| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
About to run the Graul Farm encounter for my group. I ran this a few years ago for a different group and had a blast with it but I'd like some help with ideas of how to make this a very memorable and horrifying encounter.
I'm going to make a few changes here and there that I did before or that I've picked up off the boards like making Mammy a Gravewalker Witch and switching some of the weaponry out to give it more of a hillbilly horror farm feel like giving Crowfood a scythe instead, and possibly arming some of the other ogrekin with weapons designed for capturing and/or torturing like nets and mancatchers and such.
I also plan on wrapping the porch around the eastern side of the house and switching the rooms, kitchen A4, and Playpen A5, so that it will be more difficult for the group to bypass such a fun trap on the porch by just going in the "back door" that is oddly located right by the front door. I'll probably throw in some fly swarms especially in places like the kitchen to go along with the Fortitude save stink to actually mechanically disorient the party and to get a better feel of how disgusting the place really is. Any other fun ideas, mechanically or flavor wise to throw in? Has anyone tried throwing in some pit traps or such out in the fields for Rukus or Crowfood to attempt to chase or lure people into?
My party consists of:
Human Rogue 8 (Formerly a half elf, but is now a clone of the Runelord Sorcha-Thanks Shattered Star!)
Tiefling Witch 8
Half Elf Fighter 8
Dwarf Fighter 8
Half Elf Ranger 8 and wolf animal companion
GM PC Half Elf Cleric of Erastil 8 and firepelt animal companion.
NPC Elf Ranger Shaelelu Andosana
The party is about to encounter Rukus for the first time on the road.
I was just reading over that encounter last night.
I think the odd bear trap in the woods as they approach (especially if they try to go through the woods and circle around the place).
A couple of chained-up goblin alchemists (with some sort of awful spiked face cages) in the basement with Hucker.
There has to be big long chains of "sausage" that the prisoners refer to with horror.
A girl child Graul hiding out in the tool shed. I know there's no tool shed, but heck, there's gotta be a tool shed full of disturbing but effective tools. Muck Graul was gonna supposed to throw her down in the pit with the rest of the girls, but he wanted to hear more screams like the nymph. He stashed her in the shed but completed his transformation before he could get to his work. Animalistic starving little girl jumping on someone trying to eat their face...
Yeah I had thought about bear traps after I posted this. You've got some great ideas there for sure. Thanks!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Have one of the Graul boys lurk just out of sight in the cornfield. Place something near there that would make the party investigate. Give him Spring Attack, Grab, and rogue levels.
When the party investigates, he jumps out of the cornfield, grabs a PC, and drags the PC back into the cornfield. The rest of the PCs then have to go through the cornfield-- which I treated as the same as a fog bank for vision.
Think Children of the Corn...
Thanks guys these are great ideas. I definitely want to keep Mammy more mobile or I think she'll go down pretty quickly. Cook people is fun and also gives me a reason to flip over a cauldron full "Conan the Barbarian soup" which is cool.
The cornfield idea is something I really wanted to pull off and your fog bank idea is just the thing I was trying to figure out.
I think I'm going to change Rukus from a fighter to a beastmaster/trapper ranger making the Graul hounds actual animal companions and throwing in some ranger traps outside. Having Crowfood stealth around and snagging people into the fields will be a blast.
I've debated having Hucker or possibly adding a brother just like him sneaking through the house and popping out of secret doors and maybe pulling people back into crawl spaces or something maybe using the Brawler(strangler) class.
I've also been kicking around the idea of making one of the boys in the barn an alchemist throwing "white lightning" bombs from the moonshine still but then that also could be messy when all the webs catch fire...
I'll probably be throwing in some tetanus saves on jagged metal items and other nasty things here and there like broken glass and such. A scary looking tool shed might be just the place to do that.
I don't want to get too carried away with ogre spider venom laced weapons and traps but I will probably sprinkle some more of that in as well.
My group was freaked out enough by the Grauls without needing extra bits. But I will admit I wish this thread existed half a year ago! ^^
That said, they did have a use for the still. They dosed the house and set it on fire. (One character was considering using the still either to poison the ogres in Fort Rannick with or to somehow convert the still to a rocket that he'd launch into the fort. I convinced him it wouldn't work.)
|
My group cast a couple wall of fires in Mammy's room to trap her and lit the whole house on fire. They almost lost people trying to escape the horribly built burning house....
I like the "raise dead" idea, make her have some zombies around her that were humans from the surrounding area and describe their appearance to show how they were tortured before they died....you can get as graphic as your group allows....from them being skinned (with the skin hanging on the wall behind where they are stationed) to eyelids being removed or whatnot....you can get a bit gross if your group is OK with it....
I made the interior of the barn a horror show, which would have gotten an NC-17 rating. Hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks were the corpses of four Black Arrows, gutted like deer carcasses. A bucket of half-congealed blood was below each corpse.
In the center of the barn, the Graul boys had tied the captured Kaven to a sawhorse, stripped him naked, and four of them were doing unspeakable things to him.
Play up the obsessive compulsive nature, they should find dozens of...
1. something horrible, like gruesomely dissected squirrels (or worse)
2. something mundane like a precarious wall of coffee mugs along a wall of a room that fall down with a clatter.
3. something disturbing, like a whole bunch of tally marks scratched on the on a wall somewhere, with a bunch of fresh marks, the first couple fresh marks have some blood stains.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
In all seriousness, I'd recommend watching the original versions of both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes as inspiration before running Hook Mountain Massacre.
I have a few weeks to prepare so I hope it's going to be epic with all of these suggestions. I fully intend to watch both of those movies again for sure.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd also suggest: House of 1000 Corpses and for a slightly more comedic take on it, Motel Hell.
This was 3 1/2 years ago, but here's what I did with the Grauls back in the CoT/KM mashup campaign we did back then.
Anybody has access to the original version, Nick handed in back in those days?
I know he had posted some stuff which was cut on his(?) website but I just read it and never saved it as a file and the site has long been taken down *stupidme*
Ruyan.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Did you check using the Wayback machine?
what he needs is a Delorean, and maybe a mad scientist (if he isn't one himself:)
No, I mean the Internet Wayback Machine website. http://archive.org/web/web.php
D'oh!
So it's been a couple of years but I'm finally getting to run this again. I didn't get this going last time because we unfortunately had to take a break but it's time for full on Graulfulness to happen.
One idea I had to build on the tally mark idea that Lorax mentioned is to have written in blood on the wall in the kitchen "Look" with an arrow pointed down to a bucket in the floor...upon inspection it is discovered that the bucket contains eyeballs of several Black Arrows and unfortunate critters and passerbys.
I had quite a bit of fun with it - my players still get twinges of discomfort at the mention of Mammy - one player admitted to a nightmare.
The 3 out by the barn I bumped up to Fighter 4s (and added a few dogs)
The 2 young at inside I made be fighter 2s moved them into Mammy's room.
The little girl at the shed was a barbarian 1
I liked the Ruckus posted above and used that.
I made Hucker a rogue/bloodrager.
Crowfood I used version I saw in the forums with Improved Drag - pulling people into traps.
Mammy I bumped to wizard 9 and re-selected her spells - Stoneskin/Vampiric Shadow Shield/Displacement made her pretty tough.
I also added a rack full of jars of Pickled Punks.
Mammy picked one of the PCs and "took a shine to him" and was making more than suggestive commentary throughout the fight.
It was pretty Graulful. Hope you have as much fun as I did with it.