Unplayable Horrors

I’ve been working on a bit of a secret project for my D&D game. It’s kind of brutal. Let me clarify. The encounters aren’t particularly difficult for the suggested level, no, the material itself requires a bit of a warning. It was inspired by a true story that got my design gears rolling, and that true story deals with some very dark material. The material touches on things that I know are sensitive to some people, but, therein lies the difficulty of many stories.

I stumbled across an article discussing things that aren’t in D&D. I thought it was interesting that they included some things that, in my experience, really aren’t in D&D. Well, I shouldn’t say they aren’t in the game, a better way to say it is, they get glossed over quite a bit. We all know that certain races and monsters keep slaves, even some kingdoms, countries, and organizations within the common races, keep slaves. But, it only comes up when it’s thrust in our face. Drug use, true genocide, and other truly evil aspects of real life are left out. I know why, so do you. It’s a fantasy, and part of that fantasy is we want to check the real evil at the door and enjoy some good old goblin bashin’. Heck, why not?

On the other hand, some of the best stories ever start with these very evils, and some adventures may touch on these horrors, but not very often, in some cases, never. I’ve even seen evil campaigns where it really just turns into an opportunity to play the monsters and you bash on the paladins and elves instead. I have never played a campaign where slaves were more than a group of people saved from a wagon train or drugs were maybe named dropped as a reason to not like an organization. I’ve seen rules for drug use, but have never seen it in game, actually affecting dice rolls. Even drunkenness is treated more as a humorous backdrop for a character than something that affects things.

I’m sure some groups use these things, and I’m about to explore something on par with them. I’m ready, and mature enough, to drop real evil into my game. I’ve actually creeped my players out before (they’re asking me to do so again this October) and seen true revulsion at some encounters I’ve placed before them. But, I’m going a step further, injecting a level of realness that I have never seen. I actually put a warning on the first page to introduce the idea of the adventure and make sure everyone is comfortable with playing in the game.

The idea popped up when I was looking for creepiness around Seattle during my stay there. I stumbled across an interesting story of a place called Starvation Heights. It’s got murder, betrayal, insanity, court battles, evasion, and all hanging around a core of a fad diet that was as bad as bad can get. It’s an awesome little story morsel, and I plucked it up and decided that this was the basis of awesome, it just needed a fantasy twist, like potions that make you think your healthy, but you aren’t, an evil priestess who worships a dark god of pain, and a backdrop of gorgeous evergreen forest haunted by orcs and goblins.

As you can imagine, the diet became the center of the adventure and it branched into an exploration of starvation and why people would want to use such a dangerous diet to become healthy. Then, I laced a mystery into it. The result is that the players have to talk to a lot of people who are willing to destroy themselves and risk death through starvation to be “better.”

One could say, that is a sensitive issue. I myself have people in my life that have struggled with such ideas and that made gave me some insight. It made me realize just how much I agree with the idea that some stories need a level of consent before they are thrust on people. I’ve seen arguing over the idea, that it might detract from the horror by spoiling the story. I say to the contrary, you don’t go to a body horror flick if you don’t know what you’re getting into, otherwise, you might be running on that ticket. I would expect no less at the roleplaying table. How cruel would it be to play a game where drug use is a core concept of the story, but someone at the table is haunted by circumstances surrounding drugs? Similarly, slavery, self-harm, genocide and other such brutal concepts stand to really jar someone who is not prepared.

But, (yeah, I started the paragraph with a but) I also believe that using these stories at the table, really allowing a group of hearty adventurers to explore a scenario where such an issue is at the heart could lead to an amazing and very rewarding tale, for the right group. And so, I begin the path of writing several scenarios for 5e that are driven by Loviatar, and explore everything, the darkest darknesses, that such a being might impart on her followers before stepping away from The Realms.

I think that maybe more tables should explore these horrible things, to make evil more evil, more real. But, I also believe that you should make sure before you go digging in such dark corners of the human mind, you prepare your group.

Would the Real Wolfman Please Stand Up

I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a very long time, since some time in 1993 if I’m not mistaken, and it was pretty early that I had what I will call a Tracy Hickman moment. I was used to seeing goblins and kobolds and owlbears. We fought dragons and griffons and chimeras. We even slaughtered zombies, slayed death knights, and conquered a certain famous castle with a certain famous vampire in it. During that time, though, I fought several of these weird creatures called werewolves.

Yes, werewolves. My characters treated the silly little critters with little more than disdain and frustration, or, if the DM was really clever a sudden awe at how he surprised us with who the bad guy really was. Still, my real world self always felt cheated. The werewolf was an easy kill because a rogue had a silver dagger and the always prepared fighter bought some alchemical silver crap. Oh, and wizards don’t care because magic kills anything except for ancient dragons and the tarrasque.

I remember the first time I saw a werewolf. I was spending the night at my grandmother’s house and watching cable, not good cable, but hey, Stephen King movies with a little edited for TV action were nice when I was eight. I stayed up until the wee hours and caught a werewolf flick about a kid in a rocket propelled wheelchair and the only way to kill the creature was silver. It was magnificent, and it stuck. All of the good werewolf movies sold the same crazy idea. The werewolf, or even wolfman, was basically The Incredible Hulk but all bad guy and with one weakness. Bullets didn’t hurt it, crushing it didn’t work, even after being blown to bits by a stick of dynamite, the wolfman healed. Although, I did thing it was hilarious that you could get away by kicking him in the nards.

I read about the Beast of Gevaudan, I watched the original Wolfman, I dug up the story of the wolf that was shot and sent to the Smithsonian and it arrived as a human body. I was invested, and all of that long before I cracked the spine on any role playing game nonsense. I knew, as every kid my age knew, that the only way to put down a werewolf was with a silver bullet, and sometimes, more than one.

And so, I found myself asking, why on earth can any willy-nilly adventurer tackle a werewolf like it’s no big deal. This was a creature that deserved more. The werewolf shouldn’t be a random encounter in the woods. It shouldn’t be relegated to Bitey Bloodthirsties menagerie. A werewolf should be an unstoppable threat that drives an adventure. It should be the BBEG that you have to collect the silver weapons and damage spells can’t touch so you have to plan perfectly to get the best of the creature.

I kept expecting someone to see the problem and correct it. Hell, I was looking so hard that when the Tyranid Deathleaper came along, I realized, it was just a werewolf in a carapace. And so I open the 5E Monster Manual, hoping, praying to the gods of the wild that my desires would be answered, but no. Some people say you need to add levels or just build your own. I say Van Richten would laugh his ass off at your pathetic lycanthropes, Wizards. At any rate, I think I’m going to jump on that and see what I can do, but I still have expectations. If a vampire can get its setting, why can’t we have a good werewolf adventure.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been some good lycanthropy stories, but I don’t remember the wolfman traveling in packs to create fear. And it was just comical when he was playing second fiddle to the pasty bat guy. Here’s to hoping that a real werewolf, a powerhouse of terror is waiting around the corner.

Curse of Strahd: Old Bonegrinder and Encounter Balance

Warning: Spoiler Alert for Curse of Strahd…

 

This is my first blog in quite some time and I know I’m showing up late to the Vampire party, but, here we go. I’ve been prepping to run Curse of Strahd (and by prepping I mean reading I6, reading Domains of Dread, pulling out Fair Barovia, The Bleak House, and other material, printing maps of Barovia and Darkon, figuring out what I want to use from the book and what I want to change).

A great deal of what I want to do with this adventure stems from the fact that I have loved the Ravenloft setting since some time in 1994 that started with a beautiful boxed set. But, the thing that I’ve discovered and bothers me a bit is the talk of encounter difficulty, and especially Old Bonegrinder.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that the three hags, night hags in particular, are way out of league with the recommended 4^th level status of the proclaimed 4 to 5 adventurers. Well, let me just say that I have long loved games like Vampire the Masquerade, Cult, Chill, and Cthulhu, and the Ravenloft Masque of the Red Death boxed set is among my favorites. I also love horror movies and write horror novels, so let me just say a couple things that might shed some light on this interesting encounter.

First, Welcome to Ravenloft, this is a different creature from what you are used to. Period. End of Conversation. Get it through your noggins. Ravenloft is the Wuthering Heights to The Realms’ Middle Earth, okay. You just walked out of a place where you were heroes, soon to be lords, mighty mages, and legendary dungeon delvers through the mists of Ravenloft. Things are a changin’.

Ravenloft by its very nature is supposed to present the usual challenges in different allotments and provide grimmer, darker encounters. Translation, you aren’t killing goblins every five minutes, but you might be searching behind paintings and rifling through desks on a far more frequent basis. But, that’s not the point of this little treatise. No, my point is encounters are not meant to be balanced and Old Bonegrinder is the design team screaming in your face to remind you.

Let’s catch up on the Svalich Road So Far (some of you understand that reference, I’m sure). One, you went through some mists, maybe because a gypsy told you to, a werewolf pack is hiding in it, or just because damn choking mist made us. Okay, no problem. Then, ooh, the creepy woods and headless statues at the creepy self-closing gates (every haunted house in every cheesy kids haunted movie). And welcome to Barovia. It’s doom, it’s gloom, you might have had to kill some semi-comical zombies and a vampire spawn, met the pretty lady, buried an old dude, and met a mad priest, oh, and got overcharged for stuff you should have bought on the other side of that damn, cloying mist. Then there was the creepy, yet completely harmless one-of-us ghosts at the gallows, and Madam Eva. So, a party and a bad psychic hotline.

And then Old Bonegrinder is right past the castle you already know you can’t handle. Hey, it’s just a creepy windmill, right? Right? In normal D&D it probably houses an ogre or a grumpy dwarf complaining about how he should be mining, but no, inside is a big bad night hag and her two daughters. That’s three, yep three CR 5 creatures, and if they get to act as a coven, likely but not guaranteed, three CR 7 creatures. Yes, that is exactly right.

That is some unfair crap right there if I ever saw it. You’re going to drop an encounter that is deadly for 9^th to 10^th level characters in a rundown flour making machine for four 4^th level adventurers? You must be insane, they’re going to die. If this were Forgotten Realms, yes. If it were even Dark Sun, maybe. But this is Ravenloft my friends, and you need to be reminded after all this fluff adventure building, creative storytelling, player hooking. You can die here, and that is how you make players afraid.

That is exactly the intention. That is also why the entry for when you meet Morgantha reads, “She doesn’t mind visitors, as long as they’ve come to do business. She tries to sell her latest batch of dream pastries…” You ARE NOT meant to kill these hags yet. You are meant to walk in, snoop around, run across someone who knows they can kill you, and be offered a damn pastry while as a player, you compute the fact that you just walked in on a monster that Mr. Greenwood wouldn’t make you fight for another two or three levels, even as a BBEG. Again, Welcome to Ravenloft.

See, Ravenloft is based on Gothic Horror novels primarily, and over the years has grown to embrace many facets of horror. For instance, Izek, could easily turn into a slasher like Jason or Michael Myers. The Abbott plays on body horror like “Saw” and “American Mary.” It should feel that way. It shouldn’t just be creepy forests and dark, lonely moors, because no adventurer is going to be impressed with that, or trolls, or even dragons after a while. But, if you have a bunch of greenhorns who think they’re awesome because they killed Uugurk the Ugly Orc and maybe a vampire spawn come across three night hags who would gladly sell you to the locals as donuts, the players might have to say, “Volo, I don’t think we’re in Cormyr anymore.”