Death In The Cornfields

When I first started running for the kids, it was during the summer when my nephew (who plays Tijitsu) would come and stay with us for a week or two. So I was sometimes running for a couple consecutive days and scrambling to keep up with enough material. This "hey, let's play D&D for a week" was a new thing and I wasn't really prepared. I wasn't running online yet (which would have helped), so I was scouring Firefly and the internet just to keep up with the demand. 

So one of the things I picked up was Death In The Cornfields, which I was able to download. It's a short side quest, and isn't really enough material for an entire session by itself, but it makes for an interesting side adventure. 

It's basically a bleak, rural village where the characters end up stumbling upon a tragic situation where a family must deal with their belief that their son will become a vampire. 

Honestly, when I first looked it over, I wondered what I was missing. There wasn't much to it. It was basically a rather contrived short story and there's not much for the players to do other than observe the events unfolding. 

Don't get me wrong, it's still more interesting for what I'd call an "overnight encounter" than, say, your basic "players are set upon by giant spiders while they are trying to sleep" scenario. But only barely. And the story is just sort of pointlessly depressing. So to be honest, when I got finished with messing around with it, it wasn't the same adventure. 

My players are very much into hands-on stuff in their games. So instead of just presenting the events as written, I re-wrote the story and the objective. 

Upon reflection, I didn't need the module for this. I guess it just jump-started the idea. 

Anyway, so the "vampire" had been cursed and the way to remove this curse and save him and the village was to find three artifacts that had been lost. I don't remember what the artifacts were, but it doesn't matter. I wrote a series of rhyming riddle verses to hit at where the artifacts might be hidden. Then I went out in the backyard and hid actual items in the areas the riddles referenced. 

One was hidden in the edge of the woods, where they encountered twig blights and had to fight them (we went back inside for the combat rounds). One was hidden in a large bush of lavender growing in my herb garden. And one was in a "broken down, abandoned Gurrish caravan" (yeah, no kidding, I have the base of a dismantled Romany style vardo in my yard). So the kids spent some time hunting in real time for the artifacts. They found them, participated in the cleansing ritual, and saved the boy and the village. 

Which was a heck of a lot more fun and less depressing then the story as written. 

So I guess this post is less about Death In The Cornfields and more about homebrewing a quick sidequest on the fly. 

The Riverport Rebels Stop A Coup

Dungeon Masters have to wing it.

I don't care how much you plan ahead. You will end up winging it at some point. At many points.

Back in the Bad Old Days, modules had to be hand-keyed. Old school D&D

modules consisted of a simple, gridded map and an incomplete key, which had to be filled out by the DM. You had to add monsters and treasure to your rooms.

Because I was so strapped for time the first time I ran for the kids, I actually ran off an old key I wrote back when I was something like 15 years old, and half the stuff in there I only remembered it when I was actually running the module. Which meant that one of those monster encounters consisted of a forgotten human berserker lurking inexplicably in one of the rooms.

I mean...it's a different time, right? They're not gonna just murder-hobo the guy. So they struck up a conversation with him, which meant I had to come up on the fly with a reason a lone human man might be hanging out in a monster-filled labyrinth.

So the story I came up with in that moment was that he was Rolf Larsson, a former soldier from Riverport who had had to go into hiding because he had been framed as the mastermind behind a coup attempt within the Duke's militia and they were looking to hang him on trumped up charges.

Why I went there, I have no idea. I opened my mouth and that came out.

My daughter and husband have always loved mysteries and intrigue, and all three of them enjoy role playing and figuring things out. So they insisted on pursuing that story line.

I had to stop and level with them. I said, "I don't have a story for that fleshed out. But if you give me till next time we play, I will have you a mystery to solve surrounding this plot line.

So that session, they went ahead and explored the rest of the module and by the
next session, they rooted out an elaborate plot by a bad faction of the militia, rescued the Duke, gained intel from the Bad Guys, and joined forces with the Captain Mercutio of the Riverport militia to splinter and defeat the threat to the town.

By now, the Rebels had made a bit of a name for themselves in the city, and had
gained the trust and regard of the Duke himself (and maybe more importantly, the Duke's steward, Regus), so they hired the Rebels as a special unit the Duke relied on to take care of special cases. He put them up in some apartments on his estate and that'show the Riverport Rebels became Duke Orsino's special task force.

So to translate, the newspaper says "The Duke was going out of town with three guards, and two random people jumped out of the bushes wearing armor and deadly weapons. When this happened, two of the three guards attacked Captain Mercutio, but luckily three people (Sir Peter, Stephanie, and Taijitsu) fought the ambushers and defeated them.   Captain Mercutio was hurt, but survived. The Duke rewarded Sir Peter, Stephanie, and Taijitsu with Rolf's freedom."