The Village (D&D game)

[lederhosen]

Crossposted to roleplayers, an adventure I inflicted on my D&D group over the last couple of sessions. One of the basic ideas for this came from Ravenloft, but the embellishment is mine, with a little help from Disney :-)

Introduction

The PCs arrive in an isolated village somewhat off the well-travelled roads. Mine had been plodding through unseasonably bad weather, and were almost dropping from exposure by the time they got there; they were so glad to make it that they were only very slightly suspicious. (One of our house rules is that XP is only parcelled out when PCs are 'in a safe place', and I took the opportunity to dole out the XP they'd earned in their travels to that point.)

Most of the houses are empty, with the villagers gathered in the town hall (which is also the inn). It's the town's annual fair day, and bad weather has forced them inside. PCs will have the opportunity to buy and sell a range of stuff; as well as local produce, several travelling merchants have stopped by to take shelter from the weather and sell what they can. There's also entertainment - singing, dancing, juggling, puppet shows, be creative. PCs with Performance skills may be able to earn some coins here.

Sooner or later, it's time to sleep. If your PCs are as suspicious as mine, and insist on setting a watch at all times, this may take drugged food or magic. (This tends to be the sort of thing players resist, so make sure you're prepared for objections from whoever is trying to stay awake.) At this point, I gave each of the PCs a handout along these lines:

"As you lose consciousness, you feel a soft pricking in your limbs and neck, and then there is nothing.

And then, an unknown time later, you awake. It is totally black [even PCs with darkvision can't see a thing] and your body feels somehow odd. Underneath you, you can feel a wooden surface."

One PC was also told "You can talk, but you can't move a muscle, and your hands are gripping something tight." Another, "You are squeezed into a cramped boxlike space. There are flat wooden walls around you and a wooden ceiling just above your head, preventing you from standing up." Another was told "There is something flat and wooden pressing down on you, stopping you from moving."

If they call out, they can hear one another, but the latter two PCs are muffled. A successful Spot check lets them notice a faint smell of earth. On a successful Wisdom check, the PC realises that she is not breathing. They may also notice other odd things about the ways their bodies feel; have fun dropping hints without giving too much away.

At this point there are various ways they can proceed. Unless PC actions dictate something else, the one squeezed into the 'box' feels a growing urge to escape (the player probably won't need much encouragement on that) and on a successful Strength check, manages to burst open the top of the 'box'... upon which, he goes flying up into the air, smacks his head against a high ceiling - feeling it shift a bit - and then finds himself wobbling back and forth some way above the ground. With the shift, a crack of light appears in the ceiling - three sides of a rectangle - and the PCs can see what's become of them.

They have turned into toys.

The PC who just burst out of the 'box' is, in fact, a jack-in-the-box, and the box is part of him. They're in a large toy-chest, and the impact jarred it open a crack, although it's stopped from opening further by a catch. In my game the other PCs were a glass unicorn, an understuffed rag doll, a clockwork monkey with cymbals in her hand (the paralysed character - she needs winding), a wooden teddy-bear, and an origami doll. (The doll wasn't immediately visible, because he was actually *under* the box.)

I'd taken the time beforehand to stat up these toy bodies, rescaling size, strength etc to make 'medium'/ST 10 the norm. Each of them had some major disadvantages associated with their form, and one or two useful tricks (many also had good damage reduction due to their construction and materials):

Jack-in-the-box (party's fighter/sorcerer): Can't walk around; is limited to 5' movement/round as a full action, achieved by bouncing hard enough to move the box. This particular jack had swords glued into both hands, which gave him some combat capability but limited his ability to manipulate stuff. Good reach, and a powerful ram attack - but since he has to be pent up in his box to deliver that one, somebody else has to aim it.

Rag doll (cleric): Has trouble standing up and moving fast (floppy legs); quite weak, and no effective natural attacks. Also, though this wasn't immediately obvious, stuffed with catnip. On the bright side, practically immune to crushing damage, and he was one of the few with working hands.

Glass unicorn (ranger): Fast, good armour & damage reduction due to hardness, and a nasty charge attack, but brittle. No fine manipulators.

Paper doll (rogue): Working hands. Can slip through narrow cracks, and be refolded into other shapes, although he can't refold himself. (This would've been more useful to the party if any of them had known how to fold him into something fancier than a paper dart, but it still came in handy.) Flammable, weak, and don't get him wet!

Clockwork monkey (bard): Prehensile feet, although she can't grip things while walking. Impressive cymbal-slam attack + Improved Grab, and fairly strong. Unable to move around without bashing the cymbals as she walks, and needs frequent winding or movement and strength deteriorate as she runs down.

Wooden bear (druid/wizard): Strong and resilient, two good paw attacks and can bear-hug. No elbows, knees, hands, or feet, limiting any sort of fine-work.

When figuring out capabilities and limitations of the toys, I wanted to create a group who would work much better as a party than alone. While by no means selfish or cowardly, the PCs in my game haven't been great at teamwork - they'd sooner charge into battle with an unknown number of foes than wake up the other party members to provide backup, that sort of thing - and I need to train them out of this. It's not such an issue now, but at higher levels they will be facing smart adversaries who understand teamwork, and if the PCs can't do the same by then they're going to be in trouble. By making their abilities so blatantly disparate, I hoped they'd get some practice in looking out for one another, and this actually seemed to work. The high damage reduction (both amongst PCs and the other toys they met along the way) meant a low mortality rate, which emphasised noncombat approaches to problems.

[I gave all spellcasters a 50% failure rate - besides the change in bodies, the spiritual change had disrupted the usual connection to their gods etc. This was a compromise: I didn't want to completely kill their spells, because the fighters were still benefiting from improved HP and BAB, but I didn't want their spells to obviate their disadvantages and save them from having to think things through. In hindsight, though, even at 50% failure rate spells made a lot more difference than BAB. If I was doing it over, I'd restrict them to level 0 spells only.]

Once they get out of the box, they find themselves in a bedroom. The smell of earth is due to mud tracked in on the floor - it's been raining outside for quite some time. From there, they get to explore, meet people, and discover what's going on.

Background

Once upon a time, there was a toymaker who lived in the village with his three children (his wife had died some years previously). He made toys for his children, he made toys for the other village children, and he made elaborate marionettes for grownups, because he was also a puppeteer.

About ten years before the present day, an epidemic of diphtheria killed all three children. Heartbroken, the toymaker - after burying them at the back of his garden - built puppets of the children and of himself, and used them to play 'happy families'. He put so much of himself into the puppets that eventually something awoke within them. The toymaker had wanted them to be alive; now they wanted to be alive, and that meant living bodies.

The toymaker's replica of himself, the first to awaken, stole his body and forced him into the puppet's; three other neighbourhood children were kidnapped by the children's marionettes. Then they set about finding living bodies for all the other toys. One by one, they captured townsfolk and stole their bodies. The magic prevented these victims from remembering their past lives; they accepted their role as toys, and became intelligent playthings for the 'children'.

Because there were more toys than villagers, even after the whole village had been 'replaced', there were still many original toys who had not yet been able to steal a human body. As travellers wandered into town, they too were captured and their bodies possessed. The toys formed a social hierarchy: at the top the original toys, those who were waiting for bodies; beneath them, the unknowing victims; at the bottom, those toys so damaged and dirty the children no longer wanted to play with them. As toy-spirits made the leap to human bodies, their old bodies fell in status; while the 'middle class' didn't understand *why* they had fallen, they knew when it was happening, and often victimised the newly-fallen.

The toymaker, now a marionette, was not completely overcome by the amnesia brought on by the spell; after all, he was the source of the magic. To prevent him from causing trouble, the usurpers divided him into six parts (head, body, arms, legs), rendering him inanimate and hid them in various locations. [Why do the PCs remember who they are? I had an excuse for this, but it was specific to my setting; I'm sure you can come up with something :-]

Ten years have gone by. Although they do not need food or sleep, the stolen bodies have continued to age. The 'children' now resemble 20-year-olds in clothes much too tight for them, still playing children's games, and the possessed toymaker is getting on in years. Outside in the village the other escaped toys play at being human, or talking animals in human bodies. They don't go far, though; there is still a link between the toy-spirits and their old bodies, and if a toy is completely destroyed the human body its spirit possesses will be likewise slain.

The House

Time and space work according to a childish imagination here. A bedroom ten feet across may be a vast forest to the toys within it, or a single room, depending on what interests the 'children' at the time. The behaviour of the toys is also governed by these concerns: by and large, they won't do things that are beyond the usual sphere of well-behaved childish play. They can and do have adventures in the children's bedrooms, and they might mug one another for stuffing and thread, but they're not much for deeply-thought-out political theories and they don't go into Daddy's study. These rules are reinforced by the children's presence, but are generally adhered to even when they're not around; the ones most likely to violate them are those with least contact with the children.

The PCs start out on the second floor of the toymaker's house, in a chest in his bedroom. Next to it, along the landing, are the two children's bedrooms (one for the girl, one for the two boys), where most of the toys live, love, and hold elaborate tea parties. On a table in the boys' room is Toy Castle, an elaborate building made of blocks and guarded by fierce metal nutcrackers shaped and painted to look like ogres. From the landing, there are stairs leading up into the attic/study and down to the first floor. Under the attic stairs is a crawlspace occupied by the cat, who is rather skinnier than he should be; while the children and toymaker occasionally remember to feed and/or groom him, they're not as good about this as the humans were. (Did I mention that one of the PCs is stuffed with catnip? Good.)

The ground floor contains a kitchen/eating room; the children will sometimes play with toys here too, but the other two rooms here are out of bounds. One is the toymaker's workshop, where he makes new toys and occasionally repairs damaged ones (although he's not as attentive to this as he could be - most toys have to repair themselves). The other is the pantry, with shelves piled high with bags of mouldering flour and other supplies that haven't been used much in the last ten years.

This is where the broken and unloved toys live, on the shelves and in the darkness. It is nothing more or less than a ghetto, and PCs who enter it carelessly will regret it. The toys themselves are in poor shape, but they fight dirty and they have the high ground. Depending on the nature of their target, they will rain down burning candles and scraps of cloth, pilfered cutlery, or marbles on anybody who fails to handle them carefully.

Outside, in the garden, is an overgrown pile of rocks that marks the graves of the toymaker's real children. There is also a treehouse, which has become the center of operations for Prince Yuan the Bandit Prince, a puppet of a legendary roguish hero who has now become a Robin Hood figure among the toys. From here he plans daring raids into Toy Town and ambushes the aristocracy's tax collectors. However, he's only a rebel within the framework of that fantasy; he finds it impossible to imagine that he was ever something other than a puppet.

On the second floor of the house is what used to be the toymaker's study. It is now the territory of the most splendid marionette of all, a four-foot long dragon made of wood and metal and gilt with a cunning mechanism that allows him to breathe a puff of steam. Although he has played the part of several different dragons in puppet performances - PCs who saw the puppet show during the fair will remember him as an ally of Prince Yuan - he has no name of his own other than Dragon.

Dragon, alone of all the toys, does not want to take a human body. He wants to be a dragon. He is intelligent, and has read through all the toymaker's books, and he has a much clearer understanding of reality than any of the others; he knows that no honourable gold dragon would steal another's body, even if that were somehow possible. Handled carefully, he can be a valuable source of information to the PCs, but his temperament is mercurial. Almost anything can send him into a fit of rage; PCs who try to treat him with the courtesy an respect they would show to a real dragon will only help remind him that he is no such thing. Occasionally in his anger he comes downstairs to raid Toy Town, blasting toys with steam and knocking buildings over with his mighty claws... but he knows that within an hour or two, everything he does will be picked up and set right again.

In play

In my game, Prince Yuan and his merry men were the first NPCs the party met - they had climbed up to the toymaker's window when they heard six of the aristocracy had fallen from grace and been 'imprisoned'. They warned the PCs that the other toys would mistreat them, and advised them to keep quiet about their newly-fallen status to others. Taken to the treehouse, the PCs asked Yuan for help; he was incapable of understanding what they were talking of, but told them he might be able to point them at somebody who could... if they'd do a job for him first. The outlaws were running low on mending supplies, and he needed somebody to raid the King's tax collectors for thread, buttons, needles, and stuffing.

In the end, the PCs snuck into the toymaker's workshop instead and helped themselves; this was pretty easy to do when he was out, but not the sort of thing the other toys would dream of doing. While on the ground floor, they also poked their noses into the pantry and were foolish enough to mention their fallen status; a fracas ensued and they barely escaped with their lives.

They returned to the treehouse, handed over the goodies, and got some work done on themselves (wheels for the jack-in-the-box, more stuffing and less catnip for the rag doll). With their mission accomplished, Prince Yuan told them that if anybody could understand what they were talking about, it would be the dragon.

He got them back into the house on the second floor, via the toymaker's bedroom. From there, they had to figure out how to get past the cat, who was watching them with interest; in the end the monkey provided a noisy distraction, the paper doll led the cat into the third bedroom, and then they pulled the door shut on it. (The doll, of course, was easily able to slide back under the door.) They trooped upstairs, and met the dragon, who was curious about their lack of amnesia, but not enough to suppress his bad temper; it took them some time to figure out how to talk to him without provoking another fit of anger and frustration.

Before agreeing to help, Dragon made them swear to do him a service in return. The PCs were reluctant, especially because he refused to tell them *what* they were swearing to, but they decided they didn't have much alternative. He told them much of the background above, and gave them information on where the parts of the toymaker were now: the head was kept secure in Toy Castle under constant guard, the torso in the possessed toymaker's pocket. The dragon himself had acquired one arm; the other had been in the keeping of the Mayor of Toy Town until he was murdered a couple of years ago (another paper doll, somebody had set him on fire) and had been missing since, along with the Mayor's wife, who was presumed guilty of his murder. One leg had been grabbed by the cat some time back and not seen since, and the whereabouts of the other was unknown.

So, having been given one piece by the dragon, the PCs set off looking for the other five so they could reassemble the toymaker. First off, they went looking for the cat's leg; after fending off annoyed cat and some ferocious rats, they found it fallen down into a wall cavity at the back of the cat's lair. (They also found a rotted, chewed ragdoll who bore an uncanny resemblance to the party's own ragdoll; when the cat's previous chewtoy went missing, the toymaker had made a replacement.)

Next, they decided to go into Toy Town and retrieve the piece in the castle, and this is where things went badly wrong. They refolded the paper doll into a dart and threw him up to scout it out, but after landing himself in the tallest tower he couldn't get down again. The children retrieved him and refolded him into a frog. The bear talked the children into putting him up on the table, whereupon he charged into the castle trying to knock it over; he succeeded in exposing a box containing the head, but by that stage there were half a dozen metal nutcrackers grabbing him. Meanwhile, the unicorn and the monkey were attacking other toys - trying to create a distraction or something - and the children grabbed all three of them, planning to throw them into a toy chest and slam the lid.

Unfortunately, before they completed this, the bear decided to cast Project Fire at the aristocrats' tea party on the bed. He set fire to the bed, but none of the other toys were seriously hurt before the toymaker came running up to put it out... except for the paper frog, who decided to jump into the fire and try to spread it around at the cost of his own life. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

This pretty much killed any chance of their sneaking in to raid the castle at night when everybody was asleep, or talking their way in; I wasn't sure *how* this was going to get resolved from here. Fortunately my wife's PC, who hadn't been involved in that fiasco, managed some very impressive fast-talking indeed. With a combination of three good Diplomacy checks and some good arguments she managed to convince the toymaker that some of the humans-in-toy-bodies were unhappy, and this was going to cause incidents like this and make everybody happy... eventually he agreed to restore memories and let people choose whether they wanted to be returned to their bodies. (This was *not* an approach I'd foreseen, and she had to work very hard to pull it off; no spousal favouritism in our games :-)

He was able to help them with the torso and the head, but they still needed to get two more pieces. Taking some hints, they explored the girl's bedroom. In her wardrobe, they found all her pants had one leg cut off and sewn up... the original daughter had only had one leg, but her marionette now had two. For the remaining piece, after much to-ing and fro-ing and more diplomacy, they finally found that the Mayor's wife had fled to the pantry. (She was innocent - the children had been playing with matches, and when he died they panicked and made up a story.)

With all the pieces reassembled, the real toymaker and the usurper restored people's memories; while most wanted their human bodies back, quite a few did not. (Some had been toys for ten years while their old bodies aged, and couldn't deal with the transition; others preferred a mostly-happy fantasy existence to life in a plague- and war-ridden world where people who die don't usually get up again five minutes later.) They agreed to do what they could to mend the toys in the pantry. The real toymaker was pretty messed up by the whole business; the PCs did what they could for him, but he had an awful lot to deal with.

Then, standing outside, they were restored to their own bodies. They went back into the house to wrap things up; although they heard the toys' voices, as soon as they walked into a room the toys would be silent and still, only resuming again when they left the room.

In the attic they found the dragon lying on the study table. He had been tearing pages out of a blank book, and attempting to write on them with a pen gripped awkwardly in his teeth; there was ink around his mouth, and dozens of crumpled scraps in which he had made a mess of his writing before finally completing the note that now lay folded in his jaws. It read:

TO THE NEWCOMERS

BURN THIS PUPPET. YOU HAVE SWORN IT.
THANK YOU MY FRIENDS.

Notes

One NPC who didn't end up appearing, alas, was due to shadow_5tails: a five-layered Russian doll. Only one layer could act at a time, and they were a single creature, but each layer had a very different personality, from the mother-hen who contained all the others to the neurotic one who kept scratching at her paint :-)

I spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of elements right for this. Obviously it was going to be an improvisation-heavy game. For the most part, I made a deliberate effort *not* to solve problems in my head before giving them to the players; I had faith in their ability to come up with solutions, and they didn't disappoint me. Beyond getting them into a predicament, I didn't want to railroad them; the only time I had a firm idea in my head as to how they would solve a problem (getting the piece in the castle) they came up with something entirely different, which threw me more than a little. I won't say it was a *good* plan, but it was certainly unexpected...

Still, even the most improvisational game needs some things planned out in advance. IMHO, those things ought to be NPCs and locations rather than events. You can't predict what PCs will do, but if you have a good handle on your NPCs so you can pick how they'll react to PC actions, you can trick your players into doing most of the thinking during the game itself ;-) There were a couple of set-pieces - the "in the box" introduction, and the dragon's note at the end - but for the rest, I gave them a carrot to chase and let them make their own fun.

One device I'm rather fond of (as you can probably tell) is getting PCs looking for danger in one direction, and then surprising them from another. I got warm fuzzies by spooking them with the thought that they'd become undead and then showing them what they'd really become. (BTW, thanks to Reaper I'd managed to do painted minis for all but one of the toys, so I could just stick them down on the table for the reveal.) But the most effective sucker-punch, I think, was the dragon's note; they were expecting a difficult request, and it was, but not how they'd expected.

Comments

[fluffy-cloud.livejournal.com]

You stuffed the ragdoll with catnip. Somehow, that made my day.