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View Full Version : They just keep getting crazier



Darth Credence
2020-07-22, 05:07 PM
So, I am now six sessions, I think, into my campaign. The adventure setup that I honestly thought would take 2 sessions is still going, although by the deity of your choice, they are going to finish this thing tomorrow night.

The reason it has taken so long is, in a nutshell, my players are crazy. They are having a good time - they have all individually contacted me between sessions to tell me they are having fun, and to try to wheedle some lore out of me. But sometimes I just have to laugh at everything going on.

Case in point - they had a 20 minute argument about how the gold was being divided, all in character. It worked for their characters, and no one was seeming to get mad about it, so I let it go. But, seriously, it was 20 minutes over who was going to carry and distribute the gold, when there was only one answer from the beginning - the artificer who can create a bag of holding is going to carry it. But they were going through permutations of is it all individual, is there an improve the party fund, what about magic items, and so on. I could come up with a dozen similar things they have done - my favorite is probably the argument about who got to hold the book. I had made a bunch of doodles in a notebook, and had them find it. The bard actually found it, she let the wizard look at it, then after a minute asked for it back. The wizard just froze, and everyone could tell he was considering not doing so. This made sense for him, as he has a book with some similar symbols as part of his background - "a mysterious secret that he cannot let get out". Then he decided he was going to send an unseen servant to steal the book when they got back to town. Meanwhile, the bard asked everyone in town about the symbols, and it ended up getting stolen by the person originally after it before the wizard could get there. The bard did not believe the wizard's claims of innocence, but that will work out if they make it to the town where the thief has been captured and is awaiting trial.

The basic gist of what they have to do right now is to restore the magic item that was preventing the rise of a horde of undead, before it gets out of hand and I have to convert the campaign to the fantasy equivalent of The Walking Dead. Basically, a group of kids went exploring where they shouldn't have, removed the item, and the dead started to rise. They have to find the kids and return the item. Well, they've found the kids that were killed by a wight, but they haven't found the one with the item. But as they were headed to the ruins where they need to return the magic item, the Paladin heard about the missing kids and left the rest of the party to go talk to people at the docks about them. The docks that are as far from the ruins as possible. The rest of the party continued on, and I'm sitting there prepared to run an encounter that would have been hard for the party as assembled, now without a Paladin.

Well, they barely made it out of that alive - it was a wight and the two zombies made from the kids, but at their level, it wasn't easy. If the rolls had gone differently, there would have been some deaths. But survive they did, and they took a short rest to heal up and wait for the Paladin. The paladin finished his thing, and got to them. Then they decided to start searching the room, and looked at the sealed sarcophagus. I called this encounter in the DNDBeyond encounter maker, "You shouldn't have opened the sarcophagus". Of course they opened the sarcophagus, even though they had to take some time and a pry bar to get through the seal. As soon as it was open, the very angry vampire spawn leaped out and attached itself to the Paladin that had opened it up. They made it through again, and decided to press on.

Next up, they were exploring a hallway with a bunch of stone carvings in alcoves along the wall. They were fascinated by the simple geometric shapes, dominated by spheres about the size of a baseball. They were trying to compare them to various runes they had seen, wondering about the significance. Well the significance was that they were convenient ammunition for the poltergeist attached to the area. There were some Avatars of Death (from the deck of many things, but I was just using them as guardians because I liked them and it fit the theme) floating around, but they died easy, while the poltergeist was poltergeisting. About half the party specifically weighs less than 150 pounds, and the hallways were designed to give maximum throwing lengths into walls. They freaked out - no one had a clue what was going on, and they basically started to run. One ended up a few feet away from opening the matching door on the other side (bilateral symmetry) where the other poltergeist could be found. Had he opened it, I'm pretty sure we'd have been looking at a total party kill.

They had already opened the door to where the ghost was, but the ghost was actually on their side. It was the one that originally put the item in place to stop the undead, but was killed doing it. She rose when the item was removed, but was still loyal to her God. I had been putting dream visions of this to the Paladin for three straight nights, so he allowed her to possess him, and she was able to stop the other poltergeist from being released, and point out where the current one was. They eventually defeated it, but it was a close run thing.
I am actually loving the weird choices they keep making. I do a lot of planning, even though I enjoy the improvisation more. So when they go off script, I have fun making it up as I go. I have a ton of notes on things that we have done, and it's lead me to have a whole bunch of stuff prepared for when they finally replace the item.

So tomorrow night, the zombie horde is coming (the Paladin has seen this, too). They will basically be coming from all sides, and will start by attacking the individual farms. I've worked out a plan for how many people are killed every five minutes at any given farm, how many zombies would be killed, where they will go if they clear a farm, and what it will take for the farm to end up in flames. If they do everything right, they would probably get away with only losing 40-50 townspeople. If it goes bad, it's likely going to be more than half the town of ~450 people. And they still have to find the item, or its just going to get worse.:smallbiggrin:

Darth Credence
2020-07-24, 12:11 PM
Well, it wasn't too crazy last night, although they still did some weird things. First, a party of five picked three different places to go to sleep. In addition, one of them spent half the night sending his pet rat to search random houses looking for a stolen book. That guy did not get a long rest in before the horde arrived. Then, after the horde arrived, one of the two people defending the inn decided to go scouting while some zombies were actively attacking the inn! I don't know why he left while there were still active zombies and the others had still not made it, but there it was. At one point, there were three active battles going on simultaneously. We were using up every inch of my long table to keep everything running. It actually worked surprisingly well - even though they were in different locations, having their battles overlap let everyone continue to play and have a good time.
The biggest instance of crazy PCs was the guy who left the inn to check things out. He made it to a farm, where zombies were attempting to get in. He decided to be all heroic, and attacked to attempt to save the villagers. His mechanical servant ended up getting pounded into oblivion, and eventually he had to run away, but the zombies followed him. He eventuall made it back to near the inn, where everyone else had met up and was trying to find him. First time I've seen a train of monsters in a TTRPG, but he was fast enough to stay ahead of them. I did have to break out the exhaustion rules, because everyone was running everywhere. They had to do some house to house stuff, clearing zombies in tiny groups, before making it to the big battles. They ended up saving all but 74 of the villagers, which was pretty good, all things considered. It basically was a four hour running battle, and by the end we were all exhausted, but happy about it. They did find the item when their magic started failing at one farm, and got it back where it was needed.
Milestone reached! The players will level up, and I'll see what crazy they get up to in two weeks.

Darth Credence
2020-08-04, 10:57 AM
All right, I may have a problem. We played on Sunday, because no one wanted to take a week off. I now know how fast they move, and I had enough to cover what they were going to get through.
Everything started off great - we had a small, easy encounter with some zombies, just to emphasize that the consequences of the last adventure, and they made it to the next town OK. I made a recording of the town crier, and played it at different volumes, depending on how close they were to the crier - that worked really well, and I think I'll keep doing that in the future. This was a good way to get some hooks given to them, and I could let it run while I took care of a few other things once they focused on it.
Then they found the person who stole their book. I figured this would cause the two people who argued over the book to get together and work against the person who took it, but no. The guy was imprisoned in a crows cage, and first he appealed to the paladin to grant him justice. When that didn't work, he tried to strike a deal with the two who actually wanted the book. The two who cared then started to argue about which one of them would get it and what they were willing to give. In the end, they did not agree to release him, figuring they'd find it a different way. They hit town for some shopping and visiting to temples and bookstores.
This is when the crazy kicked in. The town has a tradition of haggling, so everyone is asking outrageous prices for everything. I started to really play this up, and half the party just thought 'I guess that's what things cost' and was ready to pay, while the others were thinking it was crazy. I started improvising everyone they met as being out to wring as much money as possible for people. It was actually great for most of us, and the whole table was laughing - enough that my wife was starting to feel jealous from the other room. But the people who wanted the book were focused on learning about it. They both went to a bookstore, and started researching things (I let them get lore by looking through books, making a check appropriate to what they want to learn, then feeding them information based on the check). They are both texting me what they are doing - one of them is using their portent dice to ensure the other one doesn't learn anything, the other is basically trying to use cash and persuasion to get the bookseller on her side.
The next day, the party is ready to go on a hunt for lobstrosities. The bard who wants the book decides to not go, but stay in town and do some shopping. The rest of the group heads out, and I'm trying to adjust difficulty on the fly. The adventure becomes what they are doing, while the bard texts me about what she's doing. They quickly fall for my double layer trap - an obvious one that they barely found, then the real one that hits. This got them stuck in a room they had to figure a way out of. Meanwhile, the bard - who is listed as neutral good - finds out why the book thief is in jail, and it's a warrant from a chaotic neutral church. She talks to them, and in exchange for 5 gp, they agree to let her question the guy. They offer to rough him up first, she asks if that would help, they say it couldn't hurt, so she goes with it. Meanwhile, in the trapped cavern (kobolds are coming up), the ranger wants to attempt to just force his way through some spikes, regardless of the damage. The two that didn't get trapped have fallen under the effects of a siren fungus, my creation to justify why there are monsters hanging out in this cave - it draws creatures in, the monsters eat the creatures, the fungus lives on the waste from the monsters. All I have told them is that they have a feeling that what they are looking for is towards wherever the fungus is, and they are full on playing it as they must seek this out. And the wizard, who keeps trying to abuse the familiar system, completely forgets that his familiar is with him and could attempt to fly out of the spike filled tunnel.
Next week is going to be interesting, because since torture is not allowed by the laws of Geton Town, the thief is going to be set free, and they can have an even bigger fight about why the thief got away.