Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rood_Inverse 03-30-08, 09:23 AM	The idea occurred to me last night while I was listening to a radio program featuring local techno and club artists... Imagine a woman who wants to leave her father's supervision, but isn't allowed to. Maybe she's a prisoner in her own home... Or maybe she's just stifled. But she has a stunning plan to make her escape. She gets three or four of her aristocrat associates to help stage an abduction, setting up a ransom demand. The whole "kidnap victim who was never really kidnapped" has been done to death and, of course, the adventurers will see right through it. Until they attempt to do something like discern lies or zone of truth, to discover she's telling the truth. How? She's hypnotized herself. Intentionally wiping her short term memory of the plot to kidnap herself, based on certain situational triggers. She can't lie about something she doesn't know about, right? It would work something like contingency - hypnotism whenever there's scrying or some truth-detecting magic. It allows her to act normally and operate with all her faculties normally... But when someone tries to question her about it, she's got nothing. Seems like the perfect crime, due to the total lack of evidence of kidnappers to track down. So, how do the PCs unravel this mystery? . . . Mid- to low-level would be better, because higher-level magics would probably make this type of scheme implausible. It relies on magics and tricks too mundane to stand up to stronger divinations. I'd prefer answers that dealt strictly with Core, as I'm teaching a new group to play... But who are old enough to know most of the adventuring standards from books and movies. Psionics isn't something I'm ready to introduce yet. Any ideas?
Demetri_Knighthawk 03-30-08, 08:22 PM	first off you need to set up how they got her in the first place, how did her friends, quite probbably known by the family and staff, get to kidnap her? once that is set up, how far will they go with this 'game' are the arristocrats willing to die for the sake of thrills or will they rat out the girl first chance they get to keep out of jail? Are the girl and friends class-level characters?
Mad_Jack 03-30-08, 09:56 PM	Another element to consider is, if the girl and her friends aren't of sufficient class/level to pull this off on their own, how many other people were involved/hired for the job? Somebody had to cast those spells or use a psionic power... Could her friends and their lackeys/hired help have other motives and/or loyalties, and will they roll over if questioned? Or has *everyone* involved been "mindwiped"? As for the mechanics of it, the closest I could come up with is suggestion + permanence, which, although not quite RAW, is certainly close enough for a plot device... Permanence, however, is a 5th level spell, so that's gonna require at least a 9th level wizard... Given, however, that this is a plot device, you could probably ignore that fact, or at least tweak it, especially if the party doesn't actually have to fight the wizard who cast the spell. (And it may well come up that they don't even *have* the option of fighting the wizard, if he does indeed have contacts within the nobility...) Other options may include just having a version of the suggestion spell that's permanent until you hit it with remove curse or dispel magic, or provide a preset trigger to break it. As for solving/fixing the situation, depending on the party's level they may be able to cast detect magic on her to figure out what happened and have to figure out just what spell she was hit with and which spell to counter it with, or they may be required to go through the legwork of questioning everybody and their sister to find clues in the contradictions between peoples' stories of recent events and eventually track down the wizard that cast the spells and convince him somehow to undo the spell or tell them the trigger word or condition to end it.
MrWildman 03-31-08, 01:04 AM	All this just popped into my head, so this is first-draft rough: The lady's memory is altered by an item, a ring or wonderous device. It would have to be something she's not likely to remove (or the 'kidnappers' to remove either), maybe her wedding ring? Chastity belt?? Anyway, it casts a programmed Suggestion or whatever on her and must be destroyed for her to recover her original memories. Her aristocratic cousins also wear programmed charms, believing the fiction that they have taken her against her wishes! Perhaps over an invented family matter. Now everyone involved thinks it was genuine. The PCs start unraveling the clues when the mage who made all these charms turns up (how else?) dead. Or maybe there's a high-society black market for these memory-altering items, a shameful indulgence among the wealthy. This would be so cool in Sharn. Then the murderer of the mage could be one of the cousins. Edmund, the slimy one. Killing the mage to cover their tracks. With or without the knowledge of the family. Lots of options. And you have to have the final confrontation on the roof of some grand manorhouse! Must stop now. My brain hurts. Peace.