| jjust4me |
I am beginning my campaign in about a month or so and in 25 years of DMing, I have never been so excited about a campaign as I am AoW. That being said, I wanted to do some serious forshadowing in the first session. After the group meets and gets together in a side adventure (the wharf chase from the Mad God's Key, issue #114-a great 1st level adventure-but I am just using the wharf chase), they encounter a group of children singing various creepy songs such as 'Ring Around the Rosie' and 'The Worms Crawl In' - just to set a dark tone. Most of the players will have something in their characters' background that makes them dislike worms, maggots from something that occured in their history.
A great episode of Battlestar Galactica inspired me as well-The episode Scar, where they took a cyclon fighter and turned him into this larger-than-life villian who hated humanity and killed numerous pilots and had everyone on nerve about facing him. Looking at the first encounter in the Whispering Cairn, I found my Scar with Eric's description of the wolf that bore the scar down his.
Scar, will have quite a bounty out for him by local farms and the city watch alike. Rumors will persist about his uncanny cunning and intelligence in ambushing people; of how he has snatched babies from mothers arms, of how he managed to cripple one of the elder warriors in town. 'Mad' Murrik, one of the town drunks, was infact a ranger/druid until he lost his hand to Scar. When Murrik speaks of the wolf, the PC's will hear the fear in his voice as he relates how he has never felt so much malign evil in a natural creature before. The overwhelming hatred that ran through 'it'. How 'it's' unnatural malevolence seemed to permeate it's very essence. I want the players to poop themselves when their first encounter is with Scar, the Great Gray Wolf!
Just taking a simple encounter with three wolfs and making it much more adds a lot of fun for the players (and me too).