Homebrew Crucible: Daylight Delving and Fantasy Disease
Creating systems to answer situations is great GM skill building
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Campaign Development
We just finished session 23 of the Shadowdark campaign I started running to try out the game. The format is a hex-crawl where time passes in the game world at the same rate as the real world. In a recent session, my players bit on a hook I left out to explore the nearby town of Kinholdt that had until now been consumed by a plague and could not be entered. The rumors in the area started to say that Kinholdt was being taken back by the residents and the players were intrigued.
To be one step ahead of the players I came up with an area concept and generated a four-district large town using the roll tables within the Shadowdark rule book.
Concept
I recently listened to the audio book of the fantastic novel Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (Affiliate Link) where a major plot development occurs in a french walled city that has horrific creatures tormenting the survivors of a plague at night. There’s a particularly amazing and gruesome scene that is a must read in that book that I will not spoil that I wanted to somehow incorporate the feeling of. I don’t think I made it all the way but it was a good time.
The Town would have four districts. 2 Low districts, a Market district, and an Artisan district. Rolling up what was in these districts I had a decent setup of two taverns - one poor, one not-so-poor - a large marketplace to allow the players to look for miscellaneous goods and services, and I decided the Artisan district was where the plague was now pushed back to.
The artisan district is walled off and guarded by the city, and I place an NPC named Sylvie - owner and proprietor of “Sylvie’s Stocks” which is a shop at the dead center of the artisan district. Sylvie is drinking her days away hoping to salvage her family business and offers the NPCs reward for bringing her back a wand from her store if she hears the group is foolish enough to try.
Not-So-Dark Non-Dungeon Crawling
I wanted the party to explore the artisan district as if it were a dungeon, and Shadowdark’s specialty is exploration, but I had to come up with some environmental pressures that would replace the missing need for torchlight.
I had come up with some “wandering monster” encounters to incorporate in the area, which usually will show up when a 1 on a D6 is rolled in so many exploration rounds (depending on how deadly the area is). For this situation, I let the players lead the direction they were going and then mapped out branching paths leading towards the center of the district. I would stay just a couple steps ahead of the players and sprinkle in random encounters from my list and use reaction rolls or random situation for these encounters so it would be up to the players to decide what they interacted with.
We filled about three sessions with exploration of this area and I thought it went well with a relatively low amount of prep. I’d run similar things in 5E that taught me to let certain things go and it just makes for a more enjoyable experience for everyone. The hardest part for me is keeping the choices meaningful and the story moving. It can be tempting to throw alot of dead ends and buy time before the next major thing occurs, but 3-5 seems to be the magic number to keep the game entertaining and the story moving.
The party made their way to Sylvie’s stocks and found some concerning demonic entities with a large effigy outside the shop. I left it there seeing what they’d do and they did what all good adventuring parties do, they kicked the hornet’s nest. They lit the effigy on fire.
This gave me the time pressure by letting me bring in a big Vrock Demon flying overhead chasing down the party. Some go-to GM tricks like “thing happens in 1D4 rounds” and I told them it was coming built some good tension. Then they were off once they saw they couldn’t take it down in one hit - this can be difficult to telgraph to run even in Shadowdark where they’ve died after not running - because we’ve spent so long playing 5E it’s still in the back of your mind that if you just might be able to kill anything.
An interesting chase as the party fumbled their way back to the entrance they knew about to leave the artisan district, but members of the party had contracted the plague in the meantime. It was simply a CON check, but only 1 of them did not contract it. One of hte players got smart, playing a ranger, and started looking for info on something that could help, and I rewarded that by giving them a quest - go find a white flower native to the Southern Rainwood and you’ll have a chance to create an antidote per flower you find.
Overworld Hexploration
With no direct system in Shadowdark for finding a special plant and turning it into an antidote for something, I just winged a system that allowed me do the same conceptual exploration in the Southern Rainwood forest and put obstacles in the way of the party to getting the flower and attemping to make an antidote.
While exploring Hexes I would roll once per hex and if there was a one there would be a random encounter from the Forest Encounters roll table in the Shadowdark book - the book has thurough and excellent D100 tables for every environ - I would sprinking in a 1/3 chance of there being the flower the part was looking for amongst the treetop canopy. The Ranger was getting advantage on WIS rolls for finding the flower and INT rolls for creating the antidote (DC 15).
This little system led to the party finding a flower and extracting it from above sleeping bears and then failing to make the antidote and then going on a miniature side quest to kill some bandits at a nearby mott and bailey hideout. The narrative at the table flowed, and the antidote didnt’ seem out of reach. Of course it may be a little simplistic to have the info and a possible antidote to a plague in the nearby forest, but I figure these are adventurers risking life and limb and it’s interesting at least. I had to expand the effects taking hold from 3-5 days to 3-5 weeks as time traverses in the game in real time - and we would have 1-2 weeks between sessions, so 3-5 weeks kept is sporting but characters had a real chance of debilitation and death.
The exact effects of the Plague were being dreamt up by myself between sessions, which started with fever and a cough and grew into boils and lesions and I was planing to have loss of stats.
Being an adventurer is a tough life.
What I Am Up To
TTRPG Reading: Crown and Skull By Runehammer
TTRPG Production: Almanac of Abomination System Neutral TTRPG Zine is accepting pre-orders. Delivery of goods February 12th!
Audiobook: The Hunger of the Gods (Affiliate Link) - Bloodsworn trilogy is super good!, Slaying the Dragon (Affiliate Link) by Ben Riggs
Current Campaigns: After infiltrating and destroying a bandit camp led by a hedge knight, the party is using their old mott and bailey fortress as a base of operations into the Souther Rainwood to find a cure for members of the group who have contracted The Yellow Death.
Useful Things For Your Games
Spotify Playlist Role: Forest and Fae