The Horrific Revelation: What is the best set-up?

[Mistah J]

Hey everyone!

IMC, the party are eventually going to be the 1st ones to discover a tremendous, world-threatening, danger: an unknown super-plague. I have two options on how to reveal this and need your advice.

1. The party finds a single case - very isolated. With it comes a red herring that everyone assumes to be the cause. Later on, the party comes across a small village that has been completely wiped out by the disease.

2. The party goes to the small village first, for an unrelated reason and they find it destroyed by this illness - everyone is dead. They race to a bigger community to alert the authorities only to find that the disease has beaten them there. One or two people are now showing signs.

Which, in your opinion, is the best method to use? I'm looking for whichever invokes the bigger feeling of "Oh @%&!" and would like to hear your reasons for using one over the other. As well, if there are any ideas you can think of to help, or any issues you think I should be prepared for (or avoid) I'd love to hear those too.

I'm also interested in people sharing their own Horrific Revelation stories from games you've played or led - they are always an entertaining read worth sharing.


Thanks for your help

 

[Aberzanzorax]

The latter...so they know it is a force to be reckoned with.

 

[Doug McCrae]

How about a nightmarish vision of the future where most, or all, of the world has fallen victim to the disease. The vision could appear in something like Galadriel's pool, possibly previously set up to be a reliable source.

The problem with disease is you never really know how bad it's going to get until it happens.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

I like #2 better. I think seeing the first signs of a plague in a population center adds more urgency to the predicament, especially after the shock of witnessing its thorough devastation in the smaller village.

 

[roguerouge]

Have one of the characters sneeze when they get to the city.

 

[Sammael]

#2, with an added twist: the PCs are themselves immune to the plague, but they can still act as its carriers. What's more horrific than finding out that you may have been responsible for spreading the disease in the first place?

 

[Rabbitbait]

But you have to have some way of finding the source of the plague and defeating it. Is it some magical plague, designed by ogre mages or {insert evil race here} to rid the world of humans once and for all?

Perhaps the ogre mages have infected slaves to be carriers and then let them 'escape'. The slaves have fled to various population centres. The characters first need to hunt down the sources of the plague (the escaped slaves) and then work out what they have in common.

 

[Merkuri]

1. The party finds a single case - very isolated. With it comes a red herring that everyone assumes to be the cause. Later on, the party comes across a small village that has been completely wiped out by the disease.

2. The party goes to the small village first, for an unrelated reason and they find it destroyed by this illness - everyone is dead. They race to a bigger community to alert the authorities only to find that the disease has beaten them there. One or two people are now showing signs.

The reaction to option 2 is probably going to be more severe. If they first see the results of said disease (an entire village dead) and then they start seeing signs that this thing is spreading it has more of a sense of urgency then seeing it spreading and then seeing it has killed an entire village. After all, they can't do anything about the dead village, but they could possibly have some slim chance of curing or preventing the spread of the disease in a new village. Even if they later find out it's impossible they'll be more likely to jump to try to stop it if they know without a doubt that it's spreading.

They must have some way to connect the two cases, though. Make sure they find signs of the symptoms of this disease (maybe a healer's notebook) so they'll be able to recognize right away that it's the same thing in the new town. If they don't make the connection until later then it might not be that big of an emotional hit.

 

[Piratecat]

The best option is to have the party originally be the unwitting vectors, and have the plague's masterminds have planned that! when in doubt, the best answer is "everything's gone to hell and it's all our fault."

Then give them a chance to make things better.

 

[roguerouge]

You'll want to be pretty vivid in your description of the illness' stages. Might I suggest basing its symptoms on Captain Tripps? Captain Trips - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia