Help me kill a bunch of Kobolds.

The Game Room
1

Ok, I got suckered into writing a scenario for a gaming con this summer. I’ll be running Kobolds ate my baby!, which is a quick and easy fun RPG-like thing.
So, anybody want to help me come up with ideas to throw at unsuspecting victims?

On the off-chance that anyone reading is going to Arcon, and is planning on playing KAMB!, don’t read).

I’ll have to write out the full scenario, in case more people than me volunteer to GM (three years ago, there were something like 10 KAMB! groups. I’m sort of dreading that, but am expecting maybe 1-2 additional groups).

Ok. This is my first con scenario, so I won’t even try to rival the master who wrote the thorougly original story that got me into KAMB! in the first place. My idea is to create a landscape crammed full of weird stuff, opportunities for death and destruction, and generally allow the actual story to more or less evolve organically (which is the point of the game, anyway.

KAMB!, for those not familiar with it, is game about canibalism, senseless violence and animal cruelty, more or less. The players take on the role of a Kobold, a nasty, stupid being who likes nothing more than eating and fighting. Kobolds live in Kobold Mountain, and King Torg (all hail King Torg!) has just decided to throw a party. At the party, the main course will be human baby. The players are the youngest kobolds, who have been asigned the task of finding these babies, and bringing them back before nightfall. If they return without one, they will be eaten themselves. Pretty standard so far.

My idea is to create three maps for the kobolds to explore. Whick one they wind up in will be decided by the actions of the group at the begining of play. The general ideas are:

1: A sleepy little western like town. There is a barn full of cows and chickens, a harware store, a church, a moonshine-still in the woods, a gun shop (holy cow! kobolds with guns.) and more stuff like that. There are several houses with babies in them, but they might be difficult to collect. A more or less classic KAMP! landscape

2: A haunted house/dungeon. A large castle-like ruin with a crumbling magic tower, a ghost, a mad science laboratory, several insanely clever puzzles (the trick here is that they will be painfully obvious to the players, but difficult to get the kobolds to actually solve) and a dungeon crammed full of stuff from the More Things to Kill and Eat supplement. I have some ideas for where to place the babies, but will gladly accept more, and also ideas for puzzles.

  1. A mad carnival/travelling circus, which for some reason has set up in the woods. Absolutely full of babies, strange people, deadly animals and fiendish traps (such as the dreaded Cotton Candy Machine, the Merry-Go-Round and the Triplet Stroller.) The Kobolds will be assumed to be children or short people in ugly costumes unless they actually attack anyone or steal a baby. Ideally, this one needs to hectic, stressfull and surreal.

So anyone have ideas for random encounters, traps or puzzles I can torture my players with? The stranger the better.

2

The innards of a clock tower? Giant gears, rotating & crushing little Kobold bassards?

The Western town: have them meet the Lone Ranger. Keep a devastingly powerful Randolph Scott in reserve as a wandering encounter, & riff on Blazing Saddles in NPC dialog.
The castle: Frau Blucher. You know what to do.
A Mad Scientist, armed with a 1920’s Style Death Ray.
The carnival: The Joker. And a Merry-Go-Round that could level a small town. A hall of mirrors that creates images that spring to life & try & kill the party. Defeat them easily by smashing the mirrors. Nuff said.

3

Some general advice about con games:

In my experience, this is definitely a place where railroading is pretty good. You don’t have to be completely railroading–PCs can have choices as to how to solve the problems in front of them–but the players should never be confronted with a serious question of which direction to take the plot. The reason for this is that you have only 4-6 hours, and one difficult player can bog the whole thing down if they have an opportunity to do so. Also, good Con games tend to be much more polished than weekly games, and the fewer scenes you have to polish, the better the polish will be.

In other words, I’d choose the location for the players. Any of these three sound like a lot of fun. And instead of having it be something that they wander around, I’d consider having it be a more-or-less linear experience through the location, whether that’s because of a timeline (the circus would be great with a timeline), or a clear path (such as in the haunted house).

It’s also a good idea to pace it with about four or five encounters, unless KAMB has extremely quick combats.

Finally, props always make people squeal in delight. Can you have some props?

Daniel

Edit: one more idea. At the carnival or the mad scientist place, maybe the kobolds aren’t the only ones wanting babies. There could be a competitor, someone who is turning the babies into monstrous slaves of some sort, which the kobolds will have to defeat without killing and then reverse the process so they can have cute little babies to eat.

Daniel

4

The rules specifically state that the GM must be equiped with a french bread, for the purpose of hitting players arguing about rules.

There exist (I’m not making this up) rules for KAMB! LARP, which cannot be played without at least one rubber chicken. This is the tapletop variety (thank Og!), but I’m considering bringing one anyway. For what, I have noe idea.

I suppose I could bring a bunch of padded weapons and make people live-act any (inevitable) in-fighting. I’ll think about it.

Ooh, I like this. I was considering stuffing the laboratory with babies anyway, so this fits right in. The problem with too complex NPC motivation, though, is that Kobolds aren’t the best comunicators and only speak a handfull of human words at best.

5

Perhaps the human villain could give one of those, “Now I reveal my evil scheme!” speeches, which would sound to kobolds something like,

“Blah blah blah evil blah blah! Blah blah blah blah blah! Blah blah blah monsters blah babies! Blah blah blah chicken blah blah blah blah! Blah blah blah! Ahahahahaha!”

Accompany it with lots of grand gesticulation that makes it more or less clear that the villain is making monsters from babies (the chicken part should be mystifying–maybe said with hands raised triumpantly).

And the props sound great. If you do puzzles, props are also a lot of fun: giving the players something to manipulate makes for really interesting puzzles, in my experience.

Daniel

6

That sounds cool, LHoD. Either the “blah blah Ginger” style from Far Side, or the Peanuts adult-speak of “whah whaaa, whawha wha whaa” with certain words filled in. Insert certain words here and there, and lots of hand motions involving a baby doll, maybe some odd props, and a “raaarr!” evil monster rampage pantomime. If there’s a machine involved, maybe it’ll have pictograms of a baby and a monster, and a lever that can be pretty easily interpreted as being able to be thrown in reverse to change any transmuted babies back.

Oh, and maybe the evil scientist will push the big red button, transmute a baby… and it comes out as a baby monster, to his confusion and dismay. Then he doesn’t have any help in smashing the kobold PCs, and a transmuted baby would be easier for kobolds to wrestle into the machine and change it back.

7

I really doubt your average kobold would be able to make the conection between the baby going in and the monster coming out, but this sounds like fun. They’d probably just eat it :smiley:

8

Hey, worth a shot. :smiley: At the very least it’d be funny to see the players’ faces as you’re acting it out. Or maybe one will think the baby-monster is just a real ugly human baby, bring it back for dinner, and get smacked down for being dumber than usual.