Going Back to Ravenloft...You All Benefit

[Rucht Lilavivat]

As far as pay-for-play vs. playing with your buddies for free....

It's complicated.

All I can say is the it appears that Tomochiko is correct. When someone is paying good money to play a game, they appear to be far less likely to derail the game. I have been very surprised at the amount of focus and dedication to the game that there is from paying players. Also, it seems to me that people are far less likely to cancel on the game when they are paying money to play - or when one of the players is paying the fee. In many of my games, one player pays the full amount, usually because they happen to have more disposable income.

But, at the same time, maybe you don't have that problem in the first place. Maybe you have players who show up on time, every time. OR...maybe you don't want a game like that. You want a looser game where people don't feel this big obligation to play in a game. That's fine, too.

I always compare doing this to being a tennis pro. If you go out to your local tennis court and play with your buddies for free, you can do that. It costs you nothing. At the same time, you can pay for a tennis pro. You are going to get lessons from that pro. Maybe that pro will even organize a small tournament for you. So, you get a little more because you spent some money, but can you have fun without spending money? Sure!

If you pay for a tennis pro and you want to stop your lessons, they will almost always not take it personally. And you'll probably become friends, maybe even good friends.

So, I am definitely not saying that one experience is better than the other - they are simply different.

[alhoon]

It is making it a bit harder for those that cannot afford it though as many DMs favor their paying games over the free ones.
A player I had from Africa, thanked me for running free games professionally. The player said that for him (or her, I don't know gender) 5$ is a lot of money; he cannot afford it. I also had American players that wanted to pay me so that they will get more attention than the other players = more freebies, greater leeway etc. They thought they could buy the DM's favor. All in all, I have some bad experiences from players that were used to pay-to-play DMs. There are a lot of entitled people in the gaming pool.

But I understand what you say about tennis pros etc. and I don't fault you for it. But from my experience before pay-to-play became mainstream, it has negatively affected the game even for (or perhaps just for) us that don't do it.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

Next session starts off with a street chase! The player characters are after an escaping NPC who is trundling down a cobble stone street in a cart! Here's the map:



I made the map with DungeonFog. Feel free to print this out. If you want to be a hero for your table, print it out two of these maps and put them end to end for an extra long chase scene!

[Rucht Lilavivat]

I also had American players that wanted to pay me so that they will get more attention than the other players = more freebies, greater leeway etc. They thought they could buy the DM's favor.

Obviously, that's blatantly unethical. That's not even a pay for play situation. If you look at the tennis pro analogy, no tennis pro (unless they are corrupt) would take more money from a particular person for favoritism.

[alhoon]

About that road Rucht, since it is quite wide, is it from a city we would recognize? Seems a bit like what I imagine the main roads in Port-a-Lucine would be like. Not Saidra's Dementlieu, the original.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

About that road Rucht, since it is quite wide, is it from a city we would recognize? Seems a bit like what I imagine the main roads in Port-a-Lucine would be like. Not Saidra's Dementlieu, the original.

I've run encounters on scale-accurate roads like you are talking about. Just ten feet wide. That's just two squares. Or, in some cases, just one square wide. The problem is that I have found that these encounters are rarely fun. There is not enough space to maneuver on the map. It runs into all kinds of logistical problems - not something cinematic.

[alhoon]

Oh, I agree. I even have village roads been 10 ft wide and have the fight spill in the various yards. For towns where I want a lot of houses, I do what you do, or have the fights in front of Π-like structures, have small "parks" around a tree or obelisk etc. You can't have a fun encounter in a corridor. I was not commenting on that.
I was asking if the road is from a place we would recognize. You mentioned Levkarest elsewhere.

[Speedwagon]

How goes the campaign you're running, Rucht? I remembered you saying something about making another map of Levkarest that's in line with the Gazetteers, did you ever get around to doing that or does the current map still suit your needs well enough?

[Rucht Lilavivat]

How goes the campaign you're running, Rucht? I remembered you saying something about making another map of Levkarest that's in line with the Gazetteers, did you ever get around to doing that or does the current map still suit your needs well enough?

Making the new map of Levkarest is on the back burner.

The campaign is going very well. One session every week! Lately, the just solved a complicated murder case. How about this - how to construct a mystery in an RPG....

Typically what I do is to stage the crime and take notes on what happened. Then, I make sure the crime is fairly complicated, and I make sure that there are multiple people with motive, means, and method to commit the crime.

In this case, the head of Levkarest Opera House was murdered. Three different people attempted to kill him. A spurned lover who poisoned his tea, a rejected actor who switched his tea service with a cursed tea set. And finally, an assassin from the local assassin's guild used a blowgun to shoot a needle into his back to kill him.

The PCs found clues for all of these crimes and had to follow the threads to figure out who was who and what was done. I write a lot of my mysteries like that. If you write up a mystery where some dude got stabbed in the back by some mysterious somebody...well, five heads at the table will figure out who that was pretty fast. In this case, there were three somebodies and they had to follow all of the bread crumbs all over the city, resulting in hijinks and adventure.

Finally, it was revealed that the thing that killed the head of the Opera House was a needle from a blowgun dart from the assassin's guild.

The party confronted the assassin in the Opera House where she was posing as a Lady's Maid. I had intended for this to be a pretty epic fight with the maid running all around the Opera House and attacking while hiding in the shadows...but the party was just too good. They got her in the second room she ran to.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

Next session - the party will confront an NPC I made for the White Wolf edition of Ravenloft way back in the day...Toben the Many.

[alhoon]

Next session - the party will confront an NPC I made for the White Wolf edition of Ravenloft way back in the day...Toben the Many.

Toben the Many!!!!!!!!!!!

Is it possible throw in transcribes here? He's one of my favorite villains.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

Next session - the party will confront an NPC I made for the White Wolf edition of Ravenloft way back in the day...Toben the Many.

Toben the Many!!!!!!!!!!!

Is it possible throw in transcribes here? He's one of my favorite villains.

Transcribes? LOL! How would I even do that? I will say - I cannot record the sessions. The players have said they have no interest in that. So, sorry! I can give a session summary?

[Joël of the FoS]

Sure, as Toben is an intriguing and fascinating caracter and I'd to hear on how you used him/it.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

Okay, so it's my goal in this campaign to have Toben the Many be a long-standing antagonist. So, I am not going to introduce them as the big bad right away. In my experience, if you trot out some big bad or at the very least, a bully, the party is going to be focused on squashing that villain. And the bigger the target that villain is, the more they will want to squash them. So, Toben will be introduced in this story arc, but the big bad for the arc will be Myra Modello, the Doll Collector.

Encounter One: The Theft

The party has been ordered to investigate a theft in the Basement of Curiosities - a hidden museum underneath Levkarest University. There they find two priests from Har A'kir. The priests follow Osiris (one of the PCs is an Osiris worshipper) and are there to act as something to possibly stir that player into some roleplaying.

The matter is this: three mummies have been brought from Har A'Kir by priests of Osiris for study by some local scholars. This is part of a mutual exchange program. In exchange, the scholars of Levkarest have traded some exotic poisons to the local clerical government of Har A'Kir. In this way, the mummies can be studied carefully without desecration. Nonetheless, one of them has been stolen.

The PCs investigate clues and form a list of suspects.

The mummy was stolen by Toben the Many, in the guise of one of the university caretakers. He wheeled the mummy out in a cart, but then he was jumped one one of Myra Modelle's doll-golems. The doll-golem then stole the mummy from him.

Toben's goal is simple. Overall, the thing that drives him insane is his relentless boredom. For centuries, he's had no one to talk to but himself. He's hoping to steal a mummy that cannot be infected by his sickness so that he at least has someone to talk to. So, to start with - Toben will appear to be this rather pathetic figure. As the campaign progresses, Toben's motives will change and grow grander and more menacing.

After looking for clues, the party can be lead in one of two directions:

The Black Market - an underground marketplace for all kinds of illicit goods.
The Cabinet of Curiosities - A private museum owned by one of the more wealthy men in Levkarest. He is known only as the Master of the Crooked House. The museum is run by Mr. Jurgen Tick and Mrs. Turgen Tock.

Encounter Two: The Confrontation

The party tracked clues they accumulated to a front for the Levkarest Black Market - a simple tobacco shop. I realized it was time for some action, so when they arrived, the entire place had been raided by Toben. Toben is looking for the missing mummy as well, and is looking all around the Levkarest underworld as well. He suspects that Myra Modello attacked him, but he doesn't know where her hideout is.

At the tobacco shop, all of the bodies there had their faces twisted into that menacing Toben smile. We'll see if they are smart enough to burn all of the bodies, because after a while, they are all going to get up...

The session ended with the party finally meeting Toben. He leered at them and leapt out of a window. We'll see if they follow. One of the PCs used detect thoughts on Toben, and had to make a "madness save" since they were scanning the mind of a terrible lunatic. The final scene of the evening was Toben at Myra Modello's old house, where she keeps life-sized dolls with people tied up inside of them. They saw a vision of this collection of dolls with innocent civilians struggling to free themselves from within. This gave them something creepy to end on and to establish that it's Myra who is the big bad of this story arc.

Myra's goal is to unravel the magic that keep the mummy together so that she can animate the people she traps in doll-bodies. If she is successful, she will be able to make doll-zombies. A truly horrific fate for her victims.

[Rucht Lilavivat]

A bit of an update. Last session, the players had to contend with Toben the Many. I will talk about that a little later. Toben went over amazingly well! I had them have a run in with Toben and they were obsessed, wanting to find out all about him. I was able to read a portion of the Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead to them as part of their historical research on him.

In the current campaign, Toben had been trying to steal a mummy from some scholars from Har A’kir because he simply wanted the company. It would do for him to be able to talk to or associated with some undead being that was not him.

The villain Myra Modelo, however, stole the mummy from him, using one of her advanced automatons. She hopes to use the magic that resides in the mummy to be able to make her own sentient undead. She can already make unintelligent undead. She’d rather have sentient undead so that she can have a talkative playmate.

So, you have two villains who want company. And they are fighting over that company.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, who is Molly Modelo? She’s an artificer, who has been grated extraordinary powers by the Dark Powers.

Molly comes from a high intellectual, inbred, and vicious family. When she was little, she was not allowed to have playmates, because her mother was deathly afraid she might grow ill. Her only friends were her dolls.

As she grew older, she learned the art of horology from her uncle, who noticed a gift in Molly. Molly was able to construct amazing automatons which could do incredible things. Little did anyone know that part of the reason for her automatons’ abilities was that the Dark Powers were granting each of them just a tiny spark of life.

Molly was constantly lonely, only playing with her dolls. Even her automatons were poor company after a while. Then, one day, an urchin crawled into her mansion basement. Molly was fascinated. They talked and talked. Molly fed the urchin scraps of food from the kitchen, and she talked to her in exchange.

But the urchin left all of the time. He went out, into the streets or the wilderness. Molly was left alone each time.

One day, after the urchin had been gone for a month, he crawled into the basement to find that she had constructed an elaborate set of chairs and a table. It was all ready to host a sumptuous meal.

Molly greeted the urchin in her usual manner. She brought down a sumptuous meal for him and set it at the fancy table. And as the urchin sat a the chair set out for him, the trap sprung. A mechanism in the chair sprang out and trapped him in terrible shell. Steel wires and iron bars latched into his flesh and drilled into his skull. The urchin fond himself trapped…in the trappings of a life-sized doll.

Molly could command the life sized doll to move about, walk about, and do as she liked. But now, trapped inside of the doll was the urchin who could also talk to her. The urchin screamed and cried and cursed her. But it was to no avail. The urchin was compelled to entertain Molly for if he didn’t she would inflict such pain upon him.

For weeks and even months, they lived like this. The urchin was confined to the basement. He was fed by Molly, who even went so far as to clean his toilet every day. But eventually, the urchin died. His heart gave out from the stress and trauma.

Molly was furious. How dare the urchin leave her like this? When it was all getting so good! When she had finally found a cure for her loneliness. There was only one choice. To get more playmates. So, Molly made doll-casings for her mother and uncle. And soon…there would be more. After all, her automatons had become so advanced that they could help her with her elaborate construction work.

More on that encounter later.