Adventure on the road? (without the ambush)...

[weem]

Ok fellow EN Worlders... I stand before you as a man in need of inspiration/help.

I pride myself on being a very creative person - I come up with my own ideas for my games and always have much more in my mind than I will ever need for the number of games I play.

But tonight is different. The last week has found me doing a lot of work on our new house (painting, etc) and no time to plot out the game (I'm quickly typing this at work right now). I will finally have some time tonight (late) and that's it.

I am running the game tomorrow and it will feature the group heading from the town they are in, over to a big city. This travel will take one week and I figure this one game will cover that trip.

So, I am here looking for ideas - the one thing I want to avoid is an ambush but other than that, I'm open to whatever.

Here are some details...

- This is a 4e game (probably doesn't matter)

- The trip is heading North, along a tree line to the West and open fields to the East.

- They will probably be traveling with a small caravan of traveling entertainers (they will be good people though).

- They will have just left a town where they disrupted the operations of the local thieves guild called "The Murkers" (though the guild is comprised mostly of amateurs and wannabe thugs - mostly young humans).

- This is a fantasy setting, and is pretty typical of what we would consider the 'norm' as far as races and the overall feel etc.

- This is a story focused game - in this case meaning, it's okay if there is no combat during this game, but of course combat is always good.

Some themes I like...

- I like turning stereotypical D&D stuff on it's head. For example, the players were on a boat (which is always deadly right?). So they expected combat of course. So when they were awoken in the middle of the night by what felt like the ship hitting something, they sprung up to the ready... but as it turned out the rudder was damaged. The Artificer got to have a mini skill challenge to help repair it and the others had various social encounters - eventually ending with them arriving safely to their destination (and meeting some cool people on the way).

- I like things out of the ordinary/original. It's not a requirement, but I spend a lot of time (when I have it) attempting to give the players something they may not have experienced before. Doesn't mean it wasn't an idea I got from someone/somewhere else, but I try to avoid the 'usual' stuff (hence my "no ambush" note above).


Anyway, I meant to make this much shorter so thank you if you made it through this and thanks for any suggestions. I love reading and participating in these kinds of posts/requests, so I figured why not start one and seek inspiration

 

[Herobizkit]

How about a chance encounter with Fey?

Think of it like a very limited dip into Ravenloft. The PC's walk, walk walk, and when night falls, they come upon a forest. Of mushrooms. REALLY BIG ones. As they continue into the woods, they find myconids, giant wasps that shoot wasp swarms out their butts, and a group of pixies who are more trouble than they're worth. When they camp for the night, they wake up in the a.m...

... and they're at the city. Or rather, IN the city - in a park, surrounded by a ring of mushrooms. And faerie dust.

The key will be to really describe the surreality of the area. As they enter the mushroom forest (hee hee), the sky turns from black to an eerie magenta. The stars seem to wander about aimlessly across the sky rather than stay on one fixed point (they are actually incandescant pixies with dragonfly wings, more like insectoid glowworms than elves). The moon is ever-present, but it ripples as though it were underwater. And so on.

*shrug*

 

[Khazan]

keeping in the spirit of your ship-bound 'encounter' and the broken rudder... how about some problems with the wagons, and some skill challenges to repair a broken axle? lifting the wagon and removing the wheel (Strength checks), repairing the axle (Knowledge:Engineering maybe, i dunno). perhaps the broken wagon lurches unexpectedly and frightens the horses, requiring Handle Animal challenge to keep them calm?

what about some trouble with the travelling entertainers? perhaps a fight breaks out amongst them (love triangle gone sour! a dancing girl accused of stealing something from the acrobat! wagon drivers demand more money for the journey!) requiring Diplomacy / Sense Motive challenges to the characters. perhaps a few entertainers fall ill (cities always are great sources of all sorts of nasty illnesses) and the characters have to Heal, or, better yet, search the nearby meadows for a rare herb or plant with which to make a tonic (Knowledge: Nature, Alchemy, etc..)

 

[Mark Chance]

Weem: No specific suggestions for what happens, but I do encourage you to implement the Five-Room Dungeon format for the session. It is flexible enough to offer a little something for everyone.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

A few things that might be experienced on a journey:

- a migration or some sort, depending on season: deer, bugs or monstrous vermin, ducks (carnivorous or otherwise); or even of nomads, fey, treants, etc.

- a pursuit: a band of thieves, an escapee, or the like, is fleeing from the authorities, and the chase go through your caravan. Do the PCs help, hinder or ignore?

- a stampede of wild animals.

- weather. Have a tornado shred a village right before the caravan passes through or something. A drought gives rise to a forest/field fire. A freak snowstorm slows down the caravan. This kind of stuff opens up all kinds of opportunites for survival, repair, social/leadership, healing, etc skill use.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Earthquake sends several of the wagons down below and the players have to try and find all the vital items and people.

Players are on the road and horrid weather strikes that forces them to seek shelter in the cursed ruins that are aligned with the Fey Worlds.

Players are on the road and come across a scene of great carnage with obvious tracks leading to a supposed haunted tower that's known to be a bandit lair.

Characters see several of the wagons start to pull away. The wagon train runner is in a heated debate with one of the larger merchants and told him to go his own way. Can the players convince them to stay together with strength in numbers? Do they join one side or the other? Who has their contract? Whose paying them now?

A member of the wagon falls sick. Plague! A cursed item that a thief brought with him has caused a pox to break out and supposedly only by destroying the item in the lost pool of a fallen dragon can the curse be broken.

 

[darjr]

A very large beast of burden lies down right in the middle of the road. They need to get it moved. It probably belongs to sombody so killing it isn't an option. And besides, it means no harm.

Maybe eventually it'll mean that the troupe would need to perform for it, and the PC's need to convince them to do it. After all, music soothes the savage beast.

The entertainers meet an rival troupe and there is a 'dance off' either the PC's need to participate, judge, or stop it before it gets out of hand, or all three.

 

[samursus]

I had the same idea, roughly as Herobizkit...., however my take would be to use mists....nothing creepier than mists. PC's and caravan travelling through them for what seems like days... every now and then an NPC disappears... can only see about 10ft around you. Horrible screams ... of the missing and/or their attackers. Really play up the claustrophobic angle... (this part shouldn't take much prep... nothing really to see, mostly just building atmosphere)...throw in a confused melee with something appropriate (preferably something the PC's are unable to identify)...

Then, have the survivors walk out of the mist into a carnival/faire--- remaining twilight the whole time... throw in odd/bizarre/macabre characters to interact with. Not foes per se, but creepy as hell. Have the PCS freaked out, expecting the worst....lots of torchlight and lurid colors. Then as the blood moon reaches its peak, turning every red...have the carnies (even the women and children) go feral...growing long fangs and contorted faces turn to them as one and attack.....make many of them minions.... describe the mad hunger they emanate.... until the Boss shows up.... some sort of obese undead/demon wearing a tophat.... after the fight, the mist dissipates and they are standing under the noon day sun....in an abandoned carnival... the corpses of normal looking people lying where the monsters fell.

Players won't know what happened.

 

[Henrix]

A classic travelling adventure is to meet a ghost, that does not look like a ghost at first, who needs their help at a task that becomes more difficult than it first seems.

When they succeed the ghost is, of course, very grateful, and rewards them - an excellent time for an unusual immaterial reward!

These folk tales are generally called grateful dead and here are a few examples. (Yes, the band took the name from folk tales.)

I used it (though not in D&D, but Heroquest* once.

One of the PCs had a wife about to go into labour and had a sort of curse, so she needed expert help from a midwife from the mother goddess temple in the nearest town.

So they had to set out in the middle of the night. An inauspicious night in a time when the country had recently been through a failed uprising, and so were full of wandering ill-doers.

On their way they met a woman whose child had been 'trapped under some stones'.
As they went to where she said the child was trapped they heard a child cry and wail, but when they reached the spot (characteristically the mother had stayed near the road), they saw that the crying came from below a stone cairn.

The mother and her child had actually been ambushed on the road and killed several years earlier by bandits (or rather disgruntled mercenaries), who had then buried/hidden their bodies under the cairn.

As the PCs started lifting away the stones, the stones grew increasingly heavier. (Much heavier than they ought to have been.)
All in all it was solved by what in 4e would be a skill challenge.

As the reward they would have received the mother's blessing, a blessing that would have served them well when they had to get the priestess to hurry through the night to help the wife in labour. (Another Heroquest 'skill challenge'.)

As it were they never succeeded in helping the woman, as they deemed it more urgent to hurry and get the midwife-priestess, and broke off their attempt to rescue the child, and leaving the bereaved mother pleading with them to save her child. (I thought I was pretty obvious there.) Which is what a get for having mundanely practical minded players with no sense of drama ;-)

They had a much harder time trying to get the priestess to stir, and in the end had to pay (not in money) more for her help.

In D&D4 her reward could well be something like one of the immaterial rewards in DMG2.
Though perhaps none of the PCs have a wife in labour, so a slightly different approach may be better, depending on your players. Having the ghost resemble one of the PC's mother could possibly spark their interest.



* The roleplaying game set in Glorantha, not the GW board game. GW stole the name and used it for their board game, but that's another story.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Con man/fence traveling the road. Attempts to sell junk/stolen goods to the party. Party discovers that they fave been defrauded/ are recognized as carrying stolen goods. Hilarity ensues.

Ambush, sort of - one robber, and a bunch of scarecrows holding branches that look like bows, kind of. If combat ensues robber jumps into nearby lake, but doesn't come back up. (Cave with underwater entrance, or upended barrel filled with air.)

The Auld Grump