The Hangover
You know how it goes. The session ends, the day is saved, and all the plot points are burning bright in your mind’s eye. But then you go home. Weeks pass, memory fades, and all those niggling little details like character names and story arcs get mixed together in your head. Whether you’re a GM or a player, the lesson is clear: it pays to keep good campaign notes.
But what if you’re a PC though? What if it’s the character that can’t remember what happened? That’s the question that led to one of my most successful sessions.
Basically, I stole the plot from The Hangover. The idea was to start the session in medias res. Everyone woke up with a killer headache, and they were all handcuffed to something, married to someone, or in possession of some maguffin. The structure of the session was a mystery, as the party had to revisit the various sites of their drunkenness from the previous evening to find their missing friend.
In my specific case, it was a band of inebriated exalted heroes who woke up attuned to the anti-party’s soulsteel weapons, in a blood feud with the local god of cattle / war, and part owners of the finest sushi restaurant in Paragon. It also proved to be a handy way to explain away a player who had to miss that session. Her character had passed out drunk on the roof of a nearby gambling den.
For purposes of today’s discussion, I think it’s worth noting exactly how I went about crafting the session. I happen to remember the step-by-step because I still have my notes from 2012. (You see? Write that mess down!)
- I waited until the characters decided to go drinking. They’d just come off of a big heist, and did the usual “we go to the tavern” thing at the end of the night. That made the setup work unusually well rather than forcing it.
- I figured out the story from the night of drunkenness. In other words, I began by writing out the events of the party’s bender in chronological order. Since I had the rare opportunity to decide what the PCs did as a GM, I had them split into multiple groups so that they could more easily follow their idiosyncratic interests. That also made it more challenging for them to track their various adventures. Note however that this requires trust among your players, and that you should strive not to do anything too out of character with someone else’s PC.
- Next, I figured out the plot of the session. These are the various encounters that would happen as the players retraced their characters’ steps. For example, the aforementioned god of cattle / war causes a stampede through city streets; a fortune teller gives “another reading” to her young benefactor; a monstrous ally is still passed out inside a brew vat, and will be accosted by city watch if they can’t sneak her back to the sewers. These situations were set to “go off” as the party wandered into them, and were designed to happen in virtually any order.
- Finally, I seeded clues into the adventure. That is, I gave each passed-out PC some object to start them on the trail (fresh tattoos, someone else’s magical weapon, a bill from a restaurant stuck to someone’s head). I also invented a device I called, “Drink this. You’ll feel better.” Basically, an apothecary NPC gave them three doses of potion. If they drank it and passed an easy check, they could remember one event from the night before. These functioned as “omni-clues” in case the group got stuck.
So in the interest of trying out something a little different in your next session, what do you say we brew up a few “hangover” scenarios of our own? What crazy shit did the party get up to last night? What repercussions are they faced with this morning? Give us your best The Hangover encounters down in the comments!
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I just did something even crazier in my Eberron campaign.
The party, just recently hit level 2, and arrived to the archeologist camp in Breland where they were heading to. Someone suddenly ran into the camp, and then… the next thing they know, they are standing on a flying ship, wearing some uniform shoulderplate thing, and according to the weather it’s several months later. Also I told them, welcome to level 3, roll initiative, you are attacked by a flying strange purple cloud thing.
…which was a living Modify Memory spell that just wiped the last couple months from the party AND the crew of the flying ship that was flying just right above the Mournlands…
(I do have a draft of what happened between, which now they will have to find out as soon as they get out of the Mournlands, because, spoiler alert, a later attack obviously crashed their ship…)
How does that work? Did you level up for them? Or was the sequence more like, “Welcome to level 3, roll initiative, now let’s take half an hour to level up our characters?”
Some editions don’t have much in the way of player choice for typical level-ups beyond class.
Or maybe Edem was lucky* and his players all planned out their builds ahead of time, and they could just use those plans.
*As lucky as you can be if all of your players are the type to plan out their builds ahead of time.
Fair. I guess maybe I’m still in Exalted mode, where every level-up involved pouring over half a dozen tomes for the perfect charm.
I’m surprised that cramped cell has room for Ranger to shrug in.
Fortunately, she seems to be a pretty easy-going, roll-with-it sort of girl. Just picture if that was Barbarian instead…
Those bars wouldn’t stand a chance.
would any bar stand a chance?
How much alcohol does it take to get an entire Exalted circle (Solars, I assume) drunk enough to pass out?
I mean, I actually played one with the Overindulgence flaw — when he hit limit break, the result would be an almighty bender, but with his stamina reinforced by a suitable hearthstone, he’d still be mostly sober by the time the break wore off. I remember him on one occasion having to carry the unconscious Night-caste home… not so drunk as to risk summoning a demon to do the lifting.
I believe the phrase that inspired that session was, “I want to swim in a sea of alcohol.” That’s how they wound up with their buddy passed out in a brew vat.
That might do it… I guess my Twilight just wasn’t trying hard enough… 🙂
My party isn’t one for celebratory rounds at the tavern… but they have earned the enmity of psionic lizard people. I don’t have anything to share right now, but I do see a way to set up a teetotaling variant of the trope in a future session.
Lick not the lizard folk: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/psychedelic
If I ever did something like this, I’d write up notes of half-remembered (and possibly somewhat misremembered) events from the time between drinking and waking, and make sure they didn’t quite mesh together, just to add to the confusion.
This could be a decent campaign (or at leas tone-shot) concept, actually. A bunch of renowned heroes go to a celebration, get drunk, and when they wake up something/one important has vanished/been broken/etc and the PCs are held responsible, despite not remembering anything that happened.
Weirdly, I think that one of the reasons it worked so well was because all the PCs had clearly-established personalities and motivations. I’m talking about that sense of, “Yeah, I could totally see myself doing that while I was drunk.” It almost becomes a form of fan fiction for the PCs.
I think you could make it work as a campaign premise, but the longer it goes the more you risk running into, “Wait a minute, my guy would never do that, no matter how drunk!”
Better yet, ask the players to suggest a bunch of things their characters may or may not recall doing while drunk… then pick the ones that best lead into the outcome you’re looking for…
—Background
—Personality Trait
—Ideal
—Bond
—Flaw
—Stupid shit you do whilst drunk
Look, I made that booty call last night. I deserve inspiration.
In terms of not keeping notes; when I DM’d nobody was really tracking the party’s inventory outside of cash, and stuff they personally used. As the DM it wasn’t my job to track the party’s inventory. As a result the party had so much unknown junk in their bag of holding.
Our current campaign has a designated treasurer to prevent this.
My megadungeon guys ran into this trouble, but from the opposite direction. Three different PCs somehow wound up with a unique item in their inventory. Ironically enough, it was something called a ‘rod of repetition.’
This sounds fun, but… what if the party doesn’t drink? Or the players don’t enjoy that kind of stuff in real life?
My current group I know two of our players are not even of the age to drink and at least one I don’t think imbibes, tho we have never discussed that part of our personal lives (yet?). My character doesn’t drink because he doesn’t have to (Forgeborn, aka Warforged), but we did have a session where we learned he CAN get drunk and can eat or drink if he chooses to, tho I think even that function goes away soon as he levels up in monk and becomes immune to poison. Of our group only two regularly drink, one rather heavily, and one additional member drinks on occasion, so the other four of us are kind of not in that mix. Additionally, what if you have more than one character that is immune to poison (our druid will be at some point too I think)?
So, while the idea sounds great, maybe someone could give advice on how to create that scenario for a group that might not partake of the revelries of drink (or drugs)?
I would love to hear about it (and take notes!)
as to the note taking in general, our group takes rather good notes, it can just take a while to find things as a campaign gets long in the tooth 🙂
I believe ThinkEdem had a useful notion at the top of the comments. Hangovers worked for my group, but it’s just a device. You can always choose another device. 🙂
I hope it’s okay I respond to this old comment, but – as a teetotaler myself, it’s a scenario I’ve mulled over adapting for some time. My favourite adaptation (of a similar idea, not this prompt directly!) was from the conclusion of what had seemed like a prior one-shot.
The party had saved an old-growth forest, and the accompanying nature spirits – and their humanoid wardens.
Last session’s end saw the party cheering and dancing all night with the Maenads that protected the forest, reveling in cinematic glory as if it were the end and that was that. But I’d asked the players if they wanted to continue, and they did; I told them to bring their sheets.
The adventure started with them waking up deep, deep underground. A nearby river was running, but something was off – and as their vision returned (for those who could see underground), they soon realised the river was running a dark burgundy.
None of the adventurers had done anything without their players’ permission, and I didn’t have to force the players into uncomfortable areas they wouldn’t appreciate, but the sense of terrible, weird wrongness was everywhere. All their gear was gone, and they had been dressed in fine clothes that looked as if they would have picked themselves – I let the players decide what that meant, with ‘the sky as the limit’ for budget, though only in appearance.
Replacing their gear were crude facsimiles made from bone and wood. They kept on entering rooms to find ‘encounters’ that had already been cleared, terminated with extreme prejudice. By the time they found their old gear in a chest, they’d started to piece together that they hadn’t been in a forest revelry for a night, but thirty nights, kept in a trance by the Maenads’ music and limited druidic powers.
But that while they had been celebrating their victory, they had perhaps celebrated too prematurely…
It was fun littering the scenario with clues for them to interact with, and building up so that the first combat encounter of the adventure felt like a sudden change in tone. It was real fun, but it’d be tricky to replicate the experience again. Feel free to tweak or borrow any of the ideas if you see one that you like!
Hangover scenarios you say? You son of a bitch, I’m in.
Don’t have any personal actual tales of such (at best, my characters would be the ones cooking up Alchemist’s Kindness for the actual drunkards, though my next character may get up to these shenanigans).
One of the players has an odd orb/spheroid object with them. Careful examination will reveal it to be a genuine dragon egg. If they don’t identify it, they learn it’s a dragon egg by it hatching and imprinting on the first PC it sees. This will, naturally, piss off the dragon-whelp’s actual mother.
One or multiple of the PCs items (either ones they use commonly, or ones they rarely do but wouldn’t throw away) have acquired intelligent item status. They range from annoying, to helpful, to horrible. The PCs can get rid of the intelligent part by going through a ‘decurse my item’ quest, or they can keep them if they like them enough (the items can be tamed if threatened thoroughly).
The PCs, in their drunken state, managed to defeat a local villain, and are hailed as heroes. Unfortunately, the villain escaped from jail following their drunken bender. Double unfortunately, the PCs don’t remember how they defeated them, or why – but they’re expected to do so anyway! Villagers and NPCs they ask about their heroics may offer them hints how to defeat this mini-BBEG.
One of the PCs is transformed into an animal, either completely, or werewolf-like. They can still communicate and use their class features (including weaponry and items), but have animal-instinct urges on occasion.
If the PCs have an important plot item, they’ll learn that they, quite literally, buried it somewhere in the middle of nowhere and wrote a clumsy ‘treasure map’ to find it again.
encounter: negotiate visitation rights / responsibilities with mama
encounter: defeat the alpha were-corgi who gave you this terrible stumpy-legged curse
I’ve been logging my sessions by hand since over 20 years. After each session, I type my my notes up and add them to the campaign history.
I had the first “book” printed, too – close too 300 illustrated pages. We’re on book 5 now:
https://i.imgur.com/gy486hY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/5U8oo9R.jpg
I’m beginning to wonder if my players are planning something similar for me. One of them has gone all the way back to the beginnings of our FB page to get the session summaries into a single folder. I remain hopeful.
A cunning way to set up the ‘hangover’ and spring it as a surprise on the PCs:
Arrange for the PCs to hear of a tavern where a marvelous new drink is being concocted.
The Brewmaster of the tavern warns the PCs that the drink is extremely potent and makes them sign documents freeing him of any responsibility for sampling it.
Ask the PCs directly, who of them is drinking the brew – treat it like an announcement of how many cards are being drawn from the Deck of Many Things.
The moment a PC even sips the drink, cut to the Hangover scene (this works best in programs where you can swiftly change the map, like roll20), or tell that PC that they inactive until then. Any PCs that don’t drink will have the PCs that did drink vibrate for a little, then seemingly vanish (or, if they’re perceptive, they’ll notice them zoom out faster-than-sound).
I like the idea of it being so potent that even non-drinkers catch a second-hand buzz. They can be the ones that “kind of” remember what happened.
Didn’t think of that! Yes, could be amusing with the drink having such strong fumes that the others get drunk by proxy.
For further laughs, the brewer can pour it into a mithral/adamantine cup with full smithing protection gear (as if they were pouring molten steel), and tell them to drink it quickly, before the cup degrades.
And to enhance the PCs drunken shenanigans experience, they can later learn that, the elixir’s effects are that they effectively superbuff you into monstrous levels of power (+10 to all stats, +20 hp, Haste, and so on) at the cost of all your memory of the 24 hours events and being incredibly inebriated in the process.
This lets them do flat out impossible stunts that they then have to fix or deal with the consequences of without the elixir’s help.
Today’s comic probably brought to you by the Patreon Handbook! Cute dress on Magus, by the way!
I’m more curious about what happened to Inquisitor’s ancestral hat.
Isn’t that the lampshade? Or maybe it’s under it…
So basically: https://www.neverborncomic.com/?comic=chorus-page317
Good times, good times indeed. Looking for that was fun and seeing Inspe… The Son of Darkwater again was good, thanks 😀
Heh. Forgot about that page. It do be like that out here in Creation.
Was the first thing i though when reading the hangover thing. I mean when we talk about solars, abyssals and infernal hangover you need to get an over-the-top and epic hangover as the very same exalted that got it 🙂
So, i had this harbor-town, where a countess of hell had set herself up with a little secret tavern. The plot involving her was about her husband, who had died without an heir, and her desperation to prevent a (literally) hellish civil war resulting from a crisis of succession had made her decide to scout out the mortal realms for a decent “donor” to provide her with an heir.
Now at the time i first wrote this up, and started seeding the lore to the party in as foreshadowing stuff, the paladin was still playing a rogue. but after a crab-related incident, he wrote up a new PC.
A paladin who swore his oath to his dying father, swearing to cherish his family and elevate them back to their lost noble status.
The party arives in the harbor. and first thing the pally asks is: Are there any hot barmaids? and he asks to try seducing the barmaid. (Who is of course, said demonduchess in disguise).
Knowing that his attempt at seducing her, and her attempt at seducing him kind of help eachother. I don’t even require a roll, she serves him a drink, winks seductively and 1 failed save against alcohol later. His character blanks out.
Next morning, he wakes up in a bed, naked, covered in strange arcane sigils and suggestive bite-marks with a ring on his fingers.
I am almost bound to wind up doing something like this in the Scum & Villainy game I’ll be running soon. There’s no shortage of bad habits among the characters and they’re currently considering one of their favored factions to be one that could easily be handing them out substances to abuse on the regular.
I’ve got a pretty good memory and usually can give a decent overview of WTF happened last session and in recent sessions, but I really wish I’d been taking notes at the start of the 5e campaign that I’m because I have NO GODDAMN idea what the hell we were doing at that point. I’ve got a bunch of mixed up events in my head and I just have to smile and nod if anyone in the group brings up anything from that point.
I could see the Hangover plot having a mechanical effect to entice the players to explore what happened, or as I like to call it, the ‘Forgotten Level’ mechanic.
When the PCs enter start the hangover scene, inform them that they all gained a level! Unfortunately, since they don’t know how or why they gained it (i.e. they forgot the things they did that earned them the EXP for it), they are unable to benefit from it – mechanically simulated by giving all of them a negative level (not unlike the one you get when revived from death) which only goes away when they:
a) Gradually solve what they did during their period of lack of memory, ‘earning’ the exp for their actions once they remember them, and possibly earning their class features they would get from the level (e.g. new spells learned).
b) Solve whatever crisis or problem was caused by their drunken shenanigans.
c) Earn enough experience to gain their level ‘the normal’ way – in case they decide to abandon the hangover mystery entirely.
The players can even cooperate with the DM in this regard – have the session end with the cliffhanger of the PCs waking up from the hangover, along with the gained level. Then, the DM can discuss with the players, what they would have gotten from their level normally, and see if they can incorporate it into their drunken shenanigans (e.g. the druid learned how to wildshape and goofed around in it, the rogue got a new talent that makes them expert knife throwers to win a competition/bet, and so on).
Fun fact! In the official lore of Golarion, this exact kind of plot is how the God of drinking, freedom and adventurers, Cayden Cailean, achieved godhood.
He got incredibly drunk and decided to take on the Test of the Starstone (gauntlet of challenges that either earn you godhood or death, that only two other mortals succeeded before) as a drunken bet. Three days later, he succeeded and became a deity, but couldn’t remember how he pulled it off.
https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Cayden_Cailean
Crap, this was supposed to be a reply to another comment. Please delete it.
Not the one that actually was a reply, though. That’s supposed to be there.
The loathsome yap bat! I hate those things…
i actually made a whole campaign (Pathfinder) in roll20 with the theme being the party not remembering their past (but there was a good point to that. see below) i named it “Amnesiac in Golarion” this was on the LFG page (warning wall of text coming):
Thump…Thump…THUMP…THUMP
you wake up from the noise ..repeating constant noise that won’t let you sleep no matter how tired you are. when you open your eyes and look around..you can’t tell where you are.
you find yourself laying down on a cold stone slab, in a middle of a circular room that you don’t remmber seeing before.
you try to remember..you..try…you?…you?!…who ARE you?!?
your head hurt, the room spins but the more you try to find the answer the more it elude you. you can’t remmebr who you are. the most your foggy brain can come up with is flashes of images moving too fast to fully grasp them:
faces..people who you think you should know…armies clashing..mounds of dead corpses…places clearly out of the norm, some seem on fire some frozen in ice some even floating slowly in the air.
there is stuff you KNOW, your training, your conviction in a mission that must be finished no matter what…you think you remember being part of a…party?
far in the distance you can hear a somewhat ‘recorded’ voice repeating the same words in a languge that seem like archaic common :
“…ask for forgiveness..dear esteemed @#$%(‘golden’? or ‘elite’?) members…
…regretfully @#$%(‘plan B’? or ‘second inquiry’?) was a failure…
…seem likely to cause some memory loss…without any mean of restoration..
…more problems with the @#$% (‘revive’? or ‘resurrect’?) attempt…
…frequent @#$% (‘monsters? or ‘vermin’?) appear…
…resorted to @#$%(‘freeze’? or ‘petrify’?) in hope that later on…
…ask for forgiveness…”(loops back to start)
(some words written as ‘@#$%’ are with a meaning that is you are not sure of, the best meaning you can figure is written next to them)
It was an open sandbox game with the characters getting to know a ‘new’ world (for them).
the characters would all start without remembering their life up to waking up. (they keep their emotions and knowledge but anything personal is blank. beside remembering other party members names and looks).
all the characters wake up in a room as described above with a small stone glued to a part of their body and their gear nearby.
the rooms are connected in a long hallway with many doors,each with the name of the character etched on it from the inside (once your character get up and see the name they recall it’s their name).
if any character die and a new one created it will also wake up in such room. there will be some compensation for this and a bit of change to the normal creation of a character.
they could pick where on the body the stone, which turned out later on to be a stone of weight -loadstone, is glued on. also them. also that specific stone didn’t seem to effect them (beside being irremovable).
when any of them died (as it happened. i didn’t help) they would find themselves in a black place with a voice telling them they had 3 options. wait in hope to be revived, reincarnate or revive back in the chamber. last two option simply set them back naked in the starting chamber ether in their own body or a new one.
..the big reveal later on was that they were all actually a group of modern age gamers stuck in a bugged game.
they were vip (‘golden’? or ‘elite’) gamers who got to participate as beta testers (‘plan B’) the game had a few major bugs ( ..frequent ‘vermin’) etc.
the loadstone was actually a ‘Load-Stone’ – item that record the characters information for when they revive .- also why normal people would slow down (LAG) when they somehow get one, they are not players and the machine tried to use scripts and extract information from them that shouldn’t be there.
the way out (without the logout option which was bugged) turned out to be was entering a portable hole. or as it should really be called a ‘Port -able hole’. when they go into it with a load-stone they get into a space that allow them to log out. (it also record all that is brought inside. and the loop from putting a bag of holding which use a similar but different code is what make them go boom. (both try to write all the things brought inside which make it seem like a duplicate hack)