Riddle Adventure Trailers

[Judd]

I posted this thing on RPG.net and since the Riddle is on my mind lately many of my adventure seeds have concered this game.

A campaign trailer is what I send the players to let them know what the seed idea is and hopefully get the excited about it, like a movie trailer but with more open space for the player to create contribute.

Here's one for the Riddle:

The Holy Order of Blah*


You are all members of the Holy Order of Blah* and the temples have all been secured against the infidel for now. On a glorious day you find a majestic hawk feasting on a dead raven. Upon further inspection you find a note attached to the raven's foot, in the fashion of your Order.

The note is the head of your sect, petitioning the Grandmaster to declare you heretics and so he might burn you at the stake.

Is it an elaborate trick?

Was it left here by the powers of Blah*?

The sun is going down and in the First Temple they will be expecting you and after nightfall the hills will seeth with unholy armies.

Gird your faith and your steel, it is time for action.

*Blah will be a religion and holy order of knights created by the players as they make up characters together.

[Judd]

What I find interesting about making up trailers for the Riddle is that the character's motivations aren't clear to me until the character creation is over and so the adventure direction, while outlined a bit, isn't really evident to me until the players have their Spiritual Attributes finished.

Please post any ideas you have for an adventure trailer.




Riddle of the Dark Sun
using the Riddle of Steel in the Dark Sun setting (ouch!)


The Templar who owned you died on an obsidian knife last night. He had no heirs and so his property is to be re-distributed among the Sorcerer-King and his living Templars.

Your owner was a member of the Veiled Alliance, you are one of the few who knew this but now he is dead and who knows how much the Defilers know.

Tomorrow the Templars will come and look you all over, maybe one will take you or maybe you'll be chosen to toil in the Sorcerer-King's palace.

If no one takes you there is only one place for you to go:

The Gladiatorial Pits, where you will die for other's amusement...


[definitely inspired by Weekend at Burnius, a scenario I read about run with the FVLMINATA system]

[arxhon]

What i'm doing,
The players only know what is on the handouts. In addition to just the characters, for a change. Usually players know as much, or more than you about a published setting.

For the first group game, I'm running a scenario involving the players guarding a Lady, the daughter of a Duke. The party is ambushed, and everyone, including the players, dies. The Lady survives, of course, for much good use later....

I am running a fairgrounds for the start of my first scenario, celebrating the Duke's 49th birthday. I will let the party be amused by archery contests, fortune tellers, drunken louts and so on until i figure it's been long enough. Just as things are really getting underway in the town, an armed party shows up at the gates to the town and demand that the Duke surrender his throne to a local King or his daughter would be used for sport, and then the Duchy taken by force. (See how it ties in now?)
The Duchy is the home of the characters and one or more may actually be landed nobles with Baronies to their names (which would make an interesting game, actually). Whatever happens next is determined by the players.

I merely have a sequence of events that would happen:
Duke sends a rescue party, could be PC or NPC. Daughter is (most likely)freed. The enemy King invades. Maybe the King wins, maybe the Duke beats him back. I haven't decided. If the party isn't there for the invasion, but instead skipped town to, say, Oustenreich, well, they'll hear about it later, as a "current event".

I launch the game, and see where it goes from there. I have lots of things i could do to stir the pot, since they're right on the border with Gelure and Oustenreich.

Have stuff going on in the background to illustrate a world in motion (Gelure invades Cyrinthmeir, for example), and work with the SA's. Does buddy have Passion: Love for a someone in a manor directly threatened by the fighting in the Duchy? Put them in that manor, he gets to use his SA's, which is the whole point.

You start a game by explaining the setting, dropping them in and then having something affect their surroundings e.g. We're being invaded!".

Don't worry about a meta-story right now. Kick start the game and let it evolve on its own.

[Drew Stevens]

Wait, wait- the bodyguard party gets ambushed and everyone (including the PCs) dies?  You're /planning/ that?

[arxhon]

These aren't the player's characters. These are guardsmen. I'm giving them the character sheet filled out, so they can absorb that while playing the guardsman, realize how SA's are used (since they will have Drive: Protect the Duke's family) and mechanics are resolved, and then they will generate their real characters.

Guess i forgot to mention that part, huh...
But yes, they die.

[Jake Norwood]

Wait, wait- the bodyguard party gets ambushed and everyone (including the PCs) dies?  You're /planning/ that?

I did that once. Worked pretty well.

Jake

[Vanguard]

An idea I've been toying with provides a background for both an initial session and campaign.  

Starting in some backwater place in a peaceful land, I would fill the characters in on the general gist of the land - its cultures, people, what people know about other lands, about magic, etc...  

What I have often found difficult in starting games in a new world are those discrepancies which PC have in perceiving the land.  How much do they know, what is common practice, and what is taboo (i.e: walking round town in full plate and halberd)?

This is why the first session would concern the whole world going topsy-turny; the equivalent of a nazi invasion.  The PC are given the basics of their land, who rules and what people do.  But this soon becomes irrelevent when that very same status quo is disrupted.  One minute, everything is going as it has for the last hundred years, the next: a wholesale invasion has infected the whole world.  The equivalent of Stormtroopers now appear everywhere, claiming land in their emperor's name and generally enforcing a new draconian law.

What this offers the players is an ongoing campaign theme - how they will cope and deal with this new threat.

It also gives them the perfect theme for a first session - their immediate reaction against this change in life. What do they do when their parents and family are arrested, when 'stormtroopers' start ordering everyone about, when they are press-ganged into the imperial troops?

It may sound cheesy on paper, but I reckon it could work.  Imagine the PCs fleeing their place of birth, evading enemy patrols, not knowing what to do and whom to trust.  Later on, rebel forces might well get int contact with the PCs. Irregardless of what path the PCs choose (to abeit the enemy or oppose) there is a huge host of options available. Secret Police anyone?

And what's more, the PC's lack of knowledge about the setting (after all, they have't actually spent eighteen years living there for real) soon becomes redundent. They are now dealing with a world that's new for everyone.


Take care


'Imperial Troops have entered the base. Imperial troops have entered the - '

[Brian Leybourne]

Wait, wait- the bodyguard party gets ambushed and everyone (including the PCs) dies?  You're /planning/ that?

I did that once. Worked pretty well.
Jake

Heh, me too.. didn't work out quite as I had planned but made for a fricking good game.

What happened? Against all the odds, one of the PC's survived. Completely new to the system they rallied around it, learned on the fly and did a bloody good job. The player who survived was the player who used his SA's to the max, re-writing one (using the usual rules) to be a passion for the duchess they were guarding after one of the attackers stabbed her. I don't restrict passion to "MA times per session" and his passion very quickly rose to 5, some of it got spent, rose to 5 again. He was a whirling dervish going through the ranks of enemies who should have been more than sufficient to slaughter the PC's several times over.

When then mist cleared, there were hacked-apart bodies everywhere and this guy, covered with blood and entrails, was kneeling at the duchesses foot, calmly bandaging her wound. They then had to flee because more bandits were coming, and the PC took her to a friendly "Robin Hood" type camp he knew about in the wood nearby, where the other PC's made their actual characters, and we continued from there.

Damn cool start to the campaign. And all thanks to TROS and SA's :-)

Brian.

[Jake Norwood]

That *is* dang cool. My experience went pretty well, too, but we never finished the campaign. That ever happen to you guys?

Jake

[Brian Leybourne]

That *is* dang cool. My experience went pretty well, too, but we never finished the campaign. That ever happen to you guys?

Jake

One of my groups is pretty good about always finishing campaigns, and the other one is "famous" for campaigns dying when the players find a new system they want to try out :-)

There's nothing cooler than a really long term campaign. One current game I am running has been going for 40-odd sessions now, but those are 10 hour sessions, so it's more like 80-90 in most peoples games (about 4 hours apparently being the average for most groups). The characters have really amazing histories and backgrounds now, and when they meet up again with old NPC's from 20 or 30 sessions ago, it really is like meeting up with old friends. Damn fucking cool.

Brian.

[arxhon]

This is why the first session would concern the whole world going topsy-turny; quote]

Well, I'm taking a little bit longer than the first session to put my war into action, but your approach and mine are similar. Chances are that some of their SAs are going to keep them in the same general area as the war. Which is good stuff.

[Judd]

Rebellion of the Ringed Lords
Riddle of Steel maybe with some Universalis thrown in

The Ringed Dukes, holding the fiefs of Saturn and Uranus, rebelled against the Sun King, taking over Jupiter's floating keeps and orbiting baronies.

The stone kings were set against the lords of vapor giants. Stone was victorious.

You were there, a decorated veteran in the War of the Rings. Now it is time to strip the Ringed Dukes of their holdings and re-distribute the lands, set hostages and set examples.

The King has summoned you to his Solar Palace in order to show his love for his vassals who came to his aid in this war.

The loyal (or is it naive?) look forward to breaking bread with their brothers and sisters in battle and splitting up the usurper's moons and keeps like pie after dinner.

The wise (or is it cunning?) realize this is not the end of war but the seeds of the conflict to come.

I am intrigued by the idea of using the solar system as a fantasy setting. Picture Spelljammer as written by George R.R. Martin ala A Song of Ice and Fire.

I would fiddle with the social class priorities so that the lowest would be a landless knight and the highest would be a close relative to the Sun King.

Gifts and Flaws could be taken about being the hero of a major battle or being a known coward, all revolving around your actions in the war.

OR a kind of Amber-ish system could be put out so that all of the battles could be named and the players could bid on which ones they were heroes in and how...that might be neat.

Maybe even go whole hog Universalis and make up the war between us, knowing who is playing which character and making the drama of the war unfold at the table via that system.

Also posted on RPG.net

[arxhon]

That sounds pretty cool, Paka. The way you describe it makes it sound like the classic fantasy novels i used to read, like Vance and Moorcock

[Judd]

Vance and Moorcock...wow, thanks, I've heard great things about Vance but haven't read any of his yet but Moorcock was among the first fantasy novels I read.

Thanks.

[Sneaky Git]

Wait, wait- the bodyguard party gets ambushed and everyone (including the PCs) dies?  You're /planning/ that?

I did that once. Worked pretty well.
Jake

Heh, me too.. didn't work out quite as I had planned but made for a fricking good game.

What happened? Against all the odds, one of the PC's survived. Completely new to the system they rallied around it, learned on the fly and did a bloody good job. The player who survived was the player who used his SA's to the max, re-writing one (using the usual rules) to be a passion for the duchess they were guarding after one of the attackers stabbed her. I don't restrict passion to "MA times per session" and his passion very quickly rose to 5, some of it got spent, rose to 5 again. He was a whirling dervish going through the ranks of enemies who should have been more than sufficient to slaughter the PC's several times over.

When then mist cleared, there were hacked-apart bodies everywhere and this guy, covered with blood and entrails, was kneeling at the duchesses foot, calmly bandaging her wound. They then had to flee because more bandits were coming, and the PC took her to a friendly "Robin Hood" type camp he knew about in the wood nearby, where the other PC's made their actual characters, and we continued from there.

Damn cool start to the campaign. And all thanks to TROS and SA's :-)

Brian.

Awesome!  That's a great start!

I tried something along these lines as well...not nearly so spectacular a finish, but a solid intro to combat and SA's nonetheless...

PC's were armsmen for a minor landed noble guarding a small caravan carrying...something (they didn't have the Need To Know).  Just as they were getting the nerve to disobey their sergeant and take a peek, they were attacked by "bandits" (armsmen from a rival noble).  Horrible bloody death ensued for the majority of the PC's, several of whom lingered long enough to see that they had bled out defending...furniture.  Not the glorious end most naive dreamers hope for.

Players then created new characters, several of them who had ties to the slaughtered guardsmen.  These ties served as a means to collect them together and as a great way to generate SA's.

Love this game.

Chris