Revelation for RPGs: Handling Transformations in Your World…and in Your Characters
In previous articles in this series I talked about planting clues, revealing secrets through written artifacts, using the people in your world to build a richer setting, and adding another dimension through visual clues. Your world is not static and neither are the characters in it. In this article I’ll talk about handling transformations.
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About halfway through the campaign, the players have learned the secret of the land: the land is tied to, and resembles, the dragon Agondre, and the land is sick because the dragon is sick. How did this come about, and what can they do to cure the sickness?
The group’s wizard, Prolix, attempts to scry the emperor. This seems unlikely to work, as all we have is a coin depicting his likeness, but it actually succeeds — dead men have no magic resistance. The emperor is lying in a bed, and it appears he died in pain. He had been stabbed in the heart and the wound looks infected.
Over the following weeks the wizard repeats the scry a few times. The rate of decay seems slow, so the emperor has probably been dead for some months — perhaps, the group reasons, since around the time the troubles in the land began? The land is tied to the dragon; is the emperor also tied to the land? It seemed too great a connection to be a coincidence: the transformation of the land must be tied to the emperor’s personal change in state.
This investigation was player-driven; the GM just had to sit back and respond. The players were engaged enough with the world to want to solve the mystery. A GM can’t count on that, so have backup plans in case you need to push clues to your players, but when it works you get to watch and smile knowingly.
* * *
The emperor had been stabbed and infected and the land got sick. The group knew, from past encounters, of a magical disease-causing weapon named Weeping Wounds, last known to be in possession of a probably-malevolent man named Garrett 500 years prior. Had the emperor been stabbed with this weapon, all these years later? By whom?
Someone with a grudge, we learned. On one scry the group was able to see more of the emperor’s immediate surroundings — he was in a temple with a dragon statue, where we also saw priestly corpses, and a message had been scrawled on the wall in blood: a single word, “revenge”, in the draconic language.
The characters sought a divination.
Agondre’s bane has taken Agondre’s bane from the center of the capital to the center of the capital.
Perhaps, one character suggested, the priests need to try a different approach in asking their questions. But, Larissa wrote:
I can see an interpretation of this. Agondre’s bane is Weeping Wounds, but it would also be the one who wielded it. And while Cardior is the capital of the empire, it is not the Capital geographically — that would be farther north, from the heart to the head. So perhaps the person who stabbed the emperor with Weeping Wounds has taken the dagger and fled north.
Sharing this realization would lead the group into a daring and ill-conceived fight with a vampire, but that is a story for another time. First, we were going to have to go to Cardior to investigate matters there.
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The group arrives at Cardior, the heart of the empire, and manage to get into the monster-filled city and find their way to the mostly-unguarded palace. They encounter and defeat a powerful trap at the chapel and then enter a magical portal that transports them to the emperor’s sanctum — where they find the ghosts of the emperor’s personal guards.
Three defenders remain in ghostly form, apparently bound to stay and help repair the damage to Agondre. From them the group learns how the troubles in the land began.
500 years ago Garrett had managed to stab the dragon Agondre with the disease dagger Weeping Wounds, setting the cataclysm in motion. Why he did this was unknown, but since that time each emperor of the land had used Weeping Wounds in a special ritual to accept some of the dragon’s pain onto himself to keep things from getting worse. (This player assumed, but never confirmed, that Renard set this up. How they gained possession of Weeping Wounds was not revealed.) The job of emperor, it turned out, came with a burden of sickness. (Ha — if only the dukes vying for the succession knew!)
Fast-forward 500 years and several emperors. A few months earlier the guards and the emperor had been preparing the monthly ritual when a vampiric attacker came through the portal shouting “I have come for what is mine!” He killed the guards, took the dagger, stabbed the emperor, and fled.
Agondre’s bane has taken Agondre’s bane from the center of the capital to the center of the capital.
500 years ago Garrett transformed the land by stabbing the dragon Agondre. Each emperor had managed to keep it from getting worse at the cost of his own health, using the very weapon that had done the damage, but a cure had not been possible. Then Garrett, now transformed into a vampire, had come back and stolen away the weapon. Now, with no emperor and also no dagger, the dragon and the land were again sickening.
The group, with help from the ghosts, makes its way to the dragon’s chamber, just like in the dream. The stench of disease is overwhelming and monsters crawl from the pool in which the dragon is trapped. The group attempts to heal some of the damage, but it is like pouring thimbles of water on a raging wildfire. They will need a different strategy.
* * *
The land had undergone, and was undergoing, major transformations, but the story was not just about the land. Several characters, too, were undergoing transformations, threads that were long-running and slow to reveal themselves. (I’ll talk about Garrett’s transformation more in a later post.)
Turok, the stranger from “the Dragon Empire” (but not the dragon empire of Agondre), entered the game with a magical sword named Kotara-Nar, which he said meant “dragon’s tooth”. Over time both he and the sword grew in power. Then, one day in a fight where all the luck was against him, he was killed. This was not in the GM’s plans, and the player rolling up a new character was especially not in the GM’s plans. He needed Turok, but he couldn’t tell us that yet. In the end the group was able to get druidic help for a reincarnation, and Turok returned as a half-dragon. Adjusting to this new form would be an ongoing challenge for Turok for much of the rest of the campaign. The choice of form was not accidental, and fit into the GM’s dragon-themed plans.
This was not Turok’s only transformation. He would learn from Seamus the bard that, in order to unlock Kotara-Nar’s full power, he needed to go to the Gorge of Fire. What Seamus didn’t tell him was that doing so would transform a person forever. I will write more about the Gorge of Fire later.
* * *
Turok’s transformations began with some unlucky die rolls and was guided by the GM. Larissa’s transformations were premeditated — some by the player and some by the GM.
Larissa was a sorceror whose early religious attitudes were at the level of “be polite to the town priest”. During the group’s adventures the priest and Larissa corresponded; past posts in this series have shown some of that. Over time, Larissa’s polite gestures started to run deeper — being out in a dangerous world that’s slowly falling apart can inspire faith, this player figured. Eventually I told the GM that I was interested in possibly having Larissa multi-class as a paladin, which sounds like an unlikely combination but actually made sense in this game. (Also, in D&D 3.5, the classes share a key statistic.) The GM agreed in principle, and we set the idea aside for a while.
It’s important for players and GMs to talk in advance about these types of changes. Our having done so allowed the GM to spring a really neat surprise. During the dream-adventure where we first saw the dragon Agondre, the GM took control of Larissa’s owl familiar, something that had never happened before. After a distressing fight in which Larissa was dividing her attention between overwhelming monsters and her absent familiar, he returned, led her to a sword stuck high in the cavern wall, and told her to take it. Larissa drew her magical sword, named Sunrise, and dove into the fight, finding that she knew how to use it. And thus she gained her first level as a paladin. This was very neat for the player. Gaining this level was not a matter of paperwork; it was part of the story.
An even bigger surprise was finding that she still had the sword when awaking from the dream. So, maybe not just a dream… Larissa would soon learn that the sword was the gift of Agondre.
Later still, Larissa would learn that this was the first step on a new journey of self-sacrifice and growth.
* * *
These are only some of the transformations that the group experienced. The most-successful ones were the result of cooperation and trust between the GM and the players. When you’re working together to tell a story and build a world, you have to be willing to let go and let others drive, even if it’s “your” character or “your” world. When that happened in this game, the results were far better than I imagine any of us could have produced on our own.
In the next article I’ll talk about the group’s efforts to set matters right, and what we learned along the way.
