Dragonmarked Inquiry, out of left field.

[Erywin]

Ok just finished DMing an amazing session so I thought I would spend a few minutes telling you all about it Plus I wanted feedback on if anybody else had tried something like this and have it work out. Note: All the players LOVED it, even the player getting grilled

Background: The main player this revolves around plays a Human Fighter/Wizard that had the Mark of Making (House Cannith), now I say had cause about 5 sessions ago I gave them the chance to rebuild thier characters (ala PHB2 with a few changes). Now the player decided to get rid of her Dragonmarked feats and take some different ones that added more blasting power. Now this player has been playing for over a year but is generally a casual player, but I always thought she had the ability to become an awesome roleplayer if given the proper chance. So I decided to ambush her with a roleplaying heavy session focused on her but with a really odd twist. Now I know this could've backfired on me badly, possibly turning the player off D&D all together, but I had to take the chance

What happened: After the rebuild session they dropped by Stormreach on thier way to a Giant Ziggurat deep in Zen'dric. Word started spreading that somebody had noticed her and the loss of her dragonmark, something that had NEVER happened during the course of history. While the party was off in the middle of the jungle fighting Blood of Vol and other bad guys (Grasp of the Emerald Claw adjusted for 6 lvl 8-11 gestalted PCs) word got back to Sharn about the loss of the Mark, an Inquiry was formed and they started looking for her to ask a bunch of questions. Representatives of House Tharashk, House Medani, House Sivis, Arcanix and the Korranberg Chronicles were all involved. They knew approx. what day the PCs were due back in Sharn and after the party had a chance to get some chores done, I sent House Tharashk to track them down and "request" her audience at the inquiry. Now here comes the fun part I gave each of the other Players a short discription on one of the Representatives that they would play in the Inquiry, with a quirk and goal for each one. They would be asking all the questions and I would be at the players side to help with some of the finer details. I gave the other players an outline of questions to ask and appointed Blarg (who had helped me with the list of ideas/questions) as the leader of the Inquiry.

Things got off to a great start, with all the players getting into thier new roles quickly and asking some awesome questions that weren't on the sheet I gave them, they all worked at the goals as well Zev, the PC who was getting grilled held up VERY well and managed to answer all the questions and provided TONNES of more plot hooks This had the added benefit of getting the two newer PCs up to speed as well as revisiting a bunch of old plots for the older PCs as well, the PCs were in the front row of the audience, basically told to sit down and be quite I gotta say it was one of the funnest sessions for me to run as a DM, plus it marks the start of me stepping away from running Adventure Path type campaigns, going freeform now, wish me luck It was great sitting back and watching the players do all the work as I just sat back and smiled, had to clear up a few things for Zev but not as much as I thought I was going to have to

Anybodyelse tried anything along these lines? I have been thinking outside of the box alot lately to keep things interesting in this campaign as we are reaching a stage that none of us have reached (Post 10th level). I hope atleast it might help other DMs try something similar Got any questions, just ask.

Cheers,
E

 

[blargney the second]

I love RP-intensive sessions. There was a lot of really cool stuff going on there tonight.
-blarg

ps - Favourite moment: the Korranberg reporter jumping to the totally incorrect conclusion that our group destroyed a dragonmark and then printing it the next day!

 

[The Lost Muse]

That's just nine kinds of awesome!

 

[Asmor]

That does sound kind of cool...

Semi-related, and spoiler warning for The City of Towers (Dreaming Dark book 1)

[sblock=spoiler warning!]In The City of Towers, there's this little cabal lead by a mindflayer who are using some unusual khyber shards to steal dragonmarks. I don't think it became common knowledge among anyone, though, because everyone whose mark was stolen was killed, and they were all aberrant marks or true marks that didn't belong to a house, so nobody important missed them.[/sblock]

 

[WayneLigon]

I'm glad that worked out so well. The group I run has proven themselves very adept at picking up a statted sheet with a paragraph of background and some quirks and running with it, so I need to try this sort of thing myself.

 

[Erywin]

I'm glad that worked out so well. The group I run has proven themselves very adept at picking up a statted sheet with a paragraph of background and some quirks and running with it, so I need to try this sort of thing myself.

Heh think I gave my players a sentence for goals and one for quirks Some of the more important ones got a background sentence. They all jumped into the roles well and definately gave me more ideas for fleshing out some more NPCs

Cheers,
E

 

[Erywin]

That does sound kind of cool...

Semi-related, and spoiler warning for The City of Towers (Dreaming Dark book 1)

[sblock=spoiler warning!]In The City of Towers, there's this little cabal lead by a mindflayer who are using some unusual khyber shards to steal dragonmarks. I don't think it became common knowledge among anyone, though, because everyone whose mark was stolen was killed, and they were all aberrant marks or true marks that didn't belong to a house, so nobody important missed them.[/sblock]

Have you finished the rest of the series?

[sblock=spoiler warning!]The mindflayer ends up getting toasted by I think Pierce and he whole operation is destroyed. Altho that doesn't go to say that there can't be more of them out there But I think dealing with 3 mindflayers already is enough for the party *evil grin* oh and did I mention thier Voidmind minion that used to be one of the PCs?[/sblock]

Cheers,
E

 

[blargney the second]

We usually play in the kitchen at the table, and for the inquiry he had us go into the living room. We put Zev in a chair on one side of the room with the other players sitting across from her on the couches. Erywin was sitting just to her side to help answer any questions that stumped her.

The arrangement of the room and the simple fact of playing in a different room was really effective. It was neat to spend a half hour without even looking at our char sheets or rolling any dice.
-blarg

 

[Erywin]

We usually play in the kitchen at the table, and for the inquiry he had us go into the living room. We put Zev in a chair on one side of the room with the other players sitting across from her on the couches. Erywin was sitting just to her side to help answer any questions that stumped her.

The arrangement of the room and the simple fact of playing in a different room was really effective. It was neat to spend a half hour without even looking at our char sheets or rolling any dice.
-blarg

I think I asked for all of maybe 5 or 6 rolls all night Nice work on managing to find the Dirge-singer btw

 

[Merkuri]

A couple campaigns ago our DM (Hussar) did something kinda similar to this on a few occasions. In one instance I can think of the PCs all went to a party and split up to socialize, pick up on rumors, etc. Because the party was split and there was only one DM we took turns having each part of the split group in the spotlight. Players whose characters weren't part of the "active" group were given minor NPCs to play. It was a nice change of pace.

There was also one instance where our party was one of three teams who were taking turns to investigate a mine (or something), looking for a particular item. The party who found it first earned some reward. I'm a little fuzzy on the specifics, but it was basically a dungeon crawl where every half-hour of real time or so the party would have to surface and a new party would go in. The DM made up two other sets of character sheets with a short blip about the character's personality on each one and handed them out for us to play, so we spent the next couple sessions switching between three characters each. I remember having a lot of fun playing the "evil" party. My regular PC was a cleric who had just begun to multiclass into ranger (for roleplaying reasons), and wasn't very useful in combat yet, but the character from the new party was a dog-riding, lance-wielding, halfling fighter that kicked arse and only really cared about himself.

Taking a session to do something completely different, especially playing a brand new character, can keep a campaign fresh, IMO, and help scratch that itch some players get to try out new character concepts.