Christmas Spirit(s)
The people have spoken, and our latest Patreon Poll has come to a close. This holiday season, The Evil Party are tackling no less a foe than The Christmas Spirit. (Better luck next time, Krampus!)
Of course, our lovable band of nogoodniks actually fought the Christmas Spirit(s) off-screen. Now they’re filling their shoes, trying to turn a familiar tale to their own ends. It’s an inherently goofy shtick, but if you’ve never tried it then I suggest you give it a shot. That’s because making your party head into well-worn storylines to do battle with familiar foes is generally hilarious.
Take my recent foray into the land of one-shots. It was an evil game at a local gaming club, and we were all half-fiendish siblings desperate to get into our demonic daddy’s good graces. With a little scrying and some helpful intel from an informant, we discovered the perfect target. Apparently there was a demiplane of happiness floating out in the multiverse. The plan was to plane shift our way inside, burn the place down, and offer its smoking wreck to our progenitor as a gift.
It wasn’t literally the Kingdom of Elfwood from “Disenchantment,” but it was pretty clear where the GM had got the idea. Cartoon villainy ensued, and a good time was had by all. (Except possibly for the elves. We locked the candy factory’s doors before we set the place on fire.)
It doesn’t have to be so heavy-handed as that. In one of my Lunar Exalted games, for example, a player decided she wanted to acquire a cat form. She started hunting this fat orange cat only to discover that he was more than a mere stray. It was actually El Gato Grande, the local god of house cats. After the big bear lunar spat him out the party learned that other cats became temporarily sentient and gained the power of speech in El Gato Grande’s presence. He didn’t really understand his own powers though, and so he thought that humans were cruel slave owners.
He was a blatant Puss in Boots ripoff. My Antonio Banderas impression got a workout.
Anyway, El Gato Grande needed the party to help him win the love of a certain Persian. Fur as white as the driven snow, etc. You see, while the small fluffy god was usually a great lover, he grew tongue-tied in the presence of his lady love.
And that’s the story of how my players had to do the balcony scene from Cyrano to a fucking cat.
So how about it, guys? Have any of you recreated the plots of famous stories in your own games? Did you go in for a last stand in the vein of Seven Samurai? Maybe you co-opted The Lion King for a little regicidal treachery? What about getting cursed with a permanent haste effect, so that you die if you slow down? Let’s hear all about your best borrowed storylines down in the comments!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
Ah, the greatest power in a villain’s toolbox:
An offscreen battle. Truly, the Anti-party is a force to be reckoned with now that they have discovered this ability.
“Ha ha! We have murdered all of your favorite NPCs!”
“What? Freaking when!?”
“Between sessions! Sinister laugh!”
I recently decided to borrow two different storylines from different eras then mash them together to create some… thing for a one-shot, for a friend’s birthday. I took the old princess in a tower, guarded by a dragon, then took the rebellious Princess Tiabeanie. What came out was that a royal family secretly locking up the Princess in a tower, as they needed to find a way to calm her rebellious spirits and, well, the royal family just isn’t that bright.
And so I created the adventure, one that would start out appearing to be a cliché of a princess in a dragon-guarded tower, but would then evolve into a mystery as the players discovered clues as to what is going on, before climaxing with the grand reveal! With some comedy thrown in, of course.
Of course, players being players, this didn’t happen. They instead went with the classic comedy of an idiotic, bumbling rescue attempt, managing to mess up at almost every stage possible.
Was the dragon secretly the love interest? I bet the dragon was secretly the love interest.
For me it’s gotten to the point that subverting the “princess in the tower” has become the cliche. I’ve seen it played straight so rarely I’m genuinely shocked when it actually happens.
“Oh gee, the princess has been kidnapped and locked in the tower? I wonder if she actually ran away to be with her dragon lover (mommy, where do sorcerers come from?) Did she arrange her “kidnapping” to weaken trust in her parents so she can usurp the throne? Or is the party almost going to get tpk’ed then get rescued by the princess who saved herself because she is a strong independent woman who doesn’t need to be rescued?”
Playing with the tropes is fun and all, but when no one expects it to be played straight to me it loses a lot of its appeal.
My favorite version of this is the one from the bonus dungeon of the third-party module Death Frost Doom where the twist is that the princess is actually some random woman they turned into a wight just to set this trap and also fuck you there’s no treasure.
And by “favorite,” I mean I absolutely hate it.
Fortunately, no-one else had yet run a one-shot in which they had yet subverted the “princess in a tower”, so I knew that if I acted fast, I could get that one-shot in before it became a cliché.
And I was able to surprise the players when they discovered the Princess’s guardian to be a slightly fierce, mildly frightening, large-but-not-to-big… beige dragon! With claws able to rip through very thin steel, teeth fairly sharp but still kind of dull, and scales that are beautiful but nothing to write home about.
And the players were able to subvert my expectations by splitting up, alerting every guard at once, even the ones not on duty, and running around setting everyone and everything on fire until, finally, they managed to accidentally kill the Princess. None of this was on purpose; they just made some very, very poor decisions.
Invert. Dragon in a tower guarded by a princess.
Another Subverted, a dragon princess in a tower, obviously guarded by her knights whom are dragons.
Funnily enough I ran a oneshot based on A Christmas Carol a few days ago set in Port Nyanzaru (From Tomb of Annihilation). My party also fought the ghosts, but this was at the request of the Scrooge stand in – Ifan Talro’a. Mostly it was an opportunity to test wacky homebrew mechanics. My Ghost of Christmas Past turned everyone around it into children, The Ghost of Christmas Present was paired with two children, Want and Ignorance, who kept people close and away from them respectively. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come warped time and gave everyone haste and stun on alternating rounds. It went pretty well – my players tried to parlay with the Ghost of Christmas Present, but were unable to convince Ifan not to order his guards to attack it. At the end of the night Ifan payed all the surviving members a pittance, and resumed his greedy ways, so I’m not sure it counts as a true victory
Sounds like a fun night of goofy mechanics.
Bummer about your “let’s take the middle road” PCs though. You either go good and help the ghosts, or you go evil and kill Ifan at the end, stealing his treasure and thus teaching him a very important (and very final) lesson about greed. If you try and play it straight you only wind up with lumps of racing-dino dung in your own stocking.
Hrm. Im not familiar with any storylines I ripped off by doing this, but a couple years ago as a Christmas one shot, I had the party venture into the frozen north to liberate a bunch of enslaved elves from a cruel ogre taskmaster who was forcing them to make things for him. He rode a sleigh pulled by reindeer and wore a giant red coat.
In typical PC fashion, they ended up burning down the factory with the ogre inside, and they lost (!) a fight with the reindeer while trying to infiltrate the place. I didn’t even have stat blocks for the reindeer when I started the session.
I have not seen that Christmas special either. I’d watch the crap out of it though.
So in a one shot o ran for some eager noobies I did the standard “you all start in a tavern” opening. Before I could even introduce the plot hook the party barb challenged the sorcerer to a drinking contest. Being a fun-shot I didn’t really mind shenanigans but soon everyone got to drinking, and they all failed two consecutive con checks against alcohol poisoning. They were all KO’d and they haven’t even talked to anyone but the barmaid. And so I changed notes and shifted the scene.
After some time and a massive hangover with their equipment gone and their hands tied behind their backs. As they began to stir a familiar voice called out to them.
“Hey, you finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.”
Epic!
Had to Google to be sure of the source. My only experience with Elder Scrolls was with Oblivion. By the time I realized that “sleep to regain health” was a mechanic I was already thoroughly frustrated and ready to quit.
Anywho, I thought that you were going to spring “The Hangover” plot on them and make them try to piece together their own drunken shenanigans.
Oh I did. The Skyrim opener was a wake up call, followed by the dragon attack, and now they had to figure out how they got here and why there’s a 5000 GP bounty on each of their heads (I didn’t make them have to choose between Imperial or Stormcloak since I freed their hands shortly after the dragon attacks). What followed however was a four hour game of more drunken shenanigans as they fought monks from the church of love and mercy (stuns errday), a cyclop goat herder, and a coven of witches, one who the sorcerer has inadvertently joined and just so happened to bring sacrifices for her inauguration.
It eventually culminated into this party of level 1 nooblets challenging the god of gluttony and excess in a drinking contest, incidentally with the power of Christmas in their side as they had managed to convince various holiday entities to support them. They only got Christmas and Valinetine’s day.
The only time I’ve really ever stolen anything from cinema/tv… well… my group had been complaining that there weren’t enough “rails”. They didn’t mind the freedom to make their own agenda, but they wanted more structure in their campaign. This was also the first and last* time I ever used a “bait and switch” plot hook.
So for the next campaign they were Texas Marshals, and we started with them in hot pursuit of some bandits that had just robbed a bank. They followed their quarry onto a train just as it was departing. They’d ignored my descriptions of the train and a few passengers as looking a bit “odd” (okay one Player had paid attention, but he let it go as they were in pursuit).
So they’re underway and they corner the short bandits in the caboose. Lead and raybeams fly (!!!) and the Marshals are triumphant. The Players are getting jazzed, is this really a Steampunk or Weird West game? I’d billed it as “straight historical”. But the one Player just looks at me and says “So, Galaxy Express 999?”
I said “No. Not quite…”
So the PCs then set to tying up and bandaging the little grey bandits, and made their way back to the passenger cars… that’s when the weird conductor started asking them questions in a language they didn’t understand. Time and investigation and questioning some passengers and they discovered this was a galactic train. It flew (as did the GE999) from planet to planet, phasing in and out on tracks, there was no “flying through the stars”. This had been a once in a great long time side junket to pick-up the Greys, who has arranged it in advance.
The PCs were relatively safe on the train, but it didn’t serve food, passengers needed to bring their own… and the troubles for the PCs began. The train was waylaid (by giant cyborg ‘gorillas’) at the next station and the Greys all escaped. And they were the only ones who knew how to set-up a side junket to Earth (okay, the conductor did, but the PCs couldn’t communicate with it).
So that was session one of my Campaign On The Rails… 😀
It was a cross between GE999 and Stargate Universe. The train would pull into stations and remain for a set period of time, the PCs could leave and return to the train† but they had no supplies. Eventually the campaign wound down; one PC had stayed on the planet of Green Women (and was replaced by a robot Galactic Marshal on the next stop), one joined the Galactic Marshals, and the other two remained on the train searching for a way to return to Earth…
Mostly the “last” because I eventually came to hate bait and switch, not because that one Player kept whinging about it. Okay, a little because of Whiny McWhiner.
† The conductor always asked them some questions, but they’d just shrug or answer in some weird non-sequitur as they never did figure out what he was asking, and no one ever tried to throw them off or suggested they were in any trouble. Eventually the Players decided that because they were Lawmen they were clearly getting the “Lawman discount” on their travel fare.
Goddamn I need to watch more anime. I just caught up on My Hero Academia and now I find myself in need of additional over the top fight scenes.
Love the planet-hopping conceit you used. I’ve always wanted to do a Dr. Who / Sliders kind of setup where the setting changes regularly and drastically. Never quite had time to put together my “Quantum Knights” campaign though, more’s the pity.
So I can’t necessarily say I took an entire story so much as a few chapters. In the first Discworld novel The Colour of Magic, the Gods are literally playing a board game using the protagonist and a legendary hero as pawns, and said game is actually happening in the world. I’ve ripped that for my campaign, where my players are supposed to be “chosen heroes” when really they’re just game pieces for the Gods.
I fully expect when they find out for there to be screams of rage because they do not like being screwed with.
Old school Clash of the Titans too:
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1465221319i/19327211.SX540.jpg
Those gods just love messing the rest of us about.
As far as I’m aware I haven’t done any lifted stories, but my GM is a bit of a weeb, so she might’ve done some animu shit I’m not familiar with.
The only proper way to have a holiday special this time of year would be to have your characters get a meal from your setting’s Disneyland-Not!China, and catch a play. That play is your chance as a GM to go Ember Island Players on all of your PC’s escapades.
I wonder how you could make watching a play interactive…? It’s an interesting conceit, that’s for damn sure.
You give them stage directions and/or have them roleplay each other’s characters. They still play out the action scenes.
Much more in the spirit of Chinese Food and Movie Day than anything involving presents or fat men who enslave Elves. (Granted the Christmas elf is closer to Gnomes but still)
I’m a bit confused about your cat story. If you hadn’t mentioned Puss in Boots, I would have continued assuming it was about Garfield. White cat lady love and all. Mayhaps you just missed the reference because your GM was doing multiple references at once?
I was the ST. The reference was to Cyrano.
I’m not too proud to take a plot or a character from other media. My most recent example was in a Shadowrun game where the team ran afoul of an Ancients go-ganger who thought he was Ghost’s gift to women, and constantly hit on the team’s elven B&E specialist with lines like “You and me, we’re angels among garbage people”, while also trying to shake the team down for protection money. As soon as I told the players his name was Kevin, they all knew he was based on Kevin from Steven Universe and got precisely the right mental image of him. I found it very satisfying to use him as a recurring antagonist, and they found it very satisfying every time they got to humiliate him.
I hope they schooled him in a street race.
They did… by proxy! They went talislegging (illegal harvesting of magical materials) in the mountains after a storm, and were at risk of being hustled off their quarry by a Renraku harvesting team (that had actual licences to do that stuff). So the team decker bricked the Renraku vehicle, and left a digital trail to make it look like Kevin did it. Ignoring the obvious objection of “Kevin is too stupid to hack a vending machine”, it worked flawlessly.
The next day, there was an annual motorcycle race organised by the local friendly gang (the Kshatriyas), and of course Kevin showed up in his Ancients colours. The Renraku team also showed up, with their rigger on a very expensive bike that had everyone grumbling about “pay to win”. But she wasn’t there to win, oh no. The PCs harassed Kevin through the race, with bike tricks and Matrix shenanigans, and then the Renraku decker showed why she was really there when she fired a magnetic grapple from her bike into Kevin’s, shorted out his electronics, dragged him behind her for several hundred metres and slammed him into a brick wall, before cruising to a leisurely fourth in the race.
In one campaign I stole a famous plot out of desperation. The players were aligned with a dragonborn village that was being “persuaded” to subsume itself into a growing barbarian empire. The barbarians celebrated this with a ceremonial hunt to commemorate the occassion, and the dragonborn chieftan tasked the PCs to arrange the barbarian king’s death during this hunt in a way that wouldn’t lead blame back to the village. Being PCs, the had the genius idea to try to kill one of the chieftans in plain sight if the other gathered chieftans and the king and try to solo all of them. They failed. Badly.
This was the 3rd session of the campaign and I really didn’t want to end it in a tpk like that, so I decided to rip off “Naked Prey;” the barbarians decided that the hunt must still happen, but the players would be the hunt. So the players were stripped of all their gear, which was given to their hunters, and sent into the forest, and a new hunter would be sent every minute to track them down. I was hoping, like the movie, the players would feel the desperation and rely in their cunning, running and using the terrain while making ambushes as needed, all while trying to get somewhere safe. It didn’t quite go that way. The players decided to go into the forest a ways, find a hiding spot, and ambush the first hunter. To their credit they managed that fairly well in about 3 rounds, even without equipment to their name. Then they decided to stay in the same spot, without hiding the body, for the next minute to ambush the next hunter. Their plans didn’t get any smarter from there, and eventually they had to be bailed out by an NPC from one of the PC’s backstories who kickstarted the main plot.
To be fair to the PCs they were all new to TTRPGs (first campaign for all of them) and it did lead to a very memorable fight against a bear-totem barbarian using an amulet of Enlarge Person one of the PCs had but forgot about for their fight. I really hope that it was a learning experience for them. I certainly was given a reminder never to underestimate the genius or stupidity that PCs are capable of.
Ah, the old “let’s commit murder in front of the king” gambit. It never seems to work for some reason.
Two years ago I played a Christmas Special for my campaign. The town of Brightport was attacked by a malevolent spirit, but was trapped in a cauldron by a local witch before it could do any harm. Unfortunately, the seal was weakening, and soon the spirit would be set free. The only clue to stopping it was a name – Ebenezer Tammis, an ancestor of one of the PCs.
On that night, the ghost was visited by three mortals, who attempted to show it the error of its ways and convince it to give up its attack on the town. They succeeded (barely) and the ghost was reincarnated into an egg. We play online, so sadly I can only imagine the looks on my players’ faces as they figured out where the story was going…
Nice! Did they manage to change the ghost’s grumpy disposition? What strategies did they use?
Not a storyline and I haven’t got to use it yet, but I statted up this thing based on Lord of the Rings
Ring of the Invisible Crackhead (3.5e)
This cursed item functions as a Ring of Invisibility, except the ring applies the effect of a Greater Invisibility spell rather than a standard Invisibility spell, and thus the effect is not ended if the user makes an attack.
However, the ring also carries a curse compelling the wearer to wear it constantly. Every time the ring is worn the user must make a DC 14 will save or become addicted to wearing the ring as if it were a drug with an addiction rating of “High” (see Book of Vile Darkness page 41 and/or Lords Of Darkness)
Aura Moderate Illusion; CL 7; Prerequisites Forge Ring, [i]Greater Invisibility[/b]; Price 80000
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?553969-1001-Homebrew-Magic-Items/page5
What race is Antipaladin supposed to be? I want to know why his hair’s on fire.
Fire genasi. We like to draw on a lot of different systems. 🙂
Ok.
Wasn’t this an episode of THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, where the Ghostbusters inadvertently busted the three Christmas Ghosts and had to cover for them until the three could be found and released?
Damn. It’s been a lot of years. I need to go back and do some rewatching for nostalgia’s sake.
Pretty dure the Lion King’s regicide plot draws heavily from Hamlet. Practically unavoidable in fiction these days; it’s retellings all the way down.
A few years back I ripped off The Maltese Falcon for a Champions game. Neither of my players twigged despite a beautiful femme fatale sending them on a hunt for something called The Eagle of Rhodes.
A couple of times (once for Shadowrun, once for an all-rogues Pathfinder game) I’ve stolen the plot of The Warriors and had the PCs hunted across the slums of the city by rival gangs.