Many quests in Dungeons and Dragons – and video game RPGs, for that matter – involve violence. Slay the demons. Rout the bandits. Prune the killer plants. Ideally, there is an interesting motivation behind the quest. The monstrous plants were sent to the gardener by a jealous rival, perhaps. Or the criminal gang is ambushing the train to steal the wine before the county fair.
Those premises are popular for a reason. They’re simple to design and are likely to motivate the players. Still, I sometimes found that basic premise to be restrictive. Here’s a scenario I came up with in my last campaign that gave a specific goal to the players that had nothing to do with killing anybody. (Though %$#& hit the fan eventually, obviously.)
The players were traveling through the underworld when they came across a beholder – a non-threatening recluse – who offered them a deal. They were to go to a sorcerer’s lair nearby and disrupt a ritual he was planning. In exchange, the beholder would show the players a faster, safer route to their goal. The catch: the sorcerer, named Concelhaut, had to be seen to have failed in the ritual, not defeated. The players could not simply draw their swords and charge in.
(For those who are wondering, I was drawing from the lore in Eberron: Rising from the Last War. The beholder was aiming to stem the influence of the aberration Belashyrra, the Lord of Eyes, without alerting it that one of its followers had been attacked.)
I used the Monster of the Week structure for this session. It was useful to have a countdown of what the NPCs would be doing, to make sure it felt like the players were racing against the clock:
- Concelhaut interrogates prisoners
- Concelhaut communes with the Lord of Eyes
- Concelhaut gathers needed magical components
- Concelhaut orders the prisoners brought to the altar
- Concelhaut begins ceremony
- Concelhaut transforms into half-beholder monstrosity, goes forth to corrupt Eberron
I put together a simple map of a half dozen rooms along with some NPCs that would either provide some valuable information for stopping the ritual or have their own motivation for potentially turning on their master.
The PCs did end up having to draw their weapons and slay Concelhaut after causing the ritual to short-circuit – but it was during the chaos of an uprising among some of the cultists who wanted to unionize in the pursuit of better wages and working conditions. Not to mention the attack by the dwarves who had somehow escaped. To any outside observer, Concelhaut had simply failed to keep his followers in line and failed to perform the ritual properly.
If you want to try something like this at your own table, here are the basic steps:
- Have a quest-giver explicitly state that the goal is something other than the death of another NPC. Have some fun thinking of some tricky social situations that require some subterfuge. Perhaps a noble needs someone to convince his girlfriend to break up with him. Maybe a wizard wants her student to succeed in his experiment without knowing he’s been helped.
- Think of a few ideas – no more than four – that the players might try to accomplish this and have a couple lines ready to really obviously introduce them, whether it’s through an NPC or a journal or location description. This will keep things from hitting a dead end.
- Be ready to say “yes” when the players think of something different – but feel free to make up a complication or obstacle they’ll have to figure out first.
- Have an idea of what would happen if the players never got involved. Use that to guide what the NPCs are up to.
In my experience, this was a really fun way to incorporate some role-playing, exploration and hi-jinks into what could have been a boring dungeon crawl. I recommend giving it a shot.
Into the Fray 