Saturday Night: The players are sent by their guild to check out the string of disappearances in Piper City's slums. After meeting with the captain of the town guard, Knoxin Holt, the party has a few leads to follow. There's a large tavern near the port, where they may hear some rumors, or the party can go to the River District, home of the missing people. The party eagerly chooses the tavern.
Mentioning the tavern was the first of my many mistakes. I hadn't realized while I made this one-shot that the party I would be dealing with was mostly evil. They could really care less about some disappearances, but mention a tavern and I had their attention. My intent had been for them to check out the River District, talk to some people, and then go to the tavern where I could direct them to a supposedly haunted house in the Wind District.
So, lesson the first: Set clear hooks. If you want your players to go somewhere first, don't tempt them to stray. I made the mistake of mentioning the tavern, when I really wanted them to go to the River District.
The Naked Piper Tavern is full to bursting. Sailors, musicians, prostitutes, servers, some off duty guards, and gossiping women, sit at tables around the room.
Zugg, the half-Orc fighter of the party, bellows at the barkeep, attracting the attention of some half-Orc sailors. They all fist bump excitedly. Iyrn, cleric to the goddess of lust and outer beauty, sidles up to the prostitutes. The rogue and gnome wizard wander around the tavern before finding seats at an empty table.
Zugg leaves his Orc friends and decides to demand information from everyone in the bar. The sailors know nothing of the disappearances and others know very little. Iyrn finally interferes as Zugg bellows at a table of gossiping women.
One woman has some information. The husband of her friend Lorena went missing a few weeks ago. It was a shame, because he had just found a new job and Lorena was looking forward to getting out of the River District slums for good.
Iyrn sweet talks the woman a bit more, bribing her with a little gold before she will tell him more. The job had seemed a bit strange. A woman had come in on a ship about two months previously and started hiring people out of the River District for some kind of secret project. Lorena's husband had disappeared a little while after starting the job.
Despite my subtle attempts to lead the party back to the River District, hoping that they would find and talk to Lorena, they continue to question the bar patrons.
Iyrn finds out from a prostitute named Sylvia, who talks in an annoying valley girl accent, that despite the disappearances in the River District the guards have been focusing their patrols on the Wind District. It seems that the residents of the Wind District have been reporting weird noises coming from an empty house and have used their influence in the city (The Wind District being the most wealthy district) to get more guards stationed in the area.
The party decides to leave, shooting the barkeep with a poison dart and knocking him out (evil party, remember) before declaring an open bar and running away. They rush over to the Wind District, intent on checking out this mysterious haunting. There are a great number of guards in the area. Zugg once again decides that if he yells at them loud enough, he will get information. The party circumvents him, questioning the guards before convincing them that there's a brawl at the Naked Piper that needs to be taken care of. Supposedly, some prostitutes had even started to mud wrestle. Iyrn also talks the guards into leaving one of their medallions, so that other guards would recognize that the party is working for the city.
Moving along, the party talks to a citizen, discovers the location of the haunted house, and collects some taxes ("You collected taxes just last week." "We implemented a new one... for.... Zoo Upkeep and Grounds-keeping. Your city thanks you for your contribution."). They find that the haunted house is being watched by guards who have been stationed there by the captain himself. The party scares them off with a few bellows from their half-Orc, approach the haunted house, and kick the door in before striding into the front room.
My second mistake: not putting any traps on the front door. Or in the house at all. Nothing. A half-Orc came busting through the door and there wasn't a single punishment put into place. Truthfully, I hadn't been thinking about endangering my party when I had designed this one-shot. I set out to write a mystery, and write one I did. Unfortunately, that meant that there wasn't much of a challenge for my characters. They never feared for their lives or had anything at stake but the success of the mission.
So the lesson that I took from this is: Make your adventure well-rounded. A mystery still needs action and danger. An obstacle course should make players use their brain. A fight shouldn't be all about rolling to attack. Adventures that are all one note leave players dissatisfied.
In my case, they kept expecting a trap to take someone out. If I had just added one or two traps, it would have upped the tension of the whole adventure. Busting into a door only to set off an explosion would have made the players wary of everything else. They also would have known that this house and whatever was in it meant business.
Once inside, the party can hear the weird noise that everyone had been reporting. It's coming from below them, clink clink crunch. They search the house, finding it empty except for some rooms full of beds upstairs. In the kitchen, there's a door covered in dirty hand prints that leads down to a cellar. The party descends down the stairs. The cellar is dimly lit, looking rather ordinary except for a large hole in the floor. A ladder disappears down the hole and into the darkness. The weird sound is louder now.
The party descends the ladder, finding themselves in some roughly cut tunnels. Unstable wooden beams hold up the ceiling in some places. Traveling through the tunnels, the party finds a room of preserved dead bodies (some of the missing people of the River District), carrion crawlers, and guards with guard dogs waiting to take out the intruders that had set off the alarm spells (whoops. No one used detect magic). Zugg mangles everything in his path while the wizard, Zac, takes out the beams in the central corridor to collapse the tunnel.
The party uses the other tunnels to maneuver around the now collapsed section, and approaches a final tunnel section where the sounds are the loudest. The rogue, Sarven, peaks in and sees the source of the noise. Workers use pickaxes to chip away at the wall of the chamber, clink clink, before wheeling heavy carts through the rubble to collect the largest pieces of stone, crunch. The workers are bedraggled and underfed. Men, women, and children, look ready to collapse at any moment.
Three people oversee the work. One is a flamboyantly dressed woman with hand crossbows strapped to her side. Another is a halfling mage holding a staff and looking decidedly nervous. The final figure has the party outraged. Knoxin Holt, captain of the guard, watches the workers while flirting with the flamboyant woman. Guards and dogs stand around the room as well, keeping order.
The party makes an entrance, questioning Holt for a bit before Zac throws a fireball into the middle of the enemies. The halfling mage steps out of the fight.
Here was an area of improvisation. I had actually forgotten to write up the information of the halfling mage and I didn't have the knowledge to completely wing it. So I had her step out of the fight, claiming that she didn't know that she was getting herself into murder and didn't want part of this. That left the flamboyant woman, Carolina, and the captain to face our party. I upped their health a bit to compensate for the lack of a third party member, and increased the health of all of their guards.
Even with this adjustment, the fight was fairly quick. Having a cleric in the party means that the tank gets to come back no matter how much you throw at him. So, always have some kind of magic user among the enemies. It really helps.
And furthermore, get comfortable with improvisation. Just because you wrote it one way, doesn't mean you can't change it to suit your needs.
By the end of the fight, Sarven is unconscious but otherwise the party is still standing. Carolina and Knoxin have been knocked out and tied up. Iyrn revives everyone, bringing them back to consciousness. Sarven, who had challenged Zugg to a duel earlier in the adventure is abruptly knocked out again by the still rampaging half-Orc. After questioning the enemies, dispelling the curse on a crypt of goodies that the baddies were trying to uncover, claiming the loot, and releasing the captive workers, the party deals with their own captives.
Carolina is too hot to die, apparently. Iyrn decides to let her go and she even talks him into giving her a finder's fee for the treasure. She disappears through the tunnels. The halfling is likewise released. Zac steals her staff, but she is otherwise allowed to go unharmed. However, the party wants to see Knoxin Holt bleed. The party decides to drag him to the Naked Piper, where the kegger still rages even though the barkeep has survived the poison dart and is back behind the bar charging for beers.
Holt is threatened into confessing his crimes and then Sarven executes him on a table in the middle of the bar. It's all very bloody and the party abruptly leaves, probably so they don't have to clean up the mess or pay for the ruined clothing of half the patrons. Satisfied with a job well done, the party happily says goodbye to Piper City.
This adventure went significantly better than my first one-shot. I was better prepared overall and had come up with a decent hook in order to entice my party into wanting to follow the trail I had set for them. And that, I think, is the most important part. The party will forgive a lot of things and are much less likely to rabbit off in a completely new direction if they are interested enough in where your story is going on its own.
But that may be a discussion for a different post.
When we had finished and were sitting around the gaming table, everyone was asked to give their pro and con list for the adventure. Overall, my friends were very supportive. They had liked the mystery that I had set and the NPCs that I had created. On the other hand, my traps were lacking, my impromptu descriptions were weak, and there was not nearly enough loot to be had in the maze of tunnels. I was also told that the annoying valley girl voice was going to be used against me at a later date.
So, my final word of advice: Listen to your party, both during the game and after. While being a DM can be fun in itself, your primary job is to make sure that everyone else can have fun too. Your players aren't expecting perfection, but if it's not fun they won't be coming back. Use their advice to improve, and then get back out there for another adventure.
Catch me back here on Friday, where I'll be going through the prep process for my next one-shot: Alcinia in Wonderland.
Baby DM out.
No comments:
Post a Comment