ZEITGEIST One shots and side quests.

[Crispy120286]

Hey all, I'm curious as to if there are any side quests one could run in the Zeitgeist universe. Wasnt there supposed to be an addons for the campaign for this sort of thing? What could a DM use as a session zero or just side missions in between the various adventures. I've been looking for modules and one shots but I havent really found many that could work well.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

I am avoiding adding much in the way of Sidequests because my last campaign got massively extended by using a lot of other AP's and stuff.
However having taken a break after adventure 5 I want to ease them back in a bit before starting adventure 6 so I am going with a sidequest in the Risuri Elfaivar colonies where there have been some recent attacks on settlers and hunting parties and a confrontation with the Rajputs from the local Eladrin settlement. So the king is sending a top team of RHC agents who have links to the Eladrin to find out what is going on and stop the trouble, if that means fighting Eladrin, or arresting some of his people who have intruded into areas the Eladrin cares about, or negotiating a proper treaty he wants to stop the fighting.
I have this caused by a group of undead Eladrin lead by a cursed Rakshasha who was an Eladrin Necromancer who tried to use necromancy to bring back the dead Eladrin women, and failed his blaphemous use of magic tieing in to the remains of Ssramma's power and cursing him as a Rakshasha and his followers as Ghouls, they have a skilled illusionist and after being woken from their sleep by a team of Ob Archeologists disturbing their temple tomb they are trying to drive the humans from their lands by starting a war.

Not many prepublished adventures which I think would fit. Although once you hit they Gyre you can go crazy adding interesting worlds

 

[RangerWickett]

We had some ideas for side quests. The idea was to have a series of vignettes called Vagabond of the Mirror Moon which would have a framing narrative of Rock Rackus claiming responsibility for all the heroic stuff the PCs end up doing in those side quests. But the campaign took 5 years to finish instead of 3, and I figured we had enough content already.

But name an area and a gimmick, and I'm sure we could brainstorm something pretty quickly.

 

[EarthSeraphEdna]

We had some ideas for side quests. The idea was to have a series of vignettes called Vagabond of the Mirror Moon which would have a framing narrative of Rock Rackus claiming responsibility for all the heroic stuff the PCs end up doing in those side quests. But the campaign took 5 years to finish instead of 3, and I figured we had enough content already.

But name an area and a gimmick, and I'm sure we could brainstorm something pretty quickly.

Sentosa, Akela Sathi (Lonely Companion). Themes are "elf brothel, wat do?" and a serious examination of the ramifications of the Akela Sathi system on eladrin society, relationships, marriages, family structures, child-raising, and expectations on both men and women.

Your move.

My own GM actually ran a significantly detailed side quest on this exact topic that spanned a large degree of homebrew content. I would like to see what others would do with the absurd subject handled in a serious fashion.

 

[Crispy120286]

I'm thinking of a session 0 scenario. What would rookie just hired constables do? Not your typical police officer grunt work. But something they could do before the campaign even starts and mostly things they could do in Risur itself inbetween the modules.

 

[Andrew Moreton]

Well there is the raggedman serial killer who gets mentioned a lot in act 1 but never gets resolved, have them investigate him in the later acts. Scenario 1 is really an intro, but you could have them at level 1 dealing with some bandits in the mistwoods or something, problem is until they get a few levels under their belt they can't really take on organised crime or really competent criminals.
Otherwise look at what their affiliations are and see if you can play up the Stargazer or Veteran (or whatever angle) and have a crime involved with that affiliation(maybe someone is murdering veterans, maybe some veterans are murdering danorans, or maybe some small town sherriff pushed the last veteran of Eagle team 2 too much and now a 9th level Barbarian is rampaging through the woods and someone has to bring this decorated war hero in-- particularly if your players have just annoyed someone important)

 

[RangerWickett]

Sentosa, Akela Sathi (Lonely Companion). Themes are "elf brothel, wat do?" and a serious examination of the ramifications of the Akela Sathi system on eladrin society, relationships, marriages, family structures, child-raising, and expectations on both men and women.

Your move.

Hm. Off the top of my head, we do a low rent Handmaid's Tale.

An eladrin husband and wife couple set up a 'forward operating base' near a colony town, where eladrin who want to attack and harass the foreigners can rest and supply. They persuade some patriotic eladrin women to come help set up the base, but then the wife - who is 'old fashioned' and looking to be lord of her own domain - strongarms the women into serving as sacred prostitutes. She keeps their personal belongings locked up and basically forces them to be indentured servants, justifying her cruelty by saying that she did her duty the same way a century ago, and the soldiers going to take revenge on the foreigners need this.

There are a couple women who buy into this and help keep the others under control. A few times men figured out that this is monstrous and either pressed back against the 'ruling couple,' or tried to sneak off and get help, but the couple's enforcers have killed all of them, and now the couple is more discerning about whom they trust with which women.

The PCs get wind of this when a Clergy priest is kidnapped and dragged back to the outpost to be ritually tortured. He was thrown into a cell, and one of the enslaved women tended to him and whispered to him that she was a prisoner too. Then a storm happened to roll in, and the enforcers weren't able to hear him as he cast sending to report what he'd seen.

You can nest the narrative with a couple more layers. Perhaps the people he contacted reach out to the PCs, and they have lurid ideas of how the culture must work. But they don't know where the outpost is, so the PCs have to go to a nearby small enclave which is nominally neutral, where they can maybe help with some standard 'slay the monster that's threatening the villagers so one of them will trust you' plot beat. An eladrin woman warily agrees to be guide for them, because her husband went to that outpost and never came back. She had been an ananta paudha for four years until she became pregnant and decided the father would make a good husband, so she left the service early.

It's uncommon for married eladrin men to keep going on combat missions, since usually it's over-eager young guys trying to earn a reputation for bravery, and nowadays the margins are less razor thin on whether their culture will survive, so many eladrin men are glad to settle down and have a normal life, though they're ready to take up arms in defense. Her husband went to the outpost for . . . some complex reason -- maybe they had a fight and he felt bad for losing his temper, or maybe one of his wife's aunts went to the outpost and he was undertaking the arduous journey to reach it because he wanted to check to make sure they were safe.

In the 'normal' enclave, the tradition of ananta paudha is falling out of favor. After all, the population has reached pretty much reached sexual parity, especially the younger generations. If anything, there's a cultural pressure for young men to go throw themselves into danger, and to protect women, so the youngest eladrin actually skew female. The role is more sacred now than practical, and in any civilized enclave it is meant only to be consensual.

They might even learn about the legal background of the couple that went to go found the outpost. Maybe they had trouble having a child of their own, so they tried to adopt, but got into trouble by refusing to raise an orphaned boy. It seems they only wanted girls, and hoped to groom them to be ananta paudha in order to get social status through their kids.

The mom who wants to find her husband leaves her kid with relatives, gears up, and leads the PCs into the woods. They are refused entrance, attacked if they rest anywhere nearby, and when the PCs finally do get in, the couple who runs the place realize the jig is up, set fire to the compound to cover their tracks, and flee.

That's the rough first draft.

 

[EarthSeraphEdna]

That is not a bad first draft, but it raises a few points about eladrin culture that I am still a touch confused on.

Firstly, it does not seem like Vekeshi's philosophy has actually filtered into the eladrin all that much. The player's guide and even book #8 make a big fuss about how Vekeshi is so culturally important and the message of "The best revenge is to live and endure" has spread far and wide, but we also hear a lot about radical eladrin terrorists who are going around killing people.

Secondly, even the Vekeshi themselves seem to completely disregard their own "the best revenge is to live and endure" philosophy by personally going out and righting wrongs by... killing people. That seems like the exact opposite of the Vekeshi philosophy.

Thirdly, what is this about the eladrin population having reached sexual parity between males and females? I thought it was a huge deal to be an eladrin woman, because they were supposedly rare; how can it be that there are roughly equal amounts of men and women? I thought that Sentosa's mostly-equalized ratio was an exception, not a rule.

Fourthly, how does the eladrin enclave system actually work? The edgestones only really seem to apply to Sentosa; they are not mentioned at all in the case of Ushanti. Do all of the eladrin enclaves use edgestones to create a demiplane metaphysically "in between" the Waking and the Dreaming?

Fifthly, how does selection for the Akela Sathi system even work? It seems to be voluntary, but Kasvarina's backlash against it makes it sound more like compulsory rape, and you seem to suggest that there are some cases wherein ananta paudha are press-ganged into the role against their will. Does it vary on an enclave-to-enclave basis?

 

[RangerWickett]

Think about it this way. Christ preaches to love your enemy and to forgive those who hurt you. But lots of folks in the Irish Republican Army murdered folks and yet saw themselves as defenders of Catholicism.

Vekesh's philosophy was how the majority of eladrin survivors found the strength to carry on and not go on a bloody rampage of revenge, but instead try to rebuild. But a vengeance cult did crop up, and they came up with their own twisted take on Vekesh's philosophy, which is how they'd seduce aggrieved eladrin into joining. "Oh sure, Vekesh says that we should be peaceful and outlast them, but obviously we can't outlast them if they keep killing us. So we have to kill some of them. Vekesh knew that most eladrin were broken by the Great Malice, and were unfit to fight. You're special. You're strong enough to keep fighting. Here, we'll teach you."

Over time they shifted from direct retribution against those responsible (similar to, like, Israeli Nazi hunters) to targeting people who they think are hostile to eladrin, and then - especially the cult cells that grew up in foreign places like Flint - to weirdly re-distorting the philosophy to be about protecting the innocent of any race from the predations of the powerful.

Most eladrin are wary of the mystics, because they pervert Vekesh's teachings, and because their violence brings blowback. But sometimes you can really use the help of one of those crazy bad-asses, and they're still nominally on your side, and you grew up with them before they went and got radicalized. It's messy.

Outside Elfaivar, you mostly only run into male eladrin - usually expatriates or actual Vekeshi mystics who think they're doing good work by killing bad people. But inside Elfaivar, in the enclaves, it's been five hundred years, and so lots of the eladrin who were around for the Great Malice are dying of old age. The younger generations were always born with the usual 50% male, 50% female, and finally the population of people born after the Great Malice has nearly caught up with the population of male survivors.

Every enclave has some way to stay hidden or protect itself. I honestly don't recall whether I intended for all of them to be halfway between the real world and the Dreaming, but I think the biggest ones probably did.

Kasvarina's anger was because, well, it's sex work. It's nominally consensual sex work, but throughout history most sex work has be coercive. She hasn't grown up in the enclave and had the concept normalized, so her only context is to think of it as prostitution and of women being subservient. And it's certainly more transactional than the way things worked when the practice was first implemented. Not every enclave works the same way, though.

 

[EarthSeraphEdna]

I never once thought that Elfaivar itself has achieved sexual parity by this point. Is there some sort of stigma concerning female eladrin traveling overseas? Do people outside of Elfaivar know that Elfaivar itself has achieved sexual parity?

You seem to be confirming that there is a difference between "Vekeshi" and "Vekeshi mystics." I think one source of confusion is that the books themselves use the two terms interchangeably, even when they are supposed to mean different things. So I take it, then, that the vast majority of eladrin are Vekeshi, but only a small portion are Vekeshi mystics, and out of those Vekeshi mystics, there are the radical traditionalists and the moderate modern mystics?

Does that mean that Kasvarina, pre-amnesia, was a Vekeshi mystic of the radical traditionalist variety?