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| #1MacMcMacSep 24, 2014 22:23:10 | I did this back in 3.5, but I'm seriously considering rebooting the general idea for 5.0. I can't actually use the same thing because I've got the same gamers again, so I'm going to post it here for general goodness.
I was a bit bored with people treating our D&D evenings as games. I wanted to see if I could increase the stakes a bit emotionally while at the same time not wiping out the party too regularly. I wanted to create gaming moments that we'd tell for years because they meant something to all of us.
I wanted my players to feel genuine emotions, and based on their very wide emotional makeup I settled on a single emotion - fear. (I tried empathy earlier but a few of the pary members were not only willing to let NPCs suffer, they burned down bars when they were refused drinks...)
My goal would be to make the party deeply and profoundly afraid.
To do this, I created two major plotlines.
The first was a race war dating back 500 years. An order of nuns fought on the side of racial tolerance and created two artifacts, a ring (which was lost) and a wand. The wand resurrected characters but at the same time changed their race and potentially gender. This was intended to teach members of the order sympathy. The wand had 20 charged slots loaded up with different races and each use would spend a slot. Additionally characters would lose a random amount of XP on the rez, which meant that they might be set back up to a couple of levels. Lastly the characters would catch on magical fire during the transformation and would frequently burn up everything around them. The party found this wand in the ruins of an old abbey.
Functionally this meant that the party now had an out when they faced overwhelming odds, which I planned on throwing at them. A lot.
Unfortunately I was unwise in choosing slots for the races, which bit me in the ass hard later in some cases. In other cases it worked fantastically. I wound up quite coincidentally with a really hard core role player whose Paladin was turned into a Centaur by the wand. He did a brilliant job playing a Centaur Paladin, good enough to make up for the guy who wound up as a Korred Wild Magic Mage and was a semi-permanent pain in my ass.
The modern plotline revolved around a single bad guy - Sven. Sven was modelled roughly on a white supremacist version of Hannibal Lecter - he was the founder and shadow President of the Society for the Preservation of Human Traditions, a clearly race-baiting group gaining ground in a disenfranchised human population in the Forgotten Realms. Sven had discovered hidden history of the ancient race war and he wanted a do-over.
Secretely Sven was building golems out of other races, starting with Hobbits, then Dwarves and then Elves. His crowning glory would be a Vorpal Golem (based on the Shrike in Hyperion) built out of the magical weapons he'd looted from the piles of bodies he'd murdered and then reassembled into golems. Hopefully needless to say, a Vorpal Golem would be a potentially world changing event.
Sven wore a cloak made out of hobbit skin. Sven ate people. Sven was mean, he butchered house cats (there was a lovely sub-plot involving Bastet sending a magical cat down to join the party help them find Sven but my players COMPLETELY missed out on this <sigh>). Sven tortured, he enslaved. He was in no way cartoonish - he was as profundly creepy and awful as I could make him, by design.
As I said my goal was fear, every night, as much as I could ratchet up. Sven had roots in the city guard so the party wound up on the run. He spread lies about the party so they'd be hated in every town they showed up in. He kidnapped, tortured and murdered friendly and deeply helpful NPCs and delivered their mutilated corpses to the party. He burned down orphanages in front of the party. He made their lives a living hell.
Nearly every encounter resulted in use of the wand. The party looked more like Guardians of the Galaxy than a "normal" party. Frankly, it was succesful beyond my wildest dreams. The party was deeply, deeply scared of Sven.
This lead to the following encounter.
The party accidentally found a secret tunnel that lead to Sven's house. This was truly accidental, I didn't want them to find it for a few more levels, but they did. They wound up in a torture chamber in his basement surprising Sven and one of his Henchmen. Sven didn't really want a fight so he sent the henchmen into the room, which would be a very tough but likely winnable fight by the party.
As usual the party got in a big argument about what to do. They had taken to yelling at eachother before combat and I'd usually let them yell at eachother for ten minutes or so and then say "roll for initiative". This time, while the arguing was happening, the guy playing the mage (who is one of my oldest friends) got my attention and said "I run. Whenever combat starts. I run."
So combat starts and everyone waits for the mage to toss a fireball into the doorway. Only he's not there. The party goes NUTS on him. He says "Dudes. HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THAT GUY DOES TO PEOPLE!!!"
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