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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 1520095" data-attributes="member: 633">OooOOoOOOOOoohh! I'm... well, let's just say that facing Enkhidu already was a high honor for me. I have read some of his other entries, and I am certain that without distractions, or with some other ingredients... with different conditions, the outcome would likely have been different.  Ongoing Campaign was immediately evident as this round's bugger. How can you fit an "ongoing campaign" in a short adventure? No idea, and I wasn't surprised to see that Enkhidu struggled with it as well. In the end, it went into the background - I tied it to the adventure through the rumors, and by making the story "a part of an ongoing campaign": the PCs can be involved with the fight both before and/or after the adventure takes place. It is quite relevant but not in a here-and-now sense. It wasn't a strong use, but it was the best I could do.  Luckily, I got a solid idea right away for the Hivemind, which also was flexible enough to combine almost all of the remaining ingredients and still leave some room for PCs messing around with the plot. When some synapses somewhere flashed and got me the idea of spreading the disease through conversation, I knew that I had found a good point of strength. I'm rather proud of that idea (didn't realize that I could use the descriptors, though).  I was already thinking of setting the story in a democracy, so as to make the Forum more relevant, but this would allow me to tie it very nicely to the hivemind disease. So these two ingredients were very well settled.  The rest of the ingredients were floating around in my head by now. I felt that a troll being part of the hivemind provided the hook to make him clever; unfortunately, being part of this hivemind also means that you don't have much of a personality. The lack of personality is what makes the whole thing creepy during the first two days, I couldn't ignore it just to make the troll more interesting. Since it is a well-known fact that all hiveminds must sooner or later try to persuade the hero that they are actually a good idea after all, I decided to have the troll be the hivemind's representative.  Similarly, I knew fairly soon that I would use the sticky thread somewhere in an Alien-style dungeon. At some point I also made it into a bioweapon to "give the PCs a better view of it", as they say. Setting it as an ambush also made the troll a bit more clever. I decided immediately that the game day would be related to hunting, and I managed to stick it into the plot and give the PCs a secondary objective as well.  By this time, I had a broad outline of the plot. I didn't forget about the troll's regeneration, but I was unable to find a solid way to use it without making it seem forced. But you know what the really tough part was?  Timing. I had to calibrate the hivemind mechanics so that they would actually result in exactly what I wanted. What I wanted was the disease to take over more than half of the soldiers in exactly three days, making sure to give the PCs enough time to stop it but not so much time that they could actually just cast cure disease on everyone. I wanted to make the progress of the disease creepy but not immediately threatening. And I wanted mutated monsters. Figuring the exact numbers for the DC and "Intelligence loss" as well as the various stages of the disease wasn't exactly immediate. I was forced to place the mutation as something that could or could not happen, because if I set a fixed time for it then I would have been unable to explain why these orcs weren't already mutated by the time they were captured. Similarly, I wanted to make the spreading of the disease much more of a problem within the Forum (people who contract it within the Forum will still be OK for at least two days, way more than enough for the PCs to solve the problem), but there was no way to do it without messing with the entire timeline.   The second hard bit was how to make the hivemind defeatable. I mean, have you seen body snatchers? D&D hero or not, how can you defeat that? So I made it hierarchical, thus giving it a "design flaw" which was very plausible. It still wasn't enough, why wouldn't it just wait until the entire city was dominated? Even better, why wouldn't it stay quiet and infest the entire world? The answer: this hivemind was made from the minds of orcs. They are stupid. They like violence. They don't plan too much. There's the solution.  And it worked. Not only, but I got to use quotes from System Shock 2. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Enkhidu had a more original use of the hivemind, though, plus witty inside jokes, and a better troll. A good entry by any standard, and a good match. Thanks Enkhidu, thanks Wulf. Whatever the result of the final match, I already feel in the heavens above.</blockquote>

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