I think when I ran BoFF at a con, King Lorcan's player had the Contessa's curse on him, so he tossed the crown to Melissa, said good luck, then yeeted himself off the mountaintop so the rest of the team could kill the witch without qualms.
Please tell your players I love the art. I had, I hope you'll understand, sorta forgotten the details of the PCs, so when I saw Gatria had a tail I had to refresh my memory. But hey, since you first started posting in 2021, we actually published the setting guide, and while we don't technically have catfolk for Gatria, we do have canon tiger elves. That's kinda close.
Sorry this is so late - That BoFF anecdote absolutely rules. BoFF is such an amazing oneshot and produces so many great stories. I'm curious to know how you manage to finish everything in one convention slot, though - both times I've run it, they've taken between 9 to 12 hours! Maybe it's different when you know it by heart, aha.
By the way, I'm just grateful you guys read my writeups at all!!! I appreciate the effort to follow along with our silly little game. Now I'm imaging Gatria as an eladrin Rakshasa and that's one heck of a thought experiment...
Speaking of writeups, I meant to post this one, like, a month ago. Can it still technically be May if it doesn’t feel like June yet? What’s that? June is almost over? Oh…
Adventure 7, The Last Starry Sky: Spring Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons
The adventure in which I just kind of make stuff up for no reason!
I’ve been slow to write this because the first half of the adventure wasn't
that different from canon. So, I decided to write a "short" summary for the first half. That doesn't mean that the players didn't like it, or anything. In fact, this was probably in top three. Just ask our Fey Skyseer's player:
If you know the original, this is a really impressive edit.
After the end of Adventure 8, the book recommends spiriting away Kasavarina, but the party is so tightly bonded to her that I decided the game would be less interesting if she were no longer around. Yes, the hostage situation is compelling, but I can find other motivating factors for the party to take out the Ob! I do decide to separate her by having her run to the Eladrin enclaves to try and warn them about the imminent Dreaming collapse, and also, behind the party’s back, take the head of Cula Ravjahani. Sorry, Cula. (Yeah, she’s supposed to be in Act 3, but I’ll figure it out).
Alright, so. Throughout the game, I decided I would drop little hints that the Voice of Rot has been manipulating the party into enacting some sort of master plan - which was using them as pawns to undermine the Ob and destroy the world. I enjoy twists where it turns out that the heroes have been making things worse for everyone the entire time, and I wanted to try and pull that off in my own game. Unfortunately, I think I overplayed my hand, because as soon as the party heard Rock was dead, Gatria instantly said “yeah, yeah, yeah, this was all a set-up by The Voice of Rot to stall us until he completes some secret master plan.” Ah, dang it… My attempt to shock the players didn't pay off.
They did decide to solve the "murder", though, because they were curious about where Rock was, so… that was nice of them.
“I wonder how Mista Knives is doing.”
-My party every two weeks. He wasn’t even their guide, they chose Rambylon!!!
After the party collected all of the evidence, they went to yell at some faeries and incriminate Copperhat. My party likes to do something we refer to as “the Renegon Option”: our players are big Mass Effect Renegade Route fans, but not to an extreme - we do all of the renegade (basically, mean) dialogue, but make the paragon (altruistic) story choices. We say that in our Mass Effect campaign, Commander Shepard yells at everyone until they play nice. That’s exactly what they do to most of the NPCs in this game, honestly, including the Unseen and Hedgehog courts - yelled at them until they listened, convinced them they were being manipulated, and that they were wasting their time fighting in the face of the apocalypse. They just need to get along until the apocalypse is cancelled, and then they could go back to fighting over rulership.
Thisraldion found this awfully convenient for the Hedgehog Court, and agreed to postpone the war, on one condition - a member of the party has to serve at his side when the war resumes. Mona agreed to sit on the Unseen Court, though she managed to convince Thisraldion that she had other obligations in the Waking and could not live in the Dreaming permanently. This set the precedent for an in-universe Persephone story where Mona spends six months of the year in the Waking, and then serves six months (Waking-time, anyway) in the Dreaming, which was agreeable to Thisraldion.
The hedgehog court subsequently demanded that they send one of their own to watch over the party, and Beshela volunteered to go. With Beshela’s help, Cleone, our Danoran Technologist, decided she was actually willing to defect on Danoran industry and start developing green tech, instead. The party is currently in the Gyre trying to figure out a planar arrangement that incorporates only nature-based arcanotech, but that’s a story for another day…
They're actually in the midst of using Caeloon and Etheax to figure out how to make tech out of wood, but this was the first proposal.
Alright, so, what happened next is what I like to call “permissive DMing.” I could have laid down the law and let the cool set pieces happen as scripted, but sometimes, I just want to see what kind of crazy stuff the party will come up with on their own. So, the party knows they could have gone and bothered The Voice of Rot to get out of the Dreaming, but now that they are BFFs with Beshela, they also have a connection to She Who Writhes. As-written, the book says that if they contact She Who Writhes to leave the Dreaming, they end up in Flint and arrive too late to prevent the execution of Aodhan. I didn’t feel like skipping my favourite set piece ever (the Palace), so I just let them end up in the Capital. Whatever. The movie monster can stay hidden a bit longer to generate hype.
I did put up a paper-thin effort to scare them out of bothering SWW by saying that her version of planar teleportation was drowning all of them until they washed up in a random body of water somewhere near Slate. They weren’t intimidated, they just thought this was funny. Maybe I should have gone for the “chase” like the book says. Oh, well.
Back in the Waking, the party rolls up to the Palace in Slate completely waterlogged. They interrupt the Palace wedding by busting open the doors, dripping on everyone and everything, and start screaming at Aodhan mid-vow that he NEEDS to stay on this plane at all costs. Needless to say, they have ruined the mood of this already ruined wedding, and the ceremony is canceled. (Nigel Price-Hill is also in attendance because I need him for something - I just gave him the Green Knight’s sheet).
That’s when Catherine Romana rolls in with a member of the bridal party as a hostage, babysat by Amielle Latimer, haven been given One Last Chance to not screw this up. The Palace starts to be incorporated into the Bleak Gate, and the party is sweating bullets.
Now.
Remember that Ameille is controlled by a player in my campaign. I told Amielle’s player that she could do literally whatever she wanted from now on. I gave her a bit of a behind the scenes play-by-play of the Obscurati activities.
In our campaign, the party messed with the convocation enough that the Obscurati never got to propose the arrangement that ends up happening in Act 3. How I resolved this was that I had Nicodemus, who I have painted as a “the ends justify the means” tyrant to an extreme, decide to force his own arrangement via Borne behind the backs of the rest of the Obscurati. Yes, this conflicts with his as-written characterization in 7, where he is still open to other proposals, but I’ve tried to make it fairly consistent that Nic is a “do as I say, not as I do” sort of person.
In my game, Obcon was just one last ditch effort to see if any other ideas could impress him, as well as a honeypot to weed out the loose ends. Now that Kasavarina is out of the picture and Obcon was sabotaged, he completely gave up on overseeing the Ob towards a mutual goal and officially became the tyrant he swore he wouldn’t become. This also relies on the interpretation that Miller’s Pyre was something Kasavarina proposed in his name (as a sort of “it’s what he would have wanted, when he was still William” proposal), and not something Nicodemus would want to execute himself, but whatever. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.
So, getting back on topic, Amielle is extremely upset that Nicodemus is going behind the back of the Ob and doing Whatever. She’s smart enough to know that the status quo, while monstrous, is a better outcome than Nicodemus’ plan for the world - but no one will listen to her. So, she’s decided to defect to the party.
HERE IT IS! THE HIGHEST-EFFORT S***POST EVER! WE’VE REACHED PEAK MEME!
So, Amielle is overseeing Catherine on her mission to the Palace, and sees a prime opportunity to assassinate the wicked witch of the west and bail. Amielle stealths to possess an Obscurati rifleman and shoots the hostage, causing chaos and eliminating Catherine’s bargaining chip. Then, once all of the Ob agents have been killed by the party except for Catherine, Amielle maneuvers up behind Catherine - and stabs her with Reed MacBannon’s ghost-exorcizing knife. It was one heck of a way to end the fight.
Goodnight, Sweet Princess…
In my game, the party figured out where the Axis Seal Ritual is, so I had Slate completely fall to Catherine Romana’s loyalists to give them a reason to hurry back to Flint. Amielle then tells the party that they are out of time, the change of planes is imminent- so they need to return to Flint as fast as possible and make it the stronghold against the end of the world. It was too late for Slate, but they could still save Flint from Roland. Without a united front with all of their allies in one place, the world is doomed.
The party then splits off to deal with the various threats around the palace. They successfully take down every encounter much faster than I anticipated. At this point, they are still inside the Bleak Gate with a generous amount of time left, and Aodhan suggests holding back from returning to the Waking for a moment more. He’s about to pull a little scheme of his own.
First was that, since the only Noble alive in this plane was Price-Hill, he was the only noble Aodhan needed permission from to enact or change laws. Since Slate had fallen, his second-last decree as King of Risur was that Flint was to be the new, temporary, Capital of Risur.
And knowing that he had no sway in Flint, a town historically ignored by the King and forsaken by the Nobles, it was time for a humble docker from Flint - our party NPC, Marcel - to lead the Capital and become King of Risur.
Price-Hill was furious. Our characters are Family apologists at best and Morgan’s goons at worst, and Price-Hill knew that this would doom Risur to corruption. As the only Noble on the plane, he decides to withhold his assent to crown a new King until the party justifies themselves to him.
The whole party then banded together to have a Impromptu Big Damn Speech on how Morgan Cipiano was the only person in all of Risur who took the threat of the Obscurati seriously from the very start, was one of the few leaders in Flint who actively worked to make the lives of the people better without an Ob-related agenda, and that the Institution of Risur and the RHC had, wittingly or otherwise, undermined their investigation at every turn. They convinced Price-Hill that it was only with Morgan’s co-operation that they had gotten this far, and that everyone in the Palace right now was only alive because of his help.
After that, Price-Hill reluctantly agreed to give his blessing, but swore that once the threat of the Obscurati is over, if they the party is still working with the Family against the security of Risur, he will have each of them, including the new King, stripped of their rank and made to answer for their crimes - one way or another. The party had no choice but to agree to these terms.
…By the way, I had been trying to throw my players off of the scent that someone in the party would be crowned Monarch for, like, the entire campaign. I was SO close, and then, TWO HOURS before the game, some a**hole in the player chat messages:
“Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if someone in the party became King or Queen of Risur?”
You
scoundrel! You
fiend!! You
devil!!! We were THIS close! We were
TWO HOURS away from pulling the fastest fast one
ever!
Now, you might remember from the introduction that I was planning another gamble from the start: part of the purpose of playing Zeitgeist is to enjoy the fact that someone in the party becomes Monarch, but I was planning all along on making the party NPC King. I was open to changing my mind if I thought one of the players would enjoy it, but I never ended up getting that sense.
Fortunately, even though someone predicted what was going to happen immediately before the session, that did mean I got one last chance to change my mind depending on how the players speculated (without my prompting, of course) they would fare as Monarch. But everyone just said:
“Who’s the best choice for Monarch in our party?”
“It’s Marcel”
“It’s Marcel”
“It’s Marcel”
“Marcel”
Ah. Well. Glad I have good DM instincts.
So, with Marcel crowned King, Marcel assigned each person in his party a ministerial position, and the party now became the King’s retainers.
How did it shake out? I admit I was a little worried how players would react, but everyone
loved it. They all agreed that this was the best choice for our party in particular, where everyone is a raging garbage fire and no one stood out as a good candidate for Monarch. Even the barely-holding-it-together party NPC King is baby-faced and immature, but this allowed the party to Voltron themselves into one Monarch consisting of a baby docker and four ministers in a trenchcoat stacked on top of eachother.
A portrait a player drew of King Marcel twenty years from now, finally looking like a respectable King and not like a child wearing his daddy's clothes. By the way, we decided he doesn't wear Royal Green as a way to stay in touch with his docker roots.
(I also liked this option better than making Price-Hill Monarch, as is suggested when your party sucks, because each character had a closely established relationship with Marcel but not with Price-Hill.)
As for ministerial positions:
Mona was named the new Royal Skyseer, natch. As the Royal Skyseer and official representative of the Old Faith, her first role in office was to lead the private ceremony to swear in the new King of Risur.
Gatria was named Risur’s Spymaster General (yes, that’s a nonsensical rank, but it’s pretend), a rank above Lauryn, which Lauryn was thrilled about /s. This gave Gatria the freedom to execute the will of the King without direct oversight, a dangerous role to give a Family lieutenant, but something deliberately done to foster the party’s relationship with the Family.
Practically, she acts as
King Marcel’s anger translator.
Cleone was named Risur’s Minister of Industry, planning for a future that accommodated both the Fey and sustainable technology.
Hoya, I gave a choice. She could either be the Minister of International Relations, or the Royal Spirit Medium. The International Relations position would give her a quest to create world peace using nothing but The Power of Friendship™, or she could lean into her Spirit Medium powers and have a grittier, less optimistic story arc, instead. She was intimidated by the former, so she decided on the latter.
The party then heads to Flint to deal with the impending Apocalypse. Along the way, they duel Force Ghost Lya and her Leviathan, who they convince, with Amielle’s help (who is her great-whatever-grandmother in our game), to stand down. Lya agrees she will watch and see whether they truly are better for the world than the Ob is, but promises that she will come for them if she changes her mind.
“What a hot b****.”
-My wife, involuntarily, during one of Lya’s turns.
I was really excited to trick my players into thinking Delft was leading the charge against them with the shapeshifter, but I forgot they had the humble hook, so they sauntered up to him and instantly figured it out. Whoops. :/
That said, fun fact: did you know that the PDF version and the Print version of what happens to Delft in this adventure is DRAMATICALLY different? It’s true! I own them both, so I got to compare. There might be other big differences across the versions, but I tend to rely on the Print version unless I am out of town.
I forget which is which, but in one version, Delft is just tied up and bound, surrounded by mimics who will pounce on him if he so much as moves. Psychological torture, to be sure, but surviveable.
In the other version, Delft’s body is being used as a conduit for the magic circle that holds up the barrier around the Governor’s Mansion, and he is being tortured. Needless to say, I couldn’t resist being an edgelord.
IIRC, you have to make four checks perfectly to extricate him without killing him. I decided this was a little steep for the party, who would riot if I killed someone with a single check, so I put Carlao, Serena and Dima (canon B-Team; renamed as “C-Team” for us) in the magic circle, too. I put Delft in the easiest check for them, with the other characters in the ritual component corresponding to the harder checks. The party managed to save Delft and Serena, but Dima and Carlao were incinerated and killed instantly. Needless to say, the party was BIG MAD at Roland.
They proceeded up the lighthouse, stealthing past most of the encounters - including the stair mimic, because they just climbed up the wall with a spiderclimb potion. It was really funny when they beat the final boss of the adventure and tried to descend down the stairs, though, aha.
Anyway, Roland. Props to the converter, I have to say that that was probably my favourite boss fight in the series (I didn’t do the optional tiger fight, though). I don’t remember what the spell was, but there was an ability he had to channel his Deva energy to turn himself into the warrior aspect of Srasama, and it was so darn cool. Casting Overwhelming Presence to try and force the King and his "men" to bow to him absolutely owned. Definitely one of my favourite sessions ever.
Partway through the fight, I accidentally broke one of my strongest DMing rules - never,
ever request a check you don’t want someone to fail - and almost permanently turned the new King to stone. I just wanted to pull out all the stops and at least try to kill
someone before permadeath became difficult, but the randomizer chose to attack Marcel, and then the dice chose the “turn to stone” spell :/ Fortunately, Marcel narrowly made the check, but I literally don’t know what I would have done if he had failed.
(By the way, one of my other rules is that I never,
ever fudge a roll unless it is for a
very good reason, and in the entire campaign I have only fudged two of them - one for me and a player to cooperate in pulling a fast one over the rest of the party, and another that will come later).
The party didn’t get all the way through Roland’s monologue, but they almost always kill everything in one or two rounds, so, you know. Almost all the way through is good.
So, because my players knew that the Lighthouse had nothing to do with the Axis Seal ritual, I decided to go with the interpretation that Roland was trying to Pacify Flint with the Lighthouse to stop them from being united against the Ob, but the Lighthouse also protected Flint from the force of the Planar shift. I wanted to give the players a choice - have an alive, but enslaved, Flint, or a mostly-dead, but free, Flint.
The party decided to destroy the lighthouse. I thought things would go according to my plans, but Gatria then had the idea of contacting the Family to see if Morgan knew the faith shield spell that the Clergy used on Alais Primos during the Holy War - because if so, the dockers can channel their faith in the City of Flint to protect them from the meteor shower.
I decided, sure, Morgan can know that, because that is the coolest thing I have ever heard
.
The players decided that King Marcel would lead the dockers in “prayer” in the form of a traditional docker anthem. One problem with that: the laws of magic were being rewritten, and they had no way of knowing magic was about to wink out and destroy their little ritual.
So here’s what happened:
Morgan had a Family Oracle cast the spell, and the players and dockers began parading through the streets of Flint. Navras showed up to play the Hurricane Violin. The whole city then joined together in the power of song to hold up the barrier and keep the meteors at bay.
As magic started to fail, the barrier slowly got smaller and smaller, requiring a hasty evacuation to the centre of the city. Finally, every form of magic failed, and the barrier winked out completely. The meteors started falling on top of them, and for a moment, it looked like this was the end.
Suddenly, King Marcel raised his hand to the sky, and him and all of the Dockers of Flint became One with their newly manifested Hivemind. A giant flesh-barrier made of tentacles suddenly rose up to physically shield the town - as though the dockers themselves had thrown their own bodies over the people of Flint.
The Flint Docker Hivemind was pelted with meteors, and as the final shower rained over the flesh-shield, thick blood began to rain down over the City of Flint.
When the meteors cleared and the Hivemind vanished, every docker in the City was seriously injured (except for Marcel, who took negligible mental damage, relatively), and Flint was covered in a fine layer of hivemind flesh. But, everyone was alive.
…Leaving the players with their jaws on the floor, wondering that the FRICK just happened!
>INSERT DISC 3
Oh, dear. What’s happening to the adventure map? Why is the UI lighting up with a bunch of new quests?
Oh.
I see.
…Good luck!!!
Next time on Zeitgeist: Adventures 10 and 11 get combined into one mega-adventure. But probably not one mega-writeup.
–
God, this was long, sorry. Thanks for reading!
I’m going to do it!!! I’m going to finish DMing Zeitgeist!!!
Audience Poll Time: Who became Monarch in your campaign? Who do you THINK will become Monarch in your campaign? How did your players react, or is there any particular reactions you are anticipating? I'm very curious to know how this panned out with other groups, since I never got to do the player-as-monarch thing.
