Les Ombres d'Esteren - Forum officiel

There is a game I've always wanted to run for L5R where the adventure starts with dripping blood falling into the room of one of the PCs. The scenario then becomes a murder investigation plot where all the PCs are suspects and they have to try and unravel what happened the night before.

This sort of scenario works for Esteren as well, where the normalcy of village life is juxtaposed against the mystery of the murder & the true culprit can be a Feondas (instead of an oni).

The danger of these sorts of scenarios in a con situation is the heavy RP that is tied to doing it. This can either shine or die really fast. (I once ran a module in 3E DnD with 10 lines of text for the DM everything else was on the character sheets, with groups who got into the RP 4 hours wasn't enough, with the group that didn't the game ended well under 4 hours...)

Another plot I've used was based on an OA monster that is the ghost of a mother who does in childbirth and her similarly ghostly child. As is typical of such myths in Asia the term ghost is applied loosely. The plot was that the village magistrate was killed and the PCs are sent to investigate, arriving they are attacked by spirits drawn to places of great misfortune and soon after arriving they learn that the village has been going through increasingly hard times. A monster has been attacking and killing the village's children and other monsters have begun to plague the village. When the party arrives there is 1 pregnant woman in the village and she is due to give birth soon. As they investigate the village monk is revealed as a ghost as well (he was drowned by the real villain) and though his death is suspicious there is no other real evidence. Then a new group of monsters attack as the mother goes into labor. This is the ghost, who is also the midwife for the village, creating a distraction so she can feast on the newborn. She was essentially impossible to kill for the 1st level party and always escapes to be a recurring villain and success in the adventure is living and rescuing the baby from her. (Most groups do, it's DnD).

Something like that would play out well in Esteren as well, allowing you to get a few fights in for the "action junky" players but still having plenty of scope for RP and allowing plenty of opportunity to convey basic setting information. Some of the monsters just need to become Feondas, and the midwife need not be such a creature but could just be mad and maybe part of the tweak is uncovering why she goes over the edge...

Yes I do need to sit down and work up some canvases or scenarios

ObsidianCrane a écrit :Yes I do need to sit down and work up some canvases or scenarios

Definitely! As things are, there are to few English scenarios, so all additions are welcome... particularly if they come from such promising ideas as yours! If you take your ideas to the next level and make them into fully fledged scenarios, make sure to post them here; the community will certainly be glad to read them and share their opinion with you.

Love the idea that the players are sleeping and wake up covered with blood. Any adventure that doesn't start with the group meeting a guy in h pub or the council is good!

As for the midwife one the whole idea makes me ill, probs due to the babies sleeping upstairs! Doesn't mean it isn't really creative and be great to others.

Hullo, Clovis,

Clovis a écrit :

JohnK a écrit : My real question about that scenario is whether it will actually run close to 4 hours or not. Any thoughts on this?

I'd say yes, obviously. It's just up to you to be concise enough in the way you run the scenario, to quicken the pace when needed, and to give your players a nudge in the right direction should they get stuck at some point.

That's what I figured you might say, so that's all good. As someone who's been running games at conventions for close to 30+ years, I'm pretty good at improvising this sort of thing, judging when things need to be speeded up or slowed down, and so forth. Glad to hear that I won't have too many problems running "Poison" at conventions.

Any recommendations for a second scenario for convention play? Or perhaps we should all sit down and write one!

Clovis a écrit : To that effect, what I do is that I make the NPCs involved more or less useful and cooperative. For example, the village's Ansailéir can help the PCs by providing them with resources and advice, but he can also slow them down by keeping silent (and even giving the other villagers the order to keep quiet as well) because he doesn't like them sneaking around.

This is excellent advice for the scenario in question, and I will take that to use when I run "Poison" at the convention. One of the things I've noticed about all three of the Book 0 - Prologue scenarios is that they all have interesting and either antagonistic or useful Non-Player Characters for the characters to encounter. This is excellent, especially when it comes to convention and demo scenarios and games.

Hullo, Obsidian Crane,

I love both ideas that you've got here for scenarios, and am looking forward to seeing them done up as Canvases!

Hullo, Tamsyn,

Haven't had a proper chance to say "Hi" yet, so: Welcome to the English forums for the game! Glad to have you aboard!

tamsyn a écrit :Love the idea that the players are sleeping and wake up covered with blood. Any adventure that doesn't start with the group meeting a guy in h pub or the council is good!

This is certainly true. I really dislike plots that start off with the player characters meeting a person who hires them in a pub or inn. That said, I think that Shadows of Esteren discourages that sort of thing in this game world, though perhaps it would be interesting to create a scenario using this stereotype and seeing what interesting direction we could take it in?

Hello!

Soon you will be wanting rid of me

Obviously in the pub scenario someone will be making bar snacks out of feondas clippings and they will come to wreak their terrible revenge one quiet evening...

JohnK a écrit :perhaps it would be interesting to create a scenario using this stereotype and seeing what interesting direction we could take it in?

tamsyn a écrit :Obviously in the pub scenario someone will be making bar snacks out of feondas clippings and they will come to wreak their terrible revenge one quiet evening...

The plot thickens (like Feond soup?)!

JohnK a écrit :Any recommendations for a second scenario for convention play?

Red Fall is good too. Maybe not as much a classic as Poison, but the in medias res beginning makes for a good introduction... and deep down, it can remain the same type of straightforward scenario: find the bad guy and beat him into a bloody pulp. Of course, the implications of the plot are much more complex than that, but you can just go with this and it will certainly do very well for a convention.

Or perhaps we should all sit down and write one!

That would be a pleasure! Unfortunately, I can't say I have the time to be fully involved in such a project (be reasonable Clovis!), but I'm always eager to provide my help to build a good scenario.

tamsyn a écrit :Love the idea that the players are sleeping and wake up covered with blood. Any adventure that doesn't start with the group meeting a guy in h pub or the council is good!

Yeah, that was very much part of the point. Rokugan doesn't give itself much to the "meet in the pub" idea either so better adventure starters are needed.

tamsyn a écrit :As for the midwife one the whole idea makes me ill, probs due to the babies sleeping upstairs! Doesn't mean it isn't really creative and be great to others.

Excellent *rubs hands together*, of course that is what a good horror story should do. I love the sort of skin crawl horror of Esteren, its how I always ran VtM as well. (Note I am a dad with 2 kids under 10 so I well understand the fear of something happening to your kids.)

It probably will not be until mid December that I get to sit down and look at writing a Canvas, as it is I still have so much of Book 1 to digest.

Hullo, Tamsyn,

tamsyn a écrit : Soon you will be wanting rid of me

Oh, I don't think so, m'dear. You've been posting enough interesting stuff here on the forums that I think we can all put up with you for a long time.

tamsyn a écrit : Obviously in the pub scenario someone will be making bar snacks out of feondas clippings and they will come to wreak their terrible revenge one quiet evening...

Oh, dear, now you've got me thinking about Esteren bar snacks and foods. Not just in Taol-Kaer, but also in Gwidre and Reizh. Feond soup (different each week, depending on the Feond available), some sort of stew, regional ales and brews, that sort of thing!