I'm running a game with two players and contemplating pulling a deus ex machina to get them where they're trying to go. The object of this exercise is, ideally, that they not suspect I have helped them out. Or if they do suspect, that it doesn't seem too overt. This may or may not be possible, but I thought I would seek advice on this and see what we come up with.
Here's the situation:
- Character 1: Human Rogue level 6. Fights with 2 weapons. "Treasure hunter." Gets clobbered by will-based attacks.
- Character 2: Human Fighter level 6. Not even sure what his feats are.
- The characters are in a forest searching for a lost elven city.
- The elves went "off the grid," so to speak, 500 years ago, to the point that the existence of the city is regarded as little more than legend.
- The characters were following a map.
- The forest is home to fey. In my setting, fey includes elves.
- The fey have all been affected by a non-fatal disease ("fey fire") that makes them sadistic, cruel, and averse to sunlight. This is my take on dark elves, btw...no actual racial drow.
- Some other magical creatures such as unicorns and centaurs are also affected, and suffer horrific physical transformations as well.
- As to the existence of the disease and what's going on, the PCs are just starting to clue into it.
- In terms of the organization of the various fey: think roving gangs and warlords.
- Three affected dryads subdued the characters (using Sleep) during a protracted battle, took them to their lair, and had their way with their slumbering forms for at least one night (I haven't specified to the players how long they were out).
- The PCs awoke to find themselves bound, low on hp, and bearing many cuts. The dryads were outside their tree arguing with some elves, so the characters retrieved their stuff, grabbed some goodies, and escaped out a secret back door.
- Up until that time, they had a ranger NPC helping them find their way around (he was also captured by the dryads), but he was eaten during the next encounter*.
- They are now lost in the forest without their ranger.
Healing can be achieved via the sap of a relatively rare tree that is indigenous to the forest.
- They were still about 30 miles from the city, according to the map.
- Their horses are gone.
- They do not have much in the way of magic items (ring of protection +2 - with a personality - on one, magic armor on the other, a wand of they-know-not-what, some magic swords...nothing earth-shattering. The place they're going to is rich with magic items, but we started these characters out at lvl 5 and assumed low magic.
- The destination city is actually comprised of a gigantic, slumbering, multi-trunk treant, 600' tall, with roots surfacing as "knees" (like with cypress trees) up to half a mile away that serve as guard towers. All stonework within the perimeter has come to ruin.
- The forest has a healthy treant population, children of the great one.
I gave them multiple hints prior to the expedition that the forest is a dangerous place and that maybe they should pick up some henchmen or otherwise pull in some NPCs to fill in the missing pieces, but no, they braved it alone. I threw the ranger in as a random encounter (he really was on my random encounters table, and the dice do not lie), and he got them pretty far without getting lost (but I did roll a cool personality trait for him from the DMG: he offered horrifying solutions to simple problems, which played out nicely...thank you, DMG!), but now he's being digested. The PCs have taken several beatings and the hubris is gone, and after three sessions of (mostly) random forest encounters, we're all anxious to make it to the city...where things get really dangerous, unfortunately.
Oh hey, before everyone attacks me for being too hard on the players, please bear in mind I'm a relative noob when it comes to D20/D&D 3e+/Pathfinder, having played 1e most of my life starting in '79. I did not take the CR levels seriously enough when creating my encounters tables. My bad, but I now know that CR5 is quite challenging for only two 5th level characters. Lesson learned.
Also, this whole campaign is a sandbox. They have the option to leave the forest at any time, but of course, easier said than done. They're closer to the elven city than they are their home city, though they don't know that. They have not indicated that they want to retreat, so for the purposes of this exercise, let's assume they still want to go to the city.
* The ranger-killing encounter came at the end of the last session. The players were each 40xp away from leveling up. They asked for one more encounter. I rolled up dinosaurs (the velociraptor variety). The dice said 7 of them. I figured the dice lied (I know) and changed the quantity to 3. The ranger suffered 24 hp damage as part of a pounce where I rolled four 18's to hit in a row. Ironically, he was already sitting on 18 wounds. The PCs decided that a small sacrifice to the petty god of the number 18 might be in order.
Maybe they could hear a mounted patrol of elves coming? They could hide off the trail, and when the elves go by on horses (maybe they have THEIR horses, too?), they would leave a trail easy enough for anyone to follow.
If either of them speaks elvish, they might hear them talking about going to the city. If not, they'd probably like to get their mounts back, anyway. Just a thought.
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OK, well now is probably a good time to think about what skills the players do have. Survival is obviously not their strong suit but something else might be. If they have a lot of ranks in Intimidate you could toss a weak encounter at them which would yield a prisoner that could be made to show them the way.
Does the Fighter have a strong climb score? Give him a tree to climb that would reveal the city in the distance. You might give him a hint that that is possible by having an elf or something up there already. Have a compass or something drop on one of their heads as they pass under the tree. They see the elf above them and you say the tree looks easy to climb. Fighter climbs up, pummels the mook, sees the city.
Basically figure out what kind of problem they can solve and then give them the tools to solve it.
On another note, I'm currently playing a 2-player campaign. To deal with our small party we were given a 30 point buy and gestalt characters. We're super powerful individually but with only the two of us action economy is against us. We usually manage encounters meant for a larger party, though. Adding an extra class to each of your players might be out of the question at this point or it might be something that you can add by letting them find some artifact in the city that gives them access to ancestral memories (their or elves) or something. But it is important to remember that if two super powerful PCs are barely surviving, your PC's are going to need lower CR encounters.
Good luck!
Assuming the players remain "anxious" to get to the city, I'd give them the rope with which to hang themselves :)
You've had three sessions of establishing the forest as a dangerous place. From the point of view of pacing the adventure now would be a good time to give them an opportunity to advance the story by making some headway towards their goal.
IMO offering a way for the players to use their ingenuity and their characters' skills to achieve a result isn't deus ex machina. Handing it to them on a plate would be.
To add to the previous suggestions, my take would be to discover an overgrown and long disused elven road. One way leads to the city, the other out of the forest. The problem is that it is under the control of one of the fey factions/gangs. Although not necessarily hostile, they won't be letting anyone use their road in either direction unless they pay a toll (or do a favour).
Let us know whatever
Baldy
Why?...
If you push them to this city, and if they aren't really ready for it, then what?
Why not let the dice fall as they may for the most part?
...
is the city a reasonable place for them to be trying to do in their current situation? You seem to be saying its not, but you want to push them there anyway. What gives?
-James
I'm torn, James. Your thoughts happen to match what mine would be if someone else was posting this scenario. The players got themselves into this mess (sort of...see below), and perhaps now it's time to just see how it plays it out.
From what I've learned about the CR system, and from what I have in mind conceptually for this city, I think it is fraught with peril for them when they arrive, if they're not extremely careful. They haven't been "extremely careful" so far, but to some extent that's in line with the personalities of the characters they're playing. With that in mind, I don't really want to "push" them to the city, but if they're hell-bent on going there anyways, well, I'd rather them hurry up and get there already. There does not seem to be an appetite among them for three more sessions of being lost in the woods.
As for whether it's their fault or mine that they're in this mess, it's actually a little bit of both. This is my first time playing with these guys. We thought we were going to have between two and three additional players, right up to the last minute, so I planned accordingly. Meanwhile, the whole concept of this lost city and the treasures it contains is right up the "treasure hunter" rogue's alley, so when I prepared adventure seed rumors for the campaign, the lost city figured prominently among them, and I even prepared a map. So yeah, I put out a vibe about this place. But like I said in my first post, I kept hinting about picking up some NPCs to go along. I was thinking 1e style play (you know, like how you take a dozen wannabes with you into the Tomb of Horrors and they take the full brunt of all the traps until morale fails and they bail on you), but these guys are from a different generation and they just blew into the woods alone. I also told them that the lost city adventure was really planned with a more powerful party in mind and is, in fact, probably big enough that the characters could spend and entire campaign around it, but I don't think that info weighed heavily in their preparations. And so here we are.
Benicio and Yuengling: thanks for the ideas.
Keep 'em coming!
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Templates are fun.
Give them a side-quest (stumble across a ruin, yadda, yadda) in which they can be rewarded with the half-celestial template.
Now that they can fly they'll find the Elven city with ease, and the power boost will help to keep them alive.
Not a solution that will fit all games but worth considering.
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Honestly I don't think I would push them to the city yet.
In fact what I might do is offer up a side trek, something seemingly random that pulls them along for more than just a single encounter. Tie it in some how to the main story. Maybe after a few levels they encounter something that might tie back to that side trek. Or just let it be entirely unrelated.
The idea is to get them some more power and prepare them for the challenges to come.
You might let this side trek do some foreshadowing of the city in some way.
Sit and listen to what they try and make one of them work. If they climb a tree, they see the giant 600 year old treant in the distance, sticking out over the top of the rest of the tree line. You could encourage this by saying they can't see which way the sun is rising in the morning through the trees, so they can't tell which way is east. They don't know that this giant tree is the city they seek, but it is something they will likely go towards.
Likewise, if they start searching for old paths, then they can find some old trail markers. They can follow these trails in the general dirrection of the city.
If the players want to find some kind of friendly denizen and make them tell them, that is annother option.
But generally, make the players come up with an idea, and you find a way to make their cool idea work. This makes it feel like you are rewarding their creativity, instead of it feeling like a Deus Ex Machina, but the end result on plot is the same. Start the session off by reminding them that they are lost in these unfriendly woods and asking them what they want to do. Don't throw anything at them until they come up with an idea.
Thanks, everyone, for the great suggestions. I like a combination of several of them: climbing a tree and seeing the great tree in the distance; finding the remains of an old road, giving them an option to proceed or not, and some excitement along the way; a side adventure based on their choices that gives them a chance to level up even as they learn some more background about the setting. Either way, they have to drive it.
I'm not sure exactly how I'll proceed, but it looks like I have a few weeks to reflect and prepare.
Thanks again!