Tag Archives: post tenebras lux

Yeah, I pretty much had to do that title. Sorry.

On Friday, we had our first post-Scales of War session of the 4E campaign that I’ve retitled Post Tenebras Lux*.

We spent the first little while cleaning up some housekeeping, tying up some loose ends, divvying up the treasure, etc. That let people do a little light roleplaying, getting into their characters a little more than the previous adventure really encouraged.

After that, I had set up a skill challenge to let the party interact with the town, link into the world, and each have a moment or two of spotlight as they tried to hunt down either a job or a thread that hinted at some easy cash and adventure. I had prepped eight separate adventure hooks, along with a few generic encounters to throw at the party during travel.

They turned up six of the hooks, and opted to pursue the rumour that there was a barrow in the Witchwood that only appears during the full moon. After that, they plan to try and track down the true tomb of Azarr Kul, the half-dragon hobgoblin leader of the Army of the Red Hand**. They passed up caravan duty, hunting goblins, checking out the rumours of the Ghostlord down near the Thornwaste, and searching for the Fane of Tiamat.

Once they had decided which thread they were going to chase down, they went into research mode. Which was kind of interesting for me, because I had only minimal background created for the adventure.

Fortunately, I had read the original adventure recently, putting together the hooks for this session and filling in the wiki over at Obsidian Portal. I knew that the barrow was related to the ancient druidic people that had inhabited the vale before “civilization” arrived. So, based on those ideas, when they managed a co-operative History check somewhere north of 30, I went to town.

So, now they know that the Witchwood is home to shifters, fey, and werewolves, collectively called the Old People. They know that the Old People claim to be remnants of the ancient druidic folk, and that they have ties both to the magic of the Feywild and the primal spirits of the Elemental Chaos. They also know that the Witchwood is heavily sprinkled with barrows, menhirs, and stone circles, many of which exist in the normal world during certain times of the year or under certain astrological conditions, such as this barrow they’ve heard of.

Yeah, I took the cheap way out – tying things to the seasonal and lunar cycles of standard paganism. I stole the idea of seasonal rulers of the druidic people changing as the seasons change, and I decided that the barrow, with its obvious associations with death, would link to winter.

I worked all this out as I told them what they had discovered with their astronomically high History roll, improvising my ass off. But now I know what sort of framework to use for the adventure.

Well, they set out on the two-day walk to Witchcross, the village nearest the barrow site, and I threw in a little bit of travel roleplay, with an inn stay and such, but their attention was starting to waver by that time. So I threw a fight at them.

Nothing big – just a few hobgoblins and wolves, but it pulled people’s attention back to the game, and got everyone focused again. Unfortunately, that was right at the time we had to end the session for the evening.

Now I’ve got three weeks to put together the adventure they’ve picked. I’ve got a rough outline, drawn from a few different sources, that I think is gonna work pretty well. It’s gonna have opportunities for exploration, diplomacy, combat, and perhaps even one or two creepy moments.

All-in-all, it went pretty well, though I think it’s going to take a few sessions for people to get into the right mindset for this game, after the whole beer-and-pretzels dungeon crawl that we’ve been running up to now.

It’ll happen, though, and I think the game will be better for it.

 

 

*For those who care, the title means roughly, “After darkness, light.” It’s a phrase generally associated with the Book of Job, and has been used as a motto for a wide variety of societies and groups since the middle ages.

**I’m using a bunch of the background for the Elsir Vale, based on the Red Hand of Doom 3.5 adventure. I decided that there were tons of fake tombs for the hobgoblin leader floating around, and a thriving underground business in selling maps to these fake tombs.

This Friday is the first non-adventure path session of my 4E campaign that I started with Scales of War. I’ve talked elsewhere about my decision to abandon the adventure path, and the reasons behind it. Now, I want to talk a little bit about what I’m doing to revamp the campaign and turn it into what the group (including me) wants it to be.

First of all, there’s the wiki up at Obsidian Portal*. It’s not complete, yet, and indeed may never be, but it was really useful to me to sort of spread out all the material I had on the setting, making some of it up as I went, and take a look at the current information as a whole. This is letting me spot some threads that might interest the players, and pick up some story seeds.

I’ve also invited the players to contribute to the wiki. One of them has, filling in some interesting backstory. I like this, because it increases the emotional investment of the players in the world. It also builds some actual player familiarity with the setting material, so I have to resort less and less to telling them, “This is what you know about subject X.”

I also sent out an e-mail message to the players a couple of months ago, asking them what they wanted out of the post-Scales campaign. I didn’t get answers from everyone, but I did get some answers, and they gave me another batch of things to think about and throw into the mix. A lot of the answers were very definite about what they didn’t want, and much less specific about what they did, which is pretty much par for the course where my group is concerned. They like to tell me their deal-breakers, and trust me to find something interesting in what’s left over.

The answers were pretty scattered, though, with no real solid common element to latch onto and hang a campaign on.

See, this is where the interesting stuff starts to happen. I’m tossing out the Scales campaign structure and events, but I’ve got nothing, right now, to figure out what sort of campaign to build instead. Sure, I could just pick something and impose it on the group, but one of the things that the players were pretty clear on was that they wanted a more episodic kind of game, with shorter story arcs, and more personal relevance for the characters and their goals. And less dungeons.

Easy for them to say, right?

I’ve been thinking about what to do about this for a few weeks, now. I don’t really want to be forced to set the entire direction of the campaign, especially considering that they want more character hooks, but we’ve only played through one adventure, and that one was very combat-heavy and character-light**.

And then it occurred to me. They can’t make me decide for them. I’m lobbing the ball back into their court. I’m going to toss a bunch of options for adventures at them – in character – next session, and see what they pick up, and what threads of story interest them. Then I’m gonna run with it.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit obsessive about game prep because I tend to be fairly disorganized in general. Also, because I find it fun. But I can’t prep five or six complete adventures at a time. So, I’m prepping the first encounter for each one, along with another two or three other encounters that could work in several of the adventures. Some of these encounters are going to be skill challenges, some are going to be combat, and some are going to be straight roleplaying.

This sort of campaign is different for me. For the last several games I’ve run, there’s been a single, overarching story and objective from start to finish. I’ve always had that skeleton of story to go back to whenever I get stuck for the next adventure, or to figure out an NPC reaction, or whatever. In this style of game, that may develop over the course of play, but it’s not there right now. I’m flying by the seat of my pants.

Fortunately, I find the 4E rules make it very easy to improvise interesting scenes and encounters on the fly.

Here’s hoping it works.

 

 

*As an aside, I notice they’ve added forum functionality to their package. These guys get better and better!

**Part of this is the fault of the adventure – it was one big dungeon crawl. Part of it is my fault – I get tired of the big dungeon crawl, and start pushing just to get through it to the next thing, so it turns into a long series of fights with some boring wandering around in between. This is why I’m trying to push things back to the players, to make sure we get some more roleplaying and interesting choices rolled into the game.