This SHOCKING D&D Adventure Will Scare the Hell Out of You! (Ep #370)

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Thanksgiving it's not Thanksgiving you it's probably passed but it is Thanksgiving to me I'm trying to squeeze in this video before my guests arrive because when you got a YouTube channel and another job that's what life is like but thank you so much and this scenario is called the demon tailor and it is a scenario in my long running campaign today I'm going to focus on how I begin the scenario how I open the scenarios how I let the players know what they're supposed to be doing and how I organize to run a game really effectively and efficiently I've got four players tonight Jean is playing well not actually tonight because this happened a week ago but jean was playing hon boss a bounty hunter Veronica was playing Natasha Brower a wizard Maria is marand Don NOA a dualist you may remember her from the revi society campaign and Michelle is playing silence a thief who is a replacement character she played silence in the caves of Carnage she also played a character called raven in the reviled society and what this is is a composite character she's mashing them up she's changing the name to silence cuz she likes silence better but she's taking Raven's backstory and we're working with that now one of the ways I run this 30-year campaign is we will play for some time and then when we get bored we stop for a little while and I'll do an offshoot campaign like caves of Carnage or the reviled Society we'll take some characters we'll work them up to third or fourth level then if one of the older characters die die we have a replacement character in case you're wondering my long running campaign the character is about 6th to eth level right so fourth isn't too far away from that right so that's what we're doing we're inserting my wife's character in there we've not played these characters or this main campaign for some time so the player characters when we last left off were separated by long distances so I have to get them back together I have to remind the players about these different plot lines they may have forgotten about because it's been a while so I have a lot of work cut out for me so this scenario is based on Terror in the street by Kelvin green published by Lamentations of The Flame Princess you may remember it I gave it a very positive review sometime back and I'm also going to be talking about how I adopt other people's work for my table before we go any further I'll be appearing at Dave Con in Bloomington Minnesota April 26 to the 28th other guests include Dave Wesley creator of Brownstein the Forerunner of Blackmore and Dungeons and Dragons Mike Carr author of in search of the unknown and Dave McGary creator of the dungeon board game there is a link below and a special discount code in this video watch closely when you see my miniature make a cameo the secret code will appear nearby so keep your eyes peeled and use that discount code when you sign up now let's take a look at Terror in the streets by Kelvin green this is a a mashup between Three Musketeers and Silence of the Lambs a serial killer is kidnapping and skinning children and making them into a skin suit and he believes the children are demons and if he kills them he's going to prevent an earthquake that's going to destroy all of Paris and he's trying to save thousands of lives the players are hired by the parent of one of the victims to find their missing child I realize this is very dark subject matter and it's not for everyone you've got to know your table I've been playing with these people for years they are fans of Thomas Harris Stig Larsson Joe Nesbo all the like Swedish Nordic thriller books so they love that stuff so I know my audience here so make sure you know yours this scenario runs like a police procedure where you interview the victim's parents and Witnesses and a pattern emerges the child was last seen with a tall man with a big nose wearing a blue cloak blue cloaks are worn by the palace staff and the man also resembles Cardinal rishu the arch villain for the Three Musketeers he also sends cryptic letters about his great work and there is another killer The Werewolf of Paris who is not a real werewolf he's just a teenager in a suit who's committing a series of similar but unrelated crimes the real killer is Claude Cardinal ru's older brother now the module does a good job of following the three clue rule popularized by the alexandrian website in an RPG mystery you always include three Clues to make sure the players pick up on them it may seem like Overkill but it's really not because remember it's the game master you can see all the pieces but your players can't and there are no dice rolls if I can recall in this scenario which is really good because you don't want to hinge a scenario that is based on a mystery with Clues with them finding clues or talking to people and getting the clues you want them to talk to the witnesses and the witnesses just give them all of the information now I had to switch this setting from Paris to the city of middenheim where my campaign is set that's the middenheim from the Warhammer World from Warhammer fantasy roleplay because this campaign originally began as a Warhammer fantasy roleplay game so I've got to do a little switching around my demon Taylor is still the older brother of the cardinal the Cardinal has been changed to my version an Inquisitor named Minister Payne who hates Wizards now at the same time there are a number of other things for the players to contend with there is an unrest ey it is a D6 that is placed in the center of the table and this measures how angry the average person in Paris is now one is not angry two is mildly annoyed when you got to three there are mobs of angry villagers with torches and they're ready to beat people up and burn bur stuff down at 4 the palace gets locked down and five or six you have martial law and absolute chaos and riots and the objective for the players is to keep that die low at least that's what it's supposed to be mine decided to raise the die which is a lot more interesting actually other subplots and there are many so the Wizards Guild got blown up in my scenario cause mortis and the remaining Wizards are debating whether to overthrow the graph and replace the government with a magi Archy now this isn't my idea this is the idea of my player Veronica who first brought it up she said for a long time like I just want to Nuke these people and just and just take over the city so the remaining Mages meet to decide whether that should happen and there are two competing forces there's Garen who is Natasha's mentor and the love of her life and he's like the Professor X kind of character who's trying to talk her out of it and then there's Venom alash she is like we should burn this all down come join me and we'll rule the city together so she's the Magneto character and Natasha is like Mystique she's torn between these two sides and Co could go either way and I don't know which way she's going to go I just go with the flow I just create scenarios and and complications and I let my players decide how they're going to do it next subplot Anton rhomis the villain from the revied society angry that Maryann killed his son Wolf Gang sends a hit squad to track down and kill Maryann next subplot Silence has a secret daughter about the age of the kidnapped children and silence discovers her parents have been reduced to Poverty so they signed her daughter away to a 10-year contract of indentured servitude with a local inkeeper so she's being kept like cozette in L miserab so that is a lot of plot now I subscrib to the Hickman Manifesto which says the scenario should have a dignified end in one to two sessions of playing time so I try to finish scenarios in one night if that's possible now here's a few tricks to doing that first I only have four players tonight which means they will spend less time making decisions and doing weird things and as Matt koville points out you know you think adding one player you know let's say from four to five that would add 20% more play time but sometimes it can double the amount of play time so I have a smaller crew making it possible for us to play more game and less time another key is establishing a clear objective from the start and still another one is having a really well organized notebook I am going to take all of this and transcribe it to my notebook everything is on two facing pages so I never have to flip let's take a look so everything I need to run the adventure is here part of my process is to boil this book down into two facing pages I put the stats for the villain up front so so I could find them easily we have the introductions then we have the victims of the killer their names age when it happened where it happen and all the clues are in yellow so I can find them easy the green sections are events that happen to the player characters like when I feel the action is lagging or the characters do something that might trigger it I also have a list of rumors a subplot which is all in Orange and the major NPCs here so again all the clues are in yellow so I can find them easily and I'm not going to forget anything important and I find this process really helps me understand the adventure I really internalize the plot and the structure and the Beats so I really don't refer to this much during the game instead I can really focus on the players maintaining eye contact and living what Ralph Emerson calls a thousand eyed moment it's just 100% focus on the players and what they're saying at that moment let's talk about that first scene that there was an excellent run Hammer podcast hanker for nail just put it up where he answered a few questions and he talks about how to start a scenario with a bang one of the virtues of a good DM is being impatient you want to cut the fluff and get to the good stuff and the beginning of an adventure is not the time to slow boil a frog and I totally agree with that that's what I was getting at with my video on Sho leather and that was a very positively received video and it's one of my favorites I think it's one of my most useful ones I did get a comments with people saying well you're you must hate role playing because you're cutting all the the stuff out of the adventure and it's the best parts and you're rushing things and I am not rushing things I am trying to cut the boring Parts how do we do it well hankerin recommends and I do too carefully crafted box text I know box text is something of a prority of like it's like oh good game Masters don't use box text but that's not true well-crafted box text can be very useful especially at at the beginning of the game to set the objectives and the tones and remind people what the major conflicts are and remember the characters are separated and we haven't played for a long time so I've got a lot of stuff to do watch how I can do it in about 2 minutes I'll show you here we go after a long day holga Renos returns to his Cottage and is met at the door by his wife Valeria and their children after exchanging hug she leads holer inside where a familiar face sits by the fireplace it's Gustav Hammer your old neighbor from when you lived in the city he looks distraught after exchanging pleasantries he says you remember my son Julian 5 days ago we had an argument I wanted him to join me in the textile business but he wanted to be a tailor I I lost my temper with him and he ran away he hasn't returned his mother is worried sick she said to me find hga Rick inas he can track out any Criminal surely he can find our Julian and I have two gold crowns that I can pay you one other thing you should know Julian is not the first three other children from our neighborhood have disappeared over the last month cut two later I say you're all seated around a table and hogar has just told you this information where is the table located you tell me is it a private house is it an inn is it an upscale in middle class sleazy in is it a secret hiding room somewhere where does this take place then I ask the players what are you doing and I'm going to go around the table clockwise and you can go as a group or you can go as an individual or you could break off into pairs which is what they did but everyone's going to take their turn going around the table and if you watch live play I will show you how I can accomplish that very efficiently where no one's waiting like 10 minutes to take their next turn I also plan not one but two clim climaxes and if you have my adventure Frankenstein I do the same thing there's one possible climax in Victor Frankenstein's laboratory it's burning and they're fighting the creature and Victor at the same time and the whole thing is on the verge of collapse but maybe Victor or the creature or both will survive in which case there's a second climax that takes place on a lake of Frozen ice which is cracking and there's a coach that's sinking it's very exciting and I want to do the same thing here so the first possible ending location is the demon Taylor shop they enter after tracking him and I describe footsteps above them so they know someone is up there and they slowly starts going up the stairs and that is when the hit squad would attack now the players are not just fighting the hit squad but they're also fighting the de Taylor at the same time and not just that there's an angry mob surrounding the house so the players can't leave and they start flinging Molotov cocktails Through the Windows now the house is on fire now it's a collapsing house filled with assassins and in the serial that is the recipe for an epic climax now as it happened my players were very slow they were very cautious to go up those stairs they were afraid of the demon Taylor which I think is great that's a testament that I made him a fearful type of character so they go up very slowly and he has an Escape Route and he jumps across the rooftops but they can't pursue on foot because that angry mob has tracked them and surrounded the demon Taylor shop so they end up climbing across the rooftops running away and following the demon tayor to the second possible ending location which is a crumbling abandoned chairlift terminal now if you don't know about the city of MIM it's built on a on a plateau and there are a couple ways in there are these viaducts these elevated roads but there's also a chairlift terminal which I also changed to a a cage terminal where if they want to lift people or livestock or fish or whatever into the city they put it in this cage and they lift it up into this uh terminal using a winch the terminal is about two stories high and there's a hole in the center where you could lower a cage down and that's where the demon ta Taylor goes and he has there his final victim It's the final child and he's going to sacrifice them believing that that's going to stop this apocalypse so the demon Taylor runs into this crumbling terminal and I give my flers only seconds to decide and I say okay there is a front door and a side door which do you want to go in and that's an important decision because what a does is it forces them to split up because they know that if they all go in the same door the demon Taylor I'm going to make them run out the other end so they split the party which is what I want them to do half of them go to the lower level half of them go to the upper level and that's important even if you have a powerful foe if you have a single enemy and the players Focus their fire on that enemy that enemy will not last long so you got to give the players multiple targets to shoot at so as the players arrive and they're looking for the child and the the killer taunting them they don't know where he is that's when the hit squad arrives and they split into two groups so they're on the ground floor as well as the oper floor fighting all the player characters at the same time and that's when I toss the timer die and the child is in the cage the cage is attached to a chain it's attached to a beam and that beam is cracking and it's going to crack and the cage will plunge down the side of the cliff in D4 plus one round so now there's a time limit involved in case you haven't noticed this is a theme I really like collapsing buildings and burning buildings and I also like multiple enemies at the same time I said there's a 50-50 chance that the kid in the final victim kid is silence his daughter and the dice determined it was so she's in the cage and they got about three rounds to rescue her and the players kept whiffing they just everything one two three I mean they couldn't get above four even the deathbringer dicks couldn't help them because the spread was too big but they managed to pull the kid from the cage at the last second then the demon tailor punches silence in the face natural 20 she rolls a onead him falls through the hole barely grabs on he grabs the kid 19 throws her in the hole silence grabs her daughter's arm and she's got the kid in one hand and holding on with another barely holding on at the same time maran's across the room one guy's trying to strangle her the other On's trying to Club the wizard has these assassins crawling all over her even though she's got a shield spell one of them gets through clubbing her hoger can't kill the guy that he's fighting with all of a sudden the players have the streak of good luck Natasha guns down three of the attack with magic missiles Maran flings her dagger hits the demon Taylor pulgar pulls silence up out of the hole she natural 20es the demon tailor down the hole and he plunges to his death hundreds of feet below in the end they unmask the killer Minister Payne arrives fills in the details that it was his brother and is it a happy ending not quite remember that unrest die the concept is the players are trying to keep it low but throughout the scenario Natasha kept trying to incite the crowds she made up Flyers with Minister Payne's picture on it and and paying urchins to distribute it through the poor sections of the city and her thinking was the mobs will get angry and kill min pay who is our Archen enemy instead they end up rioting but the palace ends up getting locked down making it a perfect Target for Venom Al lash's Fireball so the last scene of the game is the palace goes up in a mushroom cloud and that's where we ended it as it happened this scenar was very well received and you know it's great when your players bomb you with text the next day in the group chat saying I can't wait to play again what are we playing again that's the equivalent of having a $100 million box office opening weekend and it means my campaign is going to continue and so that's how I plan a scenario thank you so much for your support I really appreciate it I'm looking forward to running more scenarios as soon as I can if you enjoyed this video you can check out the extended director's cut and live play on patreon link below you'll also find links to Terror in the streets from Lamentations of The Flame Princess my module Frankenstein and the quick start rules to death bringer RPG I'll see you soon may all your roles be 20s death bringer again looks like the case of the demon Taylor is all swn up for more DM planning tips stay tuned for the lost city with Bob World buer Baron derck Trevor Deval and DM Scotty

Channel: Dungeon Craft

Views: 29,502

Keywords: dungeoncraft, dungeoncraft demon tailor, dungeoncraft the demon tailor, the demon tailor dungeoncraft, terror in the streets dungeoncraft, dungeoncraft terror in the streets, dungeoncraft D&D prep

Id: 7LCLFpPa1IM

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024