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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8601728" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Two examples from my current game: one that actually did happen, one that was a possibility if things had gone really, really badly.Actual event: The party had discovered the very poorly-hidden paper trail of some druid eco-terrorists (the Shadow Druids). There were two locations they could go to: one that seemed to be the "source" of things, and one that seemed to be a spot they were "routing" through before returning to the big city. They chose to go to the latter, situated in the marshy headwaters of the main river in the region. Unfortunately, they had some trouble on the way there (low rolls on Undertake a Perilous Journey, struggling through some fights with wildlife), so by the time they arrived...the marsh was on fire. They had to put out the fire, then investigate the location--where most of the information or benefit they could have obtained was lost. As a result: (1) the Shadow Druids have been able to pull most of their resources out of their other locations, to avoid other attacks by their enemies, so although their current operations have been dashed, the bulk of their forces remain--meaning the final showdown with them will be a lot more dangerous; (2) the river ran black because of the smoke and soot from the fire, which has severely ramped up the tensions in the city as the common folk saw it as a Horrible Omen; and (3) emboldened multiple other factions to act faster and capitalize on the atmosphere of fear and doubt.Possible (averted) future: I adapted the very excellent The Gardens of Ynn into "Zerzura," expanding it to include an actual "city" portion in addition to the (now "exterior") garden portions. I also expanded the Idea of Thorns into the Song of Thorns, a spirit of savagery and entropy that slowly degrades both living things and reality itself. The Song can infect people simply by hearing or reading its lyrics, and the abilities of the party genuinely just so happened to be INCREDIBLY SCARY if the Song had somehow been able to take them. That is, at the time, the party comprised three people: a Druid, a Battlemaster, and a Bard, each of whom had immunity to passive infection by the Song. But if the Song found a way around that immunity...it would have been Extremely Bad. If it had managed to possess and subvert the Druid....it would have learned how to make all of its thralls transform into any animal it had observed, potentially turning it into an  unstoppable force. The Battlemaster's immunity comes from a magic item; if it had been able to infect him and then re-apply that item, it would have found a way to keep a single highly-intelligent human mind WITHOUT breaking it down as a consequence of its innate  decay effect on all sapient beings it corrupts, allowing it to act with full tactical brilliance rather than mere animal-level instinct. But the Bard...the Bard would have been the scariest of the lot. The Song of Thorns IS a Song--and the Bard is a master of the magic of song. With his powers, the Song of Thorns could rewrite its own lyrics, giving it the ability to create its own powers.If even a single one of them had fallen to the Song, it would have been really, really, REALLY bad for the multiverse at large. Thankfully, they both leveraged their prep quite well, and managed to roll particularly well in both stages of that combat, such that none of these untoward consequences occurred (indeed, they killed the Song very, very dead--it is gone and cannot be restored, period.)</blockquote>

Verification