Tag Archives: TTRPGs

NaNoWriMo with a TTRPG Twist: Day 8

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Coins for the Ferryman…and More, with Some Luck

This plot hook is specifically for the ink RPG. It can be used for any game, but will likely work best for ink. Let’s get spooky!

You awaken to a dull pain, surrounded by relative strangers, on a glittering black sand beach just beyond the reach of ominous obsidian waves. As you blink the world around you into greater clarity, you catch a glimpse of a translucent figure hovering just above one of the others, shaking its head. It notices you and greets you warmly, if not perhaps a little over-enthusiastically.

“Woah there, pal, take it easy,” they say. “I mean, it’s not easy being recently deceased but take it as easy as you can. You’ve surely got loads of questions, yeah?”

The realization that you’ve died washes over you as the others wake up and are given similar greetings. It’s then you notice, then hastily look away from their shadows.

“Name’s Five,” Five the Spirit says. “I’m what you’d call a Psychopomp. There’s a handful of us down here, all blessed with the task of helping those of you who have freshly shuffled off the mortal coil to find your way to the Beyond.”

After some conversation, bright lights in the distance catch your eye.

“Hoo boy, you’ll want to steer clear of that,” Five explains.

A grand island—or Key as they’re called around these parts—made up entirely of the most bombastic, engaging, and inescapable casinos in all of creation, with one of the few tickets out of the Ink somewhere hidden among its barrage of light and sound. Do you brave the Ink in an effort to resist the casino and pass on? Or will its temptation prove too much?

GM Tips and Tools

This is intended to play out as a Journey of a medium or longer length, but can be shortened depending on all of the usual factors (player availability, frequency of combat/TPKs, etc).

The central themes here are overcoming greed, pride, and envy, culminating in a Greater Fiend battle across a roulette wheel stylized casino Key against the formidable Roulette Spider, a monstrous patchwork of slot machines, craps tables, and more adorned with a colossal roulette wheel on its back.

Introduce elements relevant to the players with each additional Key that play into the overall themes of greed, pride, and envy such as Chill (the feeling of being stuck or frozen by the desire to keep playing), Terror (the crippling fear of insurmountable debt), and Poison (the toxicity in the atmosphere from revelry such as smoking, drinking, and other indulgences).

Battles should incorporate elements of the Roulette Spider into them such as mini-games of chance.

But that’s for another post (when I’ve had a chance to assemble some stat blocks).

Until then, take your chances, beat the odds; good luck and godspeed.

NaNoWriMo with a TTRPG Twist: Day 6

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Adventure Deja Vu

You meet in a tavern. Your party feels like they’ve been here before, and of course they have. The barkeep is friendly, and clearly knows your party well. The regulars regard you with warm smiles and inside jokes that for some reason don’t fully feel familiar. All is largely well in the Kingdom, even if you can’t shake the feeling you’re being watched.

And all is as it should be.

At least that seems to be the case until your party gradually finds things that are familiar that shouldn’t be. A mighty blade that seems drawn to your Paladin’s hands. A comprehensive book of spells in your mage’s handwriting though they have no recollection of writing it. A small demonic familiar who trails behind your warlock, only just within sight as if expecting commands from their master.

All roads lead back to the King, and the King seems eager to obfuscate and evade such inquiries. What is going on? What does the king know?

GM Tools and Tips

This is a quick route to a higher level campaign by way of a low level start. Leave breadcrumbs helping to indicate the party’s deja vu isn’t simply that – it’s echoes of a past in which they were mighty heroes, powerful and well-equipped, until they suddenly weren’t.

Role play the king as familiar in ways that point to him knowing why the heroes are in the state they are in. Provide quests that take them through their forgotten past until they reach a broken, forgotten citadel in which they finally recall the truth: the King had shown himself to the adventurers as a deposed ruler in need of aid, and so the party as heroic as they were stepped in to aid him.

Upon arriving at the seat of the kingdom, the King revealed himself to be a powerful devil who then sent the adventurers back in their respective timelines, carefully burying details of their identity while leaving some alone so they were none the wiser.

As the adventurers find echoes of their past they then level up and move closer to being who they once were.

As always: take care; good luck and godspeed!

NaNoWriMo with a TTRPG Twist: Day 5

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We’re now five days into November, which means we’re five days into NaNoWriMo. This is equal parts encouraging and terrifying. How are you doing? Remember to be kind to yourself no matter what your goal is for the month! (And hydrate and all that jazz.)

Anyway, without further ado as I am le tired:

Luci and the Sky Diamond

The first game/system specific plot hook/one-shot idea! This is specifically for Scum and Villainy, but you can absolutely use it for any game. It was just written with Scum and Villainy (powered by Forged in the Dark) in mind.

The Hegemony’s upper crust—the most powerful elites among the most powerful elites—have secrets just like everyone else. Your Crew has been hired to get some of those secrets and help share them, as sharing is caring. And this kind of caring will help liberate a number of worlds from Hegemony control and cause chaos for the empire.

However, those secrets are stored in a highly secure vault known only as The Sky Diamond, a space station turned fortress of sorts by a curious data broker only known as Lucien.

The Crew must find a way to charter approved transport to the Sky Diamond, make their way in, and access multiple servers undetected, as the unspoken rules of the establishment are that any caught with mischief on their minds are simply ejected from the airlocks.

Can your Crew sneak in Luci’s Sky Diamond, steal the requested data, and escape? Will the other treasures here prove too tempting and derail the plain? This could be the heist of the millennium, but only if you don’t get caught.

GM Tips and Tools

The prep portion of this job is critical for things to work out. Gathering intel on the Sky Diamond, the relevant data vaults the Crew will have to steal from, and the potential VIPs who may be present and on the look out for suspicious sorts.

Lucien is, fortunately, both incredibly vain and arrogant, and so he is easily played in terms of gaining entry.

This can easily, like many one-shots turned campaign, be a great starting point or an adventure to plug into an existing Scum and Villainy campaign.

Stay safe in your travels among the stars; good luck and godspeed!

NaNoWriMo with a TTRPG Twist: Day 4

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A Time Without Heroes

The adventurers find themselves facing down their arch-nemesis after a seemingly endless journey riddled with perilous pitfalls and fearsome foes. They square up, ready to fight, as their arch-nemesis gives the fully-anticipated monologue. Time seems to stand still.

That’s when the adventurers suddenly, inexplicably, fall into a trance-like state. Everything goes black. What feels like an instant later, the adventurers blink away their confusion and find themselves surrounded by their arch-nemesis’s minions. One calls out to alert their boss your party has awoken, and they rush over with a curious expression on their face—not one of unexpected victory or devious plotting, but one of concern.

A new monologue begins, far less villainous in nature. All around the world, other villainous sorts shared stories of the adventurers who were about to thwart their plots—the true end goal of most sinister sorts—suddenly falling out of time. Nothing could explain it and nothing could fix it. It was simply a time without adventurers—without heroes. And in that time greater evils than ever imaginable were able to rise up, and all the monsters, fiends, and villains of the world could do was tend to their heroes and hope the cosmic balance would once again right itself.

Your adventurers find themselves in a weakened state, as though they were fresh to journeying forth to best evil, but this is a world in which evil has been redefined. How do they proceed? Do they have what it takes to save the day and restore the natural order of things?

GM Tools and Tips

Taking this approach will absolutely require table buy-in, but approach it vaguely enough to allow for a surprise. Make sure you talk through starting with high level characters that are going to revert back to lower levels. Then build to that point, allowing players to experience being a fully-powered adventurer.

Play the villainous NPCs as ones that aren’t necessarily easy to trust—think like an unreliable narrator when stepping into their shoes. Everything is seen through the lens of what these villainous sorts do being the right thing, for the greater good, etc. They view themselves as the heroes of their own stories, and therefore are trying to proceed as such. But they are also eager to do what they can to help restore the adventurers so things can get back to the standard good versus evil normal they had come to know and love.

This can easily be used as a mini-campaign or a full-lengthy campaign.

Above all else: have fun! Take care and as always: good luck and Godspeed!