I'm writing a new short campaign for next semester, and I want to slowly drop hints about a duchess and her fortress deep in the woods, and her deceased love (who, importantly to the campaign, has a somewhat distinct appearance), but I don't know how to do it in such a way that the party won't immediately suspect her to be the BBEG and go hunting her down without her machinations progressing enough.
Should I introduce her lore as a sort of urban legend/ghost story at the start of the campaign, before anything suspicious happens? Or as a rumor once undead start rising? Or something else entirely? (This campaign will be at most 14 sessions, and the party just needs to be able to identify her as the culprit and hunt her down with two or three sessions to spare for a dungeon crawl/final battle).
I think one good way to start things like this without immediately leading to "let's go punch the BBEG in the face" is to layer the information.
Perhaps the party first hears about it in a journal, diary, or other text with very limited context, or overhears a rumor a couple towns over where there just isn't much information that is actionable- there's rumors of sightings of undead but no one really agrees on what's happening specifically, or the rumors are actually incorrect or misleading, exaggerated by a village drunk or a doomsayer who tried to make a single skeleton sound like an invasion of ghouls. Maybe they encounter a different group of adventurers or a merchant caravan that encountered something suspicious, but it wasn't a big problem for them and they dealt with the threat for now. Once it becomes more than an isolated incident, it becomes apparent that someone is causing the events.
Then, as part of the investigation into the actual BBEG, perhaps they get a bit more information about the cause. Before finding out who specifically it is, they might discover some noble has been expressing an interest in necromancy, but the source of information wants the adventurers to do a job for them first or mysteriously ends up dead with just enough clues to lead in the right direction after some investigation.
Once you're comfortable with the progress of the campaign, you can be more overt. Perhaps someone saw the duchess hiring grave robbers to retrieve corpses for her necromantic experiments, or she might even send an invitation to dinner a la Strahd, perhaps even posing to be interested in *ending* the undead situation instead of being the true cause.
Obviously there are many different ways to go about it but I think my preferred tactic is to use a bit of misdirection and obfuscation to make the initial information too vague or incorrect to lead directly to the BBEG's door, while still getting players connected with the crisis at hand. Obviously, tailor it to your group- some groups would be very upset to find out that they wasted a session tracking down a single skeleton that's been terrifying a tiny fishing hamlet's resident drunkard, while others would think it's interesting to see a world that has unreliable sources of information and treat it as good worldbuilding.
The best way I have done this is to make short (skyrim-level short) books for the world. The party will go to research something, and I will present them with a book that is about 25% what they needed, 50% interesting filler lore, 15% foreshadowing, and 10% misinformation.
Things which have come about from this:
- The artificer sought out a book about skyflight, to improve their Flyorite drive for their skyship. The Cleric read the book and discovered that another form of flight - that of using Bladderworm Venom - can set off a "Catastrophic Chain Reaction" if exposed to strong acid. When they were attacked by Kobolds with a Bladdership, he instigated this, causing their own captain to melt (essentially, the balloon blew out the breath weapon of an adult dragon as it exploded in acid).
- The Barbarian sought out a book on flying animals to try and find a flying mount. In that book, there was a passage regarding hunting, which explained about the Ten-Year Hunt, where the paladins of the holy order of the Cleric in the group hunted down the werebeasts of the West and killed them, using silver supplied from the family mines of said cleric. The Barbarian is on a lifelong quest to find the hunter who killed his mother. He is a were-bear. This came up roughly a year after the book was handed out.
- The party picked up a book of folklore to research the ancient lost kingdom of Aren, and in it found a story of the BBEG from a bygone age.
It takes me a few hours to write out some easily consumed lore-dumps, then I smatter it with old artwork from the public domain, and then print it as a booklet for them. the props look amazing, and I get to hand out interesting lore about my world which might otherwise not come up!
I just let them know what book they find, and then explain that I will have to make it between sessions, but let them know the details of things that they find relevant to their efforts. It's made a little bit of a rod for my own back, because now they keep going to libraries - but that just tells me that they're enjoying it!
How I'd do it, but my style may differ from your own.
While walking through town, or sitting in a tavern they overhear two commoners debating how life used to be better before this democracy stuff. The town council is nowhere near as effective as when their Grandmother served the Duchess and her family.
Wherever it's appropriate to have a bookcase, describe the titles of a few books one of them being the 'Duchess and her lost love' which is the fairytale version of how the two met and fell in love.
In some building there's an old map hanging from the walls, it depicts the region as it one was. It has interesting features on it, like old farmhouses now demolished to make way for the local adventurer's guild. It has an old watermill that has been disused. It has an old fortress which doesn't appear on any modern maps. It even still has the old library on it, you know, before it caught fire and had to be rebuilt.
In another building there's paintings or tin-types of different historical figures of the region, the owner of the building has been collecting them now for years. One is of the local king, another is of some random noble and her husband, another is of a hero of legend.
I'd try to do it through showing the party the clues. Either they'll pick up on them, or they won't. I think Bethesda games are great for this kind of environmental storytelling. Fallout 4 and Skyrim had some great examples that might get raise your interest in a location if you're paying attention, but if you weren't you'd dismiss them. Then down the line when something is revealed you suddenly twig and realise that the skeleton laid out in an odd way was showing you a part of the world.
This makes it environmental and not lore, and theoretically possible less boring for the party. If the characters choose to ask more questions about the Duchess then the two commoners having a debate can fill them in on the legend. The point is that it then becomes a player choice, not a lore dump. They've asked for it, you're not dumping it out of the blue.
It takes some work, but I believe the best way to 'lore dump' is to prepare documents that, while otherwise relevant to what they're doing now, contain small snippets of the relevant lore.
If you tell the party in session #7 they hear a rumor about this Duchess lady, in session #11 about a castle in the woods, etc., then by session #30 when the pay-off comes, they'll have forgotten all of that lore. We (as in people) tend to forget information that can't be immediately contextualized. However, if they've got those physical pieces of paper you've been handing out throughout the campaign, then one of them will probably think to either re-read them or remember that one of them might contain relevant information.
We (as in people) tend to forget information that can't be immediately contextualized. However, if they've got those physical pieces of paper you've been handing out throughout the campaign, then one of them will probably think to either re-read them or remember that one of them might contain relevant information.
This is VERY table and player dependant. If you're at a table where one player is an obsessive notetaker, you better believe that they'll be on top of that. Likewise, the table I run for all Autistic or ADHD folks, they don't forget stuff. It's almost as if they're wired to remember elements of the world that even I as GM have forgotten I dropped in as colour.
Granted, as a general rule, yes many players might forget this stuff but it really is in my experience player dependant.
That's the thing I find most about lore though, if you're at a table with combat focused players, sometimes they don't care about the Lore or the enemy's motivations. They want a cartoon villain that they can bring to justice (in one way or another).
My point here is that you're making a very sweeping statement about people here that doesn't line up with my experience either of the hobby or of people in general.
Let me ask, what is wrong with a Lore dump? What is so negative about it? Aren't there positives?
I know one negative of a lore dump is some people will have their eyes glaze over, but then those same people are probably going to glaze over no matter what and are who Martin explains as "combat focused players, sometimes they don't care about the Lore or the enemy's motivations. They want a cartoon villain that they can bring to justice (in one way or another)."
I'm writing a new short campaign for next semester, and I want to slowly drop hints about a duchess and her fortress deep in the woods, and her deceased love (who, importantly to the campaign, has a somewhat distinct appearance), but I don't know how to do it in such a way that the party won't immediately suspect her to be the BBEG and go hunting her down without her machinations progressing enough.
Should I introduce her lore as a sort of urban legend/ghost story at the start of the campaign, before anything suspicious happens? Or as a rumor once undead start rising? Or something else entirely? (This campaign will be at most 14 sessions, and the party just needs to be able to identify her as the culprit and hunt her down with two or three sessions to spare for a dungeon crawl/final battle).
First question -- how recently did the duchess' love die?
If it's recent, you could start the campaign in the town that's still mourning that NPC's passing. Maybe they were a local official or hero of some kind, and how they died might be all anyone is talking about if it was unusual or significant in some way, even if they just died suddenly in a riding accident or whatever. You can just present it as local color -- maybe the party gets hired by the town to complete some minor "clear out the goblins causing trouble on the main road" quest that the recently deceased local hero was supposed to do before their passing, so it's just a way to explain why they're there at all. Then, when events start ramping up later on and seem to involve the deceased somehow (with the focus on the person who died and not the duchess), checking in on the widow who has isolated herself deep in the woods -- or just investigating the deceased's tomb, which happens to be located on the castle grounds -- would be a logical step to get the party into the end game
If this is more of a "the duchess' love has been dead for decades and she's finally figured out how to bring them back" situation, then you probably want to scatter multiple clues around that point vaguely in her direction. People reporting spooky encounters in the woods. Some zombies are found wearing old livery of the duchess' family, but her nephew is the one in charge now (i.e. a red herring) and he seems not just innocent, but willing to help. The story of how he came to govern the area -- his uncle passed away many years ago, and rather than take over herself, his aunt withdrew from public life in sorrow -- might come up while the party is investigating him. While doing some other side quest, they find an old timer who remembers their marriage, and how she wasn't well liked at first because she came from a family that had an unsavory reputation for dabbling in dark magic
If you're worried that the party will jump ahead too quickly (and let's be honest, the moment you mention a mysterious castle in the woods, they'll want to go there), the easiest way to delay them is to give them more urgent matters to attend to first: defending the town from attacks, searching for missing persons, a quest to undo a curse, etc. Eventually it'll become clear at least some of those urgent matters will tie into what's happening at the castle, depending on what sort of plot the duchess has going on, but not until you're ready for them to get there
The clues you provide before gearing up for the climax should just be small, scattered pieces of the puzzle. If you lead with "spooky castle in the woods", even if it's just a local legend or something, you've all but given the game away -- unless it's a Barovia-like setting where it's obvious where the trouble is coming from, but it's made clear to the party that they're badly outgunned if they go charging in right away, and that doesn't sound like the vibe you want
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Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator (Assassin rogue) Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Let me ask, what is wrong with a Lore dump? What is so negative about it? Aren't there positives?
I know one negative of a lore dump is some people will have their eyes glaze over, but then those same people are probably going to glaze over no matter what and are who Martin explains as "combat focused players, sometimes they don't care about the Lore or the enemy's motivations. They want a cartoon villain that they can bring to justice (in one way or another)."
To be clear, no shade intended on the combat focused players was meant. In my opinion there's no judgement to pass on different playstyles. Perhaps I phrased poorly.
No not at all, I think you phrased it correctly. There is nothing wrong with those players either. D&D is for all kind and those combat focused players make great teammates.
In general the way you can drop information without the players immediately seizing on it and deciding "that's the BBEG" is by dropping lots of information... most of which isn't relevant. This will, however, create a problem with the players going chasing off after red herrings, or failing to notice your clues at all, so you might want to just let it be fairly obvious but stall the PCs in other ways (for example... they might just hear about a fortress in the woods, but not who owns it or enough about its location to actually find it).
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I'm writing a new short campaign for next semester, and I want to slowly drop hints about a duchess and her fortress deep in the woods, and her deceased love (who, importantly to the campaign, has a somewhat distinct appearance), but I don't know how to do it in such a way that the party won't immediately suspect her to be the BBEG and go hunting her down without her machinations progressing enough.
Should I introduce her lore as a sort of urban legend/ghost story at the start of the campaign, before anything suspicious happens? Or as a rumor once undead start rising? Or something else entirely? (This campaign will be at most 14 sessions, and the party just needs to be able to identify her as the culprit and hunt her down with two or three sessions to spare for a dungeon crawl/final battle).
:)
I think one good way to start things like this without immediately leading to "let's go punch the BBEG in the face" is to layer the information.
Perhaps the party first hears about it in a journal, diary, or other text with very limited context, or overhears a rumor a couple towns over where there just isn't much information that is actionable- there's rumors of sightings of undead but no one really agrees on what's happening specifically, or the rumors are actually incorrect or misleading, exaggerated by a village drunk or a doomsayer who tried to make a single skeleton sound like an invasion of ghouls. Maybe they encounter a different group of adventurers or a merchant caravan that encountered something suspicious, but it wasn't a big problem for them and they dealt with the threat for now. Once it becomes more than an isolated incident, it becomes apparent that someone is causing the events.
Then, as part of the investigation into the actual BBEG, perhaps they get a bit more information about the cause. Before finding out who specifically it is, they might discover some noble has been expressing an interest in necromancy, but the source of information wants the adventurers to do a job for them first or mysteriously ends up dead with just enough clues to lead in the right direction after some investigation.
Once you're comfortable with the progress of the campaign, you can be more overt. Perhaps someone saw the duchess hiring grave robbers to retrieve corpses for her necromantic experiments, or she might even send an invitation to dinner a la Strahd, perhaps even posing to be interested in *ending* the undead situation instead of being the true cause.
Obviously there are many different ways to go about it but I think my preferred tactic is to use a bit of misdirection and obfuscation to make the initial information too vague or incorrect to lead directly to the BBEG's door, while still getting players connected with the crisis at hand. Obviously, tailor it to your group- some groups would be very upset to find out that they wasted a session tracking down a single skeleton that's been terrifying a tiny fishing hamlet's resident drunkard, while others would think it's interesting to see a world that has unreliable sources of information and treat it as good worldbuilding.
The best way I have done this is to make short (skyrim-level short) books for the world. The party will go to research something, and I will present them with a book that is about 25% what they needed, 50% interesting filler lore, 15% foreshadowing, and 10% misinformation.
Things which have come about from this:
- The artificer sought out a book about skyflight, to improve their Flyorite drive for their skyship. The Cleric read the book and discovered that another form of flight - that of using Bladderworm Venom - can set off a "Catastrophic Chain Reaction" if exposed to strong acid. When they were attacked by Kobolds with a Bladdership, he instigated this, causing their own captain to melt (essentially, the balloon blew out the breath weapon of an adult dragon as it exploded in acid).
- The Barbarian sought out a book on flying animals to try and find a flying mount. In that book, there was a passage regarding hunting, which explained about the Ten-Year Hunt, where the paladins of the holy order of the Cleric in the group hunted down the werebeasts of the West and killed them, using silver supplied from the family mines of said cleric. The Barbarian is on a lifelong quest to find the hunter who killed his mother. He is a were-bear. This came up roughly a year after the book was handed out.
- The party picked up a book of folklore to research the ancient lost kingdom of Aren, and in it found a story of the BBEG from a bygone age.
It takes me a few hours to write out some easily consumed lore-dumps, then I smatter it with old artwork from the public domain, and then print it as a booklet for them. the props look amazing, and I get to hand out interesting lore about my world which might otherwise not come up!
I just let them know what book they find, and then explain that I will have to make it between sessions, but let them know the details of things that they find relevant to their efforts. It's made a little bit of a rod for my own back, because now they keep going to libraries - but that just tells me that they're enjoying it!
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How I'd do it, but my style may differ from your own.
I'd try to do it through showing the party the clues. Either they'll pick up on them, or they won't. I think Bethesda games are great for this kind of environmental storytelling. Fallout 4 and Skyrim had some great examples that might get raise your interest in a location if you're paying attention, but if you weren't you'd dismiss them. Then down the line when something is revealed you suddenly twig and realise that the skeleton laid out in an odd way was showing you a part of the world.
This makes it environmental and not lore, and theoretically possible less boring for the party. If the characters choose to ask more questions about the Duchess then the two commoners having a debate can fill them in on the legend. The point is that it then becomes a player choice, not a lore dump. They've asked for it, you're not dumping it out of the blue.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
It takes some work, but I believe the best way to 'lore dump' is to prepare documents that, while otherwise relevant to what they're doing now, contain small snippets of the relevant lore.
If you tell the party in session #7 they hear a rumor about this Duchess lady, in session #11 about a castle in the woods, etc., then by session #30 when the pay-off comes, they'll have forgotten all of that lore. We (as in people) tend to forget information that can't be immediately contextualized. However, if they've got those physical pieces of paper you've been handing out throughout the campaign, then one of them will probably think to either re-read them or remember that one of them might contain relevant information.
This is VERY table and player dependant. If you're at a table where one player is an obsessive notetaker, you better believe that they'll be on top of that. Likewise, the table I run for all Autistic or ADHD folks, they don't forget stuff. It's almost as if they're wired to remember elements of the world that even I as GM have forgotten I dropped in as colour.
Granted, as a general rule, yes many players might forget this stuff but it really is in my experience player dependant.
That's the thing I find most about lore though, if you're at a table with combat focused players, sometimes they don't care about the Lore or the enemy's motivations. They want a cartoon villain that they can bring to justice (in one way or another).
My point here is that you're making a very sweeping statement about people here that doesn't line up with my experience either of the hobby or of people in general.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
Let me ask, what is wrong with a Lore dump? What is so negative about it? Aren't there positives?
I know one negative of a lore dump is some people will have their eyes glaze over, but then those same people are probably going to glaze over no matter what and are who Martin explains as "combat focused players, sometimes they don't care about the Lore or the enemy's motivations. They want a cartoon villain that they can bring to justice (in one way or another)."
First question -- how recently did the duchess' love die?
If it's recent, you could start the campaign in the town that's still mourning that NPC's passing. Maybe they were a local official or hero of some kind, and how they died might be all anyone is talking about if it was unusual or significant in some way, even if they just died suddenly in a riding accident or whatever. You can just present it as local color -- maybe the party gets hired by the town to complete some minor "clear out the goblins causing trouble on the main road" quest that the recently deceased local hero was supposed to do before their passing, so it's just a way to explain why they're there at all. Then, when events start ramping up later on and seem to involve the deceased somehow (with the focus on the person who died and not the duchess), checking in on the widow who has isolated herself deep in the woods -- or just investigating the deceased's tomb, which happens to be located on the castle grounds -- would be a logical step to get the party into the end game
If this is more of a "the duchess' love has been dead for decades and she's finally figured out how to bring them back" situation, then you probably want to scatter multiple clues around that point vaguely in her direction. People reporting spooky encounters in the woods. Some zombies are found wearing old livery of the duchess' family, but her nephew is the one in charge now (i.e. a red herring) and he seems not just innocent, but willing to help. The story of how he came to govern the area -- his uncle passed away many years ago, and rather than take over herself, his aunt withdrew from public life in sorrow -- might come up while the party is investigating him. While doing some other side quest, they find an old timer who remembers their marriage, and how she wasn't well liked at first because she came from a family that had an unsavory reputation for dabbling in dark magic
If you're worried that the party will jump ahead too quickly (and let's be honest, the moment you mention a mysterious castle in the woods, they'll want to go there), the easiest way to delay them is to give them more urgent matters to attend to first: defending the town from attacks, searching for missing persons, a quest to undo a curse, etc. Eventually it'll become clear at least some of those urgent matters will tie into what's happening at the castle, depending on what sort of plot the duchess has going on, but not until you're ready for them to get there
The clues you provide before gearing up for the climax should just be small, scattered pieces of the puzzle. If you lead with "spooky castle in the woods", even if it's just a local legend or something, you've all but given the game away -- unless it's a Barovia-like setting where it's obvious where the trouble is coming from, but it's made clear to the party that they're badly outgunned if they go charging in right away, and that doesn't sound like the vibe you want
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator (Assassin rogue)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
To be clear, no shade intended on the combat focused players was meant. In my opinion there's no judgement to pass on different playstyles. Perhaps I phrased poorly.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
No not at all, I think you phrased it correctly. There is nothing wrong with those players either. D&D is for all kind and those combat focused players make great teammates.
In general the way you can drop information without the players immediately seizing on it and deciding "that's the BBEG" is by dropping lots of information... most of which isn't relevant. This will, however, create a problem with the players going chasing off after red herrings, or failing to notice your clues at all, so you might want to just let it be fairly obvious but stall the PCs in other ways (for example... they might just hear about a fortress in the woods, but not who owns it or enough about its location to actually find it).