mozgriken's page

"some help/advice on creating the vignettes where he hunts and kills a victim, a system for tracking his infamy, and creating a method of escalating danger as he becomes more well known."

Vignettes:

By this i assume you are referring to the murder episodes he conducts between sessions. You should probably approach this as the "intro" stage, and gradually move the scenes into something which involves the entire party. As the infamy of his acts grow, and the risk increases, he will most likely eventually draw the entire party into the predicament, unwilling or not. They may become his alibis and/or accomplices over time, or they may even be at odds with what he is doing & this creating tension within the party.
However, in the beginning, presuming he is acting alone & playing solo, there are a few things to consider:

1) in an urban environment, the pc has a very open range of victims to choose from...a true serial killer should develop a victimology & a signature method of slaying, not necessarily right away, but certainly over time. The pc doesn't have to know or acknowledge this at first, but the gm should try to encourage it by molding his hunts into something consistent. Once you establish victimology, you can prepare a short list sort of random encounter table to work off & add to as the arc progresses. The signature method of slaying should be the climax of his atrocities & the ethical footprint which makes him identifiable and notorious over time.

As far as the ritual itself, I think it is far more appropriate to handle these sorts of things in a "film-noire, off-camera action" way vs the horror movie grotesque (and highly unrealistic) violence we are bombarded by. I don't allow players to roll evil characters in my games, but as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, sometimes good game design entails a gm get gritty over just what "evil" is.

2) the gm can use the drd's patron god/divine source of power as an "inspiration" to his activity...it is a commonality amongst many serial killers that they hear voices or believe they are divinely-sanctioned, or possessed, by evil gods or spirits. The gm can use both positive & negative reinforcement to pattern pc killings into something serialized: +) gm can describe (in a group session) the pc getting an "unnerving aura" or horrible smell from some random street-walking npc, being a subtle code b/n gm and pc over who is a suitable victim to go after later; for the -), a pc might return from a successful kill, only to be wracked by bad dreams and a restless spirit, his patron god telling him over and over he has "failed" and his victim was "not worthy of the sacrifice", causing him to pray for augury and guidance in the future.

Systematizing Infamy:

-as was mentioned elsewhere in the post, if his methods are random and non-selective, he could realistically wrack up dozens of kills without attracting anything but "first response" attention. Most of the highest-body count serial killers in history have been accredited by their own confessions, not forensics, which is to say that in some cases 50%-80% of their victims were only uncovered because they admitted it once already charged with other, provable (&usually more recent) murders.

-it is also a common feature of serial killers that as time goes on, they seek open recognition for their atrocities, they get more bold, and they act with more abandon and avarice.

-this is the method of forensics I currently use in our detective/cthulian game, which focuses on hunting sk's and busting up weird cults:
a) any crime scene investigated by city watch is at least able to make search/perception checks for physical evidence, and make streetwise/gather info checks to find any witnesses to events over the last few hours. Shreds of clothing, bloody weapons, and scrawled notes are typically entered into evidence. People who saw or heard anything unusual are detained for questioning.

b) if the watch suspects murder or foul play, they will request the presence of a watch investigator, someone able to cast arc or div spells up to the 2nd sp level. These investigators can detect poison, reveal secret doors, determine alignments of witnesses and use zone of truth, command, and charms to ensure witnesses are giving credible accounts.

c) any serial killing or treason-level crime (slave-trading, worshiping outlawed gods, organizing a coup) is responded to by a watch detective, or if the crime is particularly heinous, a city magistrate. The detective is able to cast divinations of spell lv3-4, while the magistrates can employ spells of lv5-6+. Note that crimes committed on private property, such as noble estates or churches, are often responded to by powerful, in-house magic-users employing spells for their own private investigations. Usually these third parties cooperate with the city watch to accelerate justice, but they may also get embroiled in cover-ups trying to hide their own involvement.

-As long as pc's stay in the (a/b) categories, they can maintain an amount of anonymity & are really only at risk if they get caught at or near the scene. However, once they have a detective or magistrate on the case, they can be uncovered very quickly. Circumstances such as if pc left shreds of clothing behind, or took tokens or trophies from the victims, or if corpses are available for questioning, can quickly narrow down the identity of the perpetrator.

Escalating Risk:

-city watch should have a guardsman that takes interest in the case, for example from being the first person on the scene at the first known murder...he will collect as much material and witness evidence as possible, adding to any escalating investigations done by spellcasters in the future. This should be a type of person the pc would not normally seek out as a victim to kill as part of his ritual murders, but rather wants to kill for utilitarian reasons (he is coming too close). I would personally probably exercise the patron god's authority to prohibit this npc as a target in order to amp the tension.

-at least one powerful city magistrate should be thoroughly corrupt, openly known for belonging to a good-aligned church, but secretly praying to an outlawed god, using spells and charms to hide his double life. This magistrate may willingly overlook or hide key evidence in the course of the investigation, buying pc a bit of time or space (and likely dragging pc into a web of extortion and assassination).

-copycat killings. this is good for riling up the offending pc...have a faction of elite oligarchs start to execute and assassinate a few of their rivals, pinning the killings on the pc's serial killer alias. Wise detectives and the pc himself will know its not the killer's modus operandi, but the pc is lip-locked over revealing too much to discredit the interlopers.

-the party begins to hunt for the wanted serial killer themselves, whether wittingly or not. If the gm is continually mentioning this or that murder or killer-of-growing infamy, players are likely to think it is a hook they should follow up on. If they do not bite, they can be approached by a third party and hired as private investigators. If the other players at the table are truly unaware of what has been happening between sessions, the drd can lead them on a wild goose chase, or they can break the case & find out through their own investigations its been him all along. If they are amused, they may even begin to take part in the coverup (if not the crimes themselves).

-once the determination has been made that there is a serial killer at large in the city, and if they killings continue, the city lords hire an "outside investigator" to take lead on the case. This npc is a highly-specialized urban druid trained in tracking and employing a few very useful divination magic items to round out his capabilities. The drd wears a large collar at all times, and is an expert in taking dog-hound forms, which he uses to hunt by smell and endurance. In the weeks to come, the city will be filled with excitement over his arrival, and many citizens will take to buying hounds of their own to bounty-hunt and protect themselves from the killer at large. The drd npc will receive endless amounts of public adulation, but generally shun such contact since it interferes with his investigation. This npc will often seek out places of solitude in lonely parts of the city to get away from the crowds, at which times he is an easy target. However, he should be thoroughly more than the pc killer can handle solo.

Most of the exhaustion you seem to be experiencing is due to how these magic item resources are being controlled in your game, not their existence proper.

"I'm sick of PCs cutting open a dire wolf, extracting 3 potions and a wand, and selling them at the shop around the corner"

Not a comment by op, but if this is the type of thing you are trying to avoid, it has nothing to do with campaign world magic resources and everything to do with player access to them. I recognize the quote above is hyperbole, but at no place in any of my games would a dire wolf be broken down for anything but a few pelts and maybe a couple pints of blood, or some bones to carve some crude flutes from... and characters wandering back to town with hacked-up pelts & poorly-stored plasma would be laughed out of most shops, or low-balled like the amateurs they are.

And now by "shop" I assume you are referring to "magic shop" which from what I understand is apparently a standard in other peoples games. For real... cute... a magic shop... this would be the first place to get robbed, arson, infiltrated with enemy agents, blasted from the face of the earth...by ANY of the rival power factions in any of the games I run.
Next time your characters want to visit the magic shop, choose from one of the above ---
-robbed: have it get held up as they are in the middle of their pawning.
-arson: describe a pillar of smoke coming from town as they venture to sell their recently acquired magic, only to discover the shop was recently burned to the ground by unknown rivals.
-infiltrated: toss in a new shopkeeper that is an enemy spy, able to gain all sorts of info on pc movements by querying pcs and augury-reading their items.

It is one thing to have magic item fences, or a blacksmith weapons trader who keeps a secret stash of swords in his attic...but for ex in Kill Bill vol.1, Beatrice has to 1) travel to Japan, 2) endure a skill challenge full of diplomacy, bluff, sense, rinse, repeat, and then 3) Hatori Hanzo shows her some swords, telling her in no uncertain terms that he "no longer makes swords"...
-->She is only able to get a hh sword by one last diplo/intim where she scrawls "Bill" into the glass fog.
Sooo if, in a game, Beatrice would just be able to cash in the PussyWagon at a used horse dealer and walk around the block to the magic weapon shop to buy her short sword+4, so be it...the finales will suffer accordingly by this sort of story design.

Here are some things I have done to keep my players magic-item lite in our game...
-the villains all fight to win/live; this means they don't fail to run when reduced to dangerous levels, and when they do run and survive, they earn a bunch of xp for yet another near-death experience at the hands of the pc heroes. This keeps their equipment from being cycled into pc hands, and it keeps our game in exquisite dynamic tension besides.
-many items have insignias, etchings, brands, and standards that have been sworn to & consecrated for various nefarious and anti-aligned purposes: does anyone actually want to put on that armor chased with scenes of elves being mass-murdered by priests of EvilgodX? I once had a lv12 pc in our game march into a nearby field and destroy a keen smoking greataxe +3 "because he thought it was cursed"; it wasn't, but he was so convinced from the enemy wielding it that it was a cursed weapon, that he didn't even wait for the axe to be properly identified.

On another occasion, players found "belts" of giant-strength, but although they formally functioned as a belt-slot item, they were worn as dirty and uncomfortable scrotum wraps by the recently-defeated enemies; no pc could be bothered to go through the distasteful task of un-equipping the items from the enemy corpse let alone think about putting it on themselves; they buried the corpses w/ items still left on untouched. I don't blame them.

And finding a buyer wasn't always easy for their loot they did manage to extract from ruins here and there... sure a suit of armor might be worth 25,000gp, but does the merchant really have that much gold on hand? If so, does he really want to spend all his liquid assets on one such investment? (at the full market price, no less). These contingencies often have my pc's burying treasure, to try to liquidate later, or venturing to this-or-that large metropolis or church to try to bargain off. Occasionally, evil items were even ransomed back to the creating faction for info or hostages. In one of our last sessions, a +5 holy avenger sword was awarded to a lv9 npc tagging along in the party, because it was consecrated to the sun god he worshiped.

My players have griped along the way about the impoverished state their characters are often in: having been robbed of ALL their items numerous times from dying or capture, having their vaults looted by master thieves they foiled in the past, and having been price-gouged for resurrections by third-party foreign churches who know they are in a tight spot & just hit it rich...but these things move the game forward and the pcs are truly known for their character's abilities in deeds, not wealth, which is I think what you are trying to get the focus back on.

"he wants the world to believe otherwise through his books"

Ok the degree to which you want your friends to be complicit in your attempt to unilaterally take credit for their combined achievements pretty much dictates that you should never expect this issue/goal to be anything but a thorn in your & their sides.

There is no game-mechanic way to insure your success in this goal, outside of a near-endless string of time-stopping, lim.wishing, mem.modifying etc; it would be way way way more trouble than any fleeting sense of delusional accomplishment you might have at the table. It goes way beyond influencing the memories of the other party members you adv with --- every witness to a battle, every enemy lackey that snuck away mid-fight, every carrion-feeding animal who talks to druids, is a possible witness to countering your boasts about saving the day time and again.

If you really want to move forward with this idea, I would suggest focusing on the reader side of things, placing enchantments on the actual text/books to charm the reader and suggest you are the only real hero in these tales. The reader can still hear contradictory claims from other sources, but will believe, whether openly or not, that your book is the factual account.

There was a bit of talk about how to modify memory, etc...that is the least of your concerns...all it takes is one thought-reading magic-user to eavesdrop on YOUR own pc's mind, to stumble across his never-ending quest of stealing fame for this & that event. This is a far greater hazard to your undoing than any non-compliant adv companion could ever be.

I would expect this to play out with mixed amounts of indulgence & comedic self-effacement, mostly failing and worsening the characters reputation far more often than working in your favor...especially early on, as such attempts would be so easy to disproof, forensically-verify, witness otherwise, etc as to be basically trying to hit way way above your weight class.

In the end, you might end up with a clever repertoire of charm,suggest, blind, deaf, mod.mem, lim.wish to infinity, or say an artifact-level book or unleashed mass-curse of literature which always makes you the focus and protagonist of any tale, somehow achieving an ultimate success in your deception...Who would want to sit at the table for 18+levels of this is beyond me, but most things can be fun when given the right dynamics.

As a gm, it is easy to make such unilateral aims of a solitary player turn in upon themselves, and skip the "prevention" technique in favor of the "acceleration" method... rather than mince about optimizing spell lists and house rules, just move along to forming plots and stories which in fact do put the emphasis of success or failure squarely on that pc's actions in one pressure-filled moment; provide story arcs which make the pc's claim to fame a source of great hostility for another group of rivals, who single him out for plots of ruination and assassination (while underestimating or even ignoring his adv companions)...Constantly put him in conditions where he must "recreate" past exploits (which he never did in the first place), with scores of onlookers or witnesses to complicate the moment.

I didn't read pgs 5-8 of this thread, so if some of these points I make were covered there, my apologies...

-The Pal code allows for cooperation with unsavory elements & "unusual alliances", usually tempered by "periodic atonement spells" (p.64), ending the alliance immediately if they feel the party is doing more harm than good. In such a party, the Pal could for example request that the Nec participate in the atonement process with him. This provides among other things an interesting potential for roleplaying a "save his soul"/convert dynamic b/n the Pal & Nec; it doesn't have to be successful, and even without any rp -- on tactics alone -- the Pal & Nec have just as much chance of developing a respect and reliance on one another, as they do of developing an enmity. They might be the tightest pairing in the party if the players can balance the delicacies b/n their characters in a way that maintains a cooperative spirit. It puts the 'burden of proof' more on the Nec to act accordingly in-party, but that is nothing special...a party built around a LG ethics vs one built around some ambiguous evil morality...well take your pick.

Honestly if you want to sit down at the table and put your efforts into deceiving your fellow party-members, either a) become a game master (thats what i did), or b) talk to your gm about getting a hefty mind-control/possession arc going for a few sessions so you can make your character into a secret villain for a bit while still advancing the game.

The Pal code is just as problematic when juxtaposed to, for example, loose-ethics Rogues who have made a career out of honing their skills at theft, backstabbing, and deceiving others. A paladin will be just as hard-pressed to stand idly by as the rog uses lies and dirty tricks to deceive the city watch, pick his pocket for the gate-key, etc to advance party goals, as he might be by standing around watching a magic-user animate the corpses of a few well-known murderers and rapists who just died by his sword. Context plays big here. Which scene is the paladin supposed to act more fervent in, respecting the legitimate authority of a living, breathing city watchman trying to maintain law and order, or respecting the ambiguous burial rights of a blasphemous & evil career criminal who he just went off on with the sharp side of his sword?
Now in either case, if the Nec or the Rog are constantly throwing their transgressions in the Pal's face, pushing his buttons, taking provocative & unilateral actions that don't respect the party goals...in either case the person just sucks at teamwork, regardless of class. They should be thankful to have friends like you to put up with them, honestly.

To make it work, you have to use your class delicately & with smarts & innovation. Way way way too many people responded in this thread by just leaping at one polarity or the other, Nec vs Pal (not surprising, but I pity their games honestly). The default response was either get rid of one or the other... & the thread from there seemed to tangent off into how leet this or that Nec was.

A good game world is the same as a good life... to have satisfaction in both, you start with getting some food in your belly and a safe place to sleep (stats & starting locale), then you get a personal identity (race&class), basic material wealth (starting gear) and some social companionship (the party)...and then you run out and get a bunch of wealth and power(adventuring!) right? Haha. After the wealth and power, there will still be a huge void in your game (like your life), if you don't maintain authentic social relations and are honestly able to recognize yourself as a valid contributor to your society, while staying true to yourself.
This holds true just as much for a paladin king lording over fields of gold and green as it does for a necromancer holding court for his subservient lich & vampire lords. And when players make characters, they should try to keep this in mind: the paladin king is likely going to be surrounded by loyal friends and loving family, while the Necromancer Lord is likely committing to a round-the-clock schedule of scrying on his underlings and rooting out traitors in his court, able to find satisfaction only through a "life" of lonely paranoia and eternal scheming.
And in this current example, any good gm can still challenge players & their expectations or the status quo, whether they are engaging in positive roles like Pal or negative degen rp like VampNecs(haha sry)..
each can still be flipped on its head: a Pal who has had a perfect life can have it stripped from him, his family murdered/assassinated, his country besieged, his people turned against him by lies and deceit...everything stripped from him in exponential impact until he is left hated and wandering alone...perhaps the character's final fate is to be piloted by the player to his final doom, seeking out a lonely death in the Lichlands of the Necromancer King?
Or the Nec, having made a long career out of murdering, poisoning, out-witting, and out-powering his rivals and enemies, is now a powerful king in his own right, lording with fear and might over a society of ghouls, ghouls, liches and vampires... an effective gm can spin this achievement on its head by for example inserting a few vamps or young liches who are too perfect, too loyal, too dedicated to the Nec pc, in a way that the pc will come to truly (ingame&metagame) enjoy the companionship of... so when that npc is stripped from them, the loss will be palpable; say: abducted by a rival & ransomed in a race vs time er their complete destruction, or: slain by the recently maddened-king who wandered onto the Nec's land in a last-act suicide march, the victim of the Nec's master-plotting to bring his kingdom low, type thing.

Conceptualizing this partnering without the polarization, you could easily have two high-level characters, one a Pal, the other a Nec, who have been lifelong friends and occasional enemies, most often adventuring companions, with a history of feuds and incredible accomplishments shared between them,... one lives in a remote valley surrounded by silent and servant undead, cloistered away with long-laid plans to achieve undead & a measure of immortality his or herself... the other lives as a sort of guerrilla robin-hood, fighting from the wilds with a band of rebels against the lording tyrant who deposed the Pal from his throne at the height of his power, and now holding sway over a slave-based society which is composed of the Pal's former friends and citizens.
Perhaps this campaign's epic-ending arc could be the Pal & Nec teaming up for one last great crusade against the ruling tyrant, to free the populace by means of a great undead army supported by the king's rebels from the trees and hills...one last transgression for the Paladin to atone for, and by this time, his Nec friend would probably take part in the ceremony with pride and grace (then withdraw for his final descent into lichdom, having obtained a much-needed component item in the final assault on the tyrant's tower)...the reason why I talk this way is because the above-mentioned late-game arc is something that no player would plan for themselves...it requires having a few players, both committed to their characters, and willing to work together, even use the dynamic to occasionally be foes to one another, but to work with the gm to reach a resolution that moves the game forward, while the gm is (must be) able to give them a storyline which appeals to their original conception of character design & takes it to something bigger than they expected/imagined, and that they can embrace as a team (gm included).