ZEITGEIST Discoveries from the playtest of the ZEITGEIST setting book intro adventure
- Thread starter RangerWickett
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RangerWickett
Legend
Week two. No combat this time, just me inflicting a scenario on myself with eleven named NPCs in one place. I set up a 'map' in roll20 that just has the portraits and names of each of the NPCs, for roleplaying scenes.
This might be a flaw in the adventure design, being too complicated, but so far the players are enjoying it.
I apparently cannot do an Italian accent, so Crisillyiri people sound like they're from the US New England region, and Malicelanders are from the south. I like roleplaying Kvarti because it's easy for his 'Russian' accent to make him stand out from the other NPCs. I'd also scripted a three-line back-and-forth sniping conversation between a Danoran and a Risuri, but having the GM talk to himself is awkward. I might keep it just to give the GM a sense of the dynamic between the two NPCs, even if they don't use it verbatim.
Some NPCs naturally got more interest than others, and unsurprisingly everyone wanted to talk to the character with the Healer feat who will restore their HP if they're friendly to him. But to my surprise nobody made friends with anyone else because they figured everyone had a political agenda, except for the cook, who won much praise for her interest in the party's dietary requirements. (Apparently the harimau elf is a vegan, despite being descended from weretigers.)
Our dwarven naturalist PC asked about some books in the library on malice beast anatomy, which led to me making up on the spot that many books on that topic are conspicuously missing from the card catalog. That led to the PC rudely barging into the rooms of all the NPCs looking for those books, making him disliked by basically all the guests. I need to make sure there's some payoff when he finds where those books actually went. The rampage came to an end when he refused to be impressed by a wizardress acting as a VIP's bodyguard, so she cast charm person on him, and he rolled a 1.
He proceeded to roll very well on his check to write a love poem to the wizardress, which he might recite over dinner next session.
I think I did a good job providing enough detail about the manor that the "clues to secrets" blended in with the innocuous description. For maybe the first time in my entire D&D career, stonecunning revealed useful information, yet the PC didn't follow up. But the party did discover something I didn't expect, when the stealthy harimau elf eavesdropped on the right room while all the other NPCs were distracted. The person in that room was rehearsing a speech they intended to give over dinner, so the party knows one of the twists before it happens.
So far we're 6 hours in and have only finished the first of five acts. I haven't even killed the person who's supposed to get murdered to kick off the plot! I was able to run Bonds of Forced Faith in one four-hour session, but this adventure is more complicated. I wonder if I should trim things out in the version we publish, or keep it complicated and trust GMs and players to handle the heft of a mansion murder mystery.
The players are unsure if I'm doing Clue or Knives Out. Jokes on them: I'm doing And Then There Were None.
This might be a flaw in the adventure design, being too complicated, but so far the players are enjoying it.
I apparently cannot do an Italian accent, so Crisillyiri people sound like they're from the US New England region, and Malicelanders are from the south. I like roleplaying Kvarti because it's easy for his 'Russian' accent to make him stand out from the other NPCs. I'd also scripted a three-line back-and-forth sniping conversation between a Danoran and a Risuri, but having the GM talk to himself is awkward. I might keep it just to give the GM a sense of the dynamic between the two NPCs, even if they don't use it verbatim.
Some NPCs naturally got more interest than others, and unsurprisingly everyone wanted to talk to the character with the Healer feat who will restore their HP if they're friendly to him. But to my surprise nobody made friends with anyone else because they figured everyone had a political agenda, except for the cook, who won much praise for her interest in the party's dietary requirements. (Apparently the harimau elf is a vegan, despite being descended from weretigers.)
Our dwarven naturalist PC asked about some books in the library on malice beast anatomy, which led to me making up on the spot that many books on that topic are conspicuously missing from the card catalog. That led to the PC rudely barging into the rooms of all the NPCs looking for those books, making him disliked by basically all the guests. I need to make sure there's some payoff when he finds where those books actually went. The rampage came to an end when he refused to be impressed by a wizardress acting as a VIP's bodyguard, so she cast charm person on him, and he rolled a 1.
He proceeded to roll very well on his check to write a love poem to the wizardress, which he might recite over dinner next session.
I think I did a good job providing enough detail about the manor that the "clues to secrets" blended in with the innocuous description. For maybe the first time in my entire D&D career, stonecunning revealed useful information, yet the PC didn't follow up. But the party did discover something I didn't expect, when the stealthy harimau elf eavesdropped on the right room while all the other NPCs were distracted. The person in that room was rehearsing a speech they intended to give over dinner, so the party knows one of the twists before it happens.
So far we're 6 hours in and have only finished the first of five acts. I haven't even killed the person who's supposed to get murdered to kick off the plot! I was able to run Bonds of Forced Faith in one four-hour session, but this adventure is more complicated. I wonder if I should trim things out in the version we publish, or keep it complicated and trust GMs and players to handle the heft of a mansion murder mystery.
The players are unsure if I'm doing Clue or Knives Out. Jokes on them: I'm doing And Then There Were None.
Insert Boromir "One does not simply run Zeitgeist for a murderhobo campaign" meme here. 
Your specialty, what sets you apart as a writer, has been adventures that make people think and are not just another basic adventure. There are people who love WotBS for its choices that have consequences and Zeitgeist for its cerebral plot where ideas have as much weight as weapons.
It may be difficult to set up, but I wonder if you could create two paths. One path would be the pared-down storyline with just what is necessary to move the plot forward. Second, through sidebars, you wrap all of the intrigue around the plot. This allows narrative focus on the primary story while allowing a GM to bring in some or all of the side plots.
For a VTT version of these kinds of scenes, it works really well to have a portion of the map be a piece of art depicting the scene inset in a frame with other insets in the frame as a place to drop PC and NPC tokens. This avoids any white space on the page.
Your specialty, what sets you apart as a writer, has been adventures that make people think and are not just another basic adventure. There are people who love WotBS for its choices that have consequences and Zeitgeist for its cerebral plot where ideas have as much weight as weapons.
It may be difficult to set up, but I wonder if you could create two paths. One path would be the pared-down storyline with just what is necessary to move the plot forward. Second, through sidebars, you wrap all of the intrigue around the plot. This allows narrative focus on the primary story while allowing a GM to bring in some or all of the side plots.
For a VTT version of these kinds of scenes, it works really well to have a portion of the map be a piece of art depicting the scene inset in a frame with other insets in the frame as a place to drop PC and NPC tokens. This avoids any white space on the page.
Crispy120286
Explorer
I'm from Massachusetts so all I can picture here is Crisillyiri sounding Bostonian. As my campaign is right about to enter Crypta Hereticarum, I can't get Ottavia out of my mind speaking like she is from Bahstin... Thanks for that!
RangerWickett
Legend
How true you are. Here's the illo of the Crisillyiri character. He clearly looks like Matt Damon.
RangerWickett
Legend
Week three, wherein eleven NPCs and six PCs all had dinner together, and it actually worked as a scene.
I think my idea to foreground the mechanics payed off: "We're going to have a conversation, and I figure people are going to be looking for shady behavior. Everyone roll an Insight check that will apply to the conversation as a whole, and I'll give you information in the course of events, instead of us stopping the role-playing to roll dice. If you want to focus on one particular person, tell me now and you'll get an easier DC to see if you can figure out what they're hiding, but then make a Deception check to avoid them noticing that you're paying attention."
Each NPC had previously had a short scene to introduce them as the PCs made their way to the manor, and now during dinner each had a scripted line -- the Clergy preacher, the posh member of Beaumont's Queen Bee Lodge, the Risuri nationalist servant of the Father of Thunder, etc. -- and so when the Chancellor of Drakr and his ideological rival came in, the party actually got engaged in the ensuing philosophical debate between Heid Eschatol and Delkovich Nihisol - with the party's own dwarf trying to push his philosophy.
(Famed eschatologist Vlendam Heid, solipsistic nihilist Jaromir Delkovich, and evolutionist Karl Evol [not an official ZEITGEIST artwork].)
It might have helped to have typed up and ready to send via chat message the results of the insight checks, but the party noticed all the clues. We'll see if they remember them next week. We ended on a cliffhanger right after the gaslights went out and the guests discovered Heid's wizard bodyguard with her skull caved in, and a bloody hammer hidden under Delkovich's bed. Karl will be heartbroken when he sees the woman he loves (because she cast charm person on him) has been brutally murdered.
Insights:
1. Even with my preparation and various distractions, it is hard to have 'the cover of darkness' in D&D. May I here express my abiding hatred of darkvision, of light being anything less than a 2nd level spell, and of torches not being the primary source of light. That's why I'm going to rewrite the adventure so that, instead of the gaslights going out, they'll actually become blindingly bright, due to an extra compound added to the phlogiston canister. I remember writing that devas are immune to being blinded by bright lights, and its time I actually make that matter.
2. That said, when the party split up and half ran down to the docks to see what that explosion was, and I described a dying man looking over the PCs' shoulders in horror, it was awesome that one player's immediate response was to hurl his oil lantern at the looming figure in the darkness.
3. It was less cool that the bard cast Hideous Laughter twice on the menacing monster, which proceeded to giggle on the ground (and roll low Wisdom saves) as people fired shotguns into its face. However, I'm in luck: that spell shouldn't have worked on creatures with Int 4 or less! Still, it might behoove to give the big monster some sort of legendary resistance. Yes, the PCs did stake it to the ground and decapitate it, but fortunately that won't kill it. And that's not even me doing GM handwavium. It's in the statblock.
4. That 'dying man' from #2? Well, the party's sophist didn't believe he died, so I guess I should include a statblock for him in the final adventure.
5. Meanwhile the other half of the party stayed in the manor, and it was a high-wire act to keep them from sticking like glue to the assassin as he tried to slip away without my misdirection arousing the players' suspicion. I might need to add more distractions at the manor before the lights malfunction.
6. Next session the party will point fingers and maybe figure out who committed the murder, but they'll still need to explore Dr. von Recklinghausen's laboratory if they want to avoid being driven made by energy leaking from a well to the Bleak Gate. And there's still the matter of who stole the rocketry research. At this point I'm not even sure which herring is the red one.
7. Seriously, I think the players will want to do a full campaign after this, because they were really interested in the geopolitics of the aftermath of the Great Eclipse. I was a bit sad, though, that no one really blinked at the preacher claiming that demons had possessed the telegraph network in Crisillyir.
If you're into this sort of geopolitical stuff, I suggest you check out the channel World War Two:
I think my idea to foreground the mechanics payed off: "We're going to have a conversation, and I figure people are going to be looking for shady behavior. Everyone roll an Insight check that will apply to the conversation as a whole, and I'll give you information in the course of events, instead of us stopping the role-playing to roll dice. If you want to focus on one particular person, tell me now and you'll get an easier DC to see if you can figure out what they're hiding, but then make a Deception check to avoid them noticing that you're paying attention."
Each NPC had previously had a short scene to introduce them as the PCs made their way to the manor, and now during dinner each had a scripted line -- the Clergy preacher, the posh member of Beaumont's Queen Bee Lodge, the Risuri nationalist servant of the Father of Thunder, etc. -- and so when the Chancellor of Drakr and his ideological rival came in, the party actually got engaged in the ensuing philosophical debate between Heid Eschatol and Delkovich Nihisol - with the party's own dwarf trying to push his philosophy.
(Famed eschatologist Vlendam Heid, solipsistic nihilist Jaromir Delkovich, and evolutionist Karl Evol [not an official ZEITGEIST artwork].)
It might have helped to have typed up and ready to send via chat message the results of the insight checks, but the party noticed all the clues. We'll see if they remember them next week. We ended on a cliffhanger right after the gaslights went out and the guests discovered Heid's wizard bodyguard with her skull caved in, and a bloody hammer hidden under Delkovich's bed. Karl will be heartbroken when he sees the woman he loves (because she cast charm person on him) has been brutally murdered.
Insights:
1. Even with my preparation and various distractions, it is hard to have 'the cover of darkness' in D&D. May I here express my abiding hatred of darkvision, of light being anything less than a 2nd level spell, and of torches not being the primary source of light. That's why I'm going to rewrite the adventure so that, instead of the gaslights going out, they'll actually become blindingly bright, due to an extra compound added to the phlogiston canister. I remember writing that devas are immune to being blinded by bright lights, and its time I actually make that matter.
2. That said, when the party split up and half ran down to the docks to see what that explosion was, and I described a dying man looking over the PCs' shoulders in horror, it was awesome that one player's immediate response was to hurl his oil lantern at the looming figure in the darkness.
3. It was less cool that the bard cast Hideous Laughter twice on the menacing monster, which proceeded to giggle on the ground (and roll low Wisdom saves) as people fired shotguns into its face. However, I'm in luck: that spell shouldn't have worked on creatures with Int 4 or less! Still, it might behoove to give the big monster some sort of legendary resistance. Yes, the PCs did stake it to the ground and decapitate it, but fortunately that won't kill it. And that's not even me doing GM handwavium. It's in the statblock.
4. That 'dying man' from #2? Well, the party's sophist didn't believe he died, so I guess I should include a statblock for him in the final adventure.
5. Meanwhile the other half of the party stayed in the manor, and it was a high-wire act to keep them from sticking like glue to the assassin as he tried to slip away without my misdirection arousing the players' suspicion. I might need to add more distractions at the manor before the lights malfunction.
6. Next session the party will point fingers and maybe figure out who committed the murder, but they'll still need to explore Dr. von Recklinghausen's laboratory if they want to avoid being driven made by energy leaking from a well to the Bleak Gate. And there's still the matter of who stole the rocketry research. At this point I'm not even sure which herring is the red one.
7. Seriously, I think the players will want to do a full campaign after this, because they were really interested in the geopolitics of the aftermath of the Great Eclipse. I was a bit sad, though, that no one really blinked at the preacher claiming that demons had possessed the telegraph network in Crisillyir.
If you're into this sort of geopolitical stuff, I suggest you check out the channel World War Two:
Last edited:
RangerWickett
Legend
Week four was a lot of talking and investigating. And a gnoll from Ber affirming that 'monster' is a racial slur.
The PCs found a secret door. They found the hidden keyhole that would open it. So naturally the deva solipsistic nihilist just decided to ignore reality and walk through the door and open it from the other side. That is going to annoy some GMs in some future games, I'm sure.
The Occult Blade rogue snuck into a guest's room and found what appears to be the murder weapon, but had already convinced herself another guest was the killer. She finally got to use her special ability to 'swipe' thoughts with Sleight of Hand, but much to her dismay her prime suspect was busy thinking, "Whoever really killed her must not have known about the rocket science secrets she was selling."
Yes, Drakr has a space agency.
We're thick in the "too many threads, and they feel like they won't ever make sense" stage of the adventure. The same thing happened to a lot of groups in The Dying Skyseer right before parties piece things together. They literally put their hand on the door knob leading to the secret laboratory, but that'll be two weeks from now. (Next week I'm on vacation.)
By the way, one of my players had a dad who was a crime scene investigator. He asked about blood spatter, and coagulation, and defensive wounds, and the angle of the killing blow (to try to figure out if the killer was left-handed). He's convinced no one they know about committed the murder, because nobody had any blood on them. In his defense, though, real-life murderers can't cast prestidigitation.
The PCs found a secret door. They found the hidden keyhole that would open it. So naturally the deva solipsistic nihilist just decided to ignore reality and walk through the door and open it from the other side. That is going to annoy some GMs in some future games, I'm sure.
The Occult Blade rogue snuck into a guest's room and found what appears to be the murder weapon, but had already convinced herself another guest was the killer. She finally got to use her special ability to 'swipe' thoughts with Sleight of Hand, but much to her dismay her prime suspect was busy thinking, "Whoever really killed her must not have known about the rocket science secrets she was selling."
Yes, Drakr has a space agency.
We're thick in the "too many threads, and they feel like they won't ever make sense" stage of the adventure. The same thing happened to a lot of groups in The Dying Skyseer right before parties piece things together. They literally put their hand on the door knob leading to the secret laboratory, but that'll be two weeks from now. (Next week I'm on vacation.)
By the way, one of my players had a dad who was a crime scene investigator. He asked about blood spatter, and coagulation, and defensive wounds, and the angle of the killing blow (to try to figure out if the killer was left-handed). He's convinced no one they know about committed the murder, because nobody had any blood on them. In his defense, though, real-life murderers can't cast prestidigitation.
RangerWickett
Legend
Playtest over.
I'm looking for one or two people willing to do a bit of beta reading. If you're available to read an adventure this weekend and offer feedback, please private message me.
I'm looking for one or two people willing to do a bit of beta reading. If you're available to read an adventure this weekend and offer feedback, please private message me.
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