Water Rescue: Ideas needed...

[nopantsyet]

I think this goes without saying, but if you're in my Newton gaming group and you're reading this, GET OUT!!!!

I'm starting a new campaign in a city with some Renaissance Venice elements to it. So I've got fifteen levels worth of plots in the works. Problem I'm facing is what to do for those formative levels one through three.

So I came up with an idea to have a pylon give way and a few buildings collapse into the water. Right in front of the characters, so they may fall in themselves. I'd like to set them up to rescue people who are trapped underwater. In the process, I will give them the opportunity to discover an underwater cavern system, which leads inland to an area that will be significant a few levels down the road.

Of course, that's not three levels worth of adventuring. Anybody have any ideas to fill this out? I've got a few clues to the lurking horror that will eventually be discovered, but there's alot of unfolding to take place before they learn that shocking truth.

Now, on the Rat Bastard side of things, the characters will begin the adventure having actually encountered the lurking horror, but as that leaves everyone dead, insane, or amnesiac, they've got the whole mystery of who they are and what they're doing that they'll probably want to spend some time looking into.

Finally, cool or cruel if for the first session or two, I confiscate their character sheets and give them a blank sheet with just their stats? I really want them to roleplay the amnesia, and with no character sheet to fall back on, I think it'll come out cool. I think I would enjoy it, but then again, I could have encountered the lurking horror and be suffering the consequences myself...

Thanks.

 

[arwink]

You could easily do a murder mystery in this kind of setting, where people keep turning up dead from a certain noble family without anyone ever seeing where the attacker is coming from. The obvious reason for this would be something lurking in the canals, so instead make something that either flies or, for something slightly more sneaky, create an abyssal choker that is summoned and charged with knocking people off by an insane younger noble hoping to inherit. There's also the inherent joy of fight scenes on gondollas, with people trying to keep their balance as they swing at something that swoops down on them

Canal cities usually have a problem with fresh water, so you could steal a trick from Piratecats storyhour and have a bunch of disease cultists running around. Cultists make great low level adventure plots - they could be trying to disease entire city blocks or simply poisoning casks of fresh water as they're brought into the city.

The Yearly Leach Swarming: Every year, when the water from a nearby swamp overflows after the summer rains, the city is overun by a swarm of leaches. People who drop into the water are usually in trouble, and rich people tend to hire their own private force of adventurers and guards as the three foot long uber-leeches come floating into town with their smaller cousins.

Aquatic Otyugh's. Just because every canal campaign should have tentacled things rising up out of the water

 

[Hand of Evil]

I think I would have the players wake up in the water being pulled to safety with little or nothing on their backs and finding that they don't remember a thing prior being in the water! As they try to discover who they are they find their way to the horror, which they may or may not be part of, they could have been victims and had their souls ate (lost levels), clones, or something else.

 

[nopantsyet]

arwink: Good suggestions; especially the gondola fighting. That should be evilly delicious. And the freshwater idea--inexplicable disease and tenticular creatures are a great way to get into the lower ranks of the cult to the lurking horror.

Hand of Evil: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I've got some flavor written as them remember flashes of what's happening as they're dragged from the water. Then their first full awareness will be when the morning sun reflects up into the room they're recovering in.

So it turns out some of the shore people (who are rice farmers as it is wetlands) found them and dragged them into the city. To an inn where the inkeeper takes in vagrants and makes them work off their board by harvesting shellfish off the underwater sections of his walls.

So as they spend some time in the city, I want to drop clues. Some graffiti intimating the purpose of the cult. A tenticular shadow here and there. Maybe have something stalk them for a while. It could ambush them and they fight it. (On a gondola?) And something about the creature brings back brief flashes of memory too disturbing for words.

Then when they're exploring the following day, the collapse could take place where they (hopefully) will try to rescue the people, they could discover the cave where these creatures have holed up. As they make their way to the onshore exit from the cavern, they will find clues to the horror (I'm using the Ebon Maw from Dragon #312) that they will only understand later.

Does that sound like it'll work?

Thanks for your thoughts.