| Hypo |
Hello, everyone. I am currently running a Rise of Runelords campaign for my home group with a conversion to 2e rules. The company is nearing finals at this point, with the group on its way to Xin-Shalast.
Like probably many GMs before me, I've run into a bit of a problem motivating my players in the final parts. While they were responding to immediate threats in the first half of the adventure, luring them into the runeforge wasn't so easy because they didn't understand why they had to rush there, and why it couldn't wait a month or two. In the end, they got tempted by the hopes for the riches and magical items of the place more than by the urgency to stop the Karzoug. So as GM I needed a way to show that time counts in weeks, and that Karzoug's awakening would be disastrous for Varisia, not just because it's an evil old man, but because that awakening would be accompanied by calamity.
I thought of this way of giving the right hint. One of my players was a monk with the cleric archetype. He worshipped Desna, and I spent the entire game giving him hints about the goddess' special favor with him: prophetic dreams, ghostly butterflies in his room when he wakes up, and so on. So I thought, why not give him a chance to visit the Dreamland itself, and there encounter the denizens of Leng, giving hints about what happens when the runelord awakens?
So, first his dreams became more conscious so that he could "act" there. He met special guides from Desna who took him to a settlement of "dreamers" where he met some of the characters from Sandpoint, such as Risa Magravi. And some of the locals told him of the dangers that some distant lands in the Dreamlands have been exposed to, that the slave traders from Leng have become especially active and numerous, and that some say as if the sky near Leng sometimes changes color. The player was intrigued, as was the entire party. So they found a way through a ritual to get to the Dreamland, which required some interactions with Risa Magravi, Niska Mvashti and a few others.
So between book 5 and 6, I added an interlude on exploring the Dreamland. Based on "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" I made a map of the countries in Dreamland and took them on a journey to the Dylath-Leen analog where they tried to find information about what was going on. They stumbled upon the denizens of Leng, and through a series of hostile encounters, investigations, and social interactions, found out that Leng is working on some mega-project related to "some archmage of a dull world from the distant past" that requires a lot of slaves, but the benefits to Leng are incredibly promising.
I've dropped hints that the denizens of Leng have their own interest in the project, different from Karzug's. They even suspected the characters of being Karzug spies when they found out they were from the real world and knew him. Also, I introduced some Leng-related NPCs that I planned to reintroduce into the game in Part 6. About the implications of the project, I only gave hints along the lines of "the dull world will tremble". Finally, the characters figured out that the mega-project was nearing completion and could be finished within a few decades at most.
However, when the characters return, they find out that time in Dreamland goes much faster than in the material world: hours equal many days. And "a few decades in dreams" equals a few weeks in reality. And so they were highly motivated to immediately start searching for Xin-Shalast.
The only place I almost messed up here: some of the players wanted to solve the problem of Karzoug's return through Dreamland rather than the real world. But they were thankfully in the minority.
All this took only one gaming session.