This will likely be my longest post for a while since I only really have one more idea left to share from my old world building notes, but this isn't the post for that.
As I had mentioned in my first post I recently had had the pleasure of starting a run of Tower of the Stargazer for few friends of mine, the game in question being the first time for me stepping behind the GM screen as well as first time for the players stepping into something as dangerous as this where not everything is designed for the PCs to be able to overcome. Not head on at the very least.
Now I'm not a completely heartless person and had thus warned my players that death would be a very real possibility in this game, which was also why I made everyone roll their own parties of three adventurers out of which I would let max two into the tower at a time per player. I do think I got the point across pretty well since good 30 minutes of the first session was spend on getting up to the tower and carefully examining the front door.
To cut a long story short (and maybe tell it in full some other time) I had expected to be able to run this as a oneshot but it quickly became apparent that this adventure would stretch for atleast four sessions with this pacing, and after the second session one of the players did say that while she was very intrigued by the things they were finding the pace was very much a crawl as others wanted to double and triple check every single room and door before carefully proceeding forwards. Not necessarily a bad thing per se as long as people are enjoying themselves, just some mismatch on preferences between players, but definitely something that I am looking to address in the next game I'll run, which will be an attempt at writing an actual oneshot to be played in one session now that I have an idea of how atleast these particular players handle delving into unfamiliar places in an assumedly deadly setting. The hope here is that since they'll not be inside a dungeon for the oneshot but in a town that is much more abstracted place with no grid map to fall back to they're A) in a more familiar environment and not on constant lookout for traps and hijinks and B) not as concerned about where exactly they're standing in relation to their environment and the exact pathing they're taking to reach parts of the town.
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| Something in her ear - an encounter in the current Tower of the Stargazer game |
And that finally leads us to the meat of this post, the aforementioned oneshot that I've been working on and that's been given the working title of Tale of Mermaids.
The base idea for this adventure I've ripped pretty much straight from the Macabre Memoir of Morbid Mermaids mystery in World of Horror (neat game btw, check it out if you like things like Junji Ito and roguelikes) and adapted it to a fantasy world to the best of my abilities.
The oneshot is heavily based on a rather simple investigation as a local shophand has disappeared and the sailor she was supposed to be with last night turns up drowned. After asking around a little as well as hopefully picking up on a lead given to the PCs before the aforementioned events they should be headed to a somewhat remote fishing hut outside the town where they'll find the place to absolutely overpower the fresh sea breeze with stench of rotting fish as well as hear faint chanting from inside. The hut itself will be filled with depictions of all sorts of strange mixes of fish and women, and in the basement they'll find an old sailor hunched over a figure with a crude tail of fish half-sewn onto her and her head resting in a washing basin filled with sea water. Roll initiative! Old sailor grabs a rusty harpoon as the PCs have invaded his home and seen something they shouldn't have.
A simple idea really, with room to play around and for the PCs to first go around the town a little as they ask the locals as well as the sailors who recently arrived in the port for what could possibly have happened and who could possibly have done it. I've been toying with an idea to throw in some thugs or corrupt guards that'll try to rough up the PCs as they snoop around as a bit of a "combat tutorial" so that the encounter at the finale of the oneshot would hopefully go more smoothly but am still bit on the fence about this idea as some people have voiced concerns that it might give the wrong kind of signals to the players as to what they're expected to do.
For a more complete look into the story and notes I have prepared for this oneshot I offer you this: Google Sheets - Tale of Mermaid
Any feedback on the idea, delivery of it or the flow of the investigation is very welcome as I'm still working on a reason to get the PCs properly involved should this ever be ran in a campaign rather than as a oneshot where the players are specifically told "we're doing investigation game tonight, so don't go turning this into a farming simulator".
Other prep I've done for running this is having four pre-statted and geared LotFP character sheets since in Tower of the Stargazer I learned that simply choosing the gear for your character can take a surprising amount of time as well as scouring the internet for some nice art to throw at the players
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| Fish people and strange symbols, definitely thematic while not entirely related. Or are they? |
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