D&D: What Now?

[ralphmelton]

[This post is open to my players, so consider that in your responses.]

So, the events of the last session (that I described in my last entry) lead to an obvious question: what now?

Some general constraints I'm working within:
- I'm not going to hose the players whom I asked to go along with the vampire attack. (The characters might feel scared and miserable, but those players were helpful to me, and so I want to return the favor and keep them happy with the game.)
- I'm not totally opposed to the party remaining split for a while, but it's more convenient to have them together. (On the other hand, having Prolix absent makes it easier to do roleplay-heavy sessions.)
- I want Garrett to continue to be a scary badass.
- I want to be careful about PC death.

That's still a lot of latitude, though. And it gives me some opportunities to shape the campaign in ways to suit me. For example, I don't really like the 'make a pile of magic items for two weeks, then use them all in one battle' style of this fight; if I want to, I can declare that whenever they stay in one place long enough to let Melisande's scrying get a good sense of their location, they're inviting a vampire attack. But that might be so harsh as to make the game non-fun, so I want to take care.

Some possibilities:
- This campaign could turn from a game of beating up toughs into a game of cat-and-mouse with Garrett. (Especially since the healing ritual has done good things for other monster-spawning pools.)
- Or, perhaps, an Indiana-Jones-style race against the vampiric forces for various plot cookies. (Hmm... that gives me some ideas.)
- The free PCs might stage a daring rescue of their friends. This would probably require them finding some vulnerability or loophole that they could only exploit once, but which would let them make the rescue without engaging Garrett.

I must ponder and discuss this further. This event has got to change the campaign a bit; it's a golden opportunity, either to make things more exciting or to royally screw things up.

Comments

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I've actually considered the question of vampiric scrying already. It's not completely trivial for a vampire who's repulsed by mirrors to use a mirror to scry, certainly.

What do you want to do to research the question? :-)

[cellio]

It was a player question, not a character question, asked to make sure the GM had considered the point. The methods available to the character to find out are dangerous, so no answer is currently required. :-)