Problems I have with running a Dreaming Dark campaign.
The Quori are like Freddy Krueger: A particular villain always comes back after you slay him. Tarshana is effectively immortal and you can't just kill her once. Tarshana can be defeated in a "Season Finale" and be back the next "Season Finale."
The Deneith as Dreaming Dark Agents presents an interesting problem. A villain suddenly has Red Shirts for a humorous campaign. Going even funnier, and House Deneith are treated like the Communist Resistance in 'Allo, 'Allo! (if you don't know what 'Allo, 'Allo! is, then I guess you don't watch British Comedy).
Going for a darker aspect, each Sharn Deneith can be extremely dangerous. The early Black Widow in Dardevil Comics come to mind. Also, played up intelligently you might get Earnesto Blofield of SPECTRE.
The Kalashtar: Looking on the outside, the PCs can be asborbed into the Kalashtar conflict with the Dreaming Dark. The Kalashtar are good guys, but that doesn't mean a little intrigue can be worked in. The PCs are drawn into the conflict, and they might be put into a position of having to choose what side they are on.
While the Dreaming Dark is the main problem; I thought of a few NPCs that might work for the campaign. To work this into Lore, though. . . has anyone delt with Sharn's House Deneith in their campaigns and how did you work with them?
(I figured Lore would be a great place to talk about this, since I still use D&D 3.5/Pathfinder).
I would try to avoid treating them as generic red shirts, though. They are humans, not faceless monsters, so they should all have names and personalities.
Also, make sure that the PCs have opportunities to cause real setback to the Dreaming Dark without having to kill the Big Bad. Killing a quori isn't as important as reducing their influence in the city, or exposing them as a threat and convincing people to take countermeasures, etc.
1. I don't know who Freddy Krueger is (except he may be vaguely related to this guy), but I do know that a dead body is a pain in the butt. What I mean by that is if the PCs manage to kill her empty vessel then she has to find a new home.
If you're planning on her being the BBEG, then by the time they fight her they've probably taken out much of her support structure. She can't hop into any random person. If they manage to put her in a position to be killed, then she has messed up bad and it may take many years to build up a power base again.
Last bit is that the empty vessel is a recognizable figure. To anyone who knew the vessel it is dead. If some other Deneith came up and said, "I'm Such Andsuch, I've just come back in this other person's body." there would be bigger issues than simply regaining a contact/friend/whatever.
2. I don't really see a problem. Any Deneith, even one not in the mercenary branch of the house, could probably requisition plenty of "red shirted" goblins, orcs, other less skilled humans if they wanted to. The actual Deneith heirs who are supposed to be good at combat just get scarier with psychic abilities.
3. I don't really see a problem with the Kalashtar either. It could get a little weird if you had the PCs on the Quori side fighting the Kalashtar. If the PCs make a choice of sides, as you seem to imply you want, then the weirdness goes away. If it doesn't then they can always betray the Quori and join up with the Kalashtar.
If you mean it will be hard to get a party which doesn't have a Kalashtar in it involved, I agree. I'd either have them witness something and look into it, or have them approached by one side or the other. The latter result would have to hook them with the world changing consequences and you'd have to have a fast reveal of the threat to keep them interested.
That's my shot, goo luck with the game!
The Quori are like Freddy Krueger: A particular villain always comes back after you slay him. Tarshana is effectively immortal and you can't just kill her once. Tarshana can be defeated in a "Season Finale" and be back the next "Season Finale."
True, but there's a few issues here.
* As Durskut has said, a body is an investment. There are a number of people in the upper echelons of the Sharn Deneith who know what's going on. But they are exceptions. If the patriarch is killed, his son could take over, and his son would accept Tirashana. But if Tirashana just showed up in one of her Riedran vessels, she couldn't take over the enclave. All of the lower-level people would say "She's not of our blood! Why should we take orders from some Riedran b****?" So eliminating her support structure will be a temporary solution, even if it doesn't eliminate Tirashana herself (The book itself says "Even those who deal directly with the Inspired believe that they are working together as equal partners."). The Sharn Deneith are their own entity - not simply an absolute extension of the Dreaming Dark. This in turn has the advantage that they can't give away secrets of TDD.
* The Dreaming Dark is a powerful force. Sometimes, it can seem impossible to challenge or overcome. Its agents are immortal. It's got mind seed. Why DON'T they just wipe you out? The trick is that you need to see the world through their eyes. The Dreaming Dark work long term. They've been carrying out a scheme for over a thousand years now. They have operations across Khorvaire, Xen'drik, and Sarlona... and they don't EXPECT them to all work out as planned. If something screws up the Sharn operation, it's annoying - but it's not the end of the world.
The analogy I like is to imagine a chessmaster playing a hundred games of chess in a park, walking from board to board. Every now and then, he loses one. It's to be expected; he's playing a hundred games at once. When that happens, he doesn't fling the board aside and sulk; he sets it up for the next game and moves on down the line. That first failure, he may not even remember the man who won; again, he's playing a hundred different people.
Now... if that same person beats him AGAIN, he may say "Wait... haven't I seen you before?"
And if you beat him AGAIN, then you've got his attention. Then he's going to push aside other distractions and try to teach you a lesson. By which point, hopefully, you're ready to deal with it.
Alternately, of course - by that third victory, he may decide that instead of killing you, he wants to find a way to use you for his own ends. Killing you is easy. Anyone can do that. Making you the tools that assure the ultimate victory? That's far more satisfying.
And yet another possibility is that they WANT you to defeat the Deneith operation. That the whole reason they've set up this Deneith thing is NOT because they see any future in it - but because your victory and exposure of it will have an effect that they want, whether that's throwing the houses into chaos, inflaming public suspicion of the houses, or something else entirely. This is very much the way the Dark plays things... again, a gain of chess that can span centuries. The idea of building up a secret society purely so it can be exposed may seem crazy to us, but it's the sort of thing they do... because what they REALLY want is the impacct of its exposure, even though it might take 80 years before they trigger it.
Short form, though: Tirashana could come right back in an Inspired body. But there's lots of reasons why she might choose not to. Only the possessed Deneith would be loyal to her in that form; she might be willing to accept the loss; or the loss might actually have been planned from the start, which is what you reveal at the next season finale.
Still, I've written up a campaign idea that revolves around an artifact that does use the Denieth Operation as a plot hook. The actual thing that starts it is MacGuffin that sets it off (an artifact from one of the Old Sarlonan kingdoms), but it explores the relationship between the Kalashtar and the Dreaming Dark.
Although I may have to rewrite it to make any sense. I also thought of adding artificial humans (homunculi according to FMA but can be Warforged replicants like Lei is) as part of the plot representing a rogue branch of Cannith. The idea is that everyone is after the MacGuffin --> The Sharn Deneith, the Edgewalkers, House Cannith, the Kalashtar, and possibly the Heirs of Ohr Kaluun and finally the Queen of Aundair. And while everyone's distracted, the Dreaming Dark makes it's move. Perhaps they kill someone, or do something else. Something dispecable enough to turn a non-evil qouri's stomach.
It would make for an interesting campaign for the Inspired.
I can see it now, Sarlonan PCs from Reidra are dispatched to Khorvaire to retrieve the MacGuffin. One of them a possessed non-evil Inspired (I would prefer Good, but a non-aligned one would do) so Edgewalker PCs. They arrive in Sharn, but the Deneith operation wasn't informed of their visit but are strung along to want to get the MacGuffin. The Kalashtar want the MacGuffin, but in the PCs' eyes they are devils. Queen Aurala, inspired by her advisors, also want the MacGuffin.
To throw a monkey wrench, the Northern Branch of House Cannith wants the MacGuffin too. So they send Replicants (re: Warforged like Lei or humans created through Human Transmutation of all the base elements to make a human -- homunculi). Everything comes to a head, and now the Dreaming Dark makes its concerted move.
Even if Tirashana is defeated in the end and the PCs retrieve the MacGuffin, they return to see the Edgewalker headquarters destroyed and the most of the Edgewalkers brutally murdered by the Harmonious Shield. One of the persons brutually murdered is Kaltaresh. At the expense of one of their agents (Tirashana), they captured a "rogue" Quori (Kaltaresh). Then the adventure turns to Dal Quor as the PCs go to Dal Quor to find Kaltaresh and what happened to him.
Looks like a novel there.
I'll take a crack at them.
1. I don't know who Freddy Krueger is (except he may be vaguely related to this guy).
Hmm, you haven't seen Nightmare on Elm Street, have you?
The heroic tier could be centered around many plots, one of them is the Sharn's Deneith and the Throne Wardens plotting to seize the Throne of Galifar. Another plot could be that the Becoming God is a quori manipulated faith, the body being built acts both like monolith and a quori host, sort of like a Trojan Horse, the goal is planar invasion. Another plot could be Riedra taking over Q'barra by pure demographics and effectiveness. A plot that I like a lot also is one where the DD gives delusions of grandeur to Dhakanni heirs in order to reanimate patriotism.
The paragon tier could be where the quoris come to contact the PCs. Trying to make them join their ranks, failing, then trying to mind seed them, failing, then trying to turn them crazy with nightmare assaults. In parallel, the scheme to control Khorvaire and turn it into a second Sarlona goes a step further. Here the heroes, need to know their enemy, maybe travel to Sarlona or Xen'drik to learn as much as they can, make allies out of Adar and learn Giant Age secrets.
The epic tier could be all about quori invasion and taking the fight to Dal Quor. The Devourer of Dream has always been meant to be the last enemy. I've always been wanting to make Daelkyr oppose the Quori in a way. The heroes might need thier minds to be twisted by the madness of a Daelkyr in order to resist possession from the Devourer of Dreams.
I think you just lunch another campaign string for my players
A good way of introducing the quoris in the heroic tier without revealing the punch before late heroic or paragon would be to build an investigating adventures around some lunatics. Example, a mass murderer is creating quite a scare in the streets of Sharn, the PCs are charged with the case. They track the murderer, have a fight with him and take him captive. Interrogation reveals he is sick and crazy, a Lunatic, but also a Deneith blademark. The man is schizophrenic, and severely mentally sick. He speaks of visions and voices telling him what to do. However, even if the man is in custody, the murders don't stop. Do they have the wrong guy? No... there's another one. The PCs catch him too, and discover that the second man is also a Deneith heir... (or their bravery on the case has got to the ears of Q'barra, which have a similar problem with a mass murderer, the PCs travel, investigate find out the man is also a Lunatic) The PCs want to know what is going, so they decide to investgate the Deneith enclave in Sharn for clues in the first murderer's background (or both of them)
At the enclave they are welcomed as guest of the house. Of course, please investigate, we are concerned about the well-being of our family. Here's a proposition, accompagny us to the Gathering Stone in Darguun, we are going to train some Goblins mercenaries. There would be able to have an eye on us and see how we do business. (open plot with Dhakanni heirs) Slowly, the Deneith figure out that the PCs are good combattant and want to hire them as mercenaries. Theit first contract is to acompagny an expedition of the Wayfinders to Xen'drik in search of an artifact for a Morgrave professor (psionic quori artifact or anti psionic giant artifact) Another contract could be to join a Mournland salvage team where they cross against a Cannith team and meet the LoB of Becoming God warforged. Of course, on their return, the artifact has been stolen... by a Kalashtar. Deneith contracts them to recover it. The Kalashtar could succeed in doing a Spock mind fusion thing on one of the PCs and reveal the history of his people and the plague that has hit Deneith. At the same time, the PCs have their first vision from Dal Quor and the PCs figure out that what the Kalashtar says is true, Dhakanni/Deneith troops are going to take over Thronehold and assassinate lots of important people. However, the Kalashtar warns them: "Whatever they show you might not be real, whatever they show you might be leading you exactly where they want you to be." The PCs need to decide, if we let them take the throne of Galifar, a Next War will explode. On the other hand, if we prevent them from doing so, we prevent a Next War (or delay it) but we enable them to place their pawns where they want to.[End of Heroic tier]
A good way of introducing the quoris in the heroic tier without revealing the punch before late heroic or paragon would be to build an investigating adventures around some lunatics. Example, a mass murderer is creating quite a scare in the streets of Sharn, the PCs are charged with the case. They track the murderer, have a fight with him and take him captive. Interrogation reveals he is sick and crazy, a Lunatic, but also a Deneith blademark. The man is schizophrenic, and severely mentally sick. He speaks of visions and voices telling him what to do. However, even if the man is in custody, the murders don't stop. Do they have the wrong guy? No... there's another one. The PCs catch him too, and discover that the second man is also a Deneith heir... (or their bravery on the case has got to the ears of Q'barra, which have a similar problem with a mass murderer, the PCs travel, investigate find out the man is also a Lunatic) The PCs want to know what is going, so they decide to investgate the Deneith enclave in Sharn for clues in the first murderer's background (or both of them)
At the enclave they are welcomed as guest of the house. Of course, please investigate, we are concerned about the well-being of our family. Here's a proposition, accompagny us to the Gathering Stone in Darguun, we are going to train some Goblins mercenaries. There would be able to have an eye on us and see how we do business. (open plot with Dhakanni heirs) Slowly, the Deneith figure out that the PCs are good combattant and want to hire them as mercenaries. Theit first contract is to acompagny an expedition of the Wayfinders to Xen'drik in search of an artifact for a Morgrave professor (psionic quori artifact or anti psionic giant artifact) Another contract could be to join a Mournland salvage team where they cross against a Cannith team and meet the LoB of Becoming God warforged. Of course, on their return, the artifact has been stolen... by a Kalashtar. Deneith contracts them to recover it. The Kalashtar could succeed in doing a Spock mind fusion thing on one of the PCs and reveal the history of his people and the plague that has hit Deneith. At the same time, the PCs have their first vision from Dal Quor and the PCs figure out that what the Kalashtar says is true, Dhakanni/Deneith troops are going to take over Thronehold and assassinate lots of important people. However, the Kalashtar warns them: "Whatever they show you might not be real, whatever they show you might be leading you exactly where they want you to be." The PCs need to decide, if we let them take the throne of Galifar, a Next War will explode. On the other hand, if we prevent them from doing so, we prevent a Next War (or delay it) but we enable them to place their pawns where they want to.[End of Heroic tier]
I currently play the 4th edition Scales of War adventure path, but my players were looking to start a second game with a cyberpunk style. We are currently discussing which rules and setting this game should be, but I think I'll make it an Eberron campaign inspired by movies like The Matrix, Terminator, Blade Runner, I Robot, and other technology vs humanity or heavy tech movies.
I'd much rather spend my money on this, this, this, and this.