Primal/Within Chronicles: City of the Overmind, Part 1

Previously in our game…

After a few months of rest our heroes are called to save citizens of the City Within from the monstrous tentacles of a clutch of aberrant creatures. Following clues left behind by the monsters and the ever elusive ‘Master’, the party prepares to use thier recently acquired teleportation lore to follow the monsters to their source deep in the Dungeon and destroy one of the it’s most critical Nexus.

This series of game report will be different. I usually tell you the story of the game, peppered with my DMing calls and challenges. This time, I ended up using such a radically different structure for the adventure that I will summarize the whole story first and then tell you how I built/ran the session.

The City of the Overmind, Session 1 Redux

The PCs teleported on top of as ruined tower overlooking an eerie ruined city of the underdark. Far from being deserted, the whole city was under the control of a totalitarian and extremely insane Mind Flayer known as The Overmind. The PCs found an ally from the City Within and learned that the Dungeon’s nearest Nexus was likely found in the Castle of the Overmind. In its craziness, the mindflayer distributed 4 pieces of a magical key that could supposedly open the way to the castle and the Nexus. The party’s ally had one such key.

After some planning, the party decided upon an elaborate plan to retrieve the keys, disrupt the influence of the Overmind over the city, establish new Divine and Spirit foci to ‘convert’ the City, and sabotage some installations to create a diversion to facilitate entry into the Castle.

The heroes initiated the plan and obtained the likely locations of the other 3 keys from an ally hiding out in the city’s Slave Pens. They tracked one in the Market Quarter and forcefully obtained it from a reclusive and germophobe Cambion merchant.

They then set out to get the second key from the Overmind’s Re-education camps by infiltrating them from the Sewers. However our heroes got caught by a patrol of Overmind servants in the sewers. They dispatched the patrol but met with strange parasitic critters that tried to eat their brains trough their faces!

That’s the session’s story in a nutshell. Of particular interest is the ‘Elaborate Plan’ part of the story because this whole thing up there was driven by the players themselves… I didn’t prepare any of those scenes except the first one.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me rewind to the week before the game…

When Necessity and Creativity Collide

As I started planning for the game, I knew that I wanted to have the players invade the Primal Dungeon and dispatch one of the Nexus.  In fact, I told the players that our next ‘Season’ of D&D would be about busting 5 or 6 of the Dungeon’s most important points of control in order to cut off all the denizens from their master and plan the obliteration of the imprisoned Primordial when they reached Epic levels.

I wanted the next adventure to have a theme about the Far Realm (D&D’s equivalent of Lovecraft’s R’yleh) and aberrant creatures.  As I brainstormed, I had the idea of a monstrous city, built on the ruins of an abandoned Drow city (the Drow were severely shafted when I destroyed my campaign world at the end of my 2007-2008 season in order to reboot it for 4e).

I also doodled the city and placed various elements in it.   I had an old temple to Lolth taken over by the City’s leader, a Mind-Flayer.  Then I imagined that the city would be ruled like a fascist state, banners everywhere (using a symbol the PCs would recognize), crowds listening to speeches, Foulspawns acting like Secret Police, thugs and enforcers, monsters being kidnapped to be conscripted into the Dungeon’s armies, forced into slavery, brainwashed into joining the street enforcers….. or worse… Sent to the Vats for reconstruction…

I rapidly realized that I didn’t have an adventure in front of me, but a whole other chapter of the Primal/Within campaign setting.

Of course, time was slipping by, it was Wednesday night and I had no story yet. I quickly created an entry scene for the adventure.  The PCs would teleport at the top of a ruined tower overlooking the city (setting my players up for description of the city in all it’s glory and the opened portal to the Far Realm sitting on top of the Overmind’s castle).  The tower would be held by a City Within knight who lost all his comrades in a disastrous raid. The knight converted to a Warden and Cleric of both the Great Kodiak Spirit (to link him to Franky’s PC) and the trapped goddess of Civilization.

I then imagined that the Knight had created a secret society of converted monsters that spread out in the city, trying to subvert the Overmind’s influence…

Then I stopped myself.   I now had a novel, not a game, there was nothing for the PCs to do other than ‘Go in Castle and bust the Mind Flayer’s face’.

I was getting desperate, I needed a plot and I wanted to avoid the ‘first idea syndrome’!

First Idea Syndrome: When you need to come up with a solution to a problem and you are pressed for time, the first idea that’s proposed will be taken as the best idea, regardless of its actual worth.  I’ll write about this more in a future post.

I already had a Dungeon magazine adventure called ‘Depth of Madness’ that featured a full dungeon filled with aberrant.   My first idea had been to take it as is. but there was way too many fights and not enough story for me. Yet, with game day coming fast, it was getting more and more tempting to run it as is.

Then my eyes fell on my copy of the Mouse Guard RPG and a second, far more dangerous idea formed:

What if I took Mouse Guard’s task resolution structure where failures lead to Plot twists or complication and transplanted it to my D&D game to drive the plot?

What if I let my players create the scenes through thier play?

Up next: From crazy idea to actual play.