[DF] Help me design a medevac session

[Gnomasz]

I need ideas for interesting and impactful choices for my characters while they're transporting a dying comrade.

Last session our Knight ended up mortally wounded, 24 hours of forced march away from the next town with a healer competent enough for this situation. I need a way to:
1. Make the road back more interesting than „roll a death check 48 times to see if you make it to town”.
2. Avoid a situation where the player needs to create a new character after half an hour of play.

So far I have 1 choice and 1 challenge for the players:
1. They might risk an impromptu surgery. They've been led by an NPC journeyman herbalist who might have Surgery at effective 7. With the Knight's Luck it's around 40% chance of success.
2. If they choose to travel to town, they need to come up with a way to transport the Knight quickly. On their way from town they've been marching for 24 hours without rest through foothills, a ruined town, a river and (mostly) a forest – previously I've summed it up quickly with the loss of Fatigue. The river and other crevices aren't a challenge as I've ruled that the Wizard can create a Force Wall horizontally (at −4), and he can cast it for free (high skill).

Just to make the session interesting for the Knight I've decided to
1. let him be conscious, though unable to move,
2. let him control the NPC herbalist,
3. avoid combat, where he couldn't do much with the above characters.

We've only played two sessions until now, so a resurrection is out of financial reach and an eventual funeral won't bring enough memories to make it a long, significant event.

I've also decided to inverse the Rapid Fire rules to change the multitude of death checks into one at a penalty. Unfortunately I didn't think of that at the end of last session.

So I need ideas for obstacles and challenges on the road to town where a decision needs to be made. I've got Wilderness Adventures, so "what and how to roll" isn't a problem – the player choices are.

[Varyon]

Personally, I'd be inclined to allow the herbalist to use some rare poisonous (in the long term) herb of some sort to temporarily stabilize the character. Maybe have the herb be something of a last resort - the herbalist needs to monitor the character, and if he sees him crashing (failed a Death Check), he needs to administer it to save him (which simply buys him some more time before his next Death Check). Once they get to town, in addition to healing the mortal wound (and the damage that caused it), the healer (or maybe the herbalist) will also need to purge the character's system of the toxic herb, which will be more difficult, time-consuming, and of course expensive the more of the herb the character had to ingest. Say the herbalist has only a dose (or two, or three) of the herb readily at hand; when he runs low/out the party will have to make the choice of delaying travel to forage for more or pressing on and hoping he doesn't fail any more checks. If you have the herb slowly deal toxic damage to the character, that can add another concern to the situation.

[jason taylor]

What if the would is not just a wound but evil magic? Maybe he is deteriorating into a werewolf?

[A Ladder]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Personally, I'd be inclined to allow the herbalist to use some rare poisonous (in the long term) herb of some sort to temporarily stabilize the character. Maybe have the herb be something of a last resort - the herbalist needs to monitor the character, and if he sees him crashing (failed a Death Check), he needs to administer it to save him (which simply buys him some more time before his next Death Check). Once they get to town, in addition to healing the mortal wound (and the damage that caused it), the healer (or maybe the herbalist) will also need to purge the character's system of the toxic herb, which will be more difficult, time-consuming, and of course expensive the more of the herb the character had to ingest. Say the herbalist has only a dose (or two, or three) of the herb readily at hand; when he runs low/out the party will have to make the choice of delaying travel to forage for more or pressing on and hoping he doesn't fail any more checks. If you have the herb slowly deal toxic damage to the character, that can add another concern to the situation.

I really like this idea. You could also add symptoms as the character loses more hp from the periodic toxic damage (nausea at 2/3 HP, low pain threshold at 1/3 HP, blindness at 0 HP, for example).

Maybe even need to go on a quest to get the even rarer counter herb to the toxic one (above) which is obviously guarded by a {insert favorite monster} up inside a cave outside of town.

So you have the balance of how much travel can we sustain before needing to forage for the toxic herb vs fast travel to get to the permanent cure vs the chance of failure if you can't find the toxic herb to stave off death vs how many symptoms the wounded PC wants to take before getting a dose of the toxic herb. Also, it lets the damaged PC still get to do stuff.

[(E)]

Any handy monsters that can put their victim into hybernation before eating them?

A cure that might be worse than the injury, do we infect him with vine-vampire sap to keep him from dying? He will be infected with green rot but be alive.

Take the high road or the low road? One is long and rough, the other goes past a burial ground and will make enemies of the locals in town?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Ransom

Am I misremembering something from the rules for why he isn't going to stabilize anyway once he gets first aid and makes some HT rolls?

Mortal Wounds (B423) don't stabilize without surgery or a Critical Success (I think there are some spells that can stop it as well). Of course, you're right that he's far more likely to have a Critical Success or suffer a Failure at some point in 48 rolls than to get an ordinary Success 48 times in a row. Sounds like OP is going to simplify things (and skew the probabilities) by condensing things into a single roll at a penalty. That probably gives the character a better chance of surviving.

[Gnomasz]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Personally, I'd be inclined to allow the herbalist to use some rare poisonous (in the long term) herb of some sort to temporarily stabilize the character.

That's a good idea. I like the idea of it improving the odds of success better than it saving the PC after a failed Death Check – the latter use is a no-brainer. The first one might actually build tension.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

What if the would is not just a wound but evil magic? Maybe he is deteriorating into a werewolf?

Funny you'd say that. They were fighting lycantropes.

Originally Posted by A Ladder

Maybe even need to go on a quest to get the even rarer counter herb to the toxic one (above) which is obviously guarded by a {insert favorite monster} up inside a cave outside of town.

Funny… Maybe it's hivemind? They were just fetching a rare antidotic herb to cure their cursed/poisoned mounts. So I like the idea, but I'm not going to repeat it already.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Of course, you're right that he's far more likely to have a Critical Success or suffer a Failure at some point in 48 rolls than to get an ordinary Success 48 times in a row.

Yeah, looking at the actual odds I'm starting to consider making the challenge completely about the Surgery. The skill's got plenty of situational modifiers the PCs could try to affect, plus I might add the dangerous herb mentioned above, or the blood of lycanthropes, a bit like (E) suggested. Yuup! That's got to be it. Some hard choices to make.

Thanks a lot all!

[hal]

As GM, you could easily enough "find" a magic item that places the character into suspended animation, where he won't get better or worse for the time he's under.

Another alternative would be the spell "Entombment" which also places the target of the spell into a suspended animation state.

Then of course, there is the "Wish" spell itself, where the user can determine the result of a single die roll at the time BEFORE the roll is made, to make it a critical success roll. I'll never forget the night in one campaign where a character was riding all out attack towards a really badass NPC - aiming for the eyes of the NPC at full gallop. I looked at the player saying "John, are you SURE you want to do this?".

That is when he used his wish that I had forgotten he had, that was still on his character sheet.

Those are options available using GURPS MAGIC or GURPS CLASSIC MAGIC if you're so inclined. The next post will give you another option...

[hal]

Another option:

Nothing good comes without its price...

Midway to where the party thinks they have to go to save their friend, there is a village of people, who, when the see the stricken knight, will make signs of religious aversion to the knight and panic. One child will say "It is her dream!" If the party investigates this further, the child will guide them to a hut set aside from the village in a major way - almost HERMIT like (play up on that!). Turns out, there is a finished stone statue of the knight when he was first knighted (age wise). There is also another stone statue, a work in progress nearby the finished one, showing all but the knight's legs and feet (those are still rough hewn stone). The statue SHOWS the mortal wound...

When the young woman living in the hut discovers the arrival of the party, when she sees the knight player character, she will give a cry of alarm at his state, but will immediately have something of a happy smile, as if she knows him on her face.

What the players don't know, and can only discover if they ask around the village, is that she is the last of a line of Knights, whose land has been in their care for 7 generations. She is the last of the line, and the manor will eventually eschew back to the Baron at her death. Even now, the Baron is looking to find her a husband, as he is required to do as a result of his oath to his vassal (her father). She had three brothers, all of whom are now dead. Their three true loves, are also dead.

It is said, that she is an extraordinary healer, but word of her deeds has never been able to leave the village for some odd reason. Even now, they can only tell of this information as long as the KNIGHT is in the same room, otherwise, they will give evasive answers such as "The Knight is key to understanding" or "The knight is her fate" or something like that...

What the behind the scenes stuff is:
The grandfather of this girl, made a pact, an unwise pact with <insert your preference here>. Said pact was to save the life of someone he loved, and the being indicated that he will be given his pact, but only if he gave up his honor and pledged the surety of his family's afterlife as a price to give him what he wished for most: that his wife would survive the childbirth that had driven her into a mortal state of existence (ie she was dying of childbirth). The grieving knight made the pledge, and in exchange, he was given the ability to use his own soul to power a very specific wish. Only through love could he exercise the wish, and only to heal the person he loved.

One year and one day from the use of the wish, the recipient is obligated to fulfill the contractual obligation of rescuing the Knight's honor. Failure to do so results in the death of the person who granted the wish. Worse yet, the person receiving the wish would become marked as follows:

The single most important thing to the person who received the gift, shall become the repository of the gifter's soul. The recipient of the gift (the wish) would lose the benefits of the wish should the recipient get more than 1 mile from the item - or should the item be destroyed. While bound to the soul of the gifter - the recipient of the gift may not walk on hallowed ground without demonstration of his cursed state (ground heaves as if an earth quake, etc). Should the person enter a holy building with a sanctified alter, the building itself shall speak out in agony (ie, the building would begin to shake as if in an earthquake, shingles falling, cracks forming in the walls, etc - the longer the person is in the building, the worse and more quickly the damage occurs). If the person attempts to partake in any religious ceremony (including clerical miracles etc), the person trying to officiate the ceremony will find their ability to exercise their office harder and harder to perform (if the priest is within 1 hex of the character while the ceremony is trying to be accomplished, the priest is at -10 to their rolls etc). Making it a range based thing might work...

Long story short? When a manor is given/entrusted to a vassal, some symbol of its ownership is given to the Knight. In this case, it is a silver shod baton made of oak from the oldest living oak tree on the land at the time it was entrusted to the family 7 generations ago. That baton is now in the possession of the original "thing" that granted/cursed the family with the "gift". When the last generation dies (the girl that can save the player's knight), the entire generation's souls will belong to this "being".

Of course, with that year and a day thing, the Knight will KNOW of his obligation. There is more to this "backstory" if you want it. Such as why the curse couldn't become public knowledge, or why, when the young men married, their true loves all suffered "accidents" in childbirth that would require that young men to use their "wish", etc.

What matters here is that the saving of the Knight itself, places upon him an obligation to save the poor girl. What makes this a tragedy, is that she was shown the face of her true love (him). If he doesn't love her in return, well, that is tragic enough no? But if he doesn't even care to rescue her from her curse, that is truly tragic!

In the end, you may wish to modify this scenario so as to avoid railroading the dying knight into something he (the player) may not enjoy.

The point is? The guardian creature was put there to save the girl from having to make the choice as well as to protect her from other harm. Perhaps some other hero might arrive to be the true love if he can only get her to forget her visions (but that's a story for a different character or not even important to the overall story for your group).

In short - it is a way to offer life to the knight, but at a price. He has to earn it (the player) and the penalties/costs involved should make this something that is epic...

Dead Unicorn
A trip to some horrendous place of power for the originator of the pact
A deadly combat to retrieve a physical object

If the curse is emplaced where her soul is anchored to the Knight's sword, then he has a new quest to try to find her peace or get his sword exorcised, and also find a way to avert his returned "near death" state the wish spared him.

I'm sure that if you go this route, your own mind can come up with your own details. If, you would like more, simply email me...

[scc]

Why does not even one member of the party have First Aid? As for Surgeon, I don't think DF uses it.