...Of Course, Destinations Matter Too!

 ...Of Course, Destinations Matter Too!

This is the continuation/conclusion of my role-playing weekend recap from a couple of weeks ago. Last time we spoke, I had explained our party of Fighters, how our combined intelligence meant that a particularly clever house cat could run circles around us in a debate, and our hired DM ditched us after only about 5 hours of play, leaving us with nothing to do for the next 16-18 hours of planned role-playing. I volunteered to run and asked for an hour to come up with...you know, anything at all to run.

As I've written in previous posts, my tendency is to craft stories that lean toward more intricate construction. I think this works really well in campaigns because it means there's a lot for players to explore and discover while building in various fail-safes and redundancies in case I or the players get stymied. However, when it comes to one-shots, intricate stories tend to fall woefully short. If players miss a clue or two, they may head off in a completely different direction than you planned. This can make for really good stories in campaigns! But in one-shots, it usually leads to confusion, frustration, and pretty anti-climatic conclusions, as the goal has not been reached and the debrief usually includes an explanation from the DM as to what story we intended to tell instead of the one that actually ended up unfolding. Of course, that's with plenty of time to plan. In this case, the more time I spent planning, the less time we'd have for playing. So I decided to keep it simple and send the players on a relatively simple quest.

For guidance, I went into Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and started looking through the various magical items and occurrences it detailed. I stumbled across "eldritch storms," and those sounded like a lot of creative fun I could level at my players. But to what end? I looked at a map of Faerun and decided that the eldritch storms would be a means of sinking the Moonshae Isles as part of a larger scheme for power. But I didn't want my players to have to worry about a larger scheme, given that this was only a one-shot, and I didn't want them to feel as though the larger scheme was the really important part of the story, and the first part was just a way to kill time or something. We had already run into this earlier in the weekend when a major NPC that Ray used as our patron asked if we required any additional training before our main task, we declined, and then we spent all of Friday night basically going through a training challenge anyway. So while I was going to hint at a larger scheme, I didn't want too many details to distract from the real task of saving the Moonshae Isles. Rather than create a whole new villain for the party to hunt, I decided to just turn the PC I had created for our weekend's one-shot (a Duergar named Gymla Wrathmarch, a Fighter Rune Guard) into an NPC who would be their primary adversary.

I decided that, as a Rune Guard, it wouldn't make sense for Gymla to have the power to create eldritch storms on her own. So I gifted her with the Demonomicon of Iggwilv so that the party would be tasked with retrieving the Demonomicon and not *just* "defeat Gymla." I say that because it's a party of 3 Fighters at level 12 - even if I scale Gymla up so that she's a much higher level, she's still only one being. And if I've learned anything from my time in role-playing as well as playing games like Descent and Gloomhaven, it's that taking down one target, no matter how big, is usually easier than taking on a group of enemies. I worry more about tackling a bomber wing in Armada and taking little packets of 2-3 damage than taking on an SSD, which swings big on every one of its three attacks. So rather than scale Gymla up and then be forced to pivot as the party outwits and outmuscles her, I figure I'll make the book the target so that it's not as simple a quest as "kill the Duergar."

As with any story arc I write for role-playing (whether a campaign or a one-shot), I broke the story up into acts. In this case, I broke it up into 3 acts. I decided to build off of the work we had done the night before, in which we broke out of our prison and met our benefactor. However, I decided to retcon (retroactively change) most everything that happened upon escaping the prison. I knew I'd be starting my own story upon the players escaping the prison. The woman who had provided their means of escape would be their benefactor, rather than simply being the woman who works for their benefactor. And rather than looking to overthrow or conquer anything, she had freed them in the hopes that they would prevent the demonic ritual that would sink the Moonshae Isles.

I wanted to make sure I posed a choice for the players. As players, they know this is the story I have written and I'm hoping they'll play along. But in game, ultimately, they can do whatever they want. I posed it as a possibility to "take the next step along the path to becoming not only good, but heroic." I knew that this party was all about going from "being evil" to "being good," so this felt like a fair choice to pose while still tipping the scales in favor of the players doing what I wanted them to - namely, go on the damn quest! Act I would feature a Flaywind in Dernall Forest on the island of Alaron. I knew they'd have to slay some sort of sand demon while there to end the Flaywind, which in turn would save Alaron from sinking into the sea. Act II would be more of the same, as they would move to the isle of Gywnneth and have to stop the Necrotic Tempest originating in the Myrloch Vale. Honestly, this was an excuse for me to level undead faerie dragons at the heroes. I didn't think it would be particularly effective, but I thought it would be fun and creepy. Don't forget: as DM, I'm not trying to win! I don't just want to throw monsters at the heroes until they die. I want it to be a story we all tell together. And obstacles make the story more interesting, and if I kill them, then I kill them. But I'm not *trying* to kill them with every encounter. Finally, Act III features the party in the Trollclaw Range on Moray, and the heroes must survive and stop a Flame Storm (the final eldritch storm). This is the final confrontation with Gymla, and also the reveal that Gymla is possessed by the demon lord Fraz-Urb'luu. He is using Gymla and the Demonomicon to sink the Moonshae Isles as part of a ritual to retrieve Fraz-Urb'luu's Staff. That last reveal is the bigger quest to which I was referring earlier: it's something bigger they can be a part of, but this current quest of stopping the Moonshae Isles from sinking in the first place actually impacts the bigger happenings, so it doesn't just feel like a formality or something I'm using to kill time in-game.

I bother detailing all of this because while I think the joy of role-playing lies in the journey (about which you can read here), the destination absolutely matters. It definitely shouldn't dictate all of the action and railroading players (basically funneling them toward one goal regardless of their choices, thus invalidating their play) is one of the absolute worst things you can do as a GM.

In my opinion, the destination matters because it sets the tone for the game and because it gives the players a goal, even if it's not the goal they wish to achieve. The destination helps color the journey so that regardless of what choices the players make, they're made with purpose instead of in a vacuum. A specific example from this extended session is the most excellent conclusion our kobold PC reached: libraries are good because they're effectively prisons for books. In a vacuum, this is an amusing sentiment. In the game, however, it was actually a main justification for going along with their benefactor! Two of the three Fighter PCs were already predisposed toward thinking that books were actually indicative of evil on behalf of the people who read them. This was "proven" when they were told they needed to stop the Duergar from using the Demonomicon to sink the Moonshae Isles. They immediately became suspicious of their new benefactor when they entered her stronghold and found her in a library to which she willingly laid claim. When she stepped outside and the PCs were debating whether or not to trust her and take on the task, the notion of libraries as "book prisons" was stumbled upon, at which point, the party decided she could be trusted because she was willing to imprison books.

The conclusion is ludicrous and it took us several minutes to stop laughing when Doug's character posited that claim. And there were quite a lot of funny moments like that. I won't recount them here because you know what it's like when a player or a GM tries to pull that nonsense...

But if nothing else, at least I've got a fetching little underbite!

But I'll say this: I don't know that the players necessarily make the effort in this situation to find a reason to trust this mysterious, bookish woman who bailed them out of prison unless they knew what the destination of the story was meant to be. I've played with two of the three of them long enough that they know I won't railroad them and that I'll do my best to improvise when they go off in a completely unanticipated direction. But they also know me well enough to understand that I do have a story in mind, as well as a destination, and so the story usually works best when that planned destination (in this case, playing the role of heroes to stop Gymla from using the Demonomicon to sink the Moonshae Isles as a means for some nefarious end) is at least a factor in their considerations. Again, I can't say for certain which path they choose if I leave it completely open-ended. But I think destination lends shape to a story, even if the story ends up changing immensely throughout its course.

In the end, I think having a destination matters because of the impact it has on the journey. Plus, don't we all want a satisfying conclusion to a story arc, whether we're reading, watching, or playing? It's been my experience that it is far more common for conclusions to be underwhelming or even disappointing when they're not at least somewhat planned.

P.S. For the record, they saved 2 of the 3 islands from sinking, they didn't die, and they successfully destroyed the Demonomicon by tricking Fraz-Urb'luu into destroying it himself (as he had basically been possessing Gymla the whole way...yeah, I bent the rules of the game. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?). Plus, they had a really excellent encounter with a farmer family that lasted probably about an hour and had almost no impact on the game! Everyone's a winner!!