{"id":4553,"date":"2018-12-01T07:04:36","date_gmt":"2018-12-01T12:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4553"},"modified":"2018-11-20T11:05:41","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T16:05:41","slug":"5e-worlds-end-masque-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4553","title":{"rendered":"(5e) World’s End Masque & Ball"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Luke Pullen
\nBlack Lamp Games
\n5e
\nLevel 1 pregens<\/p>\n

Some say the world is ending. At the muddy end of a fruitless harvest, famine and plague stalk the land. The armies of darkness gather on the horizon. And tonight is the night of a lunar eclipse, the time when the astrologers predict a world-devouring evil will be born. For one group of decadent aristocrats, there is clearly only one possible course of action: lock themselves inside a castle, throw a masquerade, get loaded, and dabble in black magic. For a group of desperate adventurers, the masquerade is a chance to set things right. But on a night like this, they may get more than they bargained for\u2026<\/p>\n

This is a twenty page one-shot social adventure set during a masquerade ball. While it uses 5e, it could easily be adapted to just about any setting or ruleset. It needs just one more good PUSH to get it out of the mediocrity gate and in to the Good category. <\/p>\n

This is more of an outline of an adventure \u2026 which works quite well for a kind of open-ended social setting. You get a one-page summary list of about twenty NPC\u2019s, with a quirk, a goal, and an opening line of dialog to set the scene. You get a one page map of the castle with about twenty rooms and just over a page of description for those twenty rooms. You get a short timeline, of four hours, with what happens at each of those four hourly marks. And then you get some pregens, each of which has a goal to accomplish. This is all presented in a pretty compact way.<\/p>\n

Thus the adventure is very open ended. It\u2019s the DM responding to the party members as they attempt to achieve their characters goals, while using the NPC and castle map resources, as well as the events, to spice up the adventure and respond. <\/p>\n

The NPC resources provided are pretty good. FOr example, a guy in a goat mask has the opening line \u201cWhy, aren\u2019t you pretty?\u201d, who\u2019s named Kazimir, is a courtier, and wants to climb the social\/power ladder. It\u2019s a terse set of qualities that you can use together riff off of to provide the flavor you need. <\/p>\n

Likewise the room descriptions. Room six is a \u201cBoudoir\u201d with a two bullet point description: \u201cWomen’s\u2019 rooms. Baroness Koranye and Marchioness Ungern drink wine and chat quietly while looking out the window. They have much to say. Intruders are welcomed.\u201d -and, as a kind of dialog- \u201cI had the strangest dream. There was this egg\u2014this great egg, cold and white like marble, at the bottom of the black lake. And then it was here. Really here! I touched it\u2014it was cold. So cold. The egg can touch you back\u2014did you know that?\u201d It has something going on that the party can interact with. It deals with the \u201cintruders\u201d aspect, and it has a little bit of dialog to give the DM the flavor of the encounter\/conversation \u2026 that\u2019s also relevant to the various party member goals.<\/p>\n

It does have me questioning, though, some of the decisions made. First, the party doesn\u2019t know each other. I\u2019ve seen this be disastrous in many a con game, from time wasting, and bored players waiting their turn to conflict. (Intra-party conflict is a big nono in Bryce games. It\u2019s one of my most important table rules: you need to work together.) <\/p>\n

The pregens are also a little lacking in the motivation department. \u201cFind your lover and get them out alive.\u201d is one of them. I feel like there was something missing about \u201ctell the DM who your lover is and how they went missing\u201d, either as explicit instructions for the DM\/player or as an embedded backstory for that PC. Most of the party is like that. A couple more words would have solved that.<\/p>\n

Weather it works or not, as an adventure, I don\u2019t know. A lot depends on the DM. A lot ALWAYS depends on the DM, in every adventure. This is so true that I explicitly ignore it in my adventures, concentrating on \u201chelping the DM run it.\u201d I FEEL like there\u2019s just a little bit more missing from it. A little more in the way of events, conversation, NPC\u2019s based around the party motivations. As is it feels a little TOO open ended.<\/p>\n

This is free on DriveThru. The preview is four pages and shows you nothing at all of the adventure. Then again, it\u2019s free.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/257611\/Worlds-End-Masque–Ball?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Luke Pullen Black Lamp Games 5e Level 1 pregens Some say the world is ending. At the muddy end of a fruitless harvest, famine and plague stalk the land. The armies of darkness gather on the horizon. And tonight … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4552,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/worldsend.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4554,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4553\/revisions\/4554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}