The Iron Wardens in 'Dusk' - DM's Perspective

So I recently ran an adventure for the Iron Wardens, and I wanted to get a few thoughts about it down while it's still relatively fresh in my mind. The advenure I ran for them was "Dusk", written by Mike Krahulik of Penny-Arcade fame. (Mike, if you ever see this, and you want me to take the Dusk PDF off of kage23.com, just let me know; I wanted to link to it on penny-arcade.com, but couldn't find it anymore.) Anyway, my first, and overwhelming, thought/response to our session Sunday night is that it was totally awesome. It had been a long time since I had played D&D, and I hope the next time comes sooner. ;)

The adventure itself was quite entertaining. At least, I thought so, and my players seemed to be having a good time. ;) It's a take on Twilight. A traveling crew of actors and stagehands is in town to perform the play "Dusk", and the Iron Wardens must investigate what happened to the missing daughter of the owner of the town's bakery. As it turns out [SPOILERS AHEAD!], the stagecrew are vampires, and they stole the daughter. In the process of discovering this, the IWs talk to the family of actors, each of whom is a colorful character of varying sorts. It was interesting and a bit different for me as a DM to have to actually roleplay various NPCs with differing motivations, that don't necessarily want to help the PCs out. But the characters were all pretty much melodramatic caricatures anyway, so they were pretty easy to roleplay, and I think I did an alright job.

As with any good D&D game, however, things didn't really go to plan. The main difference between the adventure as written and our game was that I combined the second and third encounters into one. Or, more accurately, I dragged (most of) the monsters from the third encounter into the second. The second encounter happens when the players confront the stage manager. He casts a spell on the fangirls in the audience, who proceed to attack the players. According to the "script", as the players fight these "monsters" into which the daughters of the townsfolk have been (probably temporarily) transformed, the stage crew packs up all their shit and gets out of there on their wagons. The players finish the encounter just in time to see the stage crew leaving on their wagons, so the players steal one of the remaining wagons to give chase. They have an intense wagon-to-wagon fight while careening down the road. (I might adapt this idea for some later adventure some time, since we didn't do it in our game.) But the Iron Wardens are upstanding citizens of Fallcrest. They were not going to hurt the fangirls if they could possibly avoid it. They quickly determined that the girls were, in fact, still human, under a spell, and not actually vampires or other undead creatures themselves. As such, they speculated that, if they were to kill the creature that put them under that spell, perhaps they'd come out of it. This sounded reasonable to me, and I knew that if the stage manager tried to go pack up the wagons while the Iron Wardens fought the fangirls, that just wouldn't work. The Wardens wouldn't stand for that. They would defend themselves against the fangirls as best as they could without attacking them, and they would chase after the stage manager until they caught and killed him. So, I just brought him into the encounter, along with a few bats from the final encounter as well. The final encounter also has a few other vampires, and I wasn't sure if I should bring them in or not, so initially, I didn't. Actually, I rolled their initiative at the start of combat along with all my other creatures. My initial plan was to bring them in on the 2nd or 3rd round of combat, but I ended up not doing that. I decided that they had to come in at some point, however; after all, there's a whole stage crew's worth of vampires here. They're not just going to stand around as their leader is killed. They didn't join the fight until right after the stage manager was killed, though. Luckily for the Iron Wardens, it's a small stage crew. ;) I think I only brought two in, whereas the third encounter had three. WIth them, and with the bats, I figured it wasn't fair to bring two full encounters' worth of monsters into one encounter, if I wasn't going to let the players recharge their powers or take a short rest or anything in between, so I left a few of them out.

The whole thing makes me wonder, though ... What would have been the repercussions if they had fought the fangirls? Would the townsfolk understand that the girls were under a spell, or would they think the Iron Wardens just went crazy and had a murderous rampage? Even if they did understand that the girls were under a spell, would they approve of fighting them, hurting and probably killing them, even in the sake of self-defense? Or would the townsfolk have believed there would have to have been another way? Or would I, the DM, have let the players kill the fangirls in the first place? Maybe hitting one of the "monsters" just once would have broken the spell, causing the girl to run away, crying, in pain, actually injured, but not badly and not permanently, making it a really easy fight for the Wardens. I don't know. As it went in our game, as soon as the stage manager was destroyed, the enthralled girls passed out, unconscious but unhurt. Although it just now occurs to me as I write this that we don't necessarily know what happened to those girls afterward. We wrapped up the story, but only to the point of that night in the game-world, not days or weeks later. For all we know, those girls are all still in a coma months later. ;) That's probably something I should address in the follow-up email I told the Wardens I might write. ;)

The other thing I wanted to talk about was earlier in the adventure, when the players are investigating the wagons. They, of course, went straight to the crew wagon, the one that is magically sealed. One of the dwarves believed he could pick even a magic lock, but this one was beyond his ken. Of course, in meta-gaming actuality, it was basically a plot door. They simply weren't going to be able to get into this wagon until it was time. Of course, this was the first of the six wagons that they checked out, and if they had opened the door at that point, or if they had disassembled the wagon, as the dwarves attempted, to no avail, it would have been, you found the girl, there are a bunch of vampires, it's daytime, so they die as soon as you open their coffin lid and the sunlight gets in, so game over, we didn't even have any combat encounters. I think there was also talk of burning this wagon down, and I have to say, I don't think the Iron Wardens would have been too happy with the result, had they done that. ;) The way I was conceiving of the vampires, during the daytime, when they're asleep, they're dead asleep. I'm not sure there's anything that could wake them before sundown. Burning down the place they're sleeping certainly wouldn't do it. If the Wardens had torched the wagon, they would have found several charred, but empty, coffins (because the bodies disintegrate as soon as they are destroyed in the fire), and a charred, unidentifiable body that might have belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl. Oh, and the gold coins and the gems. Those probably wouldn't have been destroyed in the fire. ;) The dwarves did almost tip the wagon, though, but they were interrupted when they had to go save the elves from a pack of wolves in the forest. ;) Not that tipping the wagon would have had any effect, either, though, really. It wouldn't have woken the vampires, and the girl they were trying to rescue was unconscious, so it wouldn't have woken her, either.

But all in all, it was a great game, even (or especially) if it did stretch my DMing a bit. One should never expect a game to go as planned, so it's good to get practice in adapting on the fly. ;) And, when you're railroading your players and not letting them open plot-doors, hopefully making it seem not too extremely railroady in-game. ;)