Telenovela
If you’re the victim of scrying, there’s a feeling of powerlessness that comes with the experience. When a BBEG points their magic mirror your way, they suddenly know where you are, what your plans are, and (most likely) how to defeat you. That’s not a good feeling. It engenders paranoia, simmering resentment, and a deep-seated desire for revenge. And while you may want your players to hate the villains, you don’t want them to hate you. What follows is the story of my own misuse of villainous scrying. It’s a wonder my players still talk to me.
So no shit there they were. The kingdom was being invaded by a bunch of elves from fantasy-Spain, and the pointy-eared armada had established a beachhead off the coast of totally-not-France. My players were musketeers.
The war was going poorly for not-France, and His August Majesty Fribbien II was in a bit of a pickle. Due to setting fluff, there was exactly one day each year when the Questionably Villainous Archbishop Delacroix could perform a resurrection. As you might imagine, there was much talk at court about the best choice. Who could save the nation during its hour of need? Some called for the restoration of a fallen general. Others insisted on one of history’s famous diplomats.
The players, however, knew there was a better choice. A certain inventor of their acquaintance had been murdered the year before. He was on the verge of a breakthrough in military technology when his workshop had been bombed. Only his inventions could give not-France a chance at victory. It just so happened that he’d been buried at his ancestral home: the same little town where the invading elf-Spaniards had set up shop. Smash cut to the sky ships speeding toward the front.
It was a days-long journey, which gave the party plenty of time to make their Perception checks and spot the magical sensor. Someone was scrying on them! Of course, since I’d specifically requested that they pick martial characters to fit the musketeers theme, they had no way of knowing who. It was no trouble to swat the sensor with a dispelling attack, but that was an impermanent solution. The sensor returned again and again, targeting low-Perception members of the party and continuing to gather intel over the next few days. The party could only press on with their plans, hoping that the sensor hadn’t learned too much of their mission. There were mutterings about unfair magery, but I figured they were mostly in-character. I figured wrong.
The adventure went splendidly for the most part. My swashbuckling heroes had great fun infiltrating enemy lines. They roused the countryside. Lead an uprising. Used the battle as cover to make their way to the inventor’s grave. And if you’ve guessed who was waiting there for them, you were paying attention to the “questionably villainous” party of Archbishop Delacroix‘s job title. The archbishop wasn’t in attendance himself, but his personal guard (read: the anti-party) had already exhumed the body. They planned to pitch the whole “rez-the-inventor” plan to His Majesty in Delacroix’s name, and so steal all the glory for the church. When the outraged musketeers arrived on the scene, the bishop’s guard were busily preparing a word of recall scroll.
It was a tense battle as our valiant heroes tried to 1) steal back the body while 2) disrupting the scroll without 3) dying. It sounds like a tense and exciting encounter on paper. There were blown saves, unconscious PCs, and narrow victories all around. However, once the body had been saved and the villains had made their getaway, the post-session review was less than complimentary.
“What did you expect us to do about the scrying?”
“Was there even a way to win?”
“Why do all of your villains have teleportation powers?”
It wasn’t just sour grapes. As I look back at that session, I know for a fact that I would have felt the same way. The villains had arrived on the scene with some very-suspicious timing, and “they were scrying on you” was a flimsy excuse for a contrived plot.
My point in relaying this highly-abridged Romance of Not-France is to offer a warning. If you do decide to make power-plays with magic — scrying on the party, teleporting your villains, or otherwise using abilities that players can’t reasonably counter — learn from my mistake. Players can scent a whiff of unfair GM-fiat a mile away. Dressing it up as “some of the casters in this setting are more powerful than you” is fooling exactly no one. My players felt railroaded, and they weren’t wrong to feel that way.
That of course brings us to our question of the day! Have you ever used scrying to your advantage? Conversely, have you ever been the victim of a scry-happy villain? How did you work around it? Tell us the tale of your spy vs. spy adventures down in the comments!
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I intended to use the scrying/spying mechanics as a plot hook mostly.
But after this comic I might just add scrying sensors in all the settings „Dance Halls“ purely for the entertainment of the mage.
Heh. I wonder if an entertainment industry based on “scrying parlors” would be a thing.
„for a small weekly fee we‘ll suppress our Protection from Scrying just for you“
I hope Paladin doesn’t have an Oath of Chastity. And that Necromancer doesn’t get her heart broken again.
Paladin would never… wait… Yes he would! That bastard!
If he does it again, I hope Necromancer demolishes him. She can make him her next pet.
Pass the Häagen-Dazs and the Kleenex!
I think that the problem was less the scrying, and more the villains having magic while the players didn’t. Scrying has happened in my games, though I think it went well. Last campaign, the players used scrying against a major villain, who after figuring out what was happening used this to send a message to the players, by burning a city to the ground then surrounding himself with corpses, and letting the players come to him. In the current campaign, scrying was used to less dramatic effect, with the manipulative villains just using its to check in on how their pawns were doing.
You’re right of course: it’s less about the magic than the way you use it. I forced a scenario down my players’ throats, and that’s no way to make ’em feel like the prime movers of the world.
Also had a bit of a Dick Dastardly feel to it as well, when I read it
Like, so, they were scrying on them the whole time, and figured out where they were going from it (which is already potentially hard if they know they’re being scried on, trying to figure out where someone is going from a 30ft or so space around them is probly gonna be damn hard)
And yet despite them being the ones who were going there, and the bad guys were on catchup.. they got there first and nearly escaped. While dramatic, that’s the Dick Dastardly bit really, where they could have easily just won the race but inexplicably used their magic powers to arrive at the finish line way in advance, then just don’t win for what feels like obvious fiat
If it was a script I would have given it a rewrite. Alas, the heat of the moment was not kind to me that day.
It’s nice to see Paladin and Necromancer making up. (And, potentially, making out). Clearly, Necromancer’s dressing up on a previous strip worked out well.
Continuity or coincidence? You be the judge!
Contincidence? =P
Sometimes, I like to play high-intelligence characters, who come up with overly complicated plans; and of course, being so smart they know that half the population of the world is spying on them, so they should get scrying protection, but then the world would know they’re trying to hide something, so they have to set up decoys, and I end up going way to far trying to hide my ingenious plans from all of the people my characters assume to be constantly, always scrying upon them. Fortunately for my mental health, I only play these kinds of characters during one-shots, but it can be fun on occasion to go insane and try to roleplay Asmodeus in a battle of wits against a paranoid, intelligent lunatic.
That sounds like a fun character. It also sounds exhausting.
Always leaves a bitter taste whenever a GM uses magic and abilities the players themselves have no feasible way of utilizing or countering. Especially when for ever reasonable in-game counter, a GM night brew up a totally unique thing that only that villain can do, and everyone HAS to accept that or hit the road. In the case of scrying, it seems like amulets of nondetection suddenly vanish from the loot ya le or somehow go up x300 in prices, not to mention they use up a valuable attunement slot.
The worse part of scrying baddies is that they do exactly what you don’t want players to do: meta gaming, the whole “your character doesn’t know that” saying doesn’t work nearly as well on a diviner’s character who could very well know whatever they want to, and just as well the enemy could straight up be listening to the players themselves whenever anything is spoken. This leads to Terri le instances of the party intentionally planning against the GM themselves, leaving them in the dark to spring an unspoken plan that forces both sides to suddenly think in their feet and make split second decisions that will subvert the rules solely to prevent divine sourced meta gaming from being used.
It didn’t help that the bishop was a sort-of-ally, so they couldn’t even get proper revenge on him.
There were misplays all the way around in that campaign. Lessons learned!
I have used scrying exactly once, and that couple of sessions is still talked about in a mixture of awe, delight, and good-natured sarcastic bitterness by my players nearly 10 years later.
To set the background (Spoiler alert for the Ravenloft adventure Bleak House) the party were shipwrecked on an island mental asylum during a search for a missing scholar. The asylum was run by a weird psionic sub-vampire breed that fed on cerebral fluid (which helped send the patients further mad than they began), and of course, said scholar was an inmate. The party started off as guests while awaiting the next visit of the supply ship, but as the vampires gaslit the characters over a course of days, a number of their own psychosis began to manifest, and their visit became less and less ‘of their own volition’.
As part of the gaslight operation, the Vampires had the party under almost complete survellance. Firstly, all patients, visitor, and doctors were always dressed in the same robes and masks (obstensibly to avoid ‘stressing’ patients), so they couldn’t be sure who was patient of doctor (which allowed a couple of comedy asides when party mistook patients for doctors or other officials and spent near half an hour talking to a nutter they thought was a voice of authority), then naturally the Vampires could shapechange into animal forms (these Vampires had a Seagull form instead of Bat), and finally there was psionic scrying.
The idea was exactly why under normal circumstances it could be problematic – the Vampires used it entirely in order to subtly foil plots, creating a sense of paranoia about how they could possibly know what was going to happen, and make changes to the characters environment to make them doubt their sanity.
My personal favourite moment was created by the Fighter. As a character quirk he had an expensive grooming kit. Once the parties stay became involuntary, their weapons were taken away, and they were left with only their harmless possessions. We had been quite liberal about what might be kept in the grooming kit; obviously his straightrazor vanished, but everything else was fine. Which led to a comedy aside where the player kept basing plans around items in the kit. One of note was using the scissors to cut a flap in the cell padding to write their plans on the wall with another characters chalk (since talked about plans were foiled). Each time a plan involved an item from the kit, the following morning the item was gone. Then the first day a plan didn’t involve the kit, the Vampires just nicked a random item from the following night just to screw with him.
My players loved it, entirely because the adventure was entirely based around paranoia, and because of that, it wasn’t judged an unfair tool (once I explained what had been happening after the adventure concluded). But outside of the very thin window of a paranoia-based adventure, it is a much more dubious tool to use.
That’s smart writing. Using the nature of the magic to induce a specific thematic effect (your insane asylum paranoia) rather than forcing an encounter (my ‘ha-ha we beat you to the tomb!’) is a good way to go.
Alternatively, I think something like scrying comes online when the players are high enough level to have defenses in place.
I haven’t used scrying, but I have used arcane eye a few times, to interesting effect. The most memorable one still being where in doing so I led the party past a lot of traps and encounters to our ultimate goal, not realizing that we were supposed to have to do other stuff first before actually reaching there, meaning we were highly under leveled. The fight that followed was hilarious, in large part because the party was already highly dysfunctional being filled with evil members, 2 of which were partially possessed by opposing gods, 1, my own, being a psychopathic man child, and our barbarian, the most levelheaded member, being mind controlled by the enemy. Ultimately it ended with the holy relics of both gods, along with the 2 possessed party members using them, destroyed, my guy throwing a tantrum and leaving with dimension door, and the barbarian swimming up a waterfall to get out. This was my only ever intentionally evil campaign. Good times.
I love the image of salmon-barbarian abandoning the campaign like goddamn fish. lol
And this is why I work very hard to not forbid my players classes or abilities, because I will use them against them. But if they don’t have a counter for Scrying because the Wizard wanted an extra fireball that day, well that’s not my fault. And I’ve found that in those situations, if I preface it with an encounter that I kinda want them to be at a disadvantage at to set the tone and make them aware of it, they will adapt. It’s, in my experience, a good annoyance on the players.
The worst way I’ve seen this work though, was in Mage: The Awakening 1E. And you might be thinking, yes, Space Magic is horrible. No, this particular GM used Spirit to put a small, Rank 1 spirit watching a particular PC, whom we will call “Harold”. This spirit would report the Harold’s location to the group that was hunting him, and then said group would show up to try and kill him. The third time the entire scene had been trashed by his would be assassins, the players were rightly buggered. The GM kept asking every Scene “What spells do you have on yourself?” The third time they were attacked, they decide to flee into the Spirit world. So Harold casts the Spirit 4 spell “Open the Road” and steps into the Spirit world. Yes. He was specialized in the type of magic that was being used against him. He just for some weird reason never actually checked his location for unusual spirits. EVER. I was laughing with the GM, because I had in character beef with Harold and so my character didn’t hang out with him. But, that meant the GM had been passing me Index cards every time the Spirit showed up so that I was a neutral party.
You mean it’s too much of a temptation?
I work hard to run settings the way they are written and give a clear sign of what is possible in various situations. So if I find something cool, I want to be able to use it.
Hmmm, this script seems familiar…
Is bard in the background, adding dramatic and tense music to the scrying?
What are you going for here? “Gone With the Wind?”
Wrong e-mail address again; damn auto-complete! Please delete my other comment.
Looking at your example Colin, I think the problem is more that it feels railroad-y than that you used a spell that the party didn’t have access to. Putting a couple of options in where their choices mattered could have made all the difference, e.g.:
– having a low-level caster who can cast See Invisibility a few times somewhere in the journey, who the party can try to convince to aid them
– if they’re travelling by ship/wagon, the opportunity to line a room with lead and create a scry-proof war room
– keep track of what information the villain genuinely knows, so that they can be surprised by at least some parts of the plan
– instead of deciding the confrontation will take place as the players interrupt the final stages of the plan, make the timing dependent on the players actions. They might get there before the villain, or they might arrive too late.
You could do all that and still end up with exactly the same situation, but at lest when your players question you you can honestly say they had other options, and then they might feel slightly less peeved.
Yah. This is less of a “scrying is bad” comic and more of a “railroading is bad” comic. It just so happens that scrying can serve as a mental excuse for bad-wrong GMing.
“It’s not really contrived. The BBEG obviously knows everything the players do at all times because magic!”
Haven’t used scrying exactly, but there was that time that there was a house in which every room had a portrait of the villain (some fancy paintings, some stick figure drawings) so that she could use Enter Image to keep an eye on everything. The PCs figured out that something was up with the paintings, found they had a bit of magic on them and started stealing them, which would have negated the villain’s advantage… except now the party was carrying around all of the still-active security cameras.
The villain’s main goal was toying with the party for her own amusement, so that was fine. I just find it funny that they figured out that something was up and did exactly the wrong thing to counter it.
Reminds me of the insane asylum story further up the thread. “Messing with the PCs” seems like an interesting take on divination. I might have to lift that mess next time….
Yah. This is less of a “scrying is bad” comic and more of a “railroading is bad” comic. It just so happens that scrying can serve as a mental excuse for bad-wrong GMing.
“It’s not really contrived. The BBEG obviously knows everything the players do at all times because magic!”
Can sorta go both ways, oddly enough
I had a character who was pretty cautious, she had a fair bit of anti scrying stuff set up, could constantly detect scrying sensors.. had constant spells up that masked her or let her scry back on people and blah
.. pretty much nobody ever scried on us tho 🙁
I think it pays to know the kind of campaign you’re in. My players wanted courtly intrigue, and I thought that meant magical scrying. Turns out they didn’t want to watch courtly intrigue play out around them without participating in it.
To your question, yes to both. I’ve had it end up a point of literally getting a boon from a 20th level sorcerer ruling over an evil genus loci (sentient wizards tower.) that saved our fighters a ton of hp, and power in the final dungeon of the setting. Because of them watching our party actually taking care of the stolen books, transcribing them, and then setting them in safe spots while adventuring.
Because we were being people that took the knowledge for good, it helped us.
And at a point in the same game, it nearly actually cost the gm a player.
We were playing with hero points, which are very nice, but can be gamebreaking in some cases, but ‘save your butt’ deals for them.
Our sorcerer, ended up doing a double spell, and because we were facing during the siege, a 15th level abjurer, sorc got feebleminded. A sixth level sorcerer having to save vs a 15th with a -10 from an invisible censor.
There were words had then, and angry yelling over mics. The bard saved the day in the end with being selfless and heroic, and managed a new direction in campaign later.
But the paladin had to explain to the gm why the sorc was so pissed, away from both being in the same call at the same time.
So let me get this straight. The sorcerer looked like enough of a threat to draw the attention of a APL + 8 caster? Yeah, I can see both sides here.
“It makes sense given the situation.”
“But at that point you might as well just decide that rocks fall on my dude.”
Was it at least easy to un-feeblemind the guy?
Bard did a spell to take the affliction, and it lead to us being able to actively reviving a dead god.
But the player of the bard was having a bit of a rough time with the character motivation so it was a good way to bow out, and the gm rewarded the creative thinking with 2 hero points while having a temporary pc for things that was more suited. Healing was free afterward, and npc wizard didnt use it again.
The bard would again use the spell “Accept affliction” (Pathfinder) to take a cursed plot macguffin in a moment of helping another cursed soul. So it did work out.
My DM busted out the wand of Orcus at level 8. I rushed and disarmed the bad guy before he had a chance to use it… and then “Orcus teleported it back to his hand”. And that’s the story of how I got Power Word Killed by DM fiat. I got revivified right after, but I was still really mad.
This same DM made use of Drawmij’s Instant Summons when we stole something from the bad guys that we weren’t supposed to.
I am considering leaving that campaign.
Funnily enough, the DM of my other campaign actually made the whole villain scrying thing work really well, by giving us a Scry-proof secret base early on.
I feel like introducing scrying as a looming threat rather than an immediate concern is a smart play. Good on Scr-proof base GM.
Are 3X scrying sensors visible? 5E ones are invisible.
I’m fond of the NPCs playing by the same rules as the players. That means I’ll use any dirty trick in the PHB, but I won’t rely on “NPC magic” if I can help it.
Just last session I had a party member be scry’d for the first time. He failed his Wisdom save. He saw the sensor though due to his Robe of Eyes.
The sensor was invisible. However, half the player were dragons. Dragon senses help with this sort of thing.
I’ve made a similar mistake in my campaign. Not involving scrying, but still with an overpowered villain with magics the party couldn’t hope to counter.
So no shit there we were, at the heart of a volcano, fighting three witches for control of a fragment of an all-powerful artifact. With half of the (admittedly massive) party holding off a horde of minions at the entrance, the rest rallied and yote the witches into the lava… only for them to use the artifact to summon their wargod, Ztargon the God Eater. It was a tense fight against a foe magnitudes greater than anything the party had faced before – but after more than an hour of combat, with one final crit into the giant’s belly, the day was won. Ztargon disappeared, banished back to the dark realm from whence he came, and in a spray of light the artifact reformed.
Then, before the party could react, one of their NPC allies stepped into the light. Revealing himself to be the BBEG in disguise, he snatched the artifact out of the air, walked through a wall, and leaped into a portal to a distant land.
This did not go over well.
In the next session, six of the party were able to leap through the portal just before it closed, battle the BBEG on his own turf, and not only recover the artifact but also the powerful magic items that he’d used to conduct his scheme. But the damage was done. My players felt betrayed and cheated out of a well-earned victory. Still, we talked it over, I conceded that I’d done a bad, and we moved on resolved to do better.
I feel that I should compliment your conjugation. “Yote” gave me a chuckle.
But yeah man, that’s exactly the sort of fiat I’m talking about in today’s comic. Clever reversals aren’t so clever from a player’s perspective. They just feel cheap. Sucks that we both had to learn that the hard way.
In our games we don’t use scrying as a villain information gathering method. Spies have more potential for betrayals and plot-twist. You should consider them. If your character has enough levels/dots/points in awareness/spot and that they can always find a magical sensor or get an “We are being watched” feeling. Spies, unless caught in the act are more difficult to spot. Is the fair maiden who serves drinks in the local tavern a spy for Colinus Mac’Strike The Undying Lord of Darkness? Is the local blacksmith selling good steel or sabotaging the party? Is their local guide taking them into a trap? They may not know, but they surely can trust Victor Snitch The Supreme Spy of Darkness, he is trustworthy and have said he is not a spy, ten times, today 😛
Che, Colin, por que el texto dice “¿Por que? Por que Necromancer?”, no seria necromante en castellano? Digo, si en el Manual de Heroes usan el nombre de la clase como nombre del personaje entonces tendría que estar en castellano también, o si esos son los nombre, en ese caso si pueden ser en ingles ya que los nombres no se traducen. Entonces en que quedamos?
My Spanish skills are entirely based on Google Translate, and I don’t trust it. Is “Nigromante” even accurate? I don’t know!
There is a funny thing in Spanish. Necromancer, the English word can be translated to “Necromante” or “Nigromante”. Being technical necromante is someone who summons or trade with the dead, nigromante is the typical evil necromancer, a black magician who summons the dead to do their bidding and do evil things. To put it simply, necromante cast speak with dead to solve murder, nigromante cast raise dead to terrorize people.
HboH Necromancer was a necromante back when she first appear, then when Paladin betrays her and he turns evil she would become a nigromante. So nigromante can be an accurate term for her.
IMPORTANT THING: Nigromante is a word based on a Latin term refereed, originally to the color black, the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the N-word. The two of them have the same roots but complete different meaning. Just to clarify, i don’t mean to offend anyone but if someone is, please accept my apologies and word that isn’t my intention to do that 🙂
Thanks for the explanation! I’m always unsure how much to trust Google Translate in terms of context. Now I’ve learned stuff!
Don’t worry i wouldn’t complicate the thing for you on purpose, unless that would be fun. See kids? Learn languages, they are fun* 😛
*Next week curse words and insult 😀
Back when i played DnD 3.5 with friends (who are friends in name only nowadays), with our GM allowing anything the players could come up with for magic items and his little brother’s powergaming tendencies, we had a necromancer with an enchanted eyesocket (yes, he applied the enhancement directly to his skull, that mad lad) that acted like a permanent DBZ scouter that could detect any living and undead creature in his field of vision with a pretty respectable range, even through walls, and display their current hit points. From this moment on, there was no longer any surprise the GM would really come up with, and combining this with my ninja specialized to hell and back in stealth and bags of holding to temporarily hide party members, no place was secure enough against us.
With how the GM ruled magic item creation, every campaign would inevitably be broken in half at some point.
Heh. Sounds like the opposite problem. Instead of the railroading GM you got the Monte Hall experience. The game still breaks thanks to magic, but in the opposite direction.
My scrying story involves the unfortunate time that the group had to teleport away from the encounter to save themselves, but couldn’t take everyone, because an NPC we were rescuing kicked our group over the limit of people we could take along with the teleport scroll we had.
I was at the edge of the combat. I was the hardest to reach for teleportation and most likely to escape on horseback. So I did.
The next six days on the run featured just my character and the paladin’s talking horse rushing across the country, knowing that both our allies and enemies alike were trying to scry us, and not able to safely let any of the scrying through.
I kept up all my defenses until I was able to reach a town with a high enough level priest to buy a sending spell to reach them. Ultimately they broke through my save vs. scrying the same day, and the enemies didn’t manage it, but it was a nail-biting experience, especially because I knew that if the enemies got to me first, I wasn’t going to survive their attack by myself.
Well that’s friggin’ amazing. It’s always cool when the raw mechanics of the game give birth to cool story moments. Emergent narrative ftw!
Wow, they found good actor likenesses of Paladin and Necromancer for this season of Te Quiero Thief…!
Casting agents deserve some respect. It’s more art than science!
Alright. I mentioned on Twitter that THIS character was all in scrying and that I’ve been using this character as an NPC for at least 15 years.
The trick I find is that your scrying villain needs to NOT use a Magic Mirror or spy drones or what have you. Your villain is going to know everything you know, but step into your villains shoes, assume they don’t, and then think very hard about what they might think 2, maybe 3 different, likely scenarios are based on IMPERFECT divination.
In a sense, you do this anyways as a GM. You know the PC’s are going to the place, you don’t QUITE know when they will get there, and if your players are like mine, while they have tactical patterns, the plan is rarely the same twice.
Nothing is more amazing than having your villain setup a counter plan to Possible Future 47 when the party acts out Possible Future 35. Usually all KINDS of things go wrong on both sides and while your villain was PREPARED for some door breaking, the PC’s feel good that you didn’t NECESSARILY use their plan against them.
I usually offer my players that the bad guy is dynamic. They aren’t waiting around for you to kill them, and they are actively planning ways to deal with you. I also have a strong OOC dialogue with my players about game theory as well, and at this point, they know particularly my divining demon sorcerer, and what she’s about.