The campaign I’m running at the moment a Fractured Fairy Tale world. The idea behind it is that the players go through different fairy tale scenarios that I have altered some for my own amusement. Scenarios range from princess stories to moral parables.
My players all have characters that have their own goals within the world. The idea is that they were characters in a different tale that has ended or is still going but isn’t in an active part of the story. One player is a goblin barbarian who used to be human. Cursed by a shaman when he attacked a camp he’s searching for a cure while sending money home to his family. I’m trying to reinforce good role play from the players by letting them have a slightly obnoxious character to work though.
The first mission I sent them on was a classic rescue the princess with a twist on the Cinderella story. In the scenario Cinderella’s mother was a fey princess who renounced her title to marry a mortal man. Unfortunately when she died he remarried and the woman he married turned out to be a warlock that is trying to gather power for her demon patron.
Cinderella doesn’t know why her stepmother and sisters are so messed up but she found a chance to go to the ball wearing her mothers diadem. This let her unknown fey godmother see her and begin to influence her life. By manipulating the prince to love her the godmother hoped that he would keep her out of her stepmothers hands, but the stepmother managed to spirit her out of the castle and out into the woods where the family’s old manor is located.
This is where the players come in. They’re hired at the tavern in the local town by a “hidden” duke and the prince who’s compelled to find Cinderella, however his father doesn’t want to waste his knights time looking for a random runaway girl. Forced to his own devices he’s reached out to random adventurers to retrieve her.
The players then make their way into the woods to find the house. Now. Here is where I screwed up cause I want my players to have fun so I end up making things too simple or easy. I feel like I should have put a couple random encounters along the way to help even the score since I only put the stepmother and sisters as enemies in the house. This made the players a tad overpowered when the got to the house. Luckily my players are more into the role play than I thought they would be, so they managed to move around and avoid fighting the stepsisters.
Once they made it to the actual ritual place I put more into the back story for myself then needed and the players weren’t that interested. Unfortunately I didn’t have the fey godmother too fleshed out at the time so when she showed up at the end to retrieve the diadem the players wanted to fight her instead of co-operate. To correct that I should of described the house more as they looked though it so that if they remembered the portraits in the house they might have remembered the similarities.
Luckily I was able to just let Cinderella give up the diadem so that they avoided conflict with someone I hadn’t fleshed out at all. I think what I’ll do is have her step in as a Deus ex Machina if I need to bail them out but I think what I’d really like to do is have her send them messages to help out. Not sure if’d id like her to be too much of a resource since the players didn’t trust her at all.
Either way I’m trying to figure out what the next game session will be. I’m trying to structure things to be more episodic so that I don’t need to work as hard on creating a big narrative and the players don’t have to worry about being fully invested in the world. I need to sit down with each of them and flesh out what the characters long term goals will be.
The other sessions I have planned are what I’d think of as fairly high level but that all depends on what the actual structure will be. I sort of subscribe to the thought that sessions don’t have to be fair. The players can figure out how to solve the problem themselves. There are things I can tweak behind the screen but I’m running my game with 3 other DM’s as players so they know when I fudge thing’s for their benefit.
I think I’ll use werewolves for the next session. More details on that in another post.
Roll of the Dice 