Afgncaap5
2017-10-15, 06:16 PM
tl;dr - Could you suggest ideas for NPCs or rooms in a haunted house that could impress the themes of "madness" or "hatred" upon my players?
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So, I'm going to be working on my first ever 5e adventure (I'm assuming it won't jump start a campaign, but there's always the chance with my players.) It's set in Eberron, and I might be bringing in a bit too much 3.5 design methodology with me, so I wanted to bounce a few things off of some people here. Basically, the adventure is a haunted house story, with the premise that the house is located in a manifest zone to Xoriat (the plane of madness) and the house's position in the manifest zone happens to make it coexist with a similarly shaped building in the plane that was made out of pure hatred (based on a suggested line in Keith Baker's blog.)
The original idea of "what effect does it have on the players to be in this building for a prolonged amount of time" ran into some weird issues, namely that I don't want to suddenly tell the players what they should feel or think or how they should act even with constant exposure from some nebulous presence of hatred that they don't really understand yet. So I'm trying to come up with good examples of how the location itself and the various people/creatures within it can shore up that feeling.
Basic premise is that this location is near the edge of the Mournland, in a mostly war-torn and destroyed building, and while a bard from Cannith is there with a Lyre of Building to handle most of the quick construction, the PCs and other military, adventure, or logistics professionals are moving through the remains of old buildings to quickly do preparatory clean up, or to kill off monsters who might've moved in over time. The fact that the building assigned to the PCs and some other people is on a manifest zone to Xoriat is completely unknown.
A few ideas I have already:
-One of the contacts that the PCs are told to meet is identified pretty much only by name. Over the course of the journey through the house, the PCs meet several NPCs with nigh-identical backstories who all claim to have that name, and who, after a while, meet the PCs after having met other iterations of themselves. They become increasingly hostile toward the idea of these other thems and begin working to the detriment of their own mission while trying to avoid the possibility that they might not actually exist. (Tempting to name them after one of the players, but that might be a step too far.) [Self hatred]
-A massive cave connected to the basement that opens into an empty "space" filled with just mist, navigable by a giantic bridge with no discernible end. Players wandering too far onto the bridge might start catching glimpses of a "giant" figure standing off the bridge and watching them, or a bedraggled and mad person from House Orien or Cannith claiming that he needs to kill his other passengers on "the shadow bridge" so that the giant doesn't kill him first. Basically, this was a House Orien attempt to make a "bridge to anywhere" by harnessing the properties of the shadow land, but the bridge project interfered with the mansion owner's own experiments with realities (attempting to create an "artificial and stable" manifest zone to Irian or The Heavens or something like that) and the interference between the two projects may well be what caused both of them to actually be linked to Xoriat and, naturally, abandoned. [Hating others for one's own problems]
-A hedge-maze filled with angry topiary beasts and elementals who all swear fealty to "the liege trapped within the maze" or something. The maze is actually a phsical representation of the maze-like trap within a khyber shard in one of the mansion's various elemental-powered devices, specifically a device that was made with an abducted and hostile (and powerful) elemental rather than the standard "power of purity" elemental binding that just makes a deal for a willingly bound creature. [Hatred of oppressors]
-A magic mouth that audibly repeats something whenever players pass a certain place or go a certain way, initially annoying the players, but then it gets heard while the players are three or four rooms away from it, but when it's checked no one is there. [Admittedly this is more of a "haunted house" thing than a "madness" or "hatred" thing, but I like it.]
-And then I have unhelpful notes that say things like "living oozes with mutagenic or ambulatory properties" and "bleeding book(case)s."
-I also found a weird note suggesting that one of the Eberron novels has a Karrnathi group of soldiers called The Outguard who want to harness Xoriat's capabilities (generally while making use of symbiotes). I can see them wanting to reclaim some of the mansion's owner's property under the guise of charitably helping out, but possibly also tying their involvement to the feud between the three different Cannith houses since one branch is in Karrnath and since the reconstruction is being handled by a Cannith bard from a potentially different branch. [Hatred from rivalry/bitter feud/etc.]
Those are some of the things I've got. Any other ideas?
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So, I'm going to be working on my first ever 5e adventure (I'm assuming it won't jump start a campaign, but there's always the chance with my players.) It's set in Eberron, and I might be bringing in a bit too much 3.5 design methodology with me, so I wanted to bounce a few things off of some people here. Basically, the adventure is a haunted house story, with the premise that the house is located in a manifest zone to Xoriat (the plane of madness) and the house's position in the manifest zone happens to make it coexist with a similarly shaped building in the plane that was made out of pure hatred (based on a suggested line in Keith Baker's blog.)
The original idea of "what effect does it have on the players to be in this building for a prolonged amount of time" ran into some weird issues, namely that I don't want to suddenly tell the players what they should feel or think or how they should act even with constant exposure from some nebulous presence of hatred that they don't really understand yet. So I'm trying to come up with good examples of how the location itself and the various people/creatures within it can shore up that feeling.
Basic premise is that this location is near the edge of the Mournland, in a mostly war-torn and destroyed building, and while a bard from Cannith is there with a Lyre of Building to handle most of the quick construction, the PCs and other military, adventure, or logistics professionals are moving through the remains of old buildings to quickly do preparatory clean up, or to kill off monsters who might've moved in over time. The fact that the building assigned to the PCs and some other people is on a manifest zone to Xoriat is completely unknown.
A few ideas I have already:
-One of the contacts that the PCs are told to meet is identified pretty much only by name. Over the course of the journey through the house, the PCs meet several NPCs with nigh-identical backstories who all claim to have that name, and who, after a while, meet the PCs after having met other iterations of themselves. They become increasingly hostile toward the idea of these other thems and begin working to the detriment of their own mission while trying to avoid the possibility that they might not actually exist. (Tempting to name them after one of the players, but that might be a step too far.) [Self hatred]
-A massive cave connected to the basement that opens into an empty "space" filled with just mist, navigable by a giantic bridge with no discernible end. Players wandering too far onto the bridge might start catching glimpses of a "giant" figure standing off the bridge and watching them, or a bedraggled and mad person from House Orien or Cannith claiming that he needs to kill his other passengers on "the shadow bridge" so that the giant doesn't kill him first. Basically, this was a House Orien attempt to make a "bridge to anywhere" by harnessing the properties of the shadow land, but the bridge project interfered with the mansion owner's own experiments with realities (attempting to create an "artificial and stable" manifest zone to Irian or The Heavens or something like that) and the interference between the two projects may well be what caused both of them to actually be linked to Xoriat and, naturally, abandoned. [Hating others for one's own problems]
-A hedge-maze filled with angry topiary beasts and elementals who all swear fealty to "the liege trapped within the maze" or something. The maze is actually a phsical representation of the maze-like trap within a khyber shard in one of the mansion's various elemental-powered devices, specifically a device that was made with an abducted and hostile (and powerful) elemental rather than the standard "power of purity" elemental binding that just makes a deal for a willingly bound creature. [Hatred of oppressors]
-A magic mouth that audibly repeats something whenever players pass a certain place or go a certain way, initially annoying the players, but then it gets heard while the players are three or four rooms away from it, but when it's checked no one is there. [Admittedly this is more of a "haunted house" thing than a "madness" or "hatred" thing, but I like it.]
-And then I have unhelpful notes that say things like "living oozes with mutagenic or ambulatory properties" and "bleeding book(case)s."
-I also found a weird note suggesting that one of the Eberron novels has a Karrnathi group of soldiers called The Outguard who want to harness Xoriat's capabilities (generally while making use of symbiotes). I can see them wanting to reclaim some of the mansion's owner's property under the guise of charitably helping out, but possibly also tying their involvement to the feud between the three different Cannith houses since one branch is in Karrnath and since the reconstruction is being handled by a Cannith bard from a potentially different branch. [Hatred from rivalry/bitter feud/etc.]
Those are some of the things I've got. Any other ideas?