Grand Conjunction Problems

[Quinntonia]

BTW, since I want the wolfwere fights to be extremely deadly, I am ruling that damage reduction is not bypassed by spells, etc. You do more than that damage or better luck next time, bro.

So, what specifically are you stealing?

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

evertyone singing and smiling, and everything colourful and wonderful and basically playing it up like it was the opening scene in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast."

hah! that's it exactly. love it.

They then got out of the house and the wolfwere broke through the front door, enraged and attacking them as they stormed him again, finally having the Darkonion knight take him out with a crit and having his body fall back into the fiery house just as it collapsed. (all random dice rolls, but so cinematic)

wow, yeah, "cinematic" is exactly how you made it sound. well played! Man, I love that module.

[vachtor]

First your description of the opening of a disney movie is just spot on. Shiny and happy, to the point of just not right... This will help as I'm likely going to send them to Odiare immediately before running Feast, so it will already have them on their toes with another "happy town"...

After that, it will all depend on reactions to the town. I do like how you have one being attacked in the night. I'm thinking I may reverse that though as one of my characters is playing the werewolf theme (he was a foundling at a monastery who began to manifest changing and it caused him to leave). I'm planning on him actually being a wolfwere and he is mentally blocking out his attacks because he can't handle it. The other party members aren't even aware that he can shift yet, we're waiting to spring it on them mid-battle (if he gets bloodied he will shift, we've discussed it.)

[Quinntonia]

I would keep him a werewolf, and play into that whole werewolves naturally hate wolfweres thing. It seems like it would make for a fun way to double up on the antipathy for your enemies.

That being said, the "way too nice" effect I think had more of an impact specifically because they have been in nothing but shitholes since they came to Ravenloft wherein the environment has been a major factor. Lamordia, then Souragne, then Har'Akir. So, when they found this beautiful land with over the top wonderfully nice people, it smacked them in the face like a mace. I even had people refuse money when they asked for directions and everyone kept exclaiming "welcome!" with gusto and even when the gatekeepers got them to pay the "tourist tax" it was good old boys having a little good-natured fun.

However, I have had one thought, I am thinking that I am going to make Abu get deathly sick due to the exposures to disease that he has had since he has come to Kartakass. I mean, they will likely be able to cure him easily, but I may play it out that this happens a few times with different symptoms so that they get a sense of how hard this adjustment has been on him as well as give his new "father" have a chance of taking care of him under difficult circumstances.

[vachtor]

That's actually the reason that I want to change him. His character arc is looking to being about whether he wants to be the beast or the man. Right now he is convinced he is a man cursed with being a beast. When he gets to Kartakass this will be flipped on its head with him learning he was actually a beast all along, pretending to be a man. I'm even planning on having Harkon offer to take him under his wing (paw?) as a useful tool, just to play up his making a choice for his future.

The "way too nice" effect is going to work well for me because after coming through the mist my team landed in a swamp, fought off a zombie apocalypse, are about to face a fearful lynch mob in the next town (and be introduced to the Carnival), followed by a nightmarish boat ride and an island of undead led by an old nemesis. After all of this, my plan is that they are going to stumble through the mist into a happy little town celebrating a children's festival (the Created). By the time they finish that and flee Odiare, it will be into Kartakass - and another happy little town. That should hopefully play into their paranoia a bit. Maybe I'll describe all of the children running around happily with dolls to throw them off. Not sure, its going to be quite a long time until we hit FoG, my crew is only about to take on the Zombie Lord in NOTWD.

[Quinntonia]

Hmm, kind of a "Luke and the Dark Side" type thing? I like it, if that is handled well, it could be epic.

As for the "happy little town" thing, I would caution against hitting that note twice, especially back to back. The reason it is so effective in my campaign right now is that this has been so shocking to players who have experienced Ravenloft now as unrelentingly bleak and terrible in their environments, with coming into a small island domain of my own creation where it seemed to never stop raining, to Lamordia wherein they slogged through snow and blizzard constantly and burned a tonne of magic just getting around and hiding out in blizzard after shrieking, howling, blizzard. Then, they went to Souragne, where they were contantly under the threat of disease due to the swamps, humidity, and oppressive heat, and then Har'Akir where I was having them make Fort saves every 10-30 minutes depending on what they were wearing if they were doing anything physical during the day, or they would collapse.

This is teh first land they have been in wherein not only is the environment not a major factor in their every decision, it is actually quite pleasant. The shock of that alone was enough to do half the role-playing for me, and then when the people are super nice as well, they went into paranoid overdrive, but it made THEM seem like the crazy ones.

Now, if I hit this note again in their next location, it is going to have negligible impact.

[The Lesser Evil]

However, I have had one thought, I am thinking that I am going to make Abu get deathly sick due to the exposures to disease that he has had since he has come to Kartakass. I mean, they will likely be able to cure him easily, but I may play it out that this happens a few times with different symptoms so that they get a sense of how hard this adjustment has been on him as well as give his new "father" have a chance of taking care of him under difficult circumstances.

Hmm, I wonder if your players might intepret Abu repeatedly suffering from illness as a curse of some kind?
That might make for interesting roleplaying possibilities.

[Quinntonia]

A curse? Possibly. They are ridiculously paranoid at this stage.

[The Lesser Evil]

A curse? Possibly. They are ridiculously paranoid at this stage.

You're never paranoid if they really are out to get you.

[Quinntonia]

That is a fair point, lol.

[Quinntonia]

So after the last meeting I forgot to post an update:

So they woke up the next morning at the Wolfwere's farmhouse where they spent the night and the first to awake was the new halfling mage. He wandered around looking for his cat familiar when he walked into the kitchen and saw paw-prints in blood on the counters, floors, and into the hall going to the back where the box of four wolf pups were being kept. I had been playing up that his kitteh familiar was in fact, a Dread Companion (something the players have never really encountered before) and as such is totally loyal, but deeply evil. The familiar had been a factor in the new players' integration into the group as it had tried to piss off the gnomish mage's hawk familiar and even went so far as to piss on the gnome's backpack when no one was looking, because the halfling was spending so much time with someone else. I had established that it was, well, basically a cat, but wanted to go darker. So the halfling mage, in a moment if brilliant and disturbed role-playing, didn't say a word or waken anyone else up, but immediately took a cloth and cleaned up the blood while following the tracks down the hall. When he found the familiar, it was beside the whining puppies, one of whom had been pulled from the box it was in and had its little, cute, throat torn out. The kitty was completely clean from any blood and licking its fur next to the body. The mage simply took the body, wiped up the evidence, wrapped it in the cloth, and put it in the back of a cupboard behind some dishes and then went to the front door, opened it, went back into the kicthen and found a bowl of cream for the cat. All of this was done in character without saying a word. The table was floored. It was truly a great and disturbing Ravenloft moment.

The Druid, who had adopted the pups, woke up and found one missing, and enlisted the aid of the rest of the party looking for the missing pup, but to no avail. They concluded that the pup had somehow gotten out of the box and went out the front door. So they left for Skald.

So they traveled to Skald, and I started to describe the place to them as they came up. They were struck by how it seemed a pale imitation of Harmonia but somehow larger and more powerful. Even the description as they arrived of the crumbling fortress and the shanty town outside of the city proper seemed to jar them a little.

Of course, they also had three wolf pups with them and this led to a massive confrontation with the village gaurds that had the rogue leader show that they weren't "With the wolves" by slicing one of the pups' throats, which had the druid ran to save them, taking the last two and asking to release them into the forest. He released one, and used a spell to shrink the other one and has kept it, shrunk, on his person ever since, burning up valuable spell slots because he is mortified at how this went down. Of course, his player is also saying that this wolf could replace his animal companion.

So, after some diplomacy checks and bribery, they were allowed to enter the town, wherein they decided not to go and stay at the Old Kartakass Inn (damn) and found another one. I realized that I didn't want to railroad them and so made the other inn as interesting as I could. Behind the bar was an adventurer (retired) that recognized them immediately as outlanders and welcomed them. He also gave them the skinny on the local gossip and who the movers and the shakers were, as well. The inn was kind of a dive with good food and pretty amateur music (which in Kartakass is still amazing) so I let them blow off some steam that night. They drank some and soon it led to them taking turns almost Karaoke style getting up on stage to do performance checks to sing songs of their homelands. I made the players tell me the title and theme of the song, and then away they went with it. The best two was the pompous Darkonian knight who rolled two natural twenties for his performances and brought the place to tears first with a song about his local estate and then a dirge lamenting the Dead Man's Campaign in which is family had distinguished themselves. Of course, my personal favourite was the gnomish mage who rolled another natural 20 (one of those nights) and sang a song about the various committees that run gnomish society back home (in my homebrew world that he is originally from). Hilarious.

The next day they went for lunch at the Old Kartakan Inn where I played up the exquisite luxury of the place, and they chose to go to the nice dining hall and eat very well so I had them served by Coraline, the werefox. They were, of course, in awe of her beauty but after the meal I had the old man find them and tell them that Akriel was waiting for them. I had them enter the "boardroom" wherein their are clear signs of struggles and old, dried, blood, to meet with her, and left it there.

We play again this Sunday.

[Quinntonia]

Well, that session derailed a little bit.

Anyhoo, they had met with Akriel, who convinced them to continue onto Radaga's canyon lair and retrieve the Crown of Soldiers.

They decided that they were going to leave the next morning for Harmonia and then try and secure passage downriver to where the map indicated the canyon was.

At that stage, the Darkonian knight and the Voros barbarian decided that they were going to go to the Old Kartakan Inn at night "to see a show."

They had previously resisted going there at night, so I was surprised, but what I had them do was enter there and start drinking, and in order to have them imbibe Meekelbrau, I introduced a means of smoking small amounts of it in a hookah-type contraption that allowed them to imbibe for a much smaller amount. And the smoke filled room also allowed for limited visibility and a way that I could claim that even if they didn't imbibe much they would become intoxicated (second hand) from the smoke.

So the bards played, they were surrounded by rough woodsmen, and as the night wore on, I started to have the attendant wolfweres change their eyes to a wolfish yellow and back, then have a tail sneak out from under the hem of a dress for a second, or have a smile become fanged and back, all the while in the context of being heavily impaired. They even tried to leave at one stage and I had the doors locked from the inside, but when they asked the bartender to let them out, they kept saying things like "You are speaking gibberish, I can't understand you!" and "Why don't you just leave, the door is right over there?" This was all part of the terrifying game, of course, but the players and PCs were never totally sure if this was all in their head.

Finally, they were given a room (on the house, for their safety) in the inn, and they went up there in order to sleep it off and barricade themselves inside. Of course, they couldn't escape out the window and loaded everything up against the door, but a very drunk worlfwere decided to leap out of the closet at them in the middle of the night. It should be noted that their friends came in and looked for them and were told that they had gotten so drunk on Meekelbrau that they wandered out into the night. These PCs had repeatedly done just that before so their companions believed it and went back to their inn.

So when the worlfwere burst into their room, one had a dagger, another a +1 shortsword from the Touch of Death module and they tried to fight the thing, and between somew very nice crits and power attacks, injured it enough so that it decided to flee. Afterwards, they ran out of the room, and ran downstairs to get out, where they saw several "human" woodsmen glaring at them as they went to the door. But they didn't stop them, knowing that they would never be believed with the red stain on their lips.

I had also had their adopted servant boy from Har-Akir, Abu, start to cough, and they have called a physician and placed him under bedrest. I got to play up ridiculous medical advice from the very medieval doctor but they decided that they would pay the inn they were staying at to care for him and see that thephysician came by while they dealt with the next section of the quest.

They then traveled to Harmonia, stayed in an inn the next night, and purchased a few rowbats to go downriver to the canyon.

That is where they left it. I had hoped to get them to at least the mouth of the canyon but yeah...

[Quinntonia]

So after renting the rowboats and heading downriver, they arrived at a set up rustic docks that were set into the riverbank and roughly where they were told they had to go inland. At that stage they found a path with some stones pounded into the ground so the forest wouldn't overtake it, and they walked up it for about a half an hour and found a small village, about the size enough to have about ten families in a cleared area in the forest. As they approached it, they met the children of the village who were alone with no adults in it. I had them discuss the fact that the adults all had left the village in the middle of the night, and when the children woke up their parents were all gone. I also dropped several times that everyone was wearing a particularly awful shade of mustard colour in all of their clothing because of some local materials that they use for dyes.

This nearly derailed everything, with some of the group arguing that they had a responsibility to immediately move the children to a more safe place and get them some care.

After some time they decided that they had to carry on to the canyon and come back and deal with the children afterwards. And so they went.

[The Lesser Evil]

Hmm, it was as I expected, dealing with the children might present something of a roadblock. Good to hear you guys found a way around it. Did they have the wherewithal to make sure the kids were tucked away in some (relatively) safe location in town?

[Quinntonia]

No, they had a lengthy conversation about the difference between medieval children and modern children and decided that they would likely be able to care for themselves for a few days until they cam back and decided what they were going to do.