Darth Tom
2019-02-05, 05:19 PM
A mechanic which I thought was clearly dangerous and easily avoided kept being used because "it was just too cool and I wanted to know more", until the PC had an end-game condition.
A friend of mine wanted to try playing an RPG, and asked if I would be willing to do a one-shot, solo adventure. "No problem", I said, and set about preparing.
I took "The Marrow Mines (https://koboldpress.com/prepared-the-marrow-mines/)" which I thought looked cool, and made a few tweaks to get it to fit a different system I'm already using elsewhere, but that part all worked ok so no dramas there.
The game starts, and the PC finds a guy who appears to be a miner wandering the countryside. There is a chance of getting coherent speech, but that fluffed and instead the PC had to reverse-track him back to the dungeon.
So the premise is that there is the skeleton of an impossibly large and ancient creature squished into the strata on this mountainside. I had it be a dragon from Jupiter, basically. The adventure takes place inside its bones, which is creepy as all get-out and I just loved that. The thing is, there's a madness at play here as well. I had it be that there are weird carvings on the inside of some of the bones, which the inhabitants make while in a trance. If those are investigated closely (you can see they are weird and you get a bad feeling about them from further away) then it's a dice roll for madness:
1D10
1-5 - nothing
6-10 - increasingly violent imagery of storms
11-15 - increasingly clear sense of being a vast creature soaring on the storm
16-19 - increasingly complete experience of being sucked through space and trapped in a tiny world, then crashing into the mountain range
20 - you awake in the village, with no memory of your experience. Apparently you were found wandering, mad. Game over.
Oh yeah, you notice how "game over" requires to roll a 20 on 1d10? You add +1 to the die roll each time so the effect becomes cumulative per PC.
So here's the problem: my PC finds these carvings, I give the description, and the guy decides (unprompted) to try touching the carving. I reiterate that this just feels worrying.
"I know, this is so cool!"
Touch. Vision.
"Whoa. I touch it again".
At this point I'm single facepalming, inside. Outside I'm deadpanning as hard as I can. More vision, this time it's a 9 or 10 level. Friend loves this.
"I touch it again!"
And again, and again, now I'm full Picard double facepalming, and maybe an eyebrow even raised outside, because he's gone through ten rolls, so this time is +10, and he rolls... 10.
His reaction was that this was the coolest game ever and I now have an extra player for my normal game, which is obviously great, but I can't help wondering whether I played it wrong. I went out of my way to write super-spooky visions and descriptions of the mad guy, the bone cave, and so on, thinking this would be a sign to back away. Instead, H.P. Lovecraft fan that he is (we both are), he was just too fascinated by the awful thing to look away.
What do you think? Did I err in my descriptions, or does that seem a reasonable outcome for the adventure?
A friend of mine wanted to try playing an RPG, and asked if I would be willing to do a one-shot, solo adventure. "No problem", I said, and set about preparing.
I took "The Marrow Mines (https://koboldpress.com/prepared-the-marrow-mines/)" which I thought looked cool, and made a few tweaks to get it to fit a different system I'm already using elsewhere, but that part all worked ok so no dramas there.
The game starts, and the PC finds a guy who appears to be a miner wandering the countryside. There is a chance of getting coherent speech, but that fluffed and instead the PC had to reverse-track him back to the dungeon.
So the premise is that there is the skeleton of an impossibly large and ancient creature squished into the strata on this mountainside. I had it be a dragon from Jupiter, basically. The adventure takes place inside its bones, which is creepy as all get-out and I just loved that. The thing is, there's a madness at play here as well. I had it be that there are weird carvings on the inside of some of the bones, which the inhabitants make while in a trance. If those are investigated closely (you can see they are weird and you get a bad feeling about them from further away) then it's a dice roll for madness:
1D10
1-5 - nothing
6-10 - increasingly violent imagery of storms
11-15 - increasingly clear sense of being a vast creature soaring on the storm
16-19 - increasingly complete experience of being sucked through space and trapped in a tiny world, then crashing into the mountain range
20 - you awake in the village, with no memory of your experience. Apparently you were found wandering, mad. Game over.
Oh yeah, you notice how "game over" requires to roll a 20 on 1d10? You add +1 to the die roll each time so the effect becomes cumulative per PC.
So here's the problem: my PC finds these carvings, I give the description, and the guy decides (unprompted) to try touching the carving. I reiterate that this just feels worrying.
"I know, this is so cool!"
Touch. Vision.
"Whoa. I touch it again".
At this point I'm single facepalming, inside. Outside I'm deadpanning as hard as I can. More vision, this time it's a 9 or 10 level. Friend loves this.
"I touch it again!"
And again, and again, now I'm full Picard double facepalming, and maybe an eyebrow even raised outside, because he's gone through ten rolls, so this time is +10, and he rolls... 10.
His reaction was that this was the coolest game ever and I now have an extra player for my normal game, which is obviously great, but I can't help wondering whether I played it wrong. I went out of my way to write super-spooky visions and descriptions of the mad guy, the bone cave, and so on, thinking this would be a sign to back away. Instead, H.P. Lovecraft fan that he is (we both are), he was just too fascinated by the awful thing to look away.
What do you think? Did I err in my descriptions, or does that seem a reasonable outcome for the adventure?