Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henrix" data-source="post: 5001638" data-attributes="member: 3587">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 href="http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0505.html" target="_blank">a few examples</a>. (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.</blockquote>

Verification