Looking for more "investigative"-type d20 Modern adventures

[reveal]

Last session, I ran my players through the first part of "Come for the Reaping" by the Game Mechanics. Since they are higher level, I threw in a single Anthropophagi templated zombie in the lobby of the Entry level. BIG mistake.

They got their a$$e$ handed to them and, if it weren't for some very unlucky die rolls on my part, they surely would have all died.

Now that it's over, I have a better understanding of the party's capabilities. Basically, except for one character, none of them are very good in combat.

This limits my options as far as pre-written adventures because a lot of them involve a good amount of combat. One adventure I really liked, as did the players, is Last Rites of the Blackguard by 12toMidnight.

Very good balance of investigation and combat. I'm looking for something along those lines, but it doesn't have to be an exact duplicate.

Do any of you know of any good adventures that fit this model?

Thanx for any help!

 

[ledded]

Hmmm... it sounds like you want something similar to what our d20 Modern group likes, though our whole campaign is a home-brew and we dont use published adventures.

If I were you I would check some of the d20 Modern story hours for some inspiration if you cant find a published adventure you like.

Sorry that isnt much help, good luck though finding what you are looking for; our game is very investigation-intensive and we started out not being very good at combat at all (the first combat we ever had put 2 PC's in the hospital and injured the other 3 pretty badly also, the sad part was we had guns and the bad guys didnt). We've improved somewhat since then, but we are still very X-Files meets Kolchak the Night Stalker in our game approach. With a little John Woo thrown in.

 

[PosterBoy]

You might want to check out our Modern Backdrops product. They aren't adventures per say, but they are all FX/Occult based backdrops (5 in all) that would lean heavily on investigative skills.

There's a number of reviews online if you want to get a feel for what it offers.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=2101&

 

[takyris]

I'm running an investigative adventure right now, and I'm pretty happy with it -- there's been, I believe, less than 10 points of lethal damage delivered in the first two episodes. I can point you at the website, with the caveat that it's a notekeeping website for me, not a published adventure by any stretch -- I've got a lot of material there, but it's not pretty.

I'm really enjoying the crime scenes -- I've got three. At one, the PCs can take as much time as they want. At another, it's outdoors, so most of the evidence has been washed away in the rain. And at another, the apartment is being disassembled by college kids as the PCs arrive, since the scene was released, and the PCs have to use Diplomacy to convince the folks to give them some time. Putting stuff into a situation where taking 20 on all search checks isn't an option is definitely helpful.

In any event, I'll try to get an Overview page up there at some point soon, if I'm giving the link out. For now, the bare bones are at:

EDIT: URL working now, so:

http://patrick.wuut.net/Snoqualmie

EDIT: The other thing I haven't mentioned there is what's been used a lot. Search, Investigate, Computer Use, and Gather Information are big, so far. I'm allowing Computer Use to work like Gather Information in some instances, like when the hacker is working his way through a victim's computer, looking for hidden information and deleted e-mails and such. I suspect that Knowledge(Earth and Life), Knowledge(Arcane), and Treat Injury (in a diagnostic sense) will also come in handy at some point. Nobody in my party has stealth skills, so I've tried hard to avoid situations that require stealth. And the party's actual makeup is open -- my guys are a secret crime-solving wing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (rolled randomly), like the X-Files only much more underfunded.

 

[Tellerve]

pretty neat adventure Takyris. I do have one question though about it. You said the leaf people would use his blog to find out who he dislikes. Why/how would quasi-fey/supernatural creatures be logging onto the internet?

Or did I just miss something entirely?

Otherwise I could see some great role-playing being done with this one.

Tellerve

 

[takyris]

Hey Tellerve,

Well, on one hand, that's part of the absurdity of it -- powerful fey creatures killing the people named in some dude's BLOG -- but I'd imagined them doing a mystical "hand held over the keyboard, causing it to glow" sort of thing.

Will add more soon (I keep adding as the players challenge me) -- I have to put in something about the forest, since they just wandered around in it. And my Zeke Grobel fight went beautifully.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

My current game is pretty investigative and I'm currently attempting to write up the adventure we're playing in standard WotC manuscript format. For practice, really.

It's investigative more than combative, possibly to a fault. We played for hours Friday and all that went on was investigation. I'm currently writing up some Story Hour posts for it (in between writing seminar papers and grading papers and in general going insane). Basically a bit of a mystery. I'm going to run a modified Come For The Reaping next, I think ... more scariness, more terror. I need a little gunbunny action for the players that like it, since there's going to be far less in this one. Course I'm going to have to make some rules so zombies in Modern aren't as simplistic as the ones from D&D.

Link to my SH is below, should have it updated by the end of the day with something more than introduction.

--fje

 

[Tellerve]

the fight went beautifully huh? Is this a story your going to relate...in a thread or can you briefly go over it? I have to say I'm always up for reading some modern d20 storyhours as they are different and also 'cause I'm jonesin' to play/run one.

Tellerve

 

[pensiv]

Here's a bunch of free Call of Cthulhu adventures.
http://www.chaosium.com/catalog/newsdesk_info.php?newsPath=25&newsdesk_id=132

 

[takyris]

the fight went beautifully huh? Is this a story your going to relate...in a thread or can you briefly go over it? I have to say I'm always up for reading some modern d20 storyhours as they are different and also 'cause I'm jonesin' to play/run one.

Tellerve

Don't have the time or energy to story-hour it, although eventually my players will be doing an episode/session guide in blog-form. The fight went basically like this:

The Snoqualmie Bar & Grill is one of the few places in town where Gather Information checks can get information on everybody -- otherwise, you're getting limited information, or information about just one person (talking to the neighbors, etc.). So, it's got incentive.

However, if you make a GI check on one particular person, it turns Zeke Grobel, Str2/Tgh2 Heroic dude, Hostile, and he approaches you in a threatening way. Zeke doesn't take kindly to people poking their nose into the business of his dead work-buddy -- he's sort of the lawless rebel with a heart of gold (Allegiances to the Chaos, Good, the Plant (local business).

So the charismatic face-man (Cha4/Str2) had left the party at a crime scene and was asking around at the bar. He tripped Zeke's trigger, and Zeke got ornery. The face-man tried to calm him down and botched his Diplomacy check (got a 3, which did in fact total 15, which ain't bad, but which ain't nearly enough to turn a Hostile person into anything other than Hostile). So Zeke came in swinging.

Zeke has Power Attack, a BAB of +3, and attacks by default at +8 for 1d8+5+1d4 (Improved Brawl, Streetfighting, Melee Smash, Strength bonus).

Round 1: Zeke power attacks, burns an action point, charges, hits, and pings the Face-man's MDT -- Face-man saves. Other mooks grab pool cues to start swinging at Face-man -- Zeke is a popular guy.

Round 2: Face-man loses this round. Zeke swings again, burning his second action point and hitting again despite power-attackage. Pings the MDT again. Face-man saves.

Round 3: Face-man loses this round, too. Zeke swings one more time, hits again, pings the MDT again, and this time, Face-man blows his save.

Flavor-wise, the face-man got slammed into a table (which broke), then slammed into the bar, and finally floored with an uppercut.

The party found face-man awhile later, revived him (no lethal damage) and gave him an ice-pack. Then the Tough/Medic guy and the Fast/Soldier guy got ticked off that somebody beat up their fast-talker, and they went into the bar, irked. They called out in a loud voice, asking if anyone had met "some ***hole named (name of guy who triggered Zeke's response)".

Zeke and the mooks came in again, but this time, things were different. The Fast/Soldier guy critted with CMA and cracked Zeke across the jaw, and then, when the mooks came in with pool cues, the Fast/Soldier guy whipped out his Desert Eagle (he's a high-strung cop who don't play by the rules). The Tough/Medic guy was shouting, "Keep it cool unless you see weapons... Oh, wait, those are weapons," upon seeing the pool cues. Things could have gotten tense, but the cop merely declared, "Just keepin' it friendly," and gestured for the mooks to drop the pool cues and stay out of the one-on-one fight between the Tough/Medic and Zeke.

Zeke had a 14 Con and awesome nonlethal combat ability, and isn't the kind of guy who hits to kill. The Tough/Medic had DR 1/- and an MDT of 17, and decent but not great unarmed skillz (1d6+1d4+2, meaning that he pretty much had to Crit and roll well in order to threaten Zeke, unless he wanted to do lethal damage). The medic, after seeing that Zeke's attacks were almost gettin' friendly, decided not to go lethal, and proceded to talk to the guy as they whaled back and forth. "Look, man, I hate cops and bad-mouthers, too!" WHAM "We're here to find the dirtbag that killed your friend." WHAM "Hey, nice one." WHAM

On Round 15, the cops showed up and demanded to know what was going on. Zeke and the Medic looked around at the broken chairs and tables, shrugged, and maintained that they were having a friendly boxing match, no harm, no foul. The cops didn't exactly buy it, but Zeke is sort of the town hero (actually has a decent Cha), so if Zeke says it's okay, it's okay. The party ended up winning Zeke over and getting some information out of him, and they'll have him as an ally now, since they've proven that they can hang in there in a fight, and that they won't go crazy and kill people.

So, when it all comes down to it, my Brawler NPC got to shine, the Indestructible PC got to shine, and the party accomplished something and had fun while doing so. Good fight.