Garnfellow
Explorer
Olive said:
*Evil DM laugh*
First off, I only ended up with 4 players (out of 10), so the party was significantly underpowered from the get-go. However, this was supposed to be a slower-paced, investigative, story-driven adventure, rather than a big shoot-em up session. Geraldine, you see, had secretly enthralled a whole village of men. My imagined victory condition was for the players to simply trick or expose Geraldine, which would cause her to flee to fight another day -- not to kill her in combat
The scenario, inspired by Coleridge's poem "Christabel," (see http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Christabel.html) was a side-trek to an isolated village where one of the PCs has some old friends. Based on rumors, the PCs had suspected something was wrong long before they ever set foot in Langdale Hall, and I reinforced those suspcious by laying on the ominous foreshadowing nice and thick.
Once the PCs reached Langdale, they quickly picked up on the rampant weirdness there: Where are all the children? And the women? And given this absence, why are the man so pleasant and happy with their lot? And what’s this mysterious illness that seems to be plaguing Baron Leoline?
After lots of fun investigating and talking with enthralled NPCs, the party quickly pegged the Baroness Geraldine as the source of Langdale's problems.
But I think they just assumed that all the zonked-out NPCs they met were 0-level nobodies, and thus the players severely underestimated Geraldine. Meta-game logic might have been at play, as well -- the DM surely wouldn't throw a really powerful monster against us during a stinking side trek, with only half the party?
Or would he?
In any case, after making quick work of the investigation phase, they then failed to take any serious precautions while staying in Langdale -- which led to each one of them getting picked off by her minions and enthralled.
In a situation like this, I wouldn't kill off characters unless they were seriously stupid -- and my players, I am happy to report, are hardly ever stupid. And besides, it works much better to keep them all alive, but secretly enthralled to this evil succubus. It serves her in-game purposes by spreading her influence well beyond Langdale, it suits my long-running storyline nicely, and is going to set the players up for some fun roleplaying. A real trifecta!
So now these four characters have returned home, all under the spell of Geraldine. The rest of the players who missed the session have no idea what happened, and they aren't going to learn this information out of game. Instead, the enthralled characters will all tell the same, weird story to their fellow adventurers:
Langdale Hall is great! Everything is just fine there! You really ought to go soon, see it for yourself. And don't forget to see the Baroness -- she's the greatest! Really! Yup, best. Adventure. Ever.
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