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Deviation Actions
This isn't a national emergency, it's just me typing out some classic DM cope; because my roommates are moving into a new house my property manager owns. Great for them, nnnot so great for game night. Pretty much, because I'm not going to go with them, because said house is an hour plus away from my current workplace; so, yeah: time to call time of death on the barely-just-started campaign. After a month of set backs and 70$ of amazon deliveries for basic gear (erasable battle maps, etc.). Ain't it always the way?
I mean, at least I have the gear for when I DO eventually find a stable group to run a game for (and, no, I've tried the Discord/Twitch life, and, after one crummy game and one great one, I'm not about it). I don't enjoy singing and dancing for randos, I like to tell a story with people I like IRL.
All in all, I'm just bummed as hell, because I had a whole big thing planned. There was going to be an empire, with a sub-tropical port city capital, called Crownstead. Supplanting every facet of the government was going to be a cult of succubi, the Scions of Xinivrae. The cult usurped Xuthala, a tropical paradise peopled by yuan-ti (snake folk), gutting their fiendish god's temple. The shrine to "the goddess" would cater to an 'Eyes Wide Shut' cabal of Lords and Ladies practicing rituals of goetry, erotic magick; fueling their sprees of unspeakable decadence by sacrificing the children conceived by the cult's members. All of this governed by the Scions, meticulously conceived to feed and swell the ranks of their abyssal priesthood; while also binding the cabal to the unholy rites they witnessed, practiced or merely suffered to transpire before their very eyes.
Trespassers on the island, as well as traitors in the cult's ranks, would be killed and converted, with the Denomonicon, into flesh golems, mindless Frankensteinian thralls glamoured to serve the cult as beatific chattel.
I had a fantastic lead for the Party, too. Because the succubi were pervading people's dreams, and, paranthetically, minds, it made sense for them to have a means of exposing people to their erotic thrall, something innocuous that could travel quickly without detection.
When the Party entered their first tavern or inn, they were going to hear this melody:
They'd make a WIS saving throw with 15 DC, anything lower than 15, and they'd fall into a trance: during which they'd have a brush with one of the succubi cultist.
(I jotted some prose down for this--nothing super spicy--but certainly suggestive: "You come to, for some reason out of breath. No images come to mind, only lingering sensations. You recall a supple pressure against your chest, and a texture--warm--pillowesque--brushing your neck, leaving behind a wet heat: and, against your ear, you remember a chuckle. Soft, and hungry. ")
She would kiss them on the neck, branding them with an invisible Hunter's Mark, making them more susceptible to being Charmed later; unless they had the sense to examine, identify, and remove the Mark at a temple. As well, when they snapped out of their trance, they would have a new item in their inventory. This would give the cult a means of scrying their location, using Locate Item. Simple. (I was going to make the item either something petty, like a mirror, so the Party members wouldn't notice it in their inventory, or, something useful so it would be a struggle tossing it away.) The succubi priestess could reappear into the story at any time, any time the Party heard the melody, or, just, whenever, because she could glamour herself to look like anyone; including (oh, just for an instance) that wholesome cinnamon roll the Party grabbed as a heal bot for the final fight. (I would have had so many options, it's ridiculous!)
The biggest hook into the main quest was going to be a tiefling boy running into the tavern, with a tiefling woman, claiming to be his mother, chasing him. (His actual mother, also a tiefling, would have been seen earlier in the session, seeding this encounter.) The adventurers would have to chose to take the tiefling woman's word or the kid's, and based on that they would either find one inroad to the isle of Xuthala* or another; either by fighting the woman , a cultist and her two cohorts, warlocks one and all, or by meeting Donna, Vance, the boy's actual mother, shuddering with grief because her son has been kidnapped. In the former case, the adventurers would be taken into the custody of the Consuls, the royal guards, to take statements and be placed under arrest. Because they either killed the cultists or assaulted multiple people in public in front of several eye witnesses, and, in either scenario, a law enforcement agent worth a damn is going to do his due diligence. This would lead to more cultists coming after the adventurers in their cell to tie up loose ends.
If they went to the dungeons, under investigation by the Consuls, the Party would find a corpse in the cell. If they examined it, exposing the Yellow Sign, they would have to make another 15dc WIS throw. That's how I was going to involve my favorite cosmic horror, the King in Yellow, in the story. I had that first brush scripted, too:
"On a bridge, the sides left to right disappear on the horizon, swallowed by tumbling, pearlescent mist. In the distance, making your very bones rattle, you hear a guttural chanting and the ringing of bells. A procession pours from the mist. Waving censors trailing a sulfur yellow smoke, you see creatures hooded in rags—humanoid—twisted and tall—as they approach you hear their voices in concert, plunging and lilting in unsettling melody.
Lumbering behind them you see rows and ROWS of hulking beasts, each one is the size of a palace; and as the whips crack over their spiked hides their neck frills explode open in vivid shades of burnt orange and molten reds, their mouths splintering into a kaleidoscope of razor teeth as they screech; as they're driven on. All of them harnessed to a palanquin hundreds of feet high. There a giant lounges, its many hands—bone-thin--maggot pale--resting on the arms of a throne; a gaping maw of Gothic finery. The giant’s crown is steepled brass, its face shrouded in a tattered robe of fever yellow that hangs from his frame like cobwebs. "
(I was gonnuh play some kickass ambience from Cryochamber for the scene, too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQDv4q695Jo&t=266s It was going to be vintage cosmic horror.)
Hastur would recruit one or all of the adventure party to find the cult because they stole the Demonomicon, a fiendish grimoire, from Carcosa, the mad city of poets where the Yellow King reigns. Carcosa (in my canon) sits at the meridian of the multi-verse, its tendrils ensnaring countless worlds under its governance; its denizens rendered mad by their insatiable lust for knowledge of the unknown as much as each other. Carcosa offers, "The words of world's. All to have, but, none to take."; so seizing any knowledge from Carcosa is a grand heresy against its King.
(Their intent, the cult's? They were going to free Xinivrae, the mother of succubi and first paramour to the Demagorgon, from her eternal prison, and then enthrall her using the Demonomicon.)
If the adventurer/s pledged their fealty to the King, He would grant them passage out of Carcosa. When they returned to their cell, they'd level up twice, going from level two to level four, earning the eldritch feat, a "fever yellow" cloak of many things (because branding), and a full body Shadowfell brand tattoo.
Once a day, the tattoo grants the bearer, when hit, the capacity to turn insubstantial. Originally the effect only halves the damage taken, but, come on: you're incorporeal! A ghost! As a DM, I was going to rule, 'That's a miss, you take no damage.' It only works once a day, it's perfectly balanced (especially for the amount of eldritch hell you had to circumnavigate to earn it). You can also travel through walls for one round. Again, you made a deal with an Elder God of Knowledge, if you survived an encounter with an entity like that, he's going to hook it up; because everything gift He deigns to give you is another link in your chains.) The King, in future stories, would become more relevant, and, eventually, be the hook into a grander 'Sailors on the Seas of Fate' meets 'The Midwhich Cuckoos' umbrella plot. That's tangential to the Crownstead plot, though.
The point of having one or some or all of the Party exposed to the King was to give them a legitimate way to speed run to the firepower they'd need to have a fighting chance against a cult of fiendish Warlocks, a retinue of flesh golems, a priesthood of Succubi, and a Cambion.
Even with Eldritch warlocks in their stable, the Party would still need a 'Hail, Mary!' And that's what an entire ship of bards (conveniently forced to repair their ship instead of traveling through the jungle to the big scary temple) is for, to give the Party a second wind in their darkest hour. The Hawkwind crew would strictly be using their bardic magic to tank for the Party, debuff enemies, juice the Party member's stats, and generally just be heal bots. They're job wouldn't be to carry the Party, but to enable the Party to keep fighting. And if they lose, well, they lose.
That's DnD, baby.
Oh, I had a cool puzzle thing, too. Two actually. Yeah, there was going to be a polished serrated piece of exotic wood with abyssal written on it. A map, the shape of the wood with it jagged and smooth edges? That was an aerial depiction of the island with its coasts.
There was also going to be a medallion that had an inscription that said, and I'm just pulling this from memory:
"Pursue the Goddess, O' Pilgrim of Bliss
Practice delight with none but the worthy;
And uphold your signs of faith always
In the shadow of the heathen's wrath.
These tokens, to Her, will be your stairway"
In the temple there's not a billion and one traps, there's just one (and, after it, a few flesh golems patrolling the halls of the temple that you can fight or stealth past). The trap consists of one long ass hall which, when entered, activates. Thin and thick slabs of rock slam down between slits in the floor, hauled up by chains. Meanwhile the floor is hinged, like a see-saw, so, anyone who ninjas past the rapidly falling slabs of granite will just spill down--one way or another--into spikes several stories below the hall. Meanwhile, there's no adjoining hallway! The far side, after all of that mechanized death, is just a dead end. With a relief of Xinivrae on the back wall.
'So, wtf, DM!'
What you would have to do is just take out that medallion in the room, and hold it up. It would flash and aaaall those slabs would drop one by one in ascending order. The large slabs forming the landings and the lil' ones forming the steps of 'your stairway" to the temple above. (I don't think it's wildly hard to figure out, especially since the DM, me, would describe the mural at the end of the hall as "identical to the one on your medallion." prompting someone to look at the medallion and, perhaps, read the riddle.) But it's a bit of a high wire act, isn't it? Making a puzzle that's challenging but not so difficult the average Joe wouldn't at least try something you could bullshit, as a DM, into qualifying as a reasonable answer. Even if it's just an accidental one.
I've had this idea for a DnD campaign in my back pocket for about, oh, two years now (?); and after a lackluster experience on Discord for six months, after multiple stillborn attempts to form a game with my co-workers, I finally found a group of friendlies IRL I could play with, roommates I could rely on to come to the table every other week: but, that's all gone, now.
Oh, well. I still have the story with its essential beats and hooks scratched out. That's something.
*It's a barely obscured 'Conan' reference lol