Planescape Enhancing Turn of Fortune's Wheel


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One option would be to have the characters have been the original team that tried to save the great Modron March. In one of the trips through the outlands they failed to stop a large contingent being lost and this triggered the glitch.

I think it would be a cool idea but as none of my players know that adventure it would require a lot of seeding of ideas into the game. It might be a bit much.

Just out of interest, what elements from Torment would you want to add into the game?

The expansion of the Mausoleum.
The Smoldering Corpse Bar - with a decanter of endless water somewhere.
The Civic Festhall
The Brothel of Slating Intellectual Lusts
The Art Gallery
Expansion of Curst.

The more I think about it the more I feel that the gate Town visits are pretty banal. Too simplistic, too mundane, mini adventures is an understatement.

I think I would prefer to run fewer gate towns but take things into some other weird and wonderful locations and spend a bit more attention there.
 

Found some very good ideas in this thread…


Chiefly

  • The entire Modron March was trapped by the planar glitch
  • This was part of a plan by a rogue Modron R40M and Shemeska.
  • The party were High level and hired by the authorities of Automata to find the lost March. They signed a contract in the hall of concordance to confirm this.
  • The rogue Modron wanted to free the Modrons from Primus’ programming. Shemeska wanted to use Modrons as a gray planar influencer. Shifting the balance to whichever side would pay her the most. Currently the fiends are paying the most so she is influencing the planes towards chaotic evil.
  • the players previous incarnations followed the path of the Modron March to Gzemnids realm but died there - getting trapped in the glitch.
  • the rogue Modron was imprisoned but it escaped and fled to the walking castle.
  • when the players reincarnated they returned to Shemeska she realised she was outmatched so partly imprisoned the players in her mosaic - because of the glitch just a vestige of their souls. She then had her two goons work the players over draining their memories. Dumping their bodies at the mortuary hoping they would be cremated.
  • the players wake with a few of their belongings. (Or some of their belongings are stolen if you want to make it more like torment) these belongings link to several locations in Sigil - a key to the sensorium in the Civic Festhall, a receipt for the great foundry etc.
  • from there they effectively attempt to retrace their own steps through the planes following their interactions with the march.

For reincarnation the glitch causes them to reform wherever the closest concentration of glitched players is - if they all die they reawaken in the mortuary because that’s where most of their remains last existed.
 

“You wake up in the Mortuary in Sigil with no memory of how you got there, and whenever you die, an alternate-universe version of you shows up to take your place” is an incredible adventure hook, but then the actual adventure is just… Sorry, your exposition-bot won’t work until you’ve visited all of the gate towns and flailed around in them for a bit. And after that, the payoff is that the exposition-bot tells you the most basic of information about the modron march, and adds that the last one happened early “for teneberous reasons,” and that’s apparently why you keep resurrecting? The Shameshka reveal seems like it’s supposed to be a shocking twist, but it’s completely unearned. Like, the players only actually interact with the character once before the reveal, so they really have no reason to care when it turns out the Arcanaloth was a bad guy.

I think the best use of this adventure would be to disassemble it and use it for parts. Like I said, the hook is great. The casino is awesome and could be tossed into any adventure in Sigil as a point of interest. If you modernize this story, you can use an online casino. You can find them at https://rynok.biz/ and it will be much more believable, because a lot of people are using them now. Any of the gate town sections could be repurposed for an Outlands sandbox. And mimirs are a cool idea, and a broken one is a nifty tool for giving players lore a bit at a time. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts here, so just break the parts up and use them separately wherever they seem appropriate.
Your idea of breaking it up and using the pieces in other contexts is solid, though. The casino, gate towns, and mimirs all sound like fantastic assets for any Planescape-inspired campaign. Sometimes it’s better to take what works and reimagine the rest, especially in a setting as rich as Sigil and the Outlands!
 
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I really like a lot of what is in it. The alt covers and case are pretty and it's nice to have both the adventure and guide to Sigil and The Outlands.

I find I am doing a lot more work than I usually do for an adventure to fill things in. In this case that is okay because I like the framework a lot.

But, there could be more. This is the first adventure I've seen that has so few encounters per chapter. I'm combining the encounters in the gate town from the adventure with the ones from the guide (which I'm guessing is intended) and then adding a couple more to make them a full adventuring day.

I added quite a bit to Sigil in the early chapter. The original advice that the PCs just wander around and don't succeed at doing anything wasn't fun. I plan to have the day and night markets as well as The Fortune's Wheel be important locations to return to throughout the adventure. In the game they gained quite a bit of info from paying for their fortunes to be told only to have the fortune teller be shocked and usher them out because they both exist and not exist in the multiverse/timeline due to the glitch. There is also a vendor who buys and sells secrets and I'm going to give the players a chance to attempt to gain allies with the factions.

For the ending...I haven't gotten to that part yet. I'm certainly going to add to it. They have a couple more sessions before they will get a chance to return to Sigil to get more information so I plan to have my changes sorted out by then.
 

Bit of thread necromancy but thought I'd start here before doing a new thread.

IMO, the adventure is not NEARLY deadly enough considering the premise!

I'm running this for a group of relative newbies who have no idea what optimization even is - and they just waltzed through the initial encounters. I don't like increasing difficulty on new players, but (again considering the premise) I started to ramp up the difficulty about half-way through and then even more toward the end. Managed a whopping 2 character "deaths" so far. Next time I run this, definitely giving it a lethality makeover!
 

Bit of thread necromancy but thought I'd start here before doing a new thread.

IMO, the adventure is not NEARLY deadly enough considering the premise!

I'm running this for a group of relative newbies who have no idea what optimization even is - and they just waltzed through the initial encounters. I don't like increasing difficulty on new players, but (again considering the premise) I started to ramp up the difficulty about half-way through and then even more toward the end. Managed a whopping 2 character "deaths" so far. Next time I run this, definitely giving it a lethality makeover!
Because the first official 5e thing I ran was Phandelver and later ToA+CoS, I didn't put much stock in the "WotC designs 5e adventures as cakewalks, it's up to the DM to put in the work if they want to make it challenging" reputation... Buuut it turns out that as-written many (most?) 5e stuff, especially later on (Hi Vecna EoR 🙄) is waaay easier than it has any right to be.

Yes, I found this was the case when I was reading through ToFW. Did 5e do away with the "Scaling this Adventure" sidebars?
 

Because the first official 5e thing I ran was Phandelver and later ToA+CoS, I didn't put much stock in the "WotC designs 5e adventures as cakewalks, it's up to the DM to put in the work if they want to make it challenging" reputation... Buuut it turns out that as-written many (most?) 5e stuff, especially later on (Hi Vecna EoR 🙄) is waaay easier than it has any right to be.

Yes, I found this was the case when I was reading through ToFW. Did 5e do away with the "Scaling this Adventure" sidebars?

Yeah, I ran Phandelver early and it was brutal! The first couple encounters, especially, are deceptively deadly!

None of the other published adventures I've run so far have come close (Haven't run ToA - looking through that has some deadly potential).

I really thought, again considering the premise, that WoTC would up the lethality a ton in this one - but nope - it's definitely up to the DM. And no, I haven't seen any scaling the adventure sidebars. I think they now just expect the adventure to be run for the levels given and for the DM to figure it out otherwise.
 



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