I tried a little experiment in my 3.5 game yesterday, and it ended up with a session unlike anything we'd ever done before (in fact, at times it hardly felt like a D&D session) but it worked out pretty well, and we all had a blast with it.
The setup: on the outskirts of town lives a human Archmage, Dr. Graymantle; his two low-level human apprentices, Rebecca and Delmond; and Pinwhistle, a sort of mental-clone-recording of a gnome cleric currently inhabiting a warforged body. Dr. Graymantle is building a ship, the Planar Scout, which will be capable of flying to other planes. It's in the open-air enclosure behind his manor, all of which is surrounded by a security field of his own devising which prevents teleporting, scrying, and other means of surreptitious entry.
Four assassins are hired to penetrate Graymantle's manor and disable the field so that their employer can teleport in and steal the Planar Scout. (In fact, it's the same four assassins that much earlier, in a previous adventure, were hired to kill the PCs: Barbie, Bunny, Kitten, and Candi. The PCs slew them all back then, but they've since been resurrected.) They attempt to do so with a Trojan Horse gambit, by hiding in an extradimensional space within a magic shield, then having an unwitting associate hire Rebecca to cast identify on the shield to find out what it does. (This isn't unusual, as Dr. Greymantle encourages his apprentices to take on such tasks, both to further their magical experiences and keep them busy for a while so he can work on his projects.)
That night, the four assassins exit from the shield and split up to take out each of the four inhabitants of the manor. One slips a disk on Pinwhistle's chest that incapacitates him in his room downstairs as he's "recharging" for the night, and two others knock out and tie up Dr. Graymantle and Delmont. The same fate would have befallen Rebecca, had her cat familiar not awakened her to danger when it saw the assassins creeping around the manor. Realizing she was outclassed, Rebecca grabbed up some magical items and started reading a teleport spell from a scroll. Kitten, a sorcerer/assassin heard her and shot off a burning hands spell at her right as she disappeared.
Cue the PCs. They're at a late-night watering hole called The Pit-Fight, a favorite among local adventurers. There's a crowd around the pit, watching the current battle between an owlbear and a dire wolverine, when all of a sudden a screaming woman with her hair and nightgown on fire teleports in, flips over the rail, and lands in the pit with the battling beasts. She has the presence of mind to roll the flames out and grab up the handful of objects she's brought with her, and one of the PCs rescues her with a telekinesis spell. Rebecca tells them her story (she had opted to teleport to the Pit-Fight because it was the one place she'd been to that was likely to have adventurers at that time of night), they take her to their headquarters, and they make rescue plans.
The items Rebecca scooped up before teleporting out of the manor are called telepresence control rods, and each is a thin wand with an octagonal protrusion on one end (each looking like an oversized octagon lollipop; I made them out of cardboard and chopsticks from our local Chinese restaurant), with the silhouette of a specific creature on it. Each is attuned to a specific figurine back inside Greymantle's manor, and by holding the rod up to your forehead and concentrating, you can "inhabit" the figurine and move it around. The rods are:
From that point on, the rest of the adventure was less like a D&D session and more like a freeform puzzle, wherein the PCs had to decide how they were going to accomplish their goals using only the figurines. I was a little worried when I set this up, because it was definitely unexplored territory for us (my players are more of the hack-and-slash variety, although they do enjoy the occasional puzzle) and I wasn't sure that everyone would have enough to do. (If they had gone downstairs at once and freed Pinwhistle, he could potentially have taken out the assassins by himself.) But I had placed the centipede in a glass display case and the viper in a kitchen drawer, both of which required the efforts of two figurines to open, so the PCs' initial strategies were to send the marmoset from the top of the fridge over to help open the viper's drawer (and then load it with poison from one of its canisters in the same drawer), send the invisible fairy to open the centipede's cabinet, while the beetle went to check out the upstairs bedrooms and the elephant was on sentry duty under the sofa watching the two assassins try to open the door. There was a bit of excitement when they found out that the "white lump" on Kitten's shoulder was a frost drake (and that furthermore it could see invisibility!), but the fairy lured it under the sofa where the elephant could grapple it long enough for the centipede to crawl up Kitten's cloak, dominate her, and have her walk over and casually snap the drake's neck. They took out Candi with the viper when she succumbed to its paralytic poison; the dominated Kitten tried taking out Barbie in Dr. Greymantle's room (where she was interrogating him to no effect) but failed, alerting them to the fact that there was somebody in the manor with them taking control of their bodies, and when she had Bunny come over from the next room (where she had been torturing Delmont to no effect, since he didn't even know how Graymantle deactivated the shields), she spotted the centipede and the jig was up. However, by that time the fairy and the marmoset had managed to free Pinwhistle. The adventure concluded with a big showdown in Delmont's room, where the remaining assassin, Bunny, tried holding Delmont hostage (by this point Kitten had been slain, but the centipede had taken over Barbie), but threatening to kill a hostage is a poor tactic in the presence of a cleric who can raise the dead. (Plus, Pinwhistle took his marching orders from Dr. Greymantle, who was having none of this.) End result: one assassin dead, three captured, and none of the three able or willing to confess who had hired them.
Divination spells subsequently cast by Pinwhistle revealed that the assassins were hired by "the unliving woman who has never died, hidden behind the door that doesn't belong." While he was at it, I had Pinwhistle cast a divination on each of the PCs, who each received a cryptic clue to an event in their future.
What made this so much fun:
Johnathan
The setup: on the outskirts of town lives a human Archmage, Dr. Graymantle; his two low-level human apprentices, Rebecca and Delmond; and Pinwhistle, a sort of mental-clone-recording of a gnome cleric currently inhabiting a warforged body. Dr. Graymantle is building a ship, the Planar Scout, which will be capable of flying to other planes. It's in the open-air enclosure behind his manor, all of which is surrounded by a security field of his own devising which prevents teleporting, scrying, and other means of surreptitious entry.
Four assassins are hired to penetrate Graymantle's manor and disable the field so that their employer can teleport in and steal the Planar Scout. (In fact, it's the same four assassins that much earlier, in a previous adventure, were hired to kill the PCs: Barbie, Bunny, Kitten, and Candi. The PCs slew them all back then, but they've since been resurrected.) They attempt to do so with a Trojan Horse gambit, by hiding in an extradimensional space within a magic shield, then having an unwitting associate hire Rebecca to cast identify on the shield to find out what it does. (This isn't unusual, as Dr. Greymantle encourages his apprentices to take on such tasks, both to further their magical experiences and keep them busy for a while so he can work on his projects.)
That night, the four assassins exit from the shield and split up to take out each of the four inhabitants of the manor. One slips a disk on Pinwhistle's chest that incapacitates him in his room downstairs as he's "recharging" for the night, and two others knock out and tie up Dr. Graymantle and Delmont. The same fate would have befallen Rebecca, had her cat familiar not awakened her to danger when it saw the assassins creeping around the manor. Realizing she was outclassed, Rebecca grabbed up some magical items and started reading a teleport spell from a scroll. Kitten, a sorcerer/assassin heard her and shot off a burning hands spell at her right as she disappeared.
Cue the PCs. They're at a late-night watering hole called The Pit-Fight, a favorite among local adventurers. There's a crowd around the pit, watching the current battle between an owlbear and a dire wolverine, when all of a sudden a screaming woman with her hair and nightgown on fire teleports in, flips over the rail, and lands in the pit with the battling beasts. She has the presence of mind to roll the flames out and grab up the handful of objects she's brought with her, and one of the PCs rescues her with a telekinesis spell. Rebecca tells them her story (she had opted to teleport to the Pit-Fight because it was the one place she'd been to that was likely to have adventurers at that time of night), they take her to their headquarters, and they make rescue plans.
The items Rebecca scooped up before teleporting out of the manor are called telepresence control rods, and each is a thin wand with an octagonal protrusion on one end (each looking like an oversized octagon lollipop; I made them out of cardboard and chopsticks from our local Chinese restaurant), with the silhouette of a specific creature on it. Each is attuned to a specific figurine back inside Greymantle's manor, and by holding the rod up to your forehead and concentrating, you can "inhabit" the figurine and move it around. The rods are:
- Glass Fairy: Can turn invisible and fly.
- Metal Viper: Once loaded with a venom canister, can inject poison by bite.
- Ivory Elephant: Dextrous trunk, can gore with tusks, and at 7" long is the largest of the figurines.
- Metal Centipede: Can dominate person if it clasps onto the back of a victim's neck.
- Wooden Marmoset: Good climber, dextrous tail.
- Metal Beetle: Can walk on walls and capture an image it sees.
From that point on, the rest of the adventure was less like a D&D session and more like a freeform puzzle, wherein the PCs had to decide how they were going to accomplish their goals using only the figurines. I was a little worried when I set this up, because it was definitely unexplored territory for us (my players are more of the hack-and-slash variety, although they do enjoy the occasional puzzle) and I wasn't sure that everyone would have enough to do. (If they had gone downstairs at once and freed Pinwhistle, he could potentially have taken out the assassins by himself.) But I had placed the centipede in a glass display case and the viper in a kitchen drawer, both of which required the efforts of two figurines to open, so the PCs' initial strategies were to send the marmoset from the top of the fridge over to help open the viper's drawer (and then load it with poison from one of its canisters in the same drawer), send the invisible fairy to open the centipede's cabinet, while the beetle went to check out the upstairs bedrooms and the elephant was on sentry duty under the sofa watching the two assassins try to open the door. There was a bit of excitement when they found out that the "white lump" on Kitten's shoulder was a frost drake (and that furthermore it could see invisibility!), but the fairy lured it under the sofa where the elephant could grapple it long enough for the centipede to crawl up Kitten's cloak, dominate her, and have her walk over and casually snap the drake's neck. They took out Candi with the viper when she succumbed to its paralytic poison; the dominated Kitten tried taking out Barbie in Dr. Greymantle's room (where she was interrogating him to no effect) but failed, alerting them to the fact that there was somebody in the manor with them taking control of their bodies, and when she had Bunny come over from the next room (where she had been torturing Delmont to no effect, since he didn't even know how Graymantle deactivated the shields), she spotted the centipede and the jig was up. However, by that time the fairy and the marmoset had managed to free Pinwhistle. The adventure concluded with a big showdown in Delmont's room, where the remaining assassin, Bunny, tried holding Delmont hostage (by this point Kitten had been slain, but the centipede had taken over Barbie), but threatening to kill a hostage is a poor tactic in the presence of a cleric who can raise the dead. (Plus, Pinwhistle took his marching orders from Dr. Greymantle, who was having none of this.) End result: one assassin dead, three captured, and none of the three able or willing to confess who had hired them.
Divination spells subsequently cast by Pinwhistle revealed that the assassins were hired by "the unliving woman who has never died, hidden behind the door that doesn't belong." While he was at it, I had Pinwhistle cast a divination on each of the PCs, who each received a cryptic clue to an event in their future.
What made this so much fun:
- It was a definite change of pace from the way we normally play. Instead of moving miniatures around on a battle-grid on the kitchen table, we were moving figurines around the actual house where we game. (I had brought along a tape measure to track movement rates, but we ended up just winging it.) Plus, the centipede's player got to walk around and use himself as a figurine representing a dominated assassin at times.
- For once, the players could all talk to each other and suggest what the other players should do. Normally I try to discourage such behavior (letting each player run his or her own PC as they see fit without "suggestions" from the other players), but since the figurines only provided visual and tactile info to the person controlling it, the PCs, sitting in their own living room several miles away from Dr. Graymantle's manor, could freely converse amongst themselves without being overheard by the assassins.
- For once, there was no real danger to the PCs; the only damage any of them took was the player running the marmoset, who took some feedback damage when prying off the device keeping Pinwhistle immobilized.
Johnathan
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