Game Starters
September 21st, 2010
Hello everyone and welcome back to another exciting Grave Plots, where we bring you new and exciting plot hooks and adventure ideas each and every week. This week, as you all know, is Character Creation Week, and so what could be more appropriate for Grave Plots than a few new ideas for getting your game started. These ideas are all variations on popular themes and should be general enough for any DM to turn into the first adventure in an exciting sequence. Ok, let’s get started.
Orc Cave
We’re all relatively familiar with the Orc Cave adventure: basically, it starts with a cave filled with orcs and an unusually high amount of treasure, and then the PCs, armed with some probably highly convenient (or outright contrived) reason and a self-righteous attitude, burst in and cut a swath through the horde of orcs to take their loot. While those of us who ended up DMing these rather straightforward starting adventures may have poured hours of work time into figuring out all kinds of little details about the orc tribe, the PCs will probably be too distracted by finding treasure and gaining xp to bother figuring out the subtleties of the campaign while they’re busy tearing up the place. With this little variation, finally all the hard work we DMs put into making the orc cave – all the little details like: Who is the orc leader? How did he get there? What kinds of weapons and tactics do the orcs prefer and why? Is their tribe religious, and is there tension between their tribal leader and their religious one? Or are they one and the same? What kind of treasure do they have and where did they get it? Who is hording it and why? And all the other minor little things that make each and every one of our Orc Caves different from the next – finally gets a chance to shine.
Just in case you haven’t figured out where I’m going by now, I am indeed suggesting that you perform a little exercise in role reversal, setting the PCs as orcs in the cave. Make sure that these orc PCs are interesting, high quality characters; The Book of Beginnings, available in our downloads section, has some great starting points, but you will want to go further/ You want to communicate to your players the feelings the orc tribe would have, the strong attachment they would have to their way of life, and the reactions they would have when suddenly, without warning, a large raiding party of the “civilized humanoids” bursts in to attack the tribe and take all their hard-earned treasure. After a desperate struggle to defend their homeland, the PCs discover that the humans came at the behest of a Lord Bruwick with explicit instructions to make sure the orc leader died, and so, depending on how exactly the attack went (and the tendencies of the tribe and the PCs), the PCs are either ordered by the orc leader to hunt down and kill this Lord Bruwick, or, their leader murdered, they swear bloody vengeance against him, or else they move off on their own to do whatever they want as lone wolf orc types.
Rats in the Sewer
While not typically the start of too many tabletop games, those of us who also enjoy computer games and other video-based RPG entertainment all know the old standby more or less by heart: there’s trouble in the sewers, rats or a gang of thieves or even once a group of religious dissidents participating in the illegal worship of the old gods, and the protagonists are to kill them in exchange for a small portion of gold, xp, or other minor loot. In this twist on an old classic the set-up should seem relatively familiar, with a local official (one Thomas Milgraham, the under-minister of municipal affairs) hiring a group of adventurers, the PCs, to deal with a number of outlaws who have fled his own security forces and into the vast, maze-like underground sewer system. It is believed they might be holed up in the ruins of the old city, which can be accessed through the sewers. The minister offers up a good description of the outlaws and fair price for their return, dead or alive, and then lets the PCs off to do what they will. The next phase of the adventure sees the PCs heading down into the labyrinthine sewers, where they encounter monsters and their hordes, beggars, and maybe even a few young daredevil couples sneaking away to a secluded location for deeds best done far away from the prying eyes of their conservative elders, as well as anything else you might want to put down there, all before reaching the remnants of the old city and the outlaws.
The outlaws plead with the PCs, claiming that Milgraham is corrupt and that the only reason he’s hunting them is to prevent them from testifying to the local magistrate against him, and they tell the PCs that they would gladly reward them for escorting them to the magistrate’s office. If the PCs decide to help, then, following a swift trial during which the PCs are called upon to be witnesses to the minister’s attempts to silence prospective witness and innocent men (perhaps the minister could offer the PCs a bribe to give false testimony) and the minister is convicted, the local magistrate will ask the PCs if they would care for more work serving the interests of justice, eventually leading up to them being entangled in the world of city politics and other affairs, seeking out injustice and righting wrongs in a confusing and often complicated world. If the PCs decide to just kill the witnesses then the minister pays them their gold and asks if they would like to work with him on another matter, slowly attempting to incorporate the PCs into his growing criminal empire with aspirations of high treason and plenty of profiteering for all.
Skeletons in a Dungeon
Another popular first dungeon, if not necessarily the first adventure: those of us who used to play on an old NES might remember that the first dungeon in the Legend of Zelda was filled with, among other things, skeletons. These show up from time to time in our tabletop games; even though true necromancers are typically too powerful an enemy for the start of most campaigns, their evil skeletal minions can still make for fun and interesting encounters. In this new take on an old favorite, we look at a new way to utilize undead as guardians in a dungeon of another kind.
The PCs all begin the game as prisoners locked securely in the dreaded dungeon known as Reatheion, a prison created by a counsel of powerful mages long ago in order to hold the most dangerous prisoners. It is said that no one has ever left Reatheion, and that once you arrive there you will die there. Since that time, ownership of Reatheion has passed into the hands of a warlord by the name of Nilos, who has gained power largely due to his powerful command of divination. Now, without warning, he has had the PCs removed, each from separate locations on the same day, and relocated them in secret to Reatheion. It is a prison unlike any other, located underground deep beneath the ocean and guarded with magical glyphs and wards and staffed with the undead. The prisoners themselves are more or less left to their own devices after processing, a process which takes about a week and during which new arrivals are examined, cataloged, and assigned quarters. Since the PCs arrived together, they all go through processing together and receive quarters in the same general area. Life in Reatheion isn’t that bad: food is rationed to prisoners each day at dawn, though some prisoners traffic in black market food, either stocked up over time or taken from other prisoners by force.
The PCs’ arrival is a big deal, since they are the first new arrivals in over a century: most of the prisoners in Reatheion are born there, and so the PCs become the center of attention, as everyone wants to know about the outside world. The only prisoner who has been in Reatheion, long enough to remember other newcomers is an old elf by the name of Thelendiel who is said to posses some kind of prophetic power. As time goes on it becomes clear that the PCs need to escape, perhaps because there was something on the outside they need to do, perhaps because the local prison thugs look likely to kill them if they don’t get out of the prison soon, or for any of a dozen other reasons. Unfortunately escape seems difficult - even if the PCs could get past the magical wards they still need to find a way out of the underground caverns, and then back to the surface. If the PCs express any desire to escape Thelendiel approaches them with a plan of sorts, but only if they promise to take him with them. Thelendiel’s plan involves the theft of spell keys given only to a select few of the wardens; after acquiring access to the outer halls, the group will be able to use the keys to bypass the wards and head out of the prison into the monster-infested outer tunnels. There, Thelendiel claims, they must find a certain hidden cove, where a vision has shown him awaits a device which can take them to the surface.
Thelendiel’s plan might be a little unreliable, but it’s all the PCs have and so they must go about the complicated business of escaping, drawing on a dangerous black market, their own wits, improvised weapons, and their fellow prisoners to even make it out of the prison, a task which should take some time and maybe even grant a few level-ups (between 3 and 4 is probably good). After that they need to navigate the outer caves, filled with all kinds of nasty aberrations and more undead prison guards in order to reach the area where Thelendiel’s vision says they can gain transport to the surface (another 2 or 3 level-ups). In fact, after finding their way to the cove, an oversized apparatus of the crab is waiting to take the PCs and Thelendiel back to the surface, if they can defeat the treasure’s mighty guardian. Then, of course, they must survive the journey back to civilization. Once out of the mess they’re in, the PCs are basically free to do as they please, and should be ready to enjoy whatever cool campaign setting you set them up with.
Ok, well that’s it for this week’s Grave Plots. I hope to see you next week; until then I would like to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.