Post/Author/DateTime	Post
BoomerJer 10-18-06, 04:57 PM	So I picked up this book, Heroes of Horror, and I am getting some really neat ideas. I also own an adventure called "Heart of Nightfang Spire" that I have never gotten to use. My idea was that i would put my group into a typical adventure (kill this, get that, you know) and then halfway through have them all go to bed and wake up 2 years later! They might suddenly wake to find themselves covered in blood or standing over a dead body and have the town gaurd coming for them. Sounds okay... problem is i have no idea how to string this together. What happened to them during those years that they do not remember? Why should they travel to this creepy spire full of vampire cultists? How will they get out of this mess? Were they under a curse? possession? spell? potion? and how are the vampires connected? I would like to add some other elements to the mix just to make them unconfortable such as war ravaging their once quiet port city they resided in. Ideas for that would be great as well! PLEASE HELP! I have the worst kind of writers block...
CryoSilver 10-18-06, 05:01 PM	Horror is perpetuated by lack of knowledge coupled with eventual realiztion. Have your players keep 2 character sheets each, and every time ther characters go to bed, have them flashback to some point in the 2 "blank years" and use the second character sheet. When the characters in the flashback fall asleep, they wake up in the present. This will require you to run 2 plot-lines, but should hopefully freak out your players, especially if the actions of their characters in the past 2 years result in the war you mentioned...
BoomerJer 10-18-06, 05:20 PM	I like that... that is a really clever way to slowly have them figure out what happened to them during the last 2 years... but in that case... what did happen to them? I am tapped out of creativity... I'll come up with something eventually but I figured you guys might have some
Comus 10-18-06, 05:25 PM	I like that... that is a really clever way to slowly have them figure out what happened to them during the last 2 years... but in that case... what did happen to them? I am tapped out of creativity... I'll come up with something eventually but I figured you guys might have some It should end with all of them dying, long before the two years are up. Then they've got to figure out what happened while they were dead...
Frugal 10-18-06, 07:53 PM	It should end with all of them dying, long before the two years are up. Then they've got to figure out what happened while they were dead... Oooh, I like that. I was going to say that the 1 problem with the 2 year time gap and separate character sheets is handling levelling but if they die in the earlier time line then you can get at least 1 lost level right there. Maybe up their level a bit in the "future" timeline, hard to say. I think you can have a lot of fun by doing things like having pieces of the puzzle in either timeline that don't make sense until some later time in the game (which could be in the past, LOL). Maintaining a cohesive storyline could be tough but at least having readily available forms of resurrection means you can avoid a lot of the "time travel" paradoxes. For instance, suppose they meet a character in both timelines and kill him in the earlier one, at least you can reasonably assume he was resurrected. Explaining attitudes to the PCs could get a little weird though ("why is he being so nice to us if we killed him before?"). But, if you can wrap your head around it this is one of the coolest sounding concepts I've heard in a long long time. What this really sounds like to me is the movie 12 Monkeys, if you haven't seen it, rent it, rent it, rent it! Have you rented it yet! I'm serious, this is exactly what you want to do. Memento could also be good for getting your head around telling a story backwards.
lears_fool 10-18-06, 10:06 PM	Another fun thing is twisted bad guys that make sense. . Example one in a modern-dark-fantasy campaign I created. . . magic starts permeating the land and people start changing, often becoming magical caricatures of themselves. The bad guy in question was a doctor and quite a bit of a masochist who believed that people didn't truly live unless they suffered pain. Over time he gained the ability to remold and modify people (in a Brian Lumley's Whampyhri sort of way). Also, of course, a bit mad. The group encounters him briefly and he managed to creep them out quite a bit, however they moved on plot wise. Coincidentally, one player moved, and one party member vanished. The party quested for her and due to a discern location type ability determined she was at the very same doctor's house. The doctor, now modified enough to be a nice fit on a hellraiser set, very politely invites the party in and directs them to sit on a strange leather sofa (oddly warm) while going on about the virtues of pain and the enlightenment it brings. The psion observes several other odd bits of furniture and sculpture in the room and wonders who else is around, so he uses empathy. . . only to end up crab walking into a corner and curling up in fetal position screaming while the doctor starts to explain his many subjects. . including the young lady who he'd formed to feel the most gloriously exquisite pain when sat upon, in the form of a sofa. Of course, the party went a bit bonkers and attacked, the doctor (shocked that they were upset) escaped. Leaving the party with a mildly damaged psion and a friend as a gothic suffering sofa. The discussion the doctor (who by all accounts was 'good' and believed he was doing something wonderful for the people) were great. The arguments over what to do with their friend were glorious :cool:
Thubby 10-18-06, 10:19 PM	vampires have a neat little mind control ability, warp the rules on that a little, viola, reason for dead body, food harvesting(or undead army building) for vamps. to find out, they will probably find someone who will tell them (players might have to get "convincing" hint hint), someone the vamps work for/with (most likely indirectly). to make the link between vamp/mem lap, send them a message (physical or otherwise) telling them to get something/ someone (they might not know the players are free), they'll be persued by authorities, not safe in cities. and they'll be x servants to powerful undead, or will have to consort with bandits, brigands, and psychos to find the answers they seek (side quests anyone?), dont get much scarrier than that. did i miss anything?
Maxwell_Silverhammer 10-18-06, 10:27 PM	A town...(how or why character get there is a variable) people are dying. noone knows why. and the deaths are mysterious characters find cause(a creature), the creature is there why? evil wizard? evil necromancer? Why are they doing this to the town? a corrupt lord? the lord is really a dragon?
fatal error 10-18-06, 10:53 PM	Maintaining a cohesive storyline could be tough but at least having readily available forms of resurrection means you can avoid a lot of the "time travel" paradoxes. For instance, suppose they meet a character in both timelines and kill him in the earlier one, at least you can reasonably assume he was resurrected. Explaining attitudes to the PCs could get a little weird though ("why is he being so nice to us if we killed him before?"). But, if you can wrap your head around it this is one of the coolest sounding concepts I've heard in a long long time. Well, if things became too weird (like having someone die but still be friendly towards his murderers), you can always make him a doppleganger or under the domination of a vampire/mind flayer/beholder. Those four monsters are never far from a horror campaign, right? Being completely inexperianced in running a horror campaign, and not possessing any material towards running such a game, here are my unqualified suggestions: Events must be mysterious, seemingly random, but sinister. The truth must be so alien and convoluted that it is simpler to believe these seemingly random events happened for some other reason: People have been acting strangely around the town. Then a murder is witnessed at night in an alley, the murderer escapes, but the victim's body remains; it's Kallister Mardren, a local freeman. The only problem is, over the course of the investigation, it appears he actually visited a tavern after he was murdered. Clearly, a doppleganger of spell caster has killed him, fled from the scene of the crime, and used the identity only that night, knowing that by the morning he'd need to find a new one once the word spread. But that's too easy. The doppleganger is the one that died, and Kallister is actually the chief magus of a Beholder cult! See, told you I have no idea what I'm doing, but anyway, my previous suggestion stands.
Sereno 10-19-06, 09:49 AM	It should end with all of them dying, long before the two years are up. Then they've got to figure out what happened while they were dead... At some point in the adventure, they absolutely MUST find their own graves ... with their Date of Death, two years in the past, incribed right on the rock!
BoomerJer 10-21-06, 12:52 PM	All great ideas! thanks for all your help. I thought up something though. They are pretty well known in the town they currently reside in. (As all good Heroes are) So i was thinking that someone could use that notoriety... to get close to someone. Maybe there is someone in town: a guildmaster, paladin, councilman, magestrate, etc. that someone wants dead. Maybe a notorious vampire hunter that has learned of the cult and seeks to slay them. But he/she is very reclusive and well guarded, so for anyone to assassinate him/her they would have to get close to them first. So here is where the heroes come in: the vamps couldn't just turn the heroes because then the vamp hunter would know. Maybe they had a spell cast on them... like a Geas/quest from hell. They must murder this target and they loose all memory until they do... something like that. So the second they complete their charge the spell is broken.... So after they "wake up" they find the vamp hunter's plans/info/etc on this cult as a clue and then slowly unravel the plot. What do you guys think? Something like that
Comus 10-21-06, 01:51 PM	At some point in the adventure, they absolutely MUST find their own graves ... with their Date of Death, two years in the past, incribed right on the rock! If you just have a year, that works well. If a full date (day, month) is needed, I'd have it blank on the stone - and everywhere else they look. It gets filled in when the character dies, everywhere at once. The odd thing is, everyone else sees the date, but every time they try and tell the PCs what the date is, something happens to stop them...
WarColonel 10-21-06, 03:51 PM	Two words: Butterfly Effect. Granted, the movie is not really all that good, but it is a good starting point. When your characters go to sleep, they aren't just reliving the past; they're in it. So when they kill so-and-so NPC in the past who was helping them in present, all of a sudden, he's been dead for 2 years. if a limb is cut off, all of a sudden, years in the future, they wake up without it. This will also allow them to do research to prevent bad things (like a war) from happening. But maybe this war was won by the 'good guys' anyway, and preventing the pivitol event that started it only allowed the 'bad guys' to win a more decicive victory, one with untold atrocities. The character's can change the past, but how will it effect their future?
Kaligrad 10-21-06, 04:35 PM	An interesting addition to the two character sheets thing: have them start off as exact copies. However, as the plot advances during the two year stretch, have them gain experience that applies to both sheets, while actions in the present only factor on their current sheets. Given the nature of "experience," you could make a good argument in favor of having them forget the past and their experiences during it has dropped them to the levels they were when they started. You could even have them take different class levels on the same experience, the idea being that they're making different choices this time around. As for writer's block, I can only give you an idea for the general layout. Tell the party that you want them to slowly become corrupted in the past life, eventually all becoming evil and taking appropriate prestige classes. Then at the end, they find some sudden reason to repent (they started the war, a loved one dies by their hands, they massacre a town or city) and thus go to a high level wizard who will remove their memories with Alter Memory. They decide on two years ago, since they remember that it all started then. It would be up to the player as to whether these revelations disgust the PC and make him more good, or please him and make him go bad. In the end, the final cap to their deeds would propel them to Exalted good or Vilest evil. Alter Memory does have rules regarding class ability loss, but I would waive them in this case for stylistic purposes. You should really seize this opportunity to be both good and evil. It's not too many DM's who get to run both good and evil campaigns symultaniously.
kelvinaw273 10-21-06, 05:06 PM	Another elelment of Horror is pathos. Horror adventures with a BBEG are much better if the characters can actually relate to the BBEG. Strahd in Ravenloft is one such - at the end of the day, he has done what he has done for love. Twisted love, but love none the less. An even better example would be that of the Fallen Paladin - who does not even realise that they have fallen! The person begins as a paladin, noble and pure. But their failure to destroy evil utterly leads them to take more and more extreme measures. Eventually they have stopped being a paladin and have become a tyrant ... but they justify every action they have taken, never seeing how wrong they have become.
MrPiskie 10-22-06, 10:26 AM	Hmmm... Doppelgangers..... It's crazy, and it might really screw things up if you're running a protracted campaign, but here's an idea: The PCs, when they wake up 2 years later, are actually doppelganger assassins who were hired by the vampire cult to kill the original PCs and assume their places to control the town*, but due to some freak magical accident lost all knowledge that they aren't the people they were imitating. At first, the PCs have no indication that they aren't themselves, but have occasional bizarre experiences like catching snatches of other people's thoughts (from unconscious use of their detect thoughts ability), glancing at their own reflection in the mirror and noticing patches of hairless grey skin or weird, octopoid eyes, or having flashbacks of standing over their own broken, bloodied bodies. Between flashbacks and discussions with the townspeople (some of whom might be working for the cult), they start to remember enough to work their way back to the tower to investigate. It shouldn't be obvious at first that the cult members are vampires, of course; milk that revelation for all it's worth. Near the end of the adventure, the party finds either some long-dead bodies or a shallow grave and has an extended flashback where they remember everything: being hired by the vampires, killing the original PCs in their sleep, disposing of their bodies, and assuming their forms to run the town. After they remember, the PCs regain conscious control of their doppelganger powers, but are faced with a dilemma: do they continue forward to smash the cult and extract revenge, despite what they are, or do they give in to their true(?) natures and resume the duties the cult asks of them? *Why doppelgangers? Well, the PCs need to be about during the day, so simply turning them into vampire spawn won't work, and dominate is simply too short-acting and doesn't allow for for enough independent action and improvisation to be convincing.