RB: Removing a mentor

[der_kluge]

So, here's the deal - the party is 9th level, boarded a boat to an uncharted land. Once there, big scary dragon comes out after the party and their leader - an NPC archaeologist/wizard go ashore. Dragon comes and sinks the boat - half the crew die in the attack. Now they're stranded with the remaining crew, and this leader.

So, once they get everyone ashore, and rescued, they turn to the leader to decide what to do next, several options are considered and the leader (me, the DM) give them several options. The players then *suggest* to the leader (again, me) that I be firm in my decisions so as to be an effective leader.

So, here's the problem. I can see the party resorting to not thinking for themselves at all, so they just kind of sit back and let the leader decide what to do next, which means that I, the DM will end up handing them their next scenario. I don't like that.

So, I did manage to get them to investigate a strange pyramid without him. "I'll stay back and watch the remaining crew, and take stock of what we have, report back once you have found anything."

So, now I have the party in this thousands-of-years-old tomb of a once-powerful lizardman king that built the tomb as a tribute to him and his people, and it actually houses the king and his queen in a temporal stasis, so that they could be revived once the world was a safer place (in the past, there was a cataclysmic event that threatened all of civilization).

So, I was thinking that inside the tomb, time stands still. So that once the PCs spend several hours in this place, once they emerge, they will find that several years have past on the outside. Their leader is long gone, having given up hope that they will ever emerge from the tomb alive.

Muhahaha!

Good idea?

 

[takyris]

It's definitely a good idea. There could be other ramifications -- you're not just getting rid of one NPC -- you're getting rid of a lot of the world that they know right now, and that might make them really unhappy.

A possible handwave might be a kind of equal-but-opposite thing, with the area around the island acting as a reverse time-window to balance out the stasis in the temple itself. Waves of time build up in the temple, and then periodically get emitted as pulses that dramatically increase the flow of time on the island. The pulses distort the quantum signature of the plane in this area, so spells and spell-like abilities fail to work.

The PCs could come out and find a diary written in an increasingly worried and then frightened tone -- by the mentor. He starts out worried about them, then gets frantic as magic doesn't work. When the pulse passes, he does some research and figures out what happens, but the residual distortion causes some magic to malfunction -- no teleportation off the island.

The lizardmen, who knew that this effect would occur, opted to make use of it by creating animated objects that were programmed to attack when the time pulses caused magic to fail. The last diary entry speaks about this, and then trails off into a messy and bloody scrawl... that looks several decades old.

 

[der_kluge]

I was just thinking that, in the last room of the dungeon they find some sort of clock that has some inscription that indicates that time is slowed in the dungeon to counter the effects of aging.

I was also thinking that, when they left they could find some note in a chest (long covered with leaves and dirt) that the mentor would have left for them in case they ever returned. But also amidst the makeshift graves where they buried the dead from the dragon's attack, the PCs would find their own graves!

And making the players unhappy is just my intent - to move them out of their comfort zone, and into the unknown. Beautiful.

 

[shivamuffin]

It sounds like the mentor was a bit too much in control of things from the start??

Kill him off ( He can always come back much later...), and give the PCs some tough love. Otherwise you'll just be leading them by the nose and denying them a challenge.

GSI

 

[MarauderX]

It sounds like the mentor was a bit too much in control of things from the start??

Kill him off ( He can always come back much later...), and give the PCs some tough love. Otherwise you'll just be leading them by the nose and denying them a challenge.

GSI

Exactly. I like to give the PCs someone they can turn to, watch their back, or give them orders of how to get from point A to B, and then take him away right in the middle. Have him fall in battle to scare the PCs into thinking of running away, or just disappear to return later as being captured and/or tortured by some BBEG(where did that dragon go??).

Although having them figure out that a few years have passed is also good for the mystery flavor of an adventure, and how they figure that out may be a good chance to mess with them a bit.

 

[der_kluge]

Yea, in hindsight, I should have killed him in the dragon attack, but I didn't think about the long term repercussions of having him survive. The PCs are all 9th level, so they have access to raise dead. So killing him isn't an easy option, as they would just raise him right back again. Moving him 10 years into the future will pose a much more difficult problem for them, however.

 

[takyris]

10? Oh, come on. 10 is chump change.

The flow of time was slowed down by a TON, right? Gotta be at least thousands, if not millions, of seconds inside the temple for each second outside.

So why not have a good century or two go by out there in the rest of the world?

 

[shivamuffin]

There are ways to utterly destroy somebody. He could become a villian. Who better to torment the PCs than their former mentor?

 

[BSF]

It's an interesting way to remove the NPC from the situation without necesitating NPC death.

OK, don't make an arbitrary decision on the timeframe for returning. Leave it up to the players ... sorta.

Here is what you do. Eyeball about how far in the future you want them to return. Figure out how long the party will be in the tomb. Do the math to see what kind of multiple you need to get. So, if you think they will spend ~4 hours in the dungeon, and you want to advance time by ~ 10 years, you are looking at a multiple of ~ 21900.

Now is when you get *evil*. When the party leaves, assume that 1 person can pass through the doorway in one round. When the first guy walks out, you take him to another room. With a multiple of 21900, the next person will emerge in 21900 rounds! Or, 21900/10 = 2190 minutes /60 = 36.5 hours! This guy will likely freak! Tell him what he sees and then mention that nobody has come out the door yet. The player will probably go with it for a little bit, but when the character has been waiting for minutes, then hours ... I think you get the idea.

He will probably try to go running back in. Right into the person getting ready to come out. From the perspective of the rest of the party, the 1st person to leave was gone for a fraction of a second, or maybe even the better part of a round, then came charging back in. Now, use a stopwatch and watch the fun as the party tries to figure out what just happened. Just assume that the amount of time the players spend talking is how long the characters spend talking. They will likely discuss this for several minutes. Once they decide to leave again, stop the stopwatch, multiply the time and find out how many days (weeks? months? Maybe years?) longer that they stayed in there.

Now, once they begin leaving, you can use random encounter checks to see if anything shows up while the party is split up. Imagine being the first guy out, knowing that your friends are coming as quickly as they can and won't arrive for a day and a half. For added fun, maybe you could throw in a tropical storm during the days the party is trying to return?

But, the best part is that they will be able to figure out how long they were gone. And they will feel like they had some control of how long they were gone. It is no longer an arbitrary decision of the DM, it became in event that they hadn't planned on. If the NPC was rescued and left, several years ago, the PC's are going to wonder if they _really_ needed to spend as much time prying the gems out of every statue in that hallway. Every action they took in the tomb now comes back to them with implied repurcussions. They will also start trying to figure out ways to use the tomb to their advantage. Cannibals attacking? Head for the tomb, we will eat lunch and wait them out. But, we can't wait too long, what if another ship comes by while we are hiding? They will have to think real hard about entering the tomb again, but no matter what, they will remember that place.

(EDIT: My word! How many typos can I get in a single post? I swear, I wasn't on drugs at the time. I was at work, and I might have been wishing for drugs, but really, I was clean. Editing to get rid of typos.

Oh my, it is a bit difficult to follow my train of thought as well. I will clarify a bit and add a little more commentary.)

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

Another way to fix this problem is to have the mentor make a blatantly wrong decision that sets the group back. This should demonstrate that the mentor isn't just a plot device to lead them by the nose.