See part Fast-talking the Cursed Prince!
The Royal Crypt featured 2 levels of mezzanine overlooking a central ‘court’. The Court had a Huge stone throne sporting a sculpted effigy of the Dwarven Exiled prince. Support columns dotted the whole chamber. On the throne stood a dark, spectral form screaming ‘Lies, all LIES! Traitors! Undone by Traitors!” over and over again.
Kneeling in front of the throne were 5 dwarves wearing antique rusted armour, eyes pitch black and crackling with necrotic energy…
Yup, I made me some Wight Dwarf guards (-1 to Speed, Forced movement 1 square less)! He he he!
In this encounter, the dungeon’s involvement was based around the Nexus point represented by the throne. Necrotic energies from deeper in the dungeon was shunted to the throne and spread out throughout the room. That energy powered the wights, allowing them to jump 2 squares as a free action once per round ( riding the necrotic ‘currents’).
Also, each column in the room would pulse out every round, catching nearby PCs and sliding them 3 squares if caught (usually causing a 20′ fall).
When we were setting up the fight, Franky started addressing the prince. I asked him to hold on to that thought for a few seconds while we finished rolling for initiative. When the initiative was rolled, I asked him if he still wanted to address the prince, he said yes but he wasn’t sure what he could say.
I told him to roll his nature skill to find arguments to convince the prince that he was in the clutch of some unholy curse. Franky smiled and he rolled. I told him that this revelation stunned the Wraith-Prince into silence (and actually stunned it mechanics wise).
Seeing the results, I explained to the players that a skill challenge could be played out during combat. As minor or standard actions, the PCs could argue with the Prince (minor) or the whole room (std) about the curse, or his story or other things like that. Successes could stun the prince (minor) or weaken the curse (psychic burst attack vs Wight, Standard).
The skill challenge worked perfectly as players naturally wove convincing the Prince with defending against the Wights. Jaiel launched into a passionate plea that Erathis hadn’t forgotten of the Prince’s devotion to her while Korg continued driving the point that the princes curse was not natural and held in place only because he willed it so.
After the game, Yan told me that he didn’t feel he was doing the skill challenge. The consequences of success and failure made so much sense story wise that he never focused on number of successes and such. I guess that’s the best possible metric for a well designed challenge!
Oh yeah, during that time, the invoker exploded the Wights, surviving an assault by all 5 wights in the same round! Jaiel moved in the melee and teleported most of them away with a cool power. I had added a few complications to the fight (multiple tiers and Columns making sliding attacks on the PCs to have them fall) but to no avail.
As is always the case with my current group, their teamwork proved synergistic and made short work of the encounter (The wraith spending the whole fight stunned also helped).
In the end, the party easily wiped the wights and won the skill challenge. The Prince let go of the curse and, departing this world, asked the PCs to spread the truth about him. The curse thus broken, the dungeon lost his hold on the region and its Nexus cease to exist. The are had been ‘purified’.
Behind the throne was a Stone Tablet with a description of the exiled prince’s story. It implies that the prince did steal from his clan, but only to help the organization that was to become the Builders. He was betrayed by members of this group and was exiled by his clan.
If you are interested about the full story, see the Post Scriptum below.
Pondering this, the PCs had a choice: How much of the story should they reveal?
Playing it safe, they chose to reveal everything but the builder’s treachery. Jaiel took down the stone tablet and brought it back to The Foundation for safekeeping (and protecting the builders from a potential scandal).
Roll credits on one of my best D&D 4e session with my gaming group so far. Awesome game!
Lessons Learned
- Good story elements worked in rich action scenes makes for great gaming.
- Even with only 3 PCs, good team work can take more punishment than what the rules imply.
- The living dungeon concept works perfectly (when I remember to use them), I’ll make sure that additional powers are worked into the monster stat cards.
- Modifying monsters is so easy it’s almost a joke. 4e is a dream for homebrewing DMs!
I’m so looking forward to the next game! This campaign will be a winner, I feel it!
Now I’m wondering if I could package this adventure with an intro to the City Within and sell that…
Post Scriptum:The Two sides of the Story.
The Thief-Prince was the eldest heir of one of the most influential Dwarven clans: the Stoneaxes. In the decades preceding the founding of the City Within, the Stoneaxes was among the most conservative family of the region’s dwarven kingdoms and actively opposed the rising support to follow the Erathian prophecies that eventually led the dwarves to invade the Primal Dungeon and found a City inside it.
The Prince was a strong believer in the prophecies and had a near fanatic devotion to the goddess of Civilization. In order to help the Erathians, a grouping of dwarven clans that later became the Builders gain sufficient influence on the Dwarven council of Elders, the prince ‘borrowed’ a large part of the Stoneaxes’ riches and gave it to the Erathian.
When this was discovered by the Stoneaxe family, the Erathian had already used the money to secure sufficient support to stand a good chance of getting the Elder’s Council approbation to mount an expedition in the dungeon. In order to save face and not be exposed as the unwilling supporter of the Erathians’ cause, the Stonaxes put immense pressure to have the Erathians deliver the Prince to them.
Thus, the prince was betrayed by the organization he helped and was turned over to his family. In exchange the Stoneaxes abstained on the crucial votes the Erathians needed to win.
The Prince was banished, stripped of his title, honor and birthrights. The Stoneaxes alleged that the prince was caught before he stole the money and the Erathian never explained where they managed to obtained the resources needed to secure sufficient support in the Council.
Along with a retinue of loyal servants and guards, the prince left the dwarven kingdoms enraged and bitter. He rapidly fell victim of the Dungeon’s influence and died soon after, one of its enslaved servants.
Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast, Monster Manual
Quote: “Pondering this, the PCs had a choice: How much of the story should they reveal?”
Yeah this pondering lasted a good 20 minutes… 😉 As Jaïel argument with her colleges that mentioning the ancestral betrayal of the Erathians, would only bring unwanted doubt against the Builders and therefore hinder the sacred mission of stopping the primal dungeon.
I liked the skill challenge during the fight– it made spending an action “talking” an effective tactic.
It totally did. It opens up new roleplaying opportunities during combat, which is not something we’ve done naturally with 4e’s very focused combat system.
Not only does this sound like great fun, I’m also pretty impressed with the way you as a group incorporated Yan as a co-designer of the setting into play as a PC. That really turns out for the best; you’ve got a guy who knows a lot about and likes the setting working with the group members to motivate their deeper delvings into the fluffy parts! Real good work!
Cheers!
Very awesome read, chatty! You inspire me as a DM, can’t wait to try out some of these players on my players! 🙂
@Flying: It came organically as Phil and I pitched idea back and forth. The end result is pretty neat as it provides a way to link the world to the player.
The risk with this approach is to give too much focus to one player. That being said, for now, it only seems to have given more focus for backstory ideas to the other players.
Also since we are used to playing together, I doubt the group mechanic will change that much.
We’ll see how it progress as more games are played, but I’m confident this will be an awesome campaign.
@Flying Dutchman: What’s really interesting is that almost every decisions surrounding this campaign were made following a discussion started with ‘hey, wouldn’t it be fun if…?”
For instance, when Yan mentioned that he wanted to make a Deva Avenger (Devavenger!), I told him it would be nice if his character had been there since the very beginning, allowing Yan to retain is metagaming knowledge of the city he created. We both agreed that it would be cool and since then we had Jaiel act as the group’s focus for its formation.
However, Yan is right when he mentions we musn’t focus on one character over the others. Fortunately, every character story so far is building up to be great!
Wait till you meet our new Halfling Chaos Sorcerer.
@Frost Ryder: Welcome to the blog and thanks for commenting! It makes me very happy to see that my overly verbose reports can be inspiring! Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions!
That skill challenge is just the sort of thing I was looking for, *YONK*!! And the conundrum of how much of the story to tell, pure awesome. Good stuff man, good stuff.
@Stin: Welcome to the blog! I’m happy to have given you some ideas for a skill challenge. Do note that it makes the encounter a lot easier… but no less fun.
As for the conundrum, one of the things I adore with campaigns with multiple factions is how easy it is to give PCs slightly conflicting agendas or hard choices that have lasting effect on the campaign.
In our case, there is no apparent effect, except I may have an angry spirit returning or maybe the secret will come out later and people will ask PCs why they held onto it.
Fun Stuff.
@Frost Ryder: Hey I forgot to tell you: Welcome to the blog! So sorry!
At this point, easier doesn’t really matter to me. Our group has hit a bit of a brick wall, and most of it is my fault (I DM). We get into combat and it becomes a numbers game. It’s mostly OK, we still have fun with it, but I, and I think my group, are looking for a bit more. That sort of skill challenge is just the sort of thing that when sprinkled into combat, would amp up the fun. I’ll definitely be on the look out for combats where this could be used. Thanks for another helpful blog post.
In such case I heartily encourage you to create encounters with lots of interactive terrain (traps, Walkways, collapsing columns, etc) and make sure you have mobile monsters like Skirmishers and Lurkers mixed in with your Brute and Soldiers. I’ve discovered that many encounters are mostly Brutes and Soldiers, making for a static fight where no one moves a lot.
My 2 cents.
Okay.
You guys are awesome.
What an awesome-sounding game session.
What an awesome way to integrate a skill challenge.
Your players are awesome.
I am bathing in awesomeness.
And I wasn’t even there!
Eric Maziades last blog post..Looking for lost hubby…
@Eric: Ha ha! It truly was a great game session, one of our best in a long time. Thanks for the kudos.