No, I’m not using my one wish for plot advice. :roll:
So, I’m running a low-powered game in the BPRD / Hellboy universe. I’ve got a scenario idea in which the PC’s are dispatched to an ‘empty’ midwestern town to figure out what went on there. They’ll find evidence of madness and strife, but everyone’s just gone.
Somehow they’ll track to another small town, where the evidence of the madness is just starting. In the end, they’ll trace it down to a real, honest-to-ghod wishing well. It grants -one- wish per person. Some of the townsfolk wishes have gone badly; people wanting others to love them, incredible riches, dreams of revenge… Everyone’s darkest desires have come out, and the city is going to go down hard.
The well itself is a demonic entity that, of course, is spreading chaos. Having stolen… Er… Borrowed… From an episode of ‘Supernatural’, I think the well can only be reset if the original ‘wisher’ takes his penny from the well. That being said, one of the PC’s is a priest who is -always- jonesing to do an exorcism, and I think he’ll be sorely disapointed if his abilities did nothing to the well.
The problem here is, while this is a decent outline for an adventure, I’m really not sure how to flesh it out; other than ‘the PC’s find out the truth about the well, and get the guy to undo his wish’, I’m not really sure how to make a full game. I need things for the PC’s to encounter and actually -do- whilst slowly finding out the truth (and I need it to be a slow reveal, or, knowing my PC’s, they’ll ignore everyone whose life is going to heck so they can do something about the well.)
So, with the fertile ground of ‘make a wish’, what sort-of things can you envision would make a good sub-plot / adventure?
Well, I’ll start this by saying that giving the players access to wishes is dangerous. If you think the towns folk have screwed things up, just wait till the players have a crack at it. You really don’t want them to do that. I would put a price on the wish. Have the demon ask for something in return, something that would further it’s cause. See Needful Things if you need any help with it.
I would have the characters start by investigating something that seems unrelated. An occurrence of something that happened as a result of a wish. A bunch of pixies or brownies or something are causing trouble, because someone wished to never have to clean their house ever again, and now the little folk take care of it. Someone wanted to talk to a long dead relative or lover, and now there’s a ghost out and about. Someone wanted their old classic car to work again, and so there’s a possessed car on the loose. Start with simple wishes, and then run them through the demon filter.
I’m with hotflungwok - if you can twist the wishes into summoning-type situations, that’s instant meat for gameplay. For the slow reveal part, I’d recommend working out a few specific restrictions or characteristics of the well, to tie the otherwise unconnected encounters with possessed washing machines and the like together. For instance, having a wishing well work by teleportation is fairly common, and adds in the commotion caused by stuff disappearing elsewhere, which could clue in the PCs. Or, say it really only works by summoning spirits to possess things/people - a wish for someone to love you could result in a succubus-possession, a wish for physical strength could mean being possessed yourself, that sort of thing.
I’d also recommend starting out with low-key, subtle effects - the swarm of annoyed pixies, the annoying but relatively harmless ghost. As the PCs deal with these things, and get closer to working out the source, the well feels threatened and starts making bigger problems. Presumably, it can only work when someone makes a wish, so you get to play with ways to warp the wishes in more deadly fashions.
Also, I think you probably ought to have some way for the well to work without direct knowledge of the wisher - first, that makes it harder to track down, and second, wishes are going to be less carefully worded, and also more mundane, which will make them much more interesting. There are only so many ways you can twist “I wish I ruled the world”, you know?
There is a graphic novel series called Lucifer, where the second album kinda deals with this - a near-dead group of gods start granting wishes to random people all over, resulting in chaos.
The thing is, these guys are fairly stupid, and can´t understand speech - what they react to is the passion in the speakers voice. So you don´t have to say “I wish” - you just have to want something, even fleetingly, and give voice to that desire somehow. One of the beginnings of the story is a girl screaming at her mentally challenged brother “why don´t you just choke!” and getting her “wish”.
So, have some people get not just twisted wishes, but things they obviously do not want, and never did, except for a second in anger or despair. The teenager wishing death or pain on her parents, the mother wishing she was free again, the embarrassed kid wishing for the ground to swallow him up, the depressed person saying “I might as well be dead” (Turn him/her into a rather confused ghost who can´t figure out what to haunt?)
“Congratulations, welcome to the wonderful world of being in suspended animation!”
After one wish, they won’t get any ideas and you can handwave a way for the (in this case) suspended player to still play (give them an NPC to temporarily control, allow them minor telepathic contact, including very basic mindreading, there’s any number of possibilities). Don’t try to keep players on your rails, it never works, if the player makes a wish, BOOM, wish granted, have fun with your NEW main objective (freeing your friend) which can ALSO catalyze the main objective (figure out what’s going on and how to fix it).
Because an experienced player isn’t going to wish for something like that. It’s not that hard to come up with a wish that’s difficult to twist effectively. It’s like giving low level characters access to a Deck of Many Things in D&D. Sure, some of them might get something good, but it’s going to unbalance things, and it will probably end in tears.
What if you didn’t want one of the players to spend the game in suspended animation? Wishes can change the game radically, and you can’t prepare for everything. Besides, if something that bad happened every time a wish was granted, with no real benefit, then people are going to stop wishing really fast. An intelligent demon would understand that people have to see the benefit, especially if they think the benefit outweighs the perceived cost. A really intelligent demon would make sure the perceived cost is much less than the real cost.
Wishes can be awesomely powerful, and that alone means you should be careful when putting them out where the characters can get at them. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m saying be careful. Raping a player’s character for something they don’t know anything about is generally a bad idea. Give the characters a chance to find things out before giving them the opportunity to screw themselves.