DM Thoughts - Session 05
This session marked the start of the present-day Savage Tide campaign, after having completed the Olman "pre-campaign".
Yet, it still didn't bring us to the starting point of the magazine adventures, because I wanted to build things up to that point - as well as introduce certain elements from my heavily-modified plans for the campaign to come.
Major change number one was the introduction of a love interest for Lavinia. In the magazine version of the story, Lavinia is single. It is explained that a romance may develop between her and one of the PCs, at the DM's discretion... But at the start of the campaign, she is alone.
Now, I decided nearly a year ago, when I first heard of the Savage Tide campaign, that I wanted to put a twist on that idea. That rather than being alone, she would be married, but suddenly separated from her husband for reasons that will become clear in the next session (which the players have already gone through by the time I am writing this, so that spoils nothing).
As for who this husband would be, the answer was simple at the time: Anzak Guildenstern. We were early on in the Age of Worms campaign, where my main character was one that I introduced as an NPC in Shackled City, in order to help link the events of the campaigns a bit better. Elena's backstory, however, I always kept a bit hazy, unsure as to what I wanted to do with it. Then when my secondary character for the campaign, a monk named Raikun, died rather suddenly... I decided to make another secondary character, none other than a previously-unmentioned twin brother for Elena. As I developed this idea in my head, I came up with their story, of siblings both dead at birth, but raised by a local priest who had been told by Wee Jas that they were important and should be given a chance to live. In time, the two separated, but at this stage in the Age of Worms campaign, they would at last be reunited.
Yet, the most key plot point for me was actually not the part that Anzak might play in Age of Worms - all that I care about was that he somehow live or be brought back, to survive the campaign. Because just as Elena was a bridge between Shackled City and Age of Worms, I wanted Anzak to help bridge Age of Worms and Savage Tide, though in the opposite way - moving from PC to NPC. The seed for this was planted early on in Anzak's diaries on the website, when he repeatedly spoke of a love interest that motivated him to eventually return to his hometown of Sasserine... Lavinia Vanderboren. In my mind, and as I explained early on to Chris (the DM of Age of Worms) - I expected Lavinia to not become involved in the campaign in any way, but rather be the "happy ending" for Anzak, where he would one day end his adventuring career (maybe at the end of the campaign, maybe not if things didn't go so well for him) by getting himself level drained so as to no longer be a threat, then return to Sasserine to marry Lavinia.
So in this introduction to the Savage Tide campaign, their wedding was to be the centerpiece, pulling back some of our PCs from the earlier campaigns, while also introducing certain characters that would play major roles in events to come. Notably, these included Verik and Larissa Vanderboren - who in the "real" Savage Tide campaign, start of immediately as dead victims of an apparent murder. By starting events a few months earlier here, I could give them more personality by actually being involved in the story in some way, before getting killed off. I did this by having them be disapproving of the wedding, trying to dig up some dirt on Anzak to get the wedding stopped.
And that, the "dirt-digging", was the story of this session. Though in the end, as I had very much left things up in the air... many events did not go exactly as planned. Yet, I trusted to my instincts and improvisation skills, and in the end things became quite likely even better than planned.
The first surprise came at a point where Anzak was being used as an accomplice by the Lotus Dragons, unknowingly being the cause of a distraction that would allow a murder to occur. What I expected from this was for it to be the first instance of Anzak being spied on by the party. They would know that he willingly was providing a distraction, but could not intervene without putting him and themselves at risk.
After that first instance, Anzak was to be given another task, far more dangerous - and THAT is where I figured the PCs would try to stop him, perhaps even helping him to get out of the mess he was in.
Yet that didn't happen at all. And rather than allow Anzak to move on to his second task, the party grabbed every possible bit of evidence and in Glaive's case, even provided complete testimony and named names, regarding his involvement as an accomplice to murder.
Suddenly, then, Anzak unexpectedly became the center of attention, as the defendent in a trial for his actions... which was one possible outcome, though not supposed to happen so soon!
What was actually going to happen, completely different, was this (which is now a revelation to my players, since I haven't told them of it yet):
The second task Anzak was going on was going to be the assassination of Lux Seoni (!), and the theft of items called Void Crystals from her storage room. As she is the mother of two of the party members, it was expected that they would jump in to stop the murder, and likely turn him over to the authorities at that point. So the trial might still happen, though likely for attempted murder and robbery instead of being an accomplice.
Well, with him stopped before then, I had to engineer for another person to attempt this instead, since the Lotus Dragons would still want the Void Crystals stolen. And without the party there to watch and stop it, instead of it being an attempted murder on Lux Seoni, it instead went off perfectly... meaning that their mother was now unexpectedly dead, when I had meant for her to live, saved by her sons.
This I was able to revert by the end of the session, as I had Garland's attempts to raise money for her ressurection be successful, in addition to Emil Dracktus using her for his own aims, to bring the Amalgamation to the city as a way of boosting the economy and tourism.
So that part was saved from its unexpected twist (while also making Anzak out to be a lot more innocent-looking than I had planned, as well - I expected the PCs to have a hatred for him at this point, for almost killing their mother)...
The other twist came with the timing of Anzak's capture. My plan was to have had him being watched during the assassination attempt on Lux Seoni, by members of the Lotus Dragons trying to ensure that he was successful. They were to have noticed the other party members watching him as well. If and when they (the party) stopped Anzak and started talking with him, they were going to shoot and kill Anzak before he could tell the party anything.
Elena was then going to come to town to ressurect her brother, and protect him while he started naming names and testifying, eventually bringing down Rowyn and Vanthus.
Yet, in this new version, killing Anzak was no longer an option... so I decided on the spur of the moment that it could possibly still work, just to have him ask for Elena to come help him out of trouble. Which made him seem perhaps weaker (having his sister come "bail him out", essentially - instead of it being HER who came to bring him back to life), but in the end the same goal could be achieved: Anzak turning informant on the Lotus Dragons, and getting Vanthus and Rowyn sent to prison.
There were other changes as well... a large chase scene I had planned for after the murder of the blacksmith, if one of the PCs started following one of the three Lotus Dragons who were running out of the smith's shop... It was to include a big chase at the docks, with the Lotus Dragon eventually getting caught, but not before secretly dropping the stolen Skeleton Key into a boat where another member would come and recover it later. Then the Lotus Dragon could potentially be interrogated by the party, with him confessing to the fact that the blacksmith was but the first in a string of murders to take place (foreshadowing the fact that Lux Seoni was next, and then the cartographer). But again, this did not take place, as the party actually allowed the murderous Lotus Dragons to run off freely, instead putting all their efforts on Anzak, who didn't even know a thing about the murder!
All in all, though, an excellent session. It was fun for me as a DM to have to improvise in this way, coming up with alternatives that might lead to the same end, or a similar one. Thankfully, in the end, while things certainly were different (Anzak never dying, though he was supposed to - Lux Seoni dying, though she wasn't supposed to), the end result still accomplished the same aim: to land Vanthus and Rowyn behind bars just before the wedding, setting up the following week's drama...
Yet, it still didn't bring us to the starting point of the magazine adventures, because I wanted to build things up to that point - as well as introduce certain elements from my heavily-modified plans for the campaign to come.
Major change number one was the introduction of a love interest for Lavinia. In the magazine version of the story, Lavinia is single. It is explained that a romance may develop between her and one of the PCs, at the DM's discretion... But at the start of the campaign, she is alone.
Now, I decided nearly a year ago, when I first heard of the Savage Tide campaign, that I wanted to put a twist on that idea. That rather than being alone, she would be married, but suddenly separated from her husband for reasons that will become clear in the next session (which the players have already gone through by the time I am writing this, so that spoils nothing).
As for who this husband would be, the answer was simple at the time: Anzak Guildenstern. We were early on in the Age of Worms campaign, where my main character was one that I introduced as an NPC in Shackled City, in order to help link the events of the campaigns a bit better. Elena's backstory, however, I always kept a bit hazy, unsure as to what I wanted to do with it. Then when my secondary character for the campaign, a monk named Raikun, died rather suddenly... I decided to make another secondary character, none other than a previously-unmentioned twin brother for Elena. As I developed this idea in my head, I came up with their story, of siblings both dead at birth, but raised by a local priest who had been told by Wee Jas that they were important and should be given a chance to live. In time, the two separated, but at this stage in the Age of Worms campaign, they would at last be reunited.
Yet, the most key plot point for me was actually not the part that Anzak might play in Age of Worms - all that I care about was that he somehow live or be brought back, to survive the campaign. Because just as Elena was a bridge between Shackled City and Age of Worms, I wanted Anzak to help bridge Age of Worms and Savage Tide, though in the opposite way - moving from PC to NPC. The seed for this was planted early on in Anzak's diaries on the website, when he repeatedly spoke of a love interest that motivated him to eventually return to his hometown of Sasserine... Lavinia Vanderboren. In my mind, and as I explained early on to Chris (the DM of Age of Worms) - I expected Lavinia to not become involved in the campaign in any way, but rather be the "happy ending" for Anzak, where he would one day end his adventuring career (maybe at the end of the campaign, maybe not if things didn't go so well for him) by getting himself level drained so as to no longer be a threat, then return to Sasserine to marry Lavinia.
So in this introduction to the Savage Tide campaign, their wedding was to be the centerpiece, pulling back some of our PCs from the earlier campaigns, while also introducing certain characters that would play major roles in events to come. Notably, these included Verik and Larissa Vanderboren - who in the "real" Savage Tide campaign, start of immediately as dead victims of an apparent murder. By starting events a few months earlier here, I could give them more personality by actually being involved in the story in some way, before getting killed off. I did this by having them be disapproving of the wedding, trying to dig up some dirt on Anzak to get the wedding stopped.
And that, the "dirt-digging", was the story of this session. Though in the end, as I had very much left things up in the air... many events did not go exactly as planned. Yet, I trusted to my instincts and improvisation skills, and in the end things became quite likely even better than planned.
The first surprise came at a point where Anzak was being used as an accomplice by the Lotus Dragons, unknowingly being the cause of a distraction that would allow a murder to occur. What I expected from this was for it to be the first instance of Anzak being spied on by the party. They would know that he willingly was providing a distraction, but could not intervene without putting him and themselves at risk.
After that first instance, Anzak was to be given another task, far more dangerous - and THAT is where I figured the PCs would try to stop him, perhaps even helping him to get out of the mess he was in.
Yet that didn't happen at all. And rather than allow Anzak to move on to his second task, the party grabbed every possible bit of evidence and in Glaive's case, even provided complete testimony and named names, regarding his involvement as an accomplice to murder.
Suddenly, then, Anzak unexpectedly became the center of attention, as the defendent in a trial for his actions... which was one possible outcome, though not supposed to happen so soon!
What was actually going to happen, completely different, was this (which is now a revelation to my players, since I haven't told them of it yet):
The second task Anzak was going on was going to be the assassination of Lux Seoni (!), and the theft of items called Void Crystals from her storage room. As she is the mother of two of the party members, it was expected that they would jump in to stop the murder, and likely turn him over to the authorities at that point. So the trial might still happen, though likely for attempted murder and robbery instead of being an accomplice.
Well, with him stopped before then, I had to engineer for another person to attempt this instead, since the Lotus Dragons would still want the Void Crystals stolen. And without the party there to watch and stop it, instead of it being an attempted murder on Lux Seoni, it instead went off perfectly... meaning that their mother was now unexpectedly dead, when I had meant for her to live, saved by her sons.
This I was able to revert by the end of the session, as I had Garland's attempts to raise money for her ressurection be successful, in addition to Emil Dracktus using her for his own aims, to bring the Amalgamation to the city as a way of boosting the economy and tourism.
So that part was saved from its unexpected twist (while also making Anzak out to be a lot more innocent-looking than I had planned, as well - I expected the PCs to have a hatred for him at this point, for almost killing their mother)...
The other twist came with the timing of Anzak's capture. My plan was to have had him being watched during the assassination attempt on Lux Seoni, by members of the Lotus Dragons trying to ensure that he was successful. They were to have noticed the other party members watching him as well. If and when they (the party) stopped Anzak and started talking with him, they were going to shoot and kill Anzak before he could tell the party anything.
Elena was then going to come to town to ressurect her brother, and protect him while he started naming names and testifying, eventually bringing down Rowyn and Vanthus.
Yet, in this new version, killing Anzak was no longer an option... so I decided on the spur of the moment that it could possibly still work, just to have him ask for Elena to come help him out of trouble. Which made him seem perhaps weaker (having his sister come "bail him out", essentially - instead of it being HER who came to bring him back to life), but in the end the same goal could be achieved: Anzak turning informant on the Lotus Dragons, and getting Vanthus and Rowyn sent to prison.
There were other changes as well... a large chase scene I had planned for after the murder of the blacksmith, if one of the PCs started following one of the three Lotus Dragons who were running out of the smith's shop... It was to include a big chase at the docks, with the Lotus Dragon eventually getting caught, but not before secretly dropping the stolen Skeleton Key into a boat where another member would come and recover it later. Then the Lotus Dragon could potentially be interrogated by the party, with him confessing to the fact that the blacksmith was but the first in a string of murders to take place (foreshadowing the fact that Lux Seoni was next, and then the cartographer). But again, this did not take place, as the party actually allowed the murderous Lotus Dragons to run off freely, instead putting all their efforts on Anzak, who didn't even know a thing about the murder!
All in all, though, an excellent session. It was fun for me as a DM to have to improvise in this way, coming up with alternatives that might lead to the same end, or a similar one. Thankfully, in the end, while things certainly were different (Anzak never dying, though he was supposed to - Lux Seoni dying, though she wasn't supposed to), the end result still accomplished the same aim: to land Vanthus and Rowyn behind bars just before the wedding, setting up the following week's drama...
posted by Markus the Mad | 10:17 AM
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