The Sewer Solution

Sanitary Sewer (Photo credit: K e v i n)

Sometimes I GM myself into a corner, I can't help it.  I have never been the meticulous type that plans in detail or crafts elaborate set pieces; although, occasionally I wish I was.  I am the kind of game master that flies by the seat of his pants and relishes in batting the curveballs pitched by others at the table. Unfortunately, sometimes that means I GM myself into a corner.

In the ongoing Dungeon World campaign that I run my group of players traveled to a desert city, Lambatar, to seek out a forgotten treasure trove beneath the city. My mistake was giving the city an extensive sewer dungeon crawl. Nobody at the table said anything, but it wasn't long before I started thinking about it. How does it work? Where does the waste go? It isn't getting flushed out into an ocean or river. They can't be sending it into their drinking water supply. Is there some kind of gigantic, thousand year old septic tank?

I scratched my head over this for a while. I couldn't go back on this city I had created. I had told my players there was a sewer and they had already spent some time exploring it, I was stuck with it. Naturally, I started looking for a way to make it work. My solution? A link to the elemental plane of water. That's right, Lambatar was exporting their waste to another dimension. It was a good solution, one that explained how the sewers worked and where a city in the middle of the desert was getting their fresh water. It also allowed me to mix in some non-standard encounters into the sewer environment. I was riding high on my fix all week while gleefully imagining the fun I could have with unusual dungeon stock. Unfortunately, players always have a habit of throwing those curveballs.

The dungeon crawl began smoothly enough, the PCs battled their way through thieves, traps and collapsed tunnels. Everything was going my way until a chuul I had placed in the sewage managed to drag two characters into the water. They defeated it, but lacking any kind of swimming skills they were soon swept up in the increasingly strong current as they rushed towards the hole that lead to you know where. Before long they were swimming in much larger waters and I needed to do something unless I wanted to drown two player characters in order to justify my desert sewers.

Enter the tritons, roman inspired, militant and none too happy about the waste that has been pumping into their territory for centuries. They saved the drowning PCs in exchange for their aid breaking into Lambatar. This is where things started to go off the rails. The players were happy to aid the tritons, having no real attachment to the city or its inhabitants and even once they realized that the first wave of triton tidecallers were up to no good they made no effort to stop them. What is a GM to do, and how do aquatic monsters invade a city in the desert?

The tidecallers brought in the tide. They widened the rift between planes and let loose the waters of their home dimension. All said, something like 1000 cubic kilometers worth of water came pouring through and that was more than enough to allow the tritons to go about their grisly revenge. The players? They were fine, caught up in getting their own revenge on a drug lord and were lucky to be high enough above the city to avoid getting washed away.

And that's the story of how one simple decision on my part lead to a city in the middle of the desert being flooded and invaded by mermaids.

Categories: chuul, curveballs, Dungeon World, Elemental plane of water, fantasy, Game Mastering, sewers, tritons

Tug-of-Adventure

I have been thinking about adventures as a game of tug-of-war. On one side is the goal, the thing that the adventurers are trying to accomplish. On the other side are the goals of the aggressor or what happens if the adventurers are not successful in their venture. In the middle of all this lies the adventure.

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Imagine if everything that a character did (or didn't) moved the tug of war in one direction or another. If the  heroes successfully repelled some raiding orcs that would move things one notch in favour of a positive outcome or overall success for the heroes.

Now imagine there are some zones or markers along the field. Each of these zones represents a change of overall circumstances or attitudes. As the villain gets dragged through these zones they might become more and more desperate, resulting in more dangerous and risky schemes in an attempt to drag things back in their favour. On the other hand, if the adventurers get dragged towards the Negative Outcome their own circumstances worsen. Allies die or abandon them, traitors appear, evil poisons the land, monster attacks become more frequent and so on.

You could also apply positive effects in the zones. As the heroes draw closer and closer to their ultimate goal then perhaps more and more people flock to their cause and the less control over the world the villain has.

What is the point of all this?

I came up with this idea as a way to give an overall structure to a game of Rollplay. In my playtest of the game I found that since players could create any obstacle or circumstance they wanted in each scene that this lead to a disjointed, somewhat manic and unfocused narrative. This can be fun in its own right, but isn't really the overall feel I was going for.

What I hope to accomplish with a mechanic like this adventure tug-of-war I hope to create an overarching narrative in an improvised game. By using this mechanic a win and lose condition enter the game and consequences affect the story on a macro level. Using this method I can have players define the adventure or goal at the beginning of a game, something like "prevent Sauron from conquering Middle Earth".

Other uses

While I had originally conceived this as a mechanic for the Rollplay Engine, I think it could also work very well as a way to move through an adventure module for other role playing games. I envision a non-linear adventure with a primary antagonist of some kind. Any number of zones could be placed on the adventure "line" and each could be associated with a number of different encounters. As the players move back and forth along the line the GM selects (or randomly chooses) an encounter from whatever zone they have moved into.

There is some risk of the players getting caught in a loop where they bounce back and forth and end up running out of new encounters for a specific zone. To deal with this a time mechanic might be added. A villain really only needs to slow down a group of adventurers until they can complete their plan. If the group runs out of time then the villain achieves their goal, but this may not be a complete victory if the players are far enough along the line towards a heroic success.

I suppose a GM might also use this mechanic as a way to track progress on in any RPG. It could be useful just for determining the attitudes of a villain to the player characters or keeping track of progress towards defeating a villain in an improvised game.

Categories: Adventures, Game Design, Game Mastering, Rollplay Engine