musical adventure idea

[lior_shapira]

Here's an adventure 'idea' I thought about a few days after watching an episode of 'Buffy The Vampire Hunter'. The episode was 'Once More with feeling' where a lounge-lizard demon arrives in town and turns everybody into musical participants, everybody bursts into song and dance.
So my idea is to make an adventure where perhaps the pc's are guided by the god of music to thwart some evil, perhaps an evil plan by the demon of bad singing .
The way this god communicates with the pc's is by taking over one of them for a while and having him sing a prophecy or some clue to help them defeat evil. You could write the texts according to the music of some well known songs (per your musical preferences naturally) and make the players sing them (so cruel ). Of course some of the party's adversaries could also be made to sing (the dm should also participate in the fun) in encounters with the pc.

You can of course go a long way with this, maybe bring a guitar or keyboards for accompanient, It will probably serve as a good base for a humorous adventure.

Any suggestions/comments on the idea ? Further ideas for a musical plot ?

 

[yennico]

One player once got a curse. He could only speak in rhymes

Just my 2 cents
yennico

 

[RangerWickett]

It's a funny idea, but you'd need the right group, and I know for a fact that my group isn't the right one. I tried something slightly similar a few years back. The villain was a connosieur of the arts, and needed leverage against the PCs, so he lured the PC bard to huge musical audition (this was two years before American Idol, I swear), and kidnapped her. The rest of the PCs got to fight the villains henchmen, an a cappela group of bards, who sang as they fought.

The group's name was Aural Pleasure.

After experiencing great pain and suffering from Aural Pleasure, the fight reached a climax and the PCs came out victorious. Among the belongings of the group they found a small booklet with a map of the villain's mansion and numbers keyed to different doorways, secret passages, and teleportation circles. The secret doors and teleporters could only be activated by singing two lines of a particular song, and the song you sang determined where you got teleported.

The songs were adapted from Eminem, Metallica, Will Smith, and a lot of other contemporary groups, but in my world they were actually things like epic ballads (Wild Wild West), Royal Court Lineages (Slim Shady), and Orcish lullabies (Enter Sandman). The problem was, I thought all the songs were obvious, but half the group didn't recognize them, and one player outright refused to sing.

It was pretty cool that Aural Pleasure had a flying carpet, and you controlled it by singing. They attacked the guy who was singing, and they lost control of the carpet in mid-flight.

 

[yennico]

It's a funny idea, but you'd need the right group,

I totally agree with RangerWickett. One of my players (a member of a music band and ex-employee of a music publisher) would love me if I do such an adventure, but the other players would hate me for that.

Just my 2 cents
yennico

 

[Argent Silvermage]

I once ran a campaign based around the music of the Allan Parsons project. It was really interesting that they had to listen to the songs to piece together what was happening.

My suggestion is to find a band or type of music that they all like and than "find the story in the music" that they all like.

 

[yennico]

I used the text from the song "Sacred Heart" from Dio to build a high level adventure. The text also was used in the adventure as prophecy.

Just my 2 cents
yennico

 

[Sixchan]

I once ran an Adventure based on "American Pie". The God of Music was dying, and so not only were people losing the ability to sing and play music, but some were also losing their ability to speak (Tonal language speakers, along with Elves and Certain Groups of Common-Speakers all speak in melodicly (I once had an American ask me why I sang when I spoke, which confused me until I figured out that I speak in rhythm and place more emphasis on more words than he did), and thus could not speak as the God died). It was a high level campaign, which wass designed to get rid of the Bard (though obvious high-level means), as the player was getting bored of him.

It was lot's of fun, although having a messenger of the god explain the situation to them by singing the song was probably too cheesy.

 

[crater]

Dangle some xp awards and you´ll have them singing and dancing all the way to epic.

 

[MaxKaladin]

The songs were adapted from Eminem, Metallica, Will Smith, and a lot of other contemporary groups, but in my world they were actually things like epic ballads (Wild Wild West), Royal Court Lineages (Slim Shady), and Orcish lullabies (Enter Sandman). The problem was, I thought all the songs were obvious, but half the group didn't recognize them, and one player outright refused to sing.

It may simply be a case of needing to know your player's tastes better. I don't listen to any of the music you mention above and I wouldn't recognize any of their songs well enough to sing it if I recognized it at all. Even if I did recognize, by some terrible circumstance, an Eminem song then I'd probably refuse to sing it too. Granted, I'm probably about 10 years older than your group (I think you're college age and I'm 32), but there's also a fair bit of stuff from when I was a teenager in the '80s that I wouldn't recognize because it just wasn't my taste. Heck, Metallica was pretty popular in the 80s, but it just wasn't my scene.

If someone is going to do something like this, I think learning their player's musical tastes is critical. Don't use your favorite music. Use THEIR favorite music. They're much more likely to enjoy it that way.