Café de Nuit

Hello,

I am running Castles Forlorn on Saturday and my PCs will most likely enter the castle.
Now, as everyone who owns the boxed set knows, there are a ton of encounters and NPCs to use. My dilemma is that I'm not sure in what order I should introduce them...

Ideally, they'll witness Flora's night run as they go in.

But after that, I'm not sure...

The PCs are going in, running after their arch-nemesis. What they don't know is that he has been captured by Tristan who has plans for him.

Any ideas are welcome!

Patrick

I'd suggest you make two lists:

1) Scenes and encounters you'd really like to stage for your players, including which time(s) they can take place in. Some encounters can only occur in a single time-frame, but others (like meeting most of the ghosts) can be applied to two or more possible times. Also think about whether there's a particular encounter which would be fun to dump them right into the thick of (i.e. they time-shift into a battle, argument, etc), and which encounter (you shouldn't do this more than once) you'd like to get them totally in over their heads with, then time-shift them out of danger. Don't even try to include every possible encounter, just the ones you like and/or that are critical to your chosen plotline.

2) Information they'll need to gather to complete the adventure. If your players have a specific mission (e.g. solve one or more of the murders in the castle's history) then they'll need to gather clues from the various time/place settings and from encounters. If they're simply trying to get to the end of the adventure (i.e. seeing Tristen's future and/or saving his daughter), list the clues or tasks they must accomplish to do that. Make sure that each fact or task is assigned a place/time for its discovery or completion on your previous list of desired encounters, so nothing critical to the adventure is left out. It may be helpful if you include an alternate source for especially critical bits of information, in case they miss the first one.

In most adventures, these encounters and discoveries take place through a linear progression, from one site/finding to the next, in fixed order. For the "Castles Forlorn" adventure, consider assigning just a few scenes to specific points in the game-session (e.g. if you want to start them off with Flora's run, that's their first encounter and clue), and literally rolling up the others at random: each time the castle time-shifts around them, roll to see which era they'll find themselves in, then lure or guide the PCs towards the geographically-nearest encounter you've listed for that time-period. If one era's encounter-list runs out before the adventure is done, let them replay a previous encounter (for ghost-sightings) or confront the NPCs they'd met before (for run-ins with the living). Keep them jumping between times until you run out of encounters from your list, at which point the players should have all the information they need, and you can start sending them back to the site where they'll finish the storyline, over and over if necessary.

Thank you Rotipher, I was sort of going this route but wanted to know what had worked best for those who did run the boxed set.

Again thank you.
Very helpful!!

Patrick

I haven't yet, and I will be at this game, so I can't comment

Joël