Thread 96249020

I'm hoping you guys can help me with something I'm working on. I have this dark fairy-tale setting I've been puttering with, and the main villainess is intended to be the 'inspiration' for the Hag of Hansel and Gretel, the Enchantress of Beauty and the Beast, the Evil Queen of Snow White, and the Dark Fairy from Sleeping Beauty, maybe among others.

I want her to have four lieutenants, each based on a major fairy tale figure, and each one sort of representing a Cardinal Sin, with the Queen herself standing in for Pride and Envy. I'm also sort of wondering if you can help me make the encounters with the lieutenants, which would be tentpole events, more interesting.

So, I'd love to flesh this out. I have plans for a rebellion, the Red Hoods, led by an aged "Grandma Rose" and a descendant of the Woodsman, but I'm looking to weave in other fairy tales here and there as supplementals or other encounters, if you're willing to help me out.

>>96249020 (OP)
Part 2

So far I have, in order of how much I think I understand their role in the story:

>Wrath: the Beast, formerly the Crown Prince of the realm, twisted by the Queen's magic into a crazed hunter that prowls the forest around her castle.

>Lust: I'm thinking of going with Bluebeard for this, and having him be a noble seduced by the Queen when she was in her Wicked Stepmother guise, before she usurped the throne and cursed the castle and its grounds. Now he's a sadistic deviant always on the search for his next 'wife,' who rules over an H. H. Holmes-inspired murder mansion.

>Gluttony: Gretel, who had been successfully convinced by the Queen (as the Candy Witch) to eat her own brother to escape starvation. Now she's a delusional cannibal who still talks to Hansel's rotting head, which she keeps in a picnic basket.

>Greed: this one I'm really struggling with. I was thinking Rumpelstiltskin, but I don't know how to make an encounter with him interesting.

Each lieutenant also has a special item, made of silver, which when collected and brought together at the castle allows access to:

>Sloth: the nightmare reality in which the Princess is trapped, and on which I've based the Giant's Castle from Jack and the Beanstalk, mixed with the Giant's Game from Ender's Game. Defeating the Giant and freeing the Princess is the last major step before the players can contend with the Witch-Queen in her tower.

>>96249020 (OP)
>>96249042
No big bad wolf?

And have you thought of doing anything with the Pied Piper? That story always scared me as a kid.

have you run a tabletop game before, OP, or is this the first

>>96250530
The Beast is actually meant to fill the roll of the Big Bad Wolf, being the creature that was wounded and narrowly repelled by the Woodsman and causing a young "Grandma Rose" to found the Red Hoods to resist the Witch-Queen.

I hadn't thought of using the Pied Piper, but that is a good idea! Maybe he could serve as a sort of child-catcher for the Witch-Queen, to turn into additional servants?

>>96250575
It'd be my first real attempt in many years, with all other attempts sputtering out for different reasons. Does it come across as "first-timer" to you?

>>96249020 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96250771
>Does it come across as "first-timer" to you?
It does. Three things are critical going into a fresh campaign:
1. That you don't over-do worldbuilding, which will exhaust you and give you tunnel-vision on all the wrong things
2. That you don't write a story - that's your players' job
3. That you don't make the campaign conceptual, symbolic, or otherwise masturbatory (your players aren't here to read your screenplay, they're here to fuck around and get loot while pretending to be dwarves)

Here's what you need to do:

Write a pitch for the campaign:
>You will play as burglars in a steampunk society

Conceive a first session which fulfills the pitch:
>You've heard a rumor that Lord Bafford is going out of town, and taking most of his guards with him, leaving his manor lightly guarded and vulnerable to robbery. You start in a tavern the evening before the heist; how have you prepared?

Draft a dungeon/location map, NPCs, enemy statblocks, random encounter tables, and a twist:
>Lord Bafford's bedroom contains a talking toad in a cage, who promises that HE is the REAL lord bafford
Run the session, run it quickly, cover a lot of ground, make life hard for your players' characters, don't faff around with extended NPC dialogues (and never have two NPCs talk to each other), drop the twist on your player's heads, and then call an end to the session. Boom, session 1 complete and your campaign has momentum.

>>96250530
>big bad wolf
What's her cup size?

>>96251036
Thanks, really, for your advice. You're saying stuff like this should wait until I've run a successful game, then? Because it sound like you're advocating a sort of sandbox, unless I'm misinterpreting.

>>96249042
>Greed: this one I'm really struggling with. I was thinking Rumpelstiltskin, but I don't know how to make an encounter with him interesting.
Rump's ability to spin straw into gold is applicable in different ways, but the straightforward one is just treating him like a mysterious guy with infinite wealth.

Going around, making deals (and indecent proposals) with extravagant promises of gold, and corrupting people can be his whole shtick, to the point where the party can be put into an impossible situation (thanks to bribed accomplices, including officials) that only he can get them out of. He can do it while pretending to be an ally, asking for something minor in exchange the first (and second) time around, but then revealing his true colors the third time by demanding a major sacrifice.

And, when (or if) the party attacks him, he can flaunt expensive magic items that burn up with each use (turning into straw ash), and be functionally invincible as long as they don't know his true name.

There's lots of ways this can go, depending on the group, and the option to accept or reject all of his offers should always be open, so it's easy for this to get really tricky.

The easier (and more video gamey) route is just an unnamed guy with golden scarecrow golem miniond who heals up by snacking on babies, but there's probably a middle ground somewhere.

Having his name be his weakness is a big deal, and the question is do you test your player's ability to figure out the character from the clues (which would need their characters to also be aware of Rump's name and be able to call it to mind), or do you test the PC's abilities to investigate his name in-game.

>>96251534
NTA, and that while that advice can apply to a sandbox game, I find that it's helpful even if you want the players to have a more structured experience. The example he gave of the players being burglars with a local Lord going out of town so they can rob him doesn't really leave that much wiggle room for the players to decide they're going to go off and do something else. They're starting at the tavern before the heist, which implies they're already hired/committed to it.

It's fine to design a campaign around the idea of having a bunch of major figures around the world who influence everything, with a premise for a campaign being the party gong around to defeat them.
That's the typical status quo for something like Dark Sun, for example, where you have the various Sorcerer-Kings in their city states.

But the important thing is that you can't just call it a day by making the big-name villains and nothing else, because how is the first session going to start? With the players beating one of those major lieutenants while being level 1 novices? Presumably not, which is why you need to come up with the foundations first.

My suggestion to lean into those aspects would be to focus on the villains as having a magical influence over various domains. Gretel for example might have some candyland kingdom. Or a flesh forest, depending on how gruesome you want to be. But with that as a basis, you then have an angle to focus on how the players might interact with that domain when Gretel isn't around. You can have monsters made of flesh or candy. Bandits hiding out there so they don't have to worry about food. There could be people who have been turned into candy statues and a special fountain of honey rumored to cure them.
Statting up encounters with the bosses can wait until you're sure that you've actually given those enemies a place in the world that can support an adventure that has more stakes than just if the players can kill a boss.

>>96251670
You know, I like that, but the more I think about it his ability might make him almost a threat to the Witch-Queen, instead of a servant. It's possible he'd be a more non-aligned denizen of the forest, a sort of traveling salesmen? Or maybe not. Maybe he's like her treasurer, and needs to be defeated in his counting house?

>>96251693
Yes, the main idea was that each of the four lieutenants has an object, made of silver, that needs to be collected and combined in order to rescue the Princess from her nightmare. Gretel has a Knife, Bluebeard has a Key, Rumpelstiltskin has a Quill, and the Beast has a Crown.

Maybe the initial adventure could be rescuing a wagonload of children being driven by the Piper to the Counting House, as a sort of flesh-tithe? So we'd literally have the players do battle with Rodents of Unusual Size on behalf of the Red Hoods before slaying the piper, which could then maybe be used to infiltrate the Counting House and confront the gnome?

>>96251693
So, you're saying it's okay to have these tentpole encounters so long as I populate the area around them with interesting things to do. That makes obvious sense; it's like a level or stage in a video game; you have to get to the boss first, before you can fight them, so it's important to make the environment interesting on the way there.

>>96253447
Pretty much, yeah. It's not a problem to have those characters in mind, in the same way that it's not a problem to decide in advance that there's a fire-breathing dragon lurking in the nearest mountain.

But if the goal was to slay that dragon, then there's probably going to be more lead-up to it, and because your game is going to start with the lead-up, that's the better place to focus your plans.
You can pin the lieutenants and their silver objects as key facets of the campaign, but making sure the campaign has enough substance is more important. Because if the game falls apart before the first boss battle, you wasted all of your effort.

>>96253224
Rescuing a wagon of kids sounds like a fine starting point. From there, there's obvious angles of escorting them somewhere safe, dealing with any fallout as a result of the missing tithe, and otherwise dealing with underlings and local problems until they're able to mount a proper assault and take out the lieutenant responsible.

>>96253753
>if the game falls apart before the first boss battle, you wasted all of your effort.

This is excellent advice and it helps put everything in perspective. So I need to think more about where I'm starting than where I'm going. A rough sketch of a map, maybe, to be filled in later. I really appreciate your help.

Can you guys help me integrate other fairy tales into the story, either as allies or enemies or what have you?

>>96253224
>his ability might make him almost a threat to the Witch-Queen, instead of a servant.
It helps heighten the perceived level of power that the Queen has, kind of like how Dracula in the Castlevania games has Death as one of his subordinates. A guy who has infinite money might seem pretty powerful, up until you start dealing with things beyond what money can buy, and the Queen can be in that scope of power.

>Maybe he's like her treasurer, and needs to be defeated in his counting house?
Or that. His whole "spinning straw into gold" can just be very elaborate book cooking.

>>96254144
>It helps heighten the perceived level of power that the Queen has, kind of like how Dracula in the Castlevania games has Death as one of his subordinates. A guy who has infinite money might seem pretty powerful, up until you start dealing with things beyond what money can buy, and the Queen can be in that scope of power.

I love this!

>>96249020 (OP)
>>96249042
I don't like the Red Hoods rebellion, sounds too much like a faction that would make the party look like side characters in their own adventure, like the Harpers or the Rebel Alliance. I feel that having a definite good guy faction full of dramatis personae, which the party must serve if they decide to fix the realm, would be not as funny as allowing the party to assemble a coalition out of several smaller and much more flawed factions (or just plain manipulate them into doing their dirty work). I mean, imagine having to deal with the Red Hood Gang, Hook's Pirates, Gaston's Handsome Militia, the loyalist army of the deposed prince Philip (from the Sleeping Beauty), two different cults seeking to open a portal to allow two different extra-dimensional invasions (from Oz and Wonderland), and several spymasters from different rival kingdoms.

>>96251036
This is genuinely solid advice and broadly applicable to boot.

>>96255541
Well, keep in mind I'm not going for Disney interpretations, but I could see there being multiple factions. The Red Hoods aren't even a faction particularly loyal to the original Royal Family (as the Beast was the former Crown Prince, and Baron Barbleue is also one of her lieutenants, that tracks) so there could be other factions.

>>96256154
I know, right? I'm very thankful for the attention this thread has gotten.

>>96257452
I think that Disney interpretations would work if made in a manner that fits the setting and/or totally reinventing minor things. There was no Gaston in the original fairy tale, but you can certainly use his character archetype in a suitable way. Maybe the Gaston of the setting was a perfectly normal hunter who died a martyr in a duel with the Beast, coming very close to defeat it, and his legend has been greatly exaggerated, causing a few musclebound jocks to imitate him and form a monster-hunting organization in his honor. Maybe there isn't a Prince Philip, but there's certainly room for a group of former royal guards dreaming to barge into the castle and slay the Queen, as soon as they manage to find a way to turn the Beast back into their rightful liege.

>>96249020 (OP)
not to be that guy, but what system are you thinking you're going to run this in? the themes you've mentioned remind me a lot of Dolmenwood

>>96258136
Oh, I see; you're saying I can file the serial numbers off! That makes sense, since players are going to make those connections anyway. I can describe the Witch-Queen any number of ways and they're still going to see her as a combination of Grimhilde and Maleficent.

>>96258164
I'm not familiar with Dolmenwood, but I can look into it. I was going to run the game in Tiny Dungeons 2e, which I've come to really like.

>>96258263
Yup. There's really no reason to avoid one specific iteration of the fairy tales if you can make it work. In any case, speaking of factions, the rival kingdoms bordering the one the Witch-Queen usurped would be a perfect starting point: how would former allies and enemies react to her takeover? Would they seek to make an agreement with her? Fund resistence movements? Infiltrate, subvert and sabotage? Would opposition groups from those nations seek the backing of the Witch Queen? Would the not!Vatican send a few witch hunters to find out what the hell is going on, or even declare a liberation crusade?

OP, if your players don't wander into Gretel's territory and encounter a chocolate moose, I'll be disappointed in you.

>>96260493
Noted! That's really funny.