For Baldman Games’s Virtual D&D Weekend I was tasked with running a Dungeoncraft adventure set in the Feywild. I enjoy CCC and Dungeoncraft adventures. I’m excited to see what new writers bring to the table while simultaneously fearing the material might not be up to snuff.
This was WBW-DC-ZODIAC-06 Nightmare of the Naga. There are fun parts in it, however it is built along the structure that horrible things happen, then a wise old woman appears and explains what’s happening, then tells the heroes what they have to do next. Repeat.
The PCs are whisked through an archfey’s lifespan to key moments of her development that can’t be changed by PC interference apparently, but where in some cases the PCs have to fight to protect her.
The heroes don’t have to do any real tasks to find out what’s happening, and they are railroaded by the time skipping ahead story structure to the next scene, before any exploration or chance at player agency can happen.
Player agency be damned.
In order to feel comfortable running this I decided I needed to dress it up in fun costumes to make it enjoyable to my players.
At the start, the module tells how using the multiverse of Dungeons and Dragons you can get the characters to the quest giver. I jotted down that we’d start in Exandria, and something would happen, triggered by encountering the Traveler. He’d expect to be paid back for his hospitality by sending the group to check on an archfey friend of his who he’s worried about.
Yesterday I got my swag from GaryCon from Beadle & Grimm’s, the Gold Edition Beadle & Grimm’s box set of Eberron: Ruins of the Last War. This being fresh in my head, plus having seen Eberron creator Keith Baker portray his alternate ego Merrix at a GaryCon event, I changed my mind, threw out my notes and instead provided a portal from a carnival coffee shop to Sharn in Eberron, where a crowd was watching a puppet show.
Merrix, being an artificer, arranged for one of the puppets to telepathically communicate to the PCs, tasking them with going to Sheba the Fortune Teller who was worried about an archfey friend of hers. The puppet pulled free of its strings and stepped forward.
When describing this part of the improv to my wife, she said she would have immediately run forth to kill the abomination. It would not have finished giving its quest to the group.
Instead, my group listened to the puppet, who offered them a coupon for a free scone from the coffee shop if they performed this task.
Meanwhile, I had players make Perception rolls to detect Merrix seated on a rail over a thousand-foot drop, using a device to control the puppet. None of the players really put together there was a puppeteer artificer setting things in motion.
The group returned to the coffee shop, loaded up on scones and joined the module as it was written.
The group is sent through a portal by Sheba to the Opera House, where Pearl the archfey rules. The module has a section it advises not running if doing this at a convention. That part involves a table of general descriptions of NPCs the group might encounter at the Opera House.
I came up with an NPC harpist who performs music to accompany the musical productions on the Opera House stage. She’s inflicted with a cold and keeps sneezing, blasting the pixies away from her with her powerful achoos. I based her on an old friend who is a professional harpist. The group healed her of her malady and she thanked them.
Then they encountered a harrengon news reporter for the Korranberg Chronicle (another Eberron easter egg) who tries to talk the group into stepping up and becoming celebrities worth interviewing for his paper.
If I didn’t have the milling about and getting to know the locals, the module adapted to accommodate time restraints would have just had the PCs meet with the archfey who instructs them to stand guard. Then, they just wake up to find the land cursed and the archfey in a coma.
It still seemed abrupt, even with twenty minutes of socializing with NPCs, so I used the excuse of time working weird in the Feywild to justify a rapid advancement of time.
The people were dying. The Opera House was in ruins. The archfey and her consort were in a coma. The module has Sheba show up to explain what’s happened and tell the PCs they need to travel along Pearl’s timeline to find out how she got cursed.
It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the story.
If the group refuses, you thank the players for playing and end the adventure.
Next time we’ll talk about how I used callbacks to create high notes in the adventure to keep it from being pretty depressing… and to fill extra time as the group avoided two whole combats.
