Café de Nuit

My game runs on my own "Inkubator" system, which is basically a kind of crowdsourced fiction. Among things, we use polls like this one to construct an outline when there's a hole in the plot that needs to be patched.

A 3rd level gold elf wizard was accidentally transported alone to Shadowborn Manor. This place is normally a challenge for parties of a much higher level, and she faced it alone. We know she survived because she appeared again in the campaign storyline many years later, but we would like to cover how she escaped, for use in exposition and flashbacks.

The Narrator and Secret Keepers for this character will take the top two results of the poll and come up with a scenario that fits. I've made these options deliberately generic so that just about anything is a combination of one or more of those five options. If you have specific ideas or questions, please feel free to discuss down below.

I voted for options #2 and #3, but what I really mean by that is:
How did she escape alive? She didn't.

she was slaughtered, but brought back to life for whatever purpose by a higher or lower power, perhaps with the assistance of some good guys (Knights of the Shadows?) who maybe retrieved her body.

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:I voted for options #2 and #3, but what I really mean by that is:
How did she escape alive? She didn't.

she was slaughtered, but brought back to life for whatever purpose by a higher or lower power, perhaps with the assistance of some good guys (Knights of the Shadows?) who maybe retrieved her body.

Ah, a "dream" within a "dream" (that was real)...?

Well played sir.

Hear, hear!

Yeah, I considered the whole "win by losing" option; I thought of how Gary Gygax got one of his characters to survive a huge battle in one novel by being petrified and then restored to life later. But in this case, it seemed a bit much to have the character yanked into Ravenloft, dumped straight into a deathtrap, killed and then resurrected. There's no avoiding that there's some railroading going on here, I'd just like to keep it to a minimum.

Out of curiosity, I ran the same poll in a Facebook group for D&D, and the overwhelming favorite is for her to cut a deal with Ebonbane....

It's not really railroading if it's character backfill...?

Then how about she keeps going back every x amount of character levels?

If she lives, then there's destiny (another poll) to be revealed.

If she dies then she's not ready for the revelation and must prepare/piece together her fragmented experiences/memories for next attempted crack.

Is she temporarily living through others, experiencing their accomplishments and defeats?

Or is this some sort of training?

And what does the manor have to do with it?

DeepShadow of FoS wrote: cut a deal with Ebonbane....

Heh... "cut" a deal. Heh heh

Struck a deal with the bad guy! But also with lower powers

Five wrote:It's not really railroading if it's character backfill...?

Of course, except incubator allows you to go back and forth on someone's timeline, kind of like microscope RPG. So it's entirely possible that this scenario will be played out someday.

Then how about she keeps going back every x amount of character levels?

If she lives, then there's destiny (another poll) to be revealed.

Well, I don't know about going back to the exact same spot in history, but there will definitely be other polls like this one.

Is she temporarily living through others, experiencing their accomplishments and defeats?

Or is this some sort of training?

The vicarious idea is interesting, but this is mostly just about how this character got from one place to another. One of the detours on this path happened to go through someplace dangerous, we just needed the easiest way to make it believable.

DeepShadow of FoS wrote:
Of course, except incubator allows you to go back and forth on someone's timeline, kind of like microscope RPG. So it's entirely possible that this scenario will be played out someday.

I really like this idea. I must say.

Hmm, here's a puff of ninja dust (or is it dirt?):

1) During her transportation to Ravenloft, and due to it's remote/stagnant/self-regenerative existence in the cosmos (in short, due to the Dark Powers), a portion of her future self (ie: potential) has mutated into her "present" self...which is not really her present self because of her new RL reality/alternate timeline/"mutation". The DPs want Marguerite Liadon, more specifically her essence?, but why?

Answer: another poll. Her overall PC Light versus Dark (lifespan culmination of her moral choices)...?

It's a multi-faceted in-out/weave/connect-the-dots (paint by numbers for you old schoolers ) within your Inkubator system anyway. I like to believe anyway. Only from a bird's eye view.

And this hidden but sometimes usable potential, sort of like an adrenaline surge/reaction, is how she survived Shadowborn Manor.

2) This one is kinda anchored to a thought I had in my previous post (and largely inspired by Gonzoron's first post/suggestion):

RL (or, her visit) is a dreamscape of dreamscapes and her visitation there has oddly-enough resulted in some very real memories. But otherwise, it was just a dream. She thinks. Sometimes. It's so confusing...

Can the emotional resonance of RL be subconsciously tapped into by an outsider, to the point of memories shifting between owners?

Are they the unintentional and unknown byproduct of Azalin's memory rewrites?

Is it a reality-breaking cry for help?

Are the people of RL all such "dreamers"? People die unexpectedly in their sleep quite often. So can this extremely lucid dream be somehow real, yet if survived, but a dream (of real experience/memories)?

Either way, the question remains: Did Marguerite actually visit RL, or was she somehow caught within the evil writing of a "defaced" (wink, grin, nod) copy of Van Richten's Guide to the Mists?


The credibility of both of these may be questionable, I will say that. It can be viewed as a bit of a stretch...

Both of these are very interesting ideas. The one sounds like what happened with Anna in Vampire of The Mists, where part of her psyche was transported to another world due to her desperate desire to escape. The other sounds much like the extended plot of I10, where the player characters alternate back and forth between two worlds and can't tell which one is the dream.

But it's doubtful that will be going for either of these with this particular character. After all, it's not function of the character that allows us to go back later and expand on her past. It's a function of the game. We can do that with any of the characters, go back and explore some neglected part of their past that has bearing on the present. We would only be revealing history, not rewriting it.