To Catch a Killer, Part 1: Call to Adventure
Some heroes get an unfair amount of screen time, while others get the shaft. That’s why, for this month’s poll, we asked our Quest Giver Patrons to choose which party deserves its own mini-arc. As you can tell, the ladies of Team Bounty Hunter got the nod. (Better luck next time to the Dragons and The Anti-Pary).
When it comes to planning an adventure, baiting your story hook can be an exercise in frustration. Players are famously fickle beasts, and you can never be sure what will tickle their fancy. Maybe your local drama queen needs a personal tie-in (the villain killed your master-mother-sensei-dog!). The do-gooder needs a major threat to fight (and the world will explode if you don’t stop them!). The party meathead needs something to punch (better kick that plot arc off with a combat!). And even if you manage to tick all the boxes, they may still find a way to miss the inciting incident.
Don’t despair though! When you’ve got a party full of players like Magus, you don’t throw your perfectly prepped adventure in the bin. If they manage to oblivious their way past the storyline, you can always bring it back for another shot next session. For example, I’m pretty sure that Inquisitor, Ranger, and Magus are going to have to answer a few questions from the local authorities. After all, a murder just got did outside their door! Whether they manage to solve the case successfully (and score a lucrative bounty in the process) is another matter.
So how about it, guys? Have you ever managed to miss the plot hook? Was it obvious in retrospect, or do you think your GM was being a little too coy? And if you’re a GM with players without attention spans, what are your best tricks for piquing their interest? Sound off with all about best calls to adventure down in the comments!
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
A Wilhelm scream? gasp The killer is related to Goofy!
I think Wilhelm must be like Blackadder and Baldrick: an endless succession of identical descendants, playing out the same roles in different eras and places.
*sings*
I am immortal
No one can be my AAAAAaah!
Is… is Inquisitor wearing an “I Love Spiders”-nightie? 0_õ
How out of character for her.
Then again, loving them isn’t the same as actually worshipping them, so…?
Maybe she likes jumping spiders? They’re cute enough that you can play as a human-sized one (who can shapeshift into a human to avoid triggering peoples’ arachnophobia) in Pathfinder 2e with the Anadi ancestry!
Even weirder, it basically says “Heart I Spiders”
So let’s see. “I” sounds like “eye”… so she must love eye-spiders! 😉
I was wondering if the Drow language was written right-to-left (like Japanese or Arabic). Or if she just picked it up at a flea market with lots of not-quite-right t-shirt designs. Or maybe she’s wearing it inside-out (since all the print is horizontally symmetrical).
Look, we’ve debated this endlessly as a community:
https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd
A drow’s relationship to spiders is about individual choice, not some cultural monolith.
Maybe Quiz and Drow Priestess swapped luggage by accident while busting out of jail.
My fiance had a situation in a game he DMed once upon a time:
His party arrived at the tavern at the start of the adventure, where they were destined to receive their quest. He described the rough-and-tumble clientele, including a couple of pirates.
One member of the party immediately bailed from the tavern, dragging the others with him, and went so far as to leave town and go to the next city along the coast. Fiance gave them a new tavern with similar, but different clientele, intending to simply give them the intended quest here instead.
That same player immediately bailed again and fled the city, this time dragging the party as far inland as possible. It turns out that player had a weird fear of pirates. Who knew?
This is why the X-card exists. Friggin’ pirates.
Well, obviously it’s Wilhelm. It’s says so right on the sound effect.
An open and shut case!
And here I thought it was someone in middle management. 😉
I concluded a Dark Heresy campaign about 5 years ago that went a little sideways.
The party were recruited in to an Inquisitorial cell, acting as one of his strike teams. Unknown to them, their Inquisitor was a filthy traitor, betraying the Imperium, and they were going to discover this during the course of their missions (I stole the core of the campaign idea from the TV series Alias) … but things didn’t go as planned.
I started every mission with a breifing, with little eyes-only breifing packets for the specialists – the Tech Priest got breifings on dodgy tech, the Psyker on warp shenanigens, and the party leader any “special” instructions (the leader was appointed by me, based on an in-character psychological test I ran on all the characters for the most loyal), oh, and the assassin got a kill order for the party leader, in case he started showing independant thought. I peppered these breifing packets with lots of clues the Inquisitor was sliding a little heresy-wards, expecting the party to eventually compare notes. They never did. I had them perform kidnappings, assassinations, industrial espionage, sabotage, even straight up daemon summoning, and they trucked along without flinching. I introduced neutral NPC’s who were meant to tip the party in to the treachery, but they actively misdirected these guys to protect their boss. I have known my players for 20 years, and the one thing I never expected, was for them to follow orders without question.
The “following orders before discovering the truth” phase of the campaign was meant to last about 6 months irl… it lasted nearly three years. But when the scales fell from their eyes, it was glorious. One confession snowballed into an avalache, and I have never seen a group of players in such a mix of outraged and ashamed (while I cackled maniacally behind the DM screen), it was glorious. Act 2 of the campaign was meant to be them staying in the cell under cover, but they were so angry at being hoodwinked for so long, so completely, they went full “Emperors Wrath”.
I was hoping for that story to end in ‘it made the payoff incredible’ and you didn’t disappoint, that sounds like a fantastic game to have been in 😀
My best Dark Heresy game was that of a guardsman who charged, sobbing, at a daemon near the ship’s fuel repository where he wasn’t allowed to fire his weapon.
The cherry on top was the Tech Priest player adamantly insisting he had seen nothing suspicious during the vast litany of everyone else’s confessions, and being merely an innocent bystander in their heresy. Then, not half an hour later, when they were planning their explosive entrance into the cell headquarters, and discussing whether to spare that soft-spoken Adeptus Mechanicus weaponsmith who served as their provisioner, he went “oh, no, he’s part of some heretical cult that believes the Machine God is a Necron Ctan, and has been inducting me into their cult practices, he’s definitely dodgy”… the silence and hard stares around the table was priceless.
GM: Obviously the smart thing to do is gather evidence, learn about the traitor’s network of Chaos contacts, and take them all down in a surgical strike.
Playes: https://c.tenor.com/G7qpkgP6Qg4AAAAC/heresy-detected.gif
I don’t see the problem here—OBVIOUSLY that silhouetted figure is just pulling some kind of weird, wiggly snake off the other one after it bit them. I just hope it wasn’t venomous!
I don’t care if it’s a garter snake. If it bites me, I’m doing the Wilhelm scream.
Me, I’d probably scream more like Tom, whenever Jerry smashes his foot with a hammer.
The Princess was (literally) in Another Castle.
Despite my own frustrations as a DM when my players have steadfastly refused to acknowledge plot hooks because the PCs were having too much fun on a sailing voyage to stop now, I completely derailed one evening of gameplay as a player through inattention.
It was an underwater campaign and we all played aquatic elves. We were to travel to the capitol to rescue a princess. Everything should have been fairly straightforward, except that (for some reason) the group wound up looking to my Wisdom 3 Fighter/Magic User/Thief as party leader. Either I was RPing a powerful nitwit too well, got up for pizza, or just plain wasn’t listening, but I got it into my head that the Sahuagin village we were supposed to avoid was somehow where the princess was being kept.
We successfully stealthed our way to the village center and to the heart of the enclave, where I announced that we were going to “free the prisoners and rescue the princess.”
You could hear a pin drop. The DM and other players just stared at me for a moment. “The princess is being held in the capitol.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then what are we doing here?”
“We were all following you!!!”
That’s when the village full of Sahuagin were alerted to our presence and attacked.
This might be the most D&D story I’ve ever heard.
For serious though: the frustration of thinking you were doing a plot correctly, only to have it revealed that you had no idea what the crap was going on, is the very worst feeling. I experienced it recently as a GM running book 2 of Shattered Star. There’s a gate. The book calls it a gate. And if you’re picturing “two stout wooden doors,” then so was I. Apparently it was an iron lattice gate. Which makes the badass duelist who calls out from the other side, “I’ll open it for you if you fight me honorably,” make a lot more sense.
I sense a murder mystery afoot! Not to worry, all we have to do is cast a few divination spells and you’re halfway there! Now, who’s this party’s arcane caster?
…okay, this could get complicated.
“Never fear. Magus is here to save the day!”
“We’re doomed.”
She’s a CHA-using archetype, and the culprit (going by that silhouette) isn’t known for being a master thinker either. She might employ social trickery to get them to spill the beans.
If you want wiles, you want Cleric.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/gender-roles
Is Cavalier going to be on the team now?
She already botched her tryout:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/overbooked
I call this issue the “Sliding Scale of Player Initiative and Plot Progression”, or the PIPP.
Some players are more than willing to dive into the plot when they have sufficient motivations IC to do so, but some not only are invested, but practically run the narrative. As with all things this has its pros and cons. Such an invested character will have no trouble biting for every plot hook that comes their way and can really get into character. On the other hand the same person could very much become drama queen and see anything that’s not directly related to their own goals as a distraction, and can get really antsy about doing side quests or pursuing other player’s quests. And if there are multiple of these players, sometimes it’s impossible to have the plot Fo anywhere because you have two or more players trying to steer the story in their direction, not to mention the DM’s own plot.
Which brings us to the next point, Plot Progression. The story must move on but as I’m sure we’ve all experienced, sometimes something or someone appears or does something and everyone drops what they’re doing to attend to it. Be it something innocent like a cute NPC everyone wants to now take care of, or just passively mentioning some terrible stuff that everyone now really, really wants to stop first (things like child abuse or institutional racism is a good way to sidetrack a character). Now if those things were part of the plot it would be fine, but sometimes you make the mistake of dropping them as mere details in your world to make them feel more alive, and now the players have lost interest in Arch Deacon Sulyvan EvilBad and his plot to eat the sun to go after Hillbilly Bojack because he used a slur against dwarves. Sometimes as a DM you’ll have to take the reigns and make it so Bojack, once just a random NPC, is now a part of EvilBad’s plot so everyone can focus their attention and resources to deal with the actual big bad you made, and not the one the players have chosen to fight.
As with all things good and bad there needs to be a balance. Players and their characters have to want to work together to do the plot, but the DM needs to make it clear where the plot is going and what routes to take. And whether they take the easy road or bushwhacked through the unknown, you gotta make sure they reach a checkpoint or else your story will stop as soon as the players think “we’re going nowhere with this and I’m no longer entertained”.
But by the same token, if you jump at every plot hook then there’s no incentive for a GM to build plots specifically for your character. WHAT’S A DRAMA QUEEN TO DO!?
As a player that does like to jump on every plot hook, I tend to give my characters more generic motivations so the DM can easily direct them where they need to be. So you’ve got Smyler the pirate whose goal is “Become more famous and more powerful, in that order”, and Lapis the merfolk who wants to explore the surface world and learn everything about it (while covertly earning the loyalty of her party so she can use them to steal a good artifact worth the price of her soul).
Once for three consecutive sessions we missed each and every plot hook just to mess with our DM 😛
On the bright side, you’ll resurrect nearby:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-outer-planes-part-3-immediate-afterlife
DMs mess with players, players can freely mess with the DM. Psychological warfare is fair game 😛
I’m pretty sure the Geneva Convention has opinions on this point.
Why people keep calling that thing about my actions? This is the second time… today 😛
So we had reunited with an NPC ally after a period of separation. Said NPC ally was secretly a were-beast,^1 and we were in on said secret. Said NPC before the split would often help us in combat, but upon reuniting she was staying back. I assumed this was because our table had gotten bigger and the DM wanted to balance combat, so I overlooked it. (Sometimes metagaming just makes the game run, in the same way you put aside any suspicions you might have when a new PC is introduced so you just let them join the party to facilitate the player’s fun) Apparently it was actually because she had been replaced with a doppleganger. At one point the DM said the moon was full, but I didn’t hear it, because of ambient noise in the game-store so I literally was not exposed to the biggest hint the DM dropped.
^1 Fun fact: “Were” was old-English for “Man” and they used “Man” the way we use “Person”. Apparently in that framework a woman who is a werewolf would be a “Wifewolf”.
Not touching that one with a 10-ft pole. My couch isn’t that comfortable.
What about a Husbandwolf?
I had basically this exact problem trying to run The Fall of Plaguestone for some friends. The murder happens literally right in front of them and it took an ungodly amount of prodding to agree to investigate it. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.
Team Bounty Hunter vs. Gestalt is going to be a battle for the ages, though.
Gestalt needs to go a little wolfy, just so she has enough hair to twirl her mustache.
Good thing Speak With Dead is an inquisitor spell.
Question 1: Who killed you?
Question 2: What did they look like?
Question 3: Are there any unusual items or effects they they used or that you noticed right before you died that stand out?
Might have to skip question 3 if Inquisitor’s activating it from a scroll instead of using her own spell slots.
Ooh… Yeah. I think she traded that away for other class features. >_>
“The jaw! The killer stole the jaw!”
“I told you it would be fine if I didn’t take speak with dead. They always steal the jaw.”
A feature every player of Rise of the Runelords learned for it’s murder mystery bit. In fact I’m pretty sure that’s where most players of PF got their first proper murder mystery.
I recognize those floofy ears, Gestalt is up to her murderclowning (like a murderhobo, but with plot armor) ways again!
An odd choice of using a sacrificial knife when she could have dominated, torn to shred or drained her victim.
But it’s just a silhouette! That could be literally ANY pokémon!
Predictions for this murder mystery arc:
Someone wears a Detective Hat and/or puffs a bubble pipe.
An actual Investigator (the class) is introduced.
Magus and Gestalt end up performing more ‘cats vs dogs’ shenanigans.
Magus and/or Eldritch Archer get falsely accused of the murder as they, like the killer, have floofy animal ears.
The victim is a massive jerk and deserved it (alas, not Summoner).
Fine. I’ll do some rewrites.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/365/753/94c.jpg
What was the behind-the-scenes with the script/art of this comic?
I’d originally imagined Quiz looking dolefully into an empty coffer. And also Ranger looking disconsolate. And also Laurel says you can’t fit every damn thing into a single panel.
The PJs were her idea.
TITLE: To Catch a Killer, Part 1: Call to Adventure
TEXT: Be vigilant, hero! Adventure may strike at any time.
PIC: A dark and stormy night. Team bounty hunter mopes, oblivious to the murder happening under their noses. Outside, we can see the silhouette of [REDACTED] mauling a victim.
DIALOGUE:
Inquisitor: It’s been ages since our last bounty.
Ranger: …
SFX: WILHELM SCREAM!
Magus: Keep it down out there! How are we supposed to hear the call to adventure with all that racket?
SCROLLOVER: Who’s That Pokémon? (If you guessed “Houndoom,” you get partial credit.)
BLOG: When the party refuses your plothook.
Just what kind of ‘Call to Adventure’ are Magus/BH expecting whilst they’re dressed as they are?
They’re waiting for the electric company to shut off their candles. They were really counting on that Fighter bounty!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diplomatic-immunity
Huh, Miss Gestalt really has a sense of adventure/drama to kill someone just outside of the home of the bounty hunter party.
It’s almost like she wants them to know who dunnit….