After reading 681 strips of Order of the Stick, my brother has decided he wants to role play. Brother #2 and I have no lives, so we agreed, why not, to have our own sword-waving fantasy adventure, from You Meet At A Starbucks to claiming the cursed Skull of Something Or Other at the top of the foreboding Thimgummy mountains.
I spent most of last night constructing a town out of Lego, with all the important buildings you need for a D&D adventure: a magic shop, a clothing store, a luxury hotel, a roach motel, an ethnic restaurant, a jail, a weapons shop, several bars, and of course, a Starbucks. We only have two regular 6-sided dice, but that’s okay, because so far we haven’t actually done any dice rolling.
So far the game has mostly consisted of wandering around. This is because I’m not very good at making things up on the spot. Also, (not that they haven’t been warned) I’m a very mean DM. I’d like to get the adventure started, ya know, but what can I do when they won’t follow my storyline?
So far, Brother #1 has decided to become a rogue, even though we’re not quite sure what a rogue is, aside from “like Haley Starshine from OOTS”. Brother #2- who’s only ten- is having a really tough time- so far he’s had his arm broken by Belkar Bitterleaf, gotten separated from Brother #1, been cheated into doing menial labor for a pitiful amount by a weasley gardener, bludgeoned unconscious by Thor and Zeus, and nearly promised a fifth of his soul to Cthulhu.
I still have no idea what I’m doing or where we’re going or how to convince them to take UU’s Librarian with them on their quest. (I have an orange rubber ape, and darn it, I’m going to use it). The brothers have pooled their money to order an actual player’s handbook, which doubtless will tell use exactly how wrong we’re doing it.
Don’t worry about how wrong or how right you’re doing it. The whole object of D&D is to have fun. I certainly didn’t faithfully follow the Players Handbook when I was DMing, because quite a bit of it is a lot of hooey.
Wanna have fun on an adventure? Get Grimtooth’s Dungeon of Doom. We played it with Toon characters. Can’t kill em!
Under most circumstances, you’ll never actually need a map (3-dimensional or otherwise) of a town. If the players say “We’re going to the weapon shop”, then OK, they go to the weapon shop, and it probably isn’t relevant where it is relative to the inn they’re staying at. If they happen to get into a fight in a back alley on the way there, or the like, then you get out a fresh piece of graph paper and draw up as much of a map as you need, on the spot. Of course, it may be that part of the fun in your case is the “playing with LEGO” bit, as much as the role-playing bit, and if you’re having fun, you’re not doing it wrong.
Okay, I’m starting over. I’ve got a better game plan in mind, but I think I need some help.
The basic idea is: Our Heroes wake up in a literal dungeon, with no idea how they got their or who imprisoned them. They don’t remember their pasts, either (although they know their names, religion, hobbies, etc). They must explore the dungeon, find various random objects, and learn by hard experience to try and talk to monsters instead of just attacking. They’ll also find clues to their past.
I’m kinda stumped, though as to what the Grand Secret Revelation should be. Also, I want the way out of the dungeon to involve lateral thinking that has to do with the GSR.
I do have some very ingenious traps and corridors and riddles and stuff in mind. It’s just the back story that I’ve having trouble conjuring. I’m not asking you to write my story for me or anything, I’d just like an idea to start from.
I played a game that was very much like this (although I didn’t get to enjoy the good parts of it - more on this later). We players woke up in an underground room where everything was trashed. No idea where we were, no relations between the players, no memory of how any of us got here, though we did remember our identities, trade etc… Upon exploration, we realized we were in an apparently empty maze : no traps, no monsters, nothing, just tons of corridors and weird architecture, and lots of bashed furniture as a sign that we were 1) in a man-made structure, and 2) there’d been people in it before us.
From time to time, the DM handed us scraps of paper with random recollections : maybe we’d seen this player somewhere, or maybe we’d been attacked at some point in the past. We idly wondered whether we were all dead and this was the afterlife. There were big trust issues as well as the usual problems that come with establishing a command structure out of a groupe of complete strangers. Think Cube without the death traps.
The group then split up (can’t remember why, though) : a friend and I found a way to climb up an aeration/light shaft by piling furniture, while the rest soldiered on in the maze, following recent signs of passage.
Up top, we found a featureless “plain” of plaster/mortar/bricks, punctuated by holes similar to the one we’d just climbed through. The plain extended all the way to the horizon in every direction, with absolutely no landmark, but there was a sky and clouds. We both were playing highly practical, skeptical characters so we figured there was no such thing as infinite distance : the structure *had *to end somewhere. If it didn’t, then we were dead, and couldn’t escape anyway. So we picked a direction at random, and walked straight along it. That was the end of the story for both of us : eventually, we reached the edge, which was a curved wall painted to give the illusion that the scenery went on forever. We never learned how we got dumped inside the maze or why - but we got out, so I count it as a win
The rest of the group reportedly found an entire civilization that had formed out of people like us, who didn’t know why or how they’d been dumped in the maze but who’d resigned themselves to live in it since they had ran out of escape ideas, and built a religion around its inescapability. I don’t really know the details, or what transpired (this part of the scenario was played without my friend and I, since we weren’t there with them), although I do know they were involved in skirmishes with a rival civilization, and hunted rats for food. Don’t know if they ever made it out - apparently the whole point of the scenario was not to make it out of the maze, but the workings of those troglodyte civs. So, yeah, my friend and I missed out on much
After the game, the DM told us the maze was some nobleman’s idea of fun - he’d send agents all across France to kidnap people, dump them in his pet maze, and watch them squirm. There was no way to exit the maze other than climbing out : no doors at all on the outermost wall, just a bare wall - the prisonners were lowered down through the air vents.
My friends and I enjoy customizing LEGO figures to represent characters on the battle map (They’re just about the right size for the 1-inch squares) - though this sometimes leads to goodnatured arguements about who-took-the-only-dwarf-beard, and the like.
I did a game like yours once. My characters were 1st level nothings and woke up in a dark cave. It was too dark to see anything and there was no way to make light. All they knew was that everything around was wet and that there were many sharp, but brittle objects laying around. They had to escape the cave quickly though, because not long after waking up they heard angry noices of some kind of animal.
The next 1.5 years (real-time) the players leveled up steadily, but a twist was that for each level they chose, they received a second (free) level of some other class chosen by me. They also more and more frequently got flashbacks of some other life they may have lived. A life that was full of death, murder and evil. It took them a while, but in the end their search for themselves ended in some kind of cave, which turned out to be the exact same cave they escaped from in the beginning. They now had torches and could see what was in there. It turned out to be some kind of laboratory where hundreds and hundreds of clones of themselves were being bred. A few pods were broken and the embriotic fluid was all over. There was also some kind of monstrous watchdog that had to clean up any intruders, and which was the thing that chased the players away from the scene in the first place.
The grand reveal in the end was that the players were bred for some kind of magical clone warefare, and the flashbacks and dreams were part of their incomplete programming to make them evil SOBs. I was planning to do a follow up campaing in which the players were allowed to find out who created them, but that never took off.
This all took place before The Matrix was released. I always felt that I should’ve sued them for royalties or some such.
I’m not sure how mature your players are…
but maybe you could do a” the Dungeon was only in their mind" spiel
That is all the puzzles they solve somehow tie in to some kind of trauma they have to resolve? That they are actually in some kind of insane asylum.
