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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 6259805" data-attributes="member: 79141">More Musings - Slightly more coherent this time, I hope.Some time ago I added complexity and detail to the rather straightforward dungeon bash buffer adventure Danger at Dunwater by pinching a plotline from China Mieville's novel the Scar.  What I took was the idea of an explorer who had escaped the clutches of  a sea dwelling race (in my case aboleth, or Deep Ones) with details of  their fortifications and defenses, as well as a sinister jade idol in  the form of a squid that conferred powers of stealth and mobility on the wielder. The idol was just a little toy to tease the players with; the journal full of details was more important as it advanced a subplot involving Black Star Mining and their plans to launch a fleet to attack the Deep Ones. This fleet was denied a port in Flint due to the political campaigning of the players and long ago sailed south, along with Black Star Mining CEO Khaled Valchek (and Benedict Pemberton).  As for the idol, my players refused to play with it - too nervous of its addictive power - so I had a green dragon named Tatzel demand it from them as the price for leaving the feywild in another adventure. A lot later, I had Unit B stumble upon a similar idol in a Burial Chamber in the Cloudwood.  When I say 'similar' this one was in fact a shifting, disorienting crystal, and the only thing that connected the two was the fact that Tatzel ended up in possession of them both.  That wasn't supposed to happen.  I hoped Unit B would put up a doomed struggle and be rescued by a powerful NPC (Leshy, a spirit of the forest).  The idol was designed to wind up in Leon's hands and give him access to a second  pact.  When unit B surrendered it outright, I had to change things up, and instead had Leon drawn to a cave in the bayou where there dwelt an entity of pure thought who claimed to be a foe of the gidim and extended patronage to him. Recently I decided to run some simple dungeon delves as a breather between episodes of Zeitgeist.  (Other buffers have proved as complex and intense as the adventures themselves and I'm looking to give myself a bit of respite.)  To provide a hook, I have decided that the delves will be linked by more such idols, which will represent the planes of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Life, Death, Time and Space before the Ancients fixed them in place as they are now.  Some were designed to draw power from the beings who accessed this world through those planes (such as the gidim, aboleth, demons, angels, etc.) and who now can no longer do so.  Also searching for these idols are a coven of hags (who link into previous previous buffer adventures in ways described in my earlier post).  The hags may or may not serve the Voice of Rot (depending upon how epic tier progresses) and also seek to subvert and/or hijack the Obscurati plan to realign the cosmos (when they eventually find out about it) - either for their own designs or for their master's. Thanks to the players, the hags have two of the idols now - connecting to the old planes of water and time, with the traits of deceit and plasticity -  meaning they can travel back in time and alter all my mistakes. They are using these to mess with events in the Dreaming, as will become clear in the second of the buffer adventures I have planned before embarking on episode 6.  (In which Leon heads into the fey realm to try and fix the mess he's made by giving the powerful idol to Tatzel.)Maybe Lavanya is one of the coven before she became a hag. Maybe.</blockquote>

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