I am hoping to get some thoughts from the hivemind to improve this encounter / quest. I know what I want to do, but I'm not sure the best way to do it so that it plays correctly and is fun.
Level 15 party containing 4 members
Background: There is a human NPC named Toots. He is a tiny, old codger type. Toots has become the "magic item dealer" for the party. His "magic shop" is actually a demi-plane that he controls entirely. In his shop he is essentially God.
Entry to his shop is controlled via a magic coin. Normally toots holds onto the coin, his clients touch his robe, and they are whisked off to shop.
Every time the party wants to use his shop I have turned it into a mini-adventure before he would allow them access. Because I am always looking for excuses to make them do stuff. Because it's D&D. This time, the party arrived at where they would expect him to be just to find his coin sitting on the ground next to one of his guards. The guard tells them that Toots went into his shop a few days ago and has not come back. Another guard attempted to move the coin and immediately vanished, so now this guard is left there guarding the coin sitting on the ground, and making sure no one else tries to touch it.
The Plan: While doing maintenance in his shop, Toots had a naturally occurring medical emergency. My thought was he had a stroke, though I'm not married to that idea. The party needs to go into the coin, find him, and cast some variety of healing magic on him to fix him.
However, until they do manage to fix him, this entire plane is thrown into chaos.
I have thoughts on how to play this, which is in the spoiler block below. My chief concern is "Is this fun?", but also "Will this take long enough?" The goal is for this to take from 1 to 2 hours.
I would like to hear anyone elses thoughts on how to best manifest this, even if they look nothing like my thoughts.
And, yes, the initial "what would happen if God had a stroke?" idea did come from the movie Logan, but the answer of "everyone dies" isn't particularly satisfying in this context :)
My first idea on how this would work:
"Toots" physical form in this plane has been blown apart by the stroke. They need to reassemble him and cast Greater Restoration.
It doesn't make much sense for this plane, which was previously just a big room lined with magic items, to suddenly be a standard dungeon with hallways and doors. My thought was that it's just one big room where everything I'm about to describe is all happening at once.
1) His legs are running around the room. They will need to grappled and subdued. They will constantly be trying to kick free and will probably hurt quite a lot if they connect (getting kicked by "God" would probably hurt, right?) 2) The walls and ceiling are covered in spider webs. His arms and torso are climbing along the walls and will also need subdued. 3) There are some spider-related-monsters climbing on the webs. One of them has Toot's head and is blabbering incoherently about magic swords. They need to kill that one, and take Toots's head. 4) every round a "random" magic effect goes off. On intiative 20 I roll a d6 and (1) Lightning Bolt, (2) Enlarge (3) Shrink (4) Hold Person (5) No Magic This Round (6) Nothing happens.
That sounds fun to me. Another idea is Toots was keeping order in the demiplane, and now with him dead, things are getting wierd. Stuff is self-animating, so there’s a wand of wall of stone that’s just throwing up barriers here and there. A ring of invisibility is placing itself on various things. Magic swords are dueling each other, the eversmoking bottle tipped over and has been clouding up the place, the alchemy jug has been dumping mayonnaise everywhere, to the point it’s created difficult terrain in spots. Go full sorcerer’s apprentice.
If I were playing, I might not try to get all the parts. At level 15 they could have access to resurrection. All they’d need is one part.
As far as time, it’s tough to say how long it will take. There’s some parties that would spend 45 minutes staring at the coin on the ground and debating if they trust the guard, worry about what if someone else comes in to take the coin. Want to mage hand the coin to some other location. Start a side conversation about that old campaign where they jumped into a different coin, etc. But some parties will just jump in and go for it. So that’s going to be more about your group than an objective measure.
I had not considered having the magic items all go wild, though in retrospect that's pretty obvious. Among other things, there is canonically an Apparatus of Kwalish in his shop. Having that come to life and start clawing everyone would be fun! (Fun side note: I couldn't remember what the AoK was called so I googled "DnD Lobster Tank" and it was the first result)
Any other thoughts on what specific items could be in his shop (outside of what you outlined above) that would also create fun interactions? I will go digging through my DnD books when I get home, but that won't be until this evening.
Also Resurrection shouldn't do anything since he's not dead. Just... impaired...
Your last point about the coin is also true. While the party is quite familiar with Toots and his coin, it has always behaved properly in previous encounters. Our last session ended with the guard telling them about the coin and the vanishing guard, but I could see my party staring at it for a while trying to figure out what to do next and how to sequence break what I obviously want them to do.
depending on how deep you want this to be (the running-kicking legs implies not) then you could have them fight Toot's inner demons. Uncover some interesting history as they play through his past - maybe have a "guide" that is death explain that his life is flashing before his eyes, and they will have to catch him up to save him. Death now has power over the plane, so is an ambivalent god in this place.
They may have to go through his happiest moments, his saddest, and finally catch him at the final moment of his life, where they need to stop him doing whatever he did (sticking a fork in a toaster to get some toast out or something) to stop him from dying. Doing so brings him back to Stability, allowing him to be healed as the plane around them resolves into normality again. Have the edges fade to darkness if he is fading.
I like that as an idea, but am not sure if there is any actual game play there. This sounds like me just describing a bunch of rooms.
This is my first long term DnD campaign. We've been playing for over 4 years now and started at level 1. Your comment touched on one of the things that I do find annoying about this game: It's not a great mechanism for story telling. It's good for telling certain kinds of stories, but not all stories can easily turn into game play. And if you can't turn it into game play then you're kind of stuck.
I have another side plot going on in my campaign which I have done nothing with for years because I have no idea how to turn it into gameplay. I could turn it into a short story if I were so inclined (I am not) but not a series of quests. So the loose threads are just kind of hanging out there with no real form. I may make another thread about it on here. Maybe one of y'all can come up with something where I have failed...
depending on whether he has a decently mysterious backstory, you could consider having the quest be that he needs to survive every encounter.
So let's say (for the sake of this) that he was a merchant on a ship, who stole an artefact which has allowed him to become this powerful. The artefact was first in a mummies tomb, then taken by boat to the main city, and then attempted to be retrieved by cultists of the mummy, and then ultimately allowed him to gain this power.
Death tells them that he must survive his whole life to make it back. Then make a series of encounters with an NPC to first find, and then protect
1: Finding the Amulet, a swarm of undead assaults the archaelogical group. Young Toots runs in to grab the amulet, and needs defending.
2: Returning it, the boat is assailed by pirates, who Toots tries to hide from, meaning the party has to find him first.
3: Arriving in the city, he is chased by Cultists, and needs help losing them before they get the Amulet.
4: In an unexpectedly dark scene, Toots performs a ritual with sacrifice to activate the Amulet, and the shadows he summons are after his soul.
5: They arrive in the shop, with Toots on the ground - no Amulet. They have to realise that he needs the Amulet, and find an Assassin in the shop with the Amulet, and have to defeat them.
6: Return the Amulet and heal Toots, now realising his power was not entirely gotten through study.
So, he’s in parts but not dead. Ok. You should try to make that clear to the players, because when I see someone dismembered, I assume they’re dead. But that may just be me.
If you have a specific solution, you might have him leave a note: If you’re reading this something has gone terribly wrong, please take the following steps to fix it. Something like that.
You could have a dread helm, the one that makes it seem like you have glowing red eyes but has no other effect. The party could see glowing red eyes through the smoke from the bottle. They’ll probably assume it’s a demon and attack, only to find it was just a helmet sitting on a shelf, maybe with a mouse inside it.
A bag of tricks could spill open and give you a fight encounter, though at level 15, it probably wouldn’t be much challenge.
The fact that his various body parts were moving and his head was talking was supposed to indicate that he's not actually dead. But I could always split the difference and just say they fixed him if they manage to cast pretty much any heal / resurrect spell that makes sense with the parts they manage to assemble.
This is shockingly good for something that you couldn't have possibly thought about for more than a half hour. I'm impressed.
Not sure which direction I am going with this, but I like this as a completely different approach to the quest.
Thanks! I think on my feet!
Now I think of it more, it's a really good moral quandry - they will be seeing Toots as who he was, not the doddery old man. If they don't defend him, he dies.
Super-triple bonus points if you tie it into a character backstory - Toots' ritual killed the druids parents, for example. The artefact was a totem from the barbarians now-dead tribe. Do they save the doddery fool they know, or do they let the evil backstory die with him?
imagine that old man celebrity you love, and finding out he supported the nazis as you are trying to save him. What do you do?
I have a different suggestion which might be interesting. I bring it up in part because it is possible that the idea of a stroke might hit too close to home for some of your players if they have any experience with it. It is also something that D&D magic might not be able to fix since magic can't cure "old age" so if it can cure the things that prevent someone from dying of "old age" where does the magic stop?
The alternate suggestion would be ..
This is an attempt to rob Toots' shop. Another group discovered Toots' schedule and were there before the party. They intended to subjugate Toots' via magic and have him take them to the shop so they could loot it.
The demiplane itself is completely subject to Toots' mind and how he visualizes it. It can be completely reconfigured if he wishes, it is his demiplane afterall. The characters have only ever seen a shop because that is all Toots usually uses it for.
However, the spells the theives cast on Toots did not mix well with Toots' contingency magic and the magic of the demiplane. The shop is supposed to be redeployed into a defensive configuration if Toots is attacked when in the plane. The effect of the theives magic, the transition to the demiplane and Toots own defensive magic have temporarily driven Toots into a state of paranoia and hallucinations. The shop has been reconfigured to its defensive configuration. The party needs to fight through the shop defenses, fight past the theives, find Toots and cast Greater Restoration on him to clear the temporary madness and allow him to deal efficiently with any remaining intruders.
Anyway, its another idea in case you are interested ...
That leads to a more classic "fight through the dungeon" type scenario, admittedly one that is playing by an entirely different set of rules.
Unfortunately, this is a bit too close to the last "Toots related" quest that they had to do the last time that they came to his shop. Specifically he had left his coin at his home in Waterdeep which, for reasons related to other stuff going on in the campaign, is in the middle of a small civil war. So they had to go in, andfight past his magical defenses and a bunch of other nonsense to retrieve the coin.
Also, I am not planning to tell them what happened (aka: the stroke) and let them try to piece that together for themselves. You do bring up a point that it might hit too close to home for some of the players, so maybe I need to rework that a bit, or just keep it intentionally vague.
I am hoping to get some thoughts from the hivemind to improve this encounter / quest. I know what I want to do, but I'm not sure the best way to do it so that it plays correctly and is fun.
Level 15 party containing 4 members
Background: There is a human NPC named Toots. He is a tiny, old codger type. Toots has become the "magic item dealer" for the party. His "magic shop" is actually a demi-plane that he controls entirely. In his shop he is essentially God.
Entry to his shop is controlled via a magic coin. Normally toots holds onto the coin, his clients touch his robe, and they are whisked off to shop.
Every time the party wants to use his shop I have turned it into a mini-adventure before he would allow them access. Because I am always looking for excuses to make them do stuff. Because it's D&D. This time, the party arrived at where they would expect him to be just to find his coin sitting on the ground next to one of his guards. The guard tells them that Toots went into his shop a few days ago and has not come back. Another guard attempted to move the coin and immediately vanished, so now this guard is left there guarding the coin sitting on the ground, and making sure no one else tries to touch it.
The Plan: While doing maintenance in his shop, Toots had a naturally occurring medical emergency. My thought was he had a stroke, though I'm not married to that idea. The party needs to go into the coin, find him, and cast some variety of healing magic on him to fix him.
However, until they do manage to fix him, this entire plane is thrown into chaos.
I have thoughts on how to play this, which is in the spoiler block below. My chief concern is "Is this fun?", but also "Will this take long enough?" The goal is for this to take from 1 to 2 hours.
I would like to hear anyone elses thoughts on how to best manifest this, even if they look nothing like my thoughts.
And, yes, the initial "what would happen if God had a stroke?" idea did come from the movie Logan, but the answer of "everyone dies" isn't particularly satisfying in this context :)
My first idea on how this would work:
"Toots" physical form in this plane has been blown apart by the stroke. They need to reassemble him and cast Greater Restoration.
It doesn't make much sense for this plane, which was previously just a big room lined with magic items, to suddenly be a standard dungeon with hallways and doors. My thought was that it's just one big room where everything I'm about to describe is all happening at once.
1) His legs are running around the room. They will need to grappled and subdued. They will constantly be trying to kick free and will probably hurt quite a lot if they connect (getting kicked by "God" would probably hurt, right?)
2) The walls and ceiling are covered in spider webs. His arms and torso are climbing along the walls and will also need subdued.
3) There are some spider-related-monsters climbing on the webs. One of them has Toot's head and is blabbering incoherently about magic swords. They need to kill that one, and take Toots's head.
4) every round a "random" magic effect goes off. On intiative 20 I roll a d6 and (1) Lightning Bolt, (2) Enlarge (3) Shrink (4) Hold Person (5) No Magic This Round (6) Nothing happens.
Thoughts?
That sounds fun to me. Another idea is Toots was keeping order in the demiplane, and now with him dead, things are getting wierd. Stuff is self-animating, so there’s a wand of wall of stone that’s just throwing up barriers here and there. A ring of invisibility is placing itself on various things. Magic swords are dueling each other, the eversmoking bottle tipped over and has been clouding up the place, the alchemy jug has been dumping mayonnaise everywhere, to the point it’s created difficult terrain in spots. Go full sorcerer’s apprentice.
If I were playing, I might not try to get all the parts. At level 15 they could have access to resurrection. All they’d need is one part.
As far as time, it’s tough to say how long it will take. There’s some parties that would spend 45 minutes staring at the coin on the ground and debating if they trust the guard, worry about what if someone else comes in to take the coin. Want to mage hand the coin to some other location. Start a side conversation about that old campaign where they jumped into a different coin, etc. But some parties will just jump in and go for it. So that’s going to be more about your group than an objective measure.
I had not considered having the magic items all go wild, though in retrospect that's pretty obvious. Among other things, there is canonically an Apparatus of Kwalish in his shop. Having that come to life and start clawing everyone would be fun! (Fun side note: I couldn't remember what the AoK was called so I googled "DnD Lobster Tank" and it was the first result)
Any other thoughts on what specific items could be in his shop (outside of what you outlined above) that would also create fun interactions? I will go digging through my DnD books when I get home, but that won't be until this evening.
Also Resurrection shouldn't do anything since he's not dead. Just... impaired...
Your last point about the coin is also true. While the party is quite familiar with Toots and his coin, it has always behaved properly in previous encounters. Our last session ended with the guard telling them about the coin and the vanishing guard, but I could see my party staring at it for a while trying to figure out what to do next and how to sequence break what I obviously want them to do.
depending on how deep you want this to be (the running-kicking legs implies not) then you could have them fight Toot's inner demons. Uncover some interesting history as they play through his past - maybe have a "guide" that is death explain that his life is flashing before his eyes, and they will have to catch him up to save him. Death now has power over the plane, so is an ambivalent god in this place.
They may have to go through his happiest moments, his saddest, and finally catch him at the final moment of his life, where they need to stop him doing whatever he did (sticking a fork in a toaster to get some toast out or something) to stop him from dying. Doing so brings him back to Stability, allowing him to be healed as the plane around them resolves into normality again. Have the edges fade to darkness if he is fading.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
I like that as an idea, but am not sure if there is any actual game play there. This sounds like me just describing a bunch of rooms.
This is my first long term DnD campaign. We've been playing for over 4 years now and started at level 1. Your comment touched on one of the things that I do find annoying about this game: It's not a great mechanism for story telling. It's good for telling certain kinds of stories, but not all stories can easily turn into game play. And if you can't turn it into game play then you're kind of stuck.
I have another side plot going on in my campaign which I have done nothing with for years because I have no idea how to turn it into gameplay. I could turn it into a short story if I were so inclined (I am not) but not a series of quests. So the loose threads are just kind of hanging out there with no real form. I may make another thread about it on here. Maybe one of y'all can come up with something where I have failed...
depending on whether he has a decently mysterious backstory, you could consider having the quest be that he needs to survive every encounter.
So let's say (for the sake of this) that he was a merchant on a ship, who stole an artefact which has allowed him to become this powerful. The artefact was first in a mummies tomb, then taken by boat to the main city, and then attempted to be retrieved by cultists of the mummy, and then ultimately allowed him to gain this power.
Death tells them that he must survive his whole life to make it back. Then make a series of encounters with an NPC to first find, and then protect
1: Finding the Amulet, a swarm of undead assaults the archaelogical group. Young Toots runs in to grab the amulet, and needs defending.
2: Returning it, the boat is assailed by pirates, who Toots tries to hide from, meaning the party has to find him first.
3: Arriving in the city, he is chased by Cultists, and needs help losing them before they get the Amulet.
4: In an unexpectedly dark scene, Toots performs a ritual with sacrifice to activate the Amulet, and the shadows he summons are after his soul.
5: They arrive in the shop, with Toots on the ground - no Amulet. They have to realise that he needs the Amulet, and find an Assassin in the shop with the Amulet, and have to defeat them.
6: Return the Amulet and heal Toots, now realising his power was not entirely gotten through study.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
So, he’s in parts but not dead. Ok. You should try to make that clear to the players, because when I see someone dismembered, I assume they’re dead. But that may just be me.
If you have a specific solution, you might have him leave a note: If you’re reading this something has gone terribly wrong, please take the following steps to fix it. Something like that.
You could have a dread helm, the one that makes it seem like you have glowing red eyes but has no other effect. The party could see glowing red eyes through the smoke from the bottle. They’ll probably assume it’s a demon and attack, only to find it was just a helmet sitting on a shelf, maybe with a mouse inside it.
A bag of tricks could spill open and give you a fight encounter, though at level 15, it probably wouldn’t be much challenge.
The fact that his various body parts were moving and his head was talking was supposed to indicate that he's not actually dead. But I could always split the difference and just say they fixed him if they manage to cast pretty much any heal / resurrect spell that makes sense with the parts they manage to assemble.
Leave it open ended.
This is shockingly good for something that you couldn't have possibly thought about for more than a half hour. I'm impressed.
Not sure which direction I am going with this, but I like this as a completely different approach to the quest.
Thanks! I think on my feet!
Now I think of it more, it's a really good moral quandry - they will be seeing Toots as who he was, not the doddery old man. If they don't defend him, he dies.
Super-triple bonus points if you tie it into a character backstory - Toots' ritual killed the druids parents, for example. The artefact was a totem from the barbarians now-dead tribe. Do they save the doddery fool they know, or do they let the evil backstory die with him?
imagine that old man celebrity you love, and finding out he supported the nazis as you are trying to save him. What do you do?
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
I have a different suggestion which might be interesting. I bring it up in part because it is possible that the idea of a stroke might hit too close to home for some of your players if they have any experience with it. It is also something that D&D magic might not be able to fix since magic can't cure "old age" so if it can cure the things that prevent someone from dying of "old age" where does the magic stop?
The alternate suggestion would be ..
This is an attempt to rob Toots' shop. Another group discovered Toots' schedule and were there before the party. They intended to subjugate Toots' via magic and have him take them to the shop so they could loot it.
The demiplane itself is completely subject to Toots' mind and how he visualizes it. It can be completely reconfigured if he wishes, it is his demiplane afterall. The characters have only ever seen a shop because that is all Toots usually uses it for.
However, the spells the theives cast on Toots did not mix well with Toots' contingency magic and the magic of the demiplane. The shop is supposed to be redeployed into a defensive configuration if Toots is attacked when in the plane. The effect of the theives magic, the transition to the demiplane and Toots own defensive magic have temporarily driven Toots into a state of paranoia and hallucinations. The shop has been reconfigured to its defensive configuration. The party needs to fight through the shop defenses, fight past the theives, find Toots and cast Greater Restoration on him to clear the temporary madness and allow him to deal efficiently with any remaining intruders.
Anyway, its another idea in case you are interested ...
That leads to a more classic "fight through the dungeon" type scenario, admittedly one that is playing by an entirely different set of rules.
Unfortunately, this is a bit too close to the last "Toots related" quest that they had to do the last time that they came to his shop. Specifically he had left his coin at his home in Waterdeep which, for reasons related to other stuff going on in the campaign, is in the middle of a small civil war. So they had to go in, andfight past his magical defenses and a bunch of other nonsense to retrieve the coin.
Also, I am not planning to tell them what happened (aka: the stroke) and let them try to piece that together for themselves. You do bring up a point that it might hit too close to home for some of the players, so maybe I need to rework that a bit, or just keep it intentionally vague.
a knock to the head could be sufficient detail!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!