Idea for an adventure / campaign

[Elrond]

Hello all,

I'm kind of new to this, so I would appreciate some feedback on an idea I had. I might do it in pure DFRPG, I might also import some non-DFRPG material, especially DF: Wilderness Adventures, since there is a substantial outdoor element. I'm not yet decided on this.

Here goes.

The adventurers arrive at a backwater border town. Penniless. They are basically good at one activity: killing stuff. Since they are considered scum, civilized people won't talk to them until they build some reputation. The captain of the garrison however is short-handed and can use anyone able to handle a weapon. He will hire them for some basic quests: rooting out some caves that are occupied by low-level monsters that terrorise the peasants. And the road to civilization runs through a forest full of bandits with prices on their heads.

The bandit's hideout can be found in only 2 ways: high tracking skill or capuring a bandit alive and interrogating him. When the hideout is found, there are 2 ways to handle the situation: just slaughter everyone and take the bounty or by diplomacy. Of course the bandit leader turns out to be an unjustly dispossessed noble. If the adventurers decide to help him, a follow-up quest triggers: they have to prove his claim. He can't do this himself since he is an outlaw.

This will be a non-combat quest. They have to use their brains to research archives, unmask a corrupt clerk and find the embezzled documents. Then they can try to settle this out of court, essentially blackmailing the greedy relatives to give back to Sir Bandit Leader the manor they tricked him out of. If this succeeds, the quest is done and Sir Bandit Leader will be grateful. Otherwise it will come to a lawsuit. You can go all Grisham on this and make it a lawyer-drama with both sides trying to influence court in not-quite-legal ways. Or just settle it all with some public speaking rolls. Or consider the proof irrefutable and handle it all scripted. Not decided on this. Anyway, when handled correctly Sir Bandit Leader will be reinstated and the quest is done.

Now the adventurers will have attracted attention as useful goons. The town has not always been a backwater. In the past it was a thriving trading town, back when the dwarven city was still functioning. But the dwarves have disappeared, and trade has dried up. The local nobles and merchants still hope to revive the good old days and will hire the team for a fact-finding mission.

The dwarven city is not near town. It's near a military outpost further away. This outpost is now just a small fort with a garrison. Gamewise it has limited facilities:

• lodgings to safely sleep and recover. Food is for sale here.
• they can place orders for gear and hire people to fetch stuff in town. The roundtrip is at least a week however, so they have to plan in advance. Or wait, while paying for lodgings.
• the captain may have some minor outdoor quests in the area.
• the soldiers have a forge to service weapons and armour.
• the adventurers can carouse with the soldiers and gather the info the soldiers can be expected to know.
• for real research they will have to travel to town.

In the end they find the dwarven city and find it occupied by orcs. This is of course the main dungeon. As they battle their way through the dungeon, it is gradually revealed what has happened. The mines ran dry and of course the dwarves mined too deeply, as they always do. They dug into primordeal tunnels, inhabited by Elder Things. The Things tempted the dwarves into abandoning their gods and worshipping them instead. They promised the dwarves the easy life, having the real work done by orc slaves. The Elder Things tunnels have valuable minerals with strange properties (orichalcum?), triggering the greed of the dwarves.

Since dwarves were made for work, this could only go wrong. The Elder Things are powerful, but few in numbers. They could not overthrow the dwarves on their own. Hence the orc slaves and the plotting. The Things secretly have the orcs multiply until there were enough of them to overthrow the dwarves who have quickly grown complacent by the easy life. Most dwarves where slaughtered before the realised what was happening, some barricaded themselves into a small but defendable area. The adventurers can make contact with them and so figure out more details of what happened.

The Elder Things meanwhile also couldn't control the orcs. So a stalemate developed: the orcs occupying the upper levels and the Things down below. When the adventurers fight themselves through the orcs, they will reach the Things-controlled areas. Lots of weirdness and insanity awaits them there. Of course, since the dwarves worshipped the Things, there is plenty of scope for evil altars and idols all over the place. So, exorcists and Hidden Lore / occultism specialists will have their hands full. There are collectors willing to pay handsomely for evil artifacts that ought to be destroyed.

Many quests are possible: nobles in town will want to recover stuff that was in the care of the dwarves. They could have ordered things to be made by the dwarven smiths that have never been delivered. There could be relatives there on trading talks when it all went pear-shaped. The nobles will want their bones recovered for proper burial. The Church will want the evil of the Elder Things exterminated. The wizard guild will pay for any knowledge hidden down there, including the kind of knowledge the Church would rather have destroyed. The still-surviving dwarves will want their city back. Etcetera.

Does this sound workable and, most of all, fun?

[Apollonian]

Sounds fun enough, but you do have some choke points that assume the PCs will do X, so that Y happens.

What if the PCs don't have a high tracking skill and aren't able (or willing) to capture and interrogate a bandit?

What if the PCs just slaughter the bandits? (Maybe they think the bandit leader is just trying to con them; maybe they just don't care; maybe they like the current nobles better than the dispossessed noble.)

Honestly, the last part (dwarven ruins and such) sounds like a lot more fun than the first part, as far as Dungeon Fantasy style stuff goes. Indeed, they sound like two separate, unrelated adventures. If I were going with this, I'd consider having the first part be a non-gamed prelude to the rest, and have the players work out how their PCs navigated the bandit/dispossessed noble situation without any rolling, and then use that to set up interesting situations for the rest of the campaign.

[Tom H.]

That sounds very good Elrond.

You have a rich and developed plot.

I do like the first part as well. However, for new players it seems that more nuanced, non-combat play would develop better after more traditional armed conflicts.

There are two areas that I myself find somewhat challenging.

1. What is a good way to provide structure to the more investigative roleplaying?

2. How much detail will you provide to the various levels of the "dwarven dungeon?"
For better or worse, this could entail lots of design and work on your part.
It may be fun if you decide to develop it progressively throughout a campaign.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Elrond

Of course the bandit leader turns out to be an unjustly dispossessed noble. If the adventurers decide to help him, a follow-up quest triggers: they have to prove his claim. He can't do this himself since he is an outlaw.

To link to the fallen dwarf settlement half of the setting, perhaps Sir Bandit Leader has been preparing to take back his manor by force, and is collecting dwarven Elder magic weapons to aid in the attack. He's been able to get them by either trading with the orcs or raiding them.

The PC's can then get clues about the fate of the dwarves beforehand, either through negotiation with Sir Bandit Leader, or if they deal with him more violently, by finding said artifacts in his loot along with his own notes about the dungeon.

Also, about his dispossession, instead of an archive hunt for forged documents, have the target of that quest in the dungeon too. Perhaps it was a dwarven artist who was able to do the forgery, and there's a chance he's still alive to testify. Otherwise there would be his preliminary sketches or the original deeds in his files. Or the title of the manor goes to the bearer of a particular seal or signet ring, and that's what's lost in the dungeon.

[Tom H.]

I like Daigoro's insights.

Collaboration can be great for weaving plots.

I wish Pyramid magazine would be used more for setting and adventure collaboration with the community in this regard.

[Elrond]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

Sounds fun enough, but you do have some choke points that assume the PCs will do X, so that Y happens.

What if the PCs don't have a high tracking skill and aren't able (or willing) to capture and interrogate a bandit?

What if the PCs just slaughter the bandits? (Maybe they think the bandit leader is just trying to con them; maybe they just don't care; maybe they like the current nobles better than the dispossessed noble.)

Honestly, the last part (dwarven ruins and such) sounds like a lot more fun than the first part, as far as Dungeon Fantasy style stuff goes. Indeed, they sound like two separate, unrelated adventures. If I were going with this, I'd consider having the first part be a non-gamed prelude to the rest, and have the players work out how their PCs navigated the bandit/dispossessed noble situation without any rolling, and then use that to set up interesting situations for the rest of the campaign.

Thanks for your reply. This is the reason why I asked for feedback.

Some things I didn't mention (and probably should): the idea was to play the wilderness parts off a hex-grid map. My background (and the player's) is in computer RPG's. That kind of sets the mindset. The typical computer player would simply lawnmow the map and expect to find the correct hex and bingo. Something a bit more intelligent is required here. This will be cued by tavern tales ("the bandit camp is well-hidden", "we searched extensively in the entire forest and never found their camp").

To me the most obvious course of action (when lawnmowing doesn't work) seemed to be to interrogate a bandit. There will be random encounters in the forest and of course the bandits are designed to be captured (they will not automatically die on 0 HP, so fighters can knock them out, and they will flee when hit a few times, so that scouts can shoot them in the legs).

As a backup plan, tracking is present (at a successful roll, they should find faint traces leading to the camp hex, at a successful roll on the camp hex, the camp will be revealed). I probably shouldn't set the penalty on the tracking roll too steep. It should be more or less inevetable that they stumble on traces somewhere, in order to set them on the track.

That was the idea. If they don't find the camp, they can just collect the bounty on the bandits they killed and get a few points for the kills. If they find the camp and simply massacre it, they will collect the bounty and a special reward for eliminating the bandit threat. It's a valid and anticipated course of action. Doing the whole thing is basically a (semi-hidden) bonus with a bigger payout.

Something like that was my vision. I realise I described it a bit minimally, but your reaction was no less valuable, since it prompted me to think the whole thing over again.

Regarding your second point. That is a more fundamental issue of course. The basic idea was to offer something for everyone. A lot of wilderness action for druids and outdoorsy barbarians, and non-combat content for the brainiacs, not just a dungeon. But I do see your point. You can make a thing worse by packing too much stuff into it. I will consider it.

[Elrond]

@Daigoro:

Great ideas! Thanks a lot. That does tie everything together much more naturally.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Elrond

That was the idea. If they don't find the camp, they can just collect the bounty on the bandits they killed and get a few points for the kills. If they find the camp and simply massacre it, they will collect the bounty and a special reward for eliminating the bandit threat. It's a valid and anticipated course of action. Doing the whole thing is basically a (semi-hidden) bonus with a bigger payout

Another option, if they don't find the bandits, is the bandits start tracking them. They're wary of these armed intruders in their territory. The PCs might get captured, and this is when the bandits' boss, Sir Dispossessed, offers them a deal if they go into the dungeon for him.

[Tinman]

A few questions about this dispossessed noble:
1) Yes, he had an awful thing happen to him however, isn't he now a thief & murderer &/or the leader of thieves & murderers?
2) If the PC's are "good guys" & heroes, Why should the party want to help him?
3) Even if the PC's successfully help him prove his claim, isn't he still a criminal wanted by The Crown for his crimes? Why would The Crown be OK with giving him back his titles & land? Won't The Crown need to punish him for the crimes he committed as the leader of bandits?