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:
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: