enough actual material for two sessions :P.



I don't think the dopples will have spent the entire two years on a smear campaign...I think they will have done enough in the first 4-6 months to smear reputation and then probably took on another appearance after that. The comment about recurring villains was sort of just a random thought. Now that you've brought it up it doesn't really make sense for them to use the party's identities for a terribly long time...just long enough to use up any good favor they may have had and then switch out when too many people started looking for them.
The war going on is a very interesting idea and there's even a key political figure whose life they saved right before leaving for the island. At the time he was the governor of the largest town in a small region...he could have risen further in power in the past four years and could be the most likely person to believe that they didn't do the things everyone else thinks they did.

A two year war over 4-6 months of dopplegangers screwing around seems a little implausible... fairly quickly one side or the other would figure out they had been conned and try to patch things back together, because a war is a costly, bloody thing. How's this for an idea:

Governor of the largest town wants to move up in the world. His favorite adventurers (the dopplegangers disguised as PCs) have just returned, so he entrusts them with some errand running to Waterdeep (or any other big city), specifically to pave the way for something big. The dopplegangers know something is up, so they play along for the 4-6 months, running messages between the Governor and his big city friends. Governor has been making all the right people happy so that they would trust him enough to sell/give him something big and powerful he could use to tip the balance in the governor's home region. This McGuffin could be a state-of-the-art warship, a powerful artifact, a contract with the largest mercenary group in the area for 5 years, even a big city ruler's son/daughter's hand in marriage (thus sealing an alliance between the two), etc. Finally, when everything is set, the governor sends his most trusted aides with a sizeable chunk of his treasury to make the exchange. The dopplegangers take the money and the McGuffin and run, leaving the Governor and the big city mad at each other, threatening war and fighting the odd skirmish, but ESPECIALLY mad at the PCs. The dopplegangers pawn off the McGuffin to the highest bidder, and then retire to a life of wealthy obscurity in another big city.

The PCs now have four plots to pursue: recover the McGuffin, recover the Governor's money, patch relations between the two aggrieved parties, and most importantly, catch those dopplegangers.

TheYell
2016-08-11, 05:54 PM
One way to guarantee the allied city's help is to have them catch and kill a doppleganger (disguised as a PC of course) off screen, so that when the party shows up the city is very confused initially. A quick jaunt to Gallows Hill or the local cesspit quickly confirms that the doppleganger-ed PC is not back from the dead and that should clue everyone (at least the city officials) in to what's going on.

This could work at any time to establish the PCs didn't do it. In fact they don't have to kill the doppleganger themselves, if the authorities know the Barbarian got killed a year ago and is buried on Boot Hill in disgrace.


They will have options of stealing a ship (there's a small dock on the island that will have a small sailing ship) or building one

What? A paladin stealing! Surely he'd insist on working their way back. You could have them scrub decks and sing sea shanties for their cup of fish stew and a hammock.


The PCs now have four plots to pursue: recover the McGuffin, recover the Governor's money, patch relations between the two aggrieved parties, and most importantly, catch those dopplegangers.


That works for me.

If it were a Bond movie, they'd have a bunch of stuffy Ambassadors to smooth over, track the doppelgangers to a rich resort spa where the bad guys hang out living like millionaires every winter, use diplomacy with the rich and noble clients to get information, and then track them to another fortress dungeon. It turns out the doppelgangers are happier working as a necromancer's gang, and they went in as partners with a newbie and made him a dungeon like the old one. Your party can use its experience from the first time to do a better job of it.

JLCook50
2016-08-16, 08:30 AM
Thanks again for the feedback! Just got back from vacation to read the last two - I agree that an extended war would be a bit extreme if it were just based on the actions of the dopples but the war could be only slightly related or not related at all if I decide to go with that.

I do really like the McGuffin idea, that seems like a super-plausible scenario AND would cause some tension and distrust for the players to work through, which is what I'm really trying to achieve. I will still probably have a few warrants out for the party, if for no other reason than that it will be fun to have bounty hunters and maybe even another adventuring party pop up to challenge my players at very inopportune times.

The paladin certainly will not agree with stealing the boat...but he also won't be interested in being left behind on this terrible island so I could see him forcing the rogue (who is the party treasurer, conveniently) to leave a fair sum of coin behind for the owner of the vessel or to perform some kind of task or penance.

I may or may not ever have the dopples show back up. They've done the job the necromancer wanted them to do and they've made a lot of money in the process. By now they would have certainly switched out of the guise of the party and either into another or are holed up somewhere with all their wealth. Showing back up as the party could only cause them trouble and I can't think of a good reason to make them do it. I can, however, use the experience to challenge the heroic resolve of the party - I may present unrelated dopplegangers at some point that are clearly not the ones that caused them trouble and leave it up to the group to decide if they will persecute them just for being dopples or if they will be reasonable/fair until given a reason to do otherwise. I enjoy seeing character development like that...