The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
IRON DM 2023: Round 1, Match 2, FitztheRuke vs Kobold Stew @FitzTheRuke and @Kobold Stew, you have 24 hours to post your entries to this thread. Please limit your entry to a title, a list of the ingredients used and 750 additional words. Please include your list of ingredients at the beginning of the entry and please do not edit your post once it is submitted. Please refrain from reading your opponent's entry until after you have posted your own. You are on your honor to do so.
Entries that are between 1 and 59 minutes late will have their word-limits reduced to 675. Later entries that are at less than 1 day late will have their word-limits reduced to 525. Entries that are at least 1 day late will have their word-limits reduced to 375. In addition, entries that are at least 2 days late may be disqualified at the discretion of the judge with consent from the match's opposing competitor. Entries that exceed their word-limits will be considered to end once they reach that limit; I will ignore everything after.
Have to admit, when you didn't get a bard-related initial ingredient i thought the judges missed a prime comedic opportunity. But honestly, you'd have just mercilessly killed off the bard as a plot hook in your submission, wouldn't you?
Murder in Beggar’s Gulch
Iron DM 2023 R1: FitzTheRuke vs Kobold Stew
Broken Mirror
Persistent Kitten
Clouded Vision
Celebrated Bard
Home Renovation
Shadow Puppet
A solo adventure in the Weird West.
Note: The style is meant to evoke a tone. A GM should feel free to use any part as flavor text (being careful not to give too much away at any time) or to inspire a similar take of their own.
You’re the law in these here parts. I dunno how it happened, just that it did. Maybe you lost a bet. Maybe you volunteered. In that case, some folks would call you crazy. There ain’t never been much use for Law in Beggar’s Gulch.
This here story starts at the town saloon. The looking-glass behind the counter was shot during a dust-up long ago. Strangely, now each cracked piece shows a reflection of a different day. You can watch the shot that took out the glass, or you can see yourself drinking – though you might not like that streak of gray you spot in your hair.
The bartender, Maggie hails from a pack of were-pumas from out near Leadbelly. Her kid is Kitty both because her name’s Catherine, and because she keeps to her half-form much of the time. Kitty found body out back by the stables, and she’ll ask you to track who done it. She doesn’t let up with her questions, but she means well.
The body is Shakey Parr, right as rain. He was the best darn storyteller in these parts, and he could tickle the ivories like no one else. He had a voice like silk. I’m gonna miss him, I can tell you that. But it’s your job to find out who or what killed him, not mine. Kitty won’t let up about it.
If you watch the mirror behind the bar long enough, without drinking yourself into a stupor, you’ll see that Shakey stepped out the back with a farmhand. Prospector Joe can tell you that it was Geddy Coltrain who works at the Edblatt’s farm down by Blistering Bluff.
Max Edblatt and his wife Skipper have been working on their farmhouse’s kitchen and pantry ever since the whirlwind busted through the roof and took off little Peonie and the dogs. Some say she’s still out there, flying around. You know how to swing a hammer, so in exchange for labor, they’ll tell you that Geddy quit suddenly and took the road to Murmur.
Taking the coach to Murmur is a story in itself: Your fellow passengers are Ophelia Whittle and her son, Bart. Devil-worship has given Ophelia the Sight, though it took her eyes, and talking to her might well tell you things you’d rather not know. But she’ll give you a hint or two of what’s to come, in her clouded way. Bart no longer speaks on account of the things he’s seen, but he helps his mom get around, like a good kid.
If you’re unlucky enough to be carrying anything shiny, like your pistols or frankly, the driver’s vest’s buttons, the coach will be set upon by red ravens by the bend near Bloody Brook. They won’t let up until chased off by a loud enough bang. That stick of dynamite under the driver’s seat will do the job - if you can find it.
Sure enough, Geddy is holed up at the Old Vic Theatre in Murmur. They’re the one that done in Shakey Parr all right, but they won’t go quietly. Their puppets have knives, and though the real things are small, somehow Geddy can cast them up on a white canvas when they’re backlit by a series of lights and mirrors. Good thing no one else is around.
Geddy knew you were on to them, and they have the puppets ready to go. Ten feet tall the puppets are on the screen, and their shadow-knives still cut like a razor. If you can find where Geddy is holed up among the manakins, screens, and armatures of the stage before getting yourself much cut up, you can put an end to all this nonsense.
Shooting at shadows never helped many folks, but Geddy won’t put up much of a fight if you can find out where they’re laying low. A better plan might be to smash the lights, but then the Vic will go all dark and there’s a good chance Geddy will hightail it away in the confusion. If so, you can still catch up to them at the Rocksbury Train Station – where the train is late, as usual.
Hooks: (a) After watching her concert, players befriend Ancella Sutomi, whose sellout performances blend songs, virtuoso violin, and illusions of shadows and shapes, with an encore that conjures a forest on stage for her pastoral finale. With a winsome flirtatiousness, she invites the PCs to her house the next day.
(b) The following night, Ancella fails to show up for her show, and the PCs are invited to find her by the landlord, who does not want to lose paying audiences. The pub’s backroom concert hall sells out whenever Ancella performs.
The Mirror: Ancella Sutomi, celebrated bard, is doing home renovations. She has leased Moccari Hall, the mansion once occupied by that wizard, and is removing the cramped, labyrinthine corridors, favoring an open-space plan. If seen in the day (=hook a), she is covered with dust and swinging a sledgehammer into some bookcases for which she has no use. She offers tea, smiles warmly, but is working throughout their visit. If the PCs help, it can be they who find the hidden room; otherwise, Ancella will.
Boarded over is a small alcove, containing a broken mirror. It reaches the floor, and has been cracked and chipped. It’s enchanted, and reflects individuals standing before it, but not the wider room. Instead, the viewer sees swirling mists of a pocket dimension. Nosing up to the glass’s inside, tapping at the PCs with its paw, is a young displacer beast, the thorns on its tentacles not yet matured and opened. The mirror thus shows the bodies of all in the alcove and the persistent kitten, whose reflection remains though it’s no longer in the room. The kitten isn’t behaving as displacer young should: it rolls about, taking adorable swipes at the mist, and tumbles cutely – a clue that creatures caught within this mirror reverse their alignment while inside.
Breaking in. Striking the glass from the outside opens this, the only portal, and those in the alcove are transported within. Whether trying to free the kitten, or to destroy the mirror, this is how Ancella gets trapped (with some PCs, following hook a). If PCs seek Ancella (=hook b), they’ll see the kitten, but not Ancella. They need to enter to retrieve her.
Inside the mirror, players can be encouraged to play against their usual alignment. They remember their mission, but are pulled to behave antithetically (clerics and paladins remain safe; what happens in a pocket dimension, stays in a pocket dimension). This should be fun, not an ethical challenge: a means to encourage out-of-character speeches, etc.
Because of the mists, everyone inside has clouded vision: the space’s dimensions are not visible, but rough, damp, cavelike walls can be found and followed. Forgotten objects are scattered about, to be stumbled over: small piles of copper pieces; an unmade bed; a hank of silvered cord; perhaps a forgotten treasure chest. Time works different here: there is no need for food or sleep (the kitten hasn’t aged since it entered, decades earlier); rest remains possible. Sound is deadened: no reverberations, no footsteps; voices remain clear.
When she enters, Ancella flees into the mists and begins scheming: now malevolent, she stews in imagined resentments. She hides, and if found will fight the PCs as best she can. The challenge is to take her out without killing her, and then to escape. She has her sledgehammer and her cantrips, and will conjure illusions of shadow-creatures to misdirect and try to separate the PCs. Her shadow puppets move silently, offering targets always just out of reach. Ignoring these leaves PCs open to (ill-aimed) sniping attacks. Completing a rest under these conditions is another challenge. Creative solutions may dispel the mist briefly, but it always returns. The kitten will cuddle anyone who pets it.
Breaking out. There are several ways out. Remove Curse cast from within can free any individual. Other spells might also work: Mirror Image cast next to the portal, but not Misty Step or Dimension Door (since the mirror dimension is beyond range). Mundane solutions also exist. Someone mirroring the actions of a person in the alcove can be released as they enter, as reflection and reality switch. Anchoring oneself before entering (e.g. with rope) creates a lifeline that can be followed out. Physically smashing the portal from the inside (any magic is reflected away) breaks the mirror, closes the dimension, and ejects everything from within.
The kitten reverts to its feral state in the real world.
Iron DM 2023: Round 1 Match 3, Whizbang Dustyboots vs humble minion
@Whizbang Dustyboots and @humble minion, you have 24 hours to post your entries to this thread. Please limit your entry to a title, a list of the ingredients used, and 750 additional words. Please include your list of ingredients at the beginning of the entry and please do not edit your post once it is submitted. Please refrain from reading your opponent's entry until after you have posted your own. You are on your honor to do so.
Entries that are between 1 and 59 minutes late will have their word limits reduced to 675. Later entries that are less than 1 day late will have their word limits reduced to 525. Entries that are at least 1 day late will have their word limits reduced to 375. In addition, entries that are at least 2 days late may be disqualified at the discretion of the judge with consent from the match's opposing competitor. Entries that exceed their word limits will be considered to end once they reach that limit; I will ignore everything after.
Your ingredients are:
Hypocritical Vegetarian
Permanent Ink
Unlikely Mutiny
Living Chessboard
Cheerful Melody
Divine Triceratops
And, again, I’m sorry for the delay in getting your match started.
As I have in years past, I will use my traditional method of scoring entries as it helps me put my thoughts in order and I am too indolent to come up with another system. For those not familiar with how it works, I semi-arbitrarily assign points to the entries and the one with the most points is declared the winner. Points are awarded as follows:
Followed the Rules: Wordcount, time limit, etc. (worth 6 points)
Ingredient Use: Were all the ingredients legitimately used as a necessary part of the adventure? (worth up to 12 points, up to 2 pts per ingredient)
Useability: How easy could a GM plop the adventure down into their game? (worth 6 points)
Style: Personal preference – how much does the presentation and adventure appeal to the judge (worth 6 points)
For the second match of our first round this year, we have a delightfully weird, weird west offering from Mssr. theRuke, and a pleasant little “side-quest” D&D adventure from Sir Stew. Having read them each a few times, I think I have a clear favorite, but we will see how the points add up, as the demonic entity may be in the details.
Let us begin with the most basic of assessments: how well did each entry follow the rules? Our first entry, “Murder in Beggar Gulch,” (hereafter Murder) was turned in on time, clocks in at 742 words according to Wordcounter.net, and follows the correct format of title, ingredients, etc.. The second entry, “Through a Mirror Darkly,” (hereafter Mirror) was also turned in on time, contains 744 words, and also has a title, etc..
Full points to each for following the rules. I will interject at this point that neither title really wows me, as they are both somewhat pedestrian. Through a Mirror Darkly is a title that has seen use, and A Murder in Beggar’s Gulch, while serviceable, would be better used, in my opinion, as a title when the murder is a true mystery to be solved, with clues, red-herrings and the like; and the location is a location where one might not expect a murder. Here we really just have a shooting in a town where shootings are likely common and a need to chase down the culprit. There is no real mystery such as the title might suggest. That being said, I have an adventure published in my own name entitled, “Murder in Stoneholme,” so take the specific critique with a small grain of sodium chloride.
Let us move then into the heart of the judging: ingredient use.
We have six ingredients and we will go through them one by one, starting with Broken Mirror. Let me start with the Broken Mirror in Murder, which is a cool mirror. A broken magic mirror that shows you different events from different days reflected in its surface? I like it a lot, but it doesn’t actually serve much of a purpose in the adventure. Sure, you could look in the mirror for clues, but most investigators are just going to ask around the bar first and get the info they need straight from Prospector Joe. It would have been better, I think to have it reflect something that couldn’t be gotten from the witnesses. Maybe something like a motive. The mirror in Mirror is also a neat item, though a bit cliched (not that there is anything wrong with cliche. But I am not sure why it is broken, or if being broken really matters much in the adventure, especially as the main way to escape, barring other ideas, is to break it more. Overall I think I prefer the mirror in Murder to the one in Mirror, though I would have liked to see it used more fully.
The Persistent Kitten is our next ingredient, and I am not greatly impressed with either use. The were-puma kitteness which bugs the PCs into solving the mystery in Murder is a use, possibly even a cute use, but she didn’t have to be a kitten, and if the PCs are the law, why does she need to pressure them into doing their job? Does she know something about the murder we don’t? Like a motive perhaps? The flavor of the were-puma also, for some reason, just doesn’t seem to quite fit the flavor of the rest of it all. On the whole the ingredient feels a bit tacked-on. The displacer beast kitten, in Mirror, on the other hand, provides a nice bit of color for the mirror world, but I don’t get a real feeling of persistence from the kittenish beast, and that’s a shame because it could have been played up later in the adventure as following the PCs everywhere, and getting underfoot. I was told the kitten was persistent, but I am not sure I was shown it. This ingredient is a bit of a wash, in my opinion.
Our third ingredient is Clouded Vision. With Murder, I again feel a little bit like the ingredient is inserted, but not altogether necessary. The flavor of the blind devil-worshipping oracle is very nice, but what she shares is left vague, making me wonder what she is going to tell them that might actually move the adventure along or aid the PCs later? We are not told. Maybe she shares a motive for the murder with them, or warns them about the shadow puppets, but even so I have another semi-related issue, and that is, I am left wondering why western lawmen are riding the coach, when surely they have their own horses? Are they even going to encounter her? The clouded vision in Mirror is used better, if in a somewhat uninspired manner. The confines of the mirror reduce visibility, creating a muted, mysterious atmosphere. That makes for a nice combination of mechanics, ingredient, and flavor. I must admit that I am not altogether convinced the clouded vision will ever fully come into play (see my thoughts on this later), but assuming it does, advantage goes to Mirror.
With the fourth ingredient, Celebrated Bard, Murder commits the classic blunderof relegating the ingredient to background text. While not quite as catastrophic an error as going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line, for this competition it is a serious misstep. The storyteller’s identity as a “bard” doesn’t really matter all that much, except that people like him. But he could have been a generous banker, and it would have been much the same. Maybe the fact he told stories might have provided some motive to the murder, but it is likely that we will never know. On the other hand, the celebrated bard in Mirror is the impetus of the adventure and an antagonist, and so points again to Mirror.
Home Renovation is another ingredient where I am not completely satisfied with the use in Murder. Again, it feels unnecessary to the general plot. Sure, the PCs might volunteer to help in order to loosen the tongues of the farmer and his wife, but why the recalcitrance on the part of the two solid people of the earth in helping the local law? Is there something keeping them from wanting to talk? Maybe they know the motive for the murder and they don’t want to share it? It’s a nice bit of local color, but it just feels a bit contrived. The renovations in Mirror are also a bit unnecessary and feel slightly contrived (the mirror alcove could have just as easily been in a secret passage as behind a “new” wall, and it would make no difference). I also find myself wondering what sort of lease allows one to just go about tearing out walls at leisure. If she had bought the house, that would make more sense to me. But that’s a bit of a muchness. I am going to give the nod here to Mirror, but it’s slight.
We come then to the last ingredient, Shadow Puppet, and here I feel that Murder finally has the far better use. The shadow puppets in Mirror aren’t really. Shadows, yes. But puppets only in the loosest sense of the word. I feel like it’s more of a clever use of word-play than anything else, and word-play, when put up against actual puppets, as an ingredient use, is going to lose out. Additionally, the puppets casting lethal magical-shadows which can cut and slice in Murder are evocative and a fitting final encounter. One is left to guess how the murderer managed to pull off such a trick. My theory is that he stole the power from the storyteller somehow, and that’s the real motive for the murder. But that’s just my own conjuration. Advantage Murder here.
So casting our eyes over ingredients, and their usage, we see that there is an ever so small advantage being held by Mirror. Let’s move on to my thoughts on useability, as well as which one appeals to me more, and see if the lead holds.
I gotta admit, that I find the mood and atmosphere in Murder to be quite good. Part of it is the voice used to present the entry, but a general creepy vibe runs throughout and it definitely, excepting a few hiccups like the were-pumas, seems to fit into a weird west I would like to visit (even though I doubt I would like living there). Some of those hiccups do interfere with my total acceptance of the setting, but if I jettisoned those things, I think that I could take this adventure and run with it. There are a few loose threads that need tightened, maybe an extra encounter and two that might be used to spice it up, and some of NPCs could use a rewrite. I would also like to know the motive for the murder, the source of the shadow puppets, and such; but the entry does something I appreciate in an Iron DM offering, and that is, it makes me want to finish the write-up. These aren't finished adventures after all, they are the outlines of an adventure. As I read it, I want to fix it and run it, because I think it would make a fun game, and I think the setting, on the whole, is one players (with the right mindset) would enjoy exploring more.
When I look at Mirror, I see a solid little side-quest (which I won’t hold too much against it, though I do prefer slightly meatier adventure offerings). The setting has some quirky things I like, though there are some elements in the set-up I think need better thought out, or explained, like why the bardess is knocking half the walls out of an expensive manor she is just leasing. Why does she invite them for tea and then ignore them as she takes a hammer to the wall? Did she think she was getting free labor? I am also not sure the PCs are going to try and break a mirror they encounter in someone else’s house, thus triggering the trap, and most players I know would go and try to research the mirror a little before just trying to smash it (and again, its already broke, so why try to smash it more?). My real difficulty with the adventure as presented, however, is the alignment reversal of the mirror world. Some groups would roleplay this well, I suppose. Some groups can roleplay anything well. A lot more groups, I suspect, would, if they did not balk at the idea of an alignment reversal, decide that their once kind-hearted PC is now going to murder their comrades. Assuming the PCs were all heroic before, why, once their attitude has been reversed, are they going to try and rescue their friend? Beyond this issue with the adventure, there is another problem I have and it is that, as written, I don’t think the adventure is going to be much of an adventure or quest. Once on the other side of the mirror, how many groups are not just going to have someone who tries to break the mirror from the inside, thus ending the adventure almost as soon as it starts. There is no need to chase the contrary bard through the mists if as soon as they break the mirror, everyone gets dumped back out in the alcove where it all started. Though there are some genuinely interesting ideas in the mirror world, I find none of them really matter. I don’t think they will ever get used. Because of these two, in my mind, glaring difficulties, the imaginary publisher inside of me says that if I was reading submissions and this one crossed my desk, I would send it back to be reworked.
Thus, while Through a Mirror Darkly had the slightly better use of ingredients, I don’t think its enough to make up for the problems I see in the adventure as a whole. Thus, I find that in the end I am going to go with A Murder in Beggar’s Gulch. FitztheRuke advances to round 2.
A Murder in Beggar’s Gulch (Murder)
Follows Rules 6
Ingredient Use
Broken Mirror 1.5
Persistent Kitten 1
Clouded Vision 1.5
Celebrated Bard 1
Home Renovation 1
Shadow Puppet 2 (total 8/12)
Useability 5
Appeal 5 TOTAL SCORE: 23.5/30
Through a Mirror Darkly (Mirror)
Follows Rules 6
Ingredients
