Help! There's a watery hole in my plot!

[Bob the Wonder Dog]

I have this devious plan of starting an adventure by having all the PCs do horrible, horrible things. Without the players knowledge.

Problem is, for this devious plan I need them to toss creatures into the sea. For a good reason. And I can't think of one.

Help?

I probably need to elaborate on this.

First, I'm going to use "sortof" DnD3 rules. Monsters should be roughly like in the MM, but they can do what I say they can do. That sort of thing.

So. A very powerful aboleth-like creature is swimming along a coast. It wants to establish a small outpost, so it needs some more slaves. Also it's probably hungry. It finds a small community along the coast and wants the humans around there. Some just for food, some brought alive (unconscious or damaged is fine) to the shore for conversion to underwater slaves.

As it can't do much on land, it picks a small group of creatures (the PCs) working/wandering the beach to act as its agents and, using eerie aboleth powers, screws with their minds.

Here the players enter and get told the adventure is something like they have been sent from their village to eradicate a small community of Evil (kobolds, orcs, feral gnomes - some roughly human-shaped evil creatures) that is threatening the lives and safety of them and their families. The players then plan and execute an attack on the Evil village, the characters unwittingly killing and maiming their own kin. And, for some reason that eludes me, drag the dead and dying Evil creatures to the sea...

Later, a powerful team of troubleshooters, having tracked the slimy villain, come to fight the aboleth and its slaves. The players will only then (hopefully) realize what their characters have done and recoil in horror. Especially when they see their former family members, now turned to hideous slimy slaves, shamble from the murky waters desperately trying to protect their new fishy master.

The PC's then get a good long time in prison to recuperate from any temporary insanity before they get banished from the lands for their crimes and venture forth into the unknown sharing the deep, dark secret of their horrible deeds.

That's the plan, anyway.

Problem is, I can't figure out why they should toss Badguys into the sea. As that is the reason a horribly powerful aboleth needs them, I can't figure out a way around this.

These are experienced players which I know very well. I'll be explaining that monsters and such will be different in my setting, but "orcs will regenerate unless doused in seawater!" will probably not fly. So I need different monsters or some other clever reasoning.

It all hinges on the players believing what the I (AKA the aboleth) tell them.

I've never been the GM before, so some strangeness will be chalked up to crappy planning/GMing on my part. This is the only time I get to use the "It's my first time!" excuse with this lot, so I want to make it work for me.

Can anyone help me with my plot hole? Either a logical reason to drag (low level) dead, restrained or unconscious badguys to the sea, or some adjustment to my plot. Whatever badguys they think they're killing off needs to be something I can convincingly introduce as irredeemably evil, so the players will accept killing (probably more like slaughtering in their sleep) several whole families of them.

(While typing that last part I figured out that the aboleth might make a slimy zombie slave instead of slimy living slave out of little sister, so it's not strictly required to bring it live people. Still a zombie can't do the "You did thisss! Mommy, dad, even little Bobby! You doomed usssss!" as well as a living slime-slave when it shambles slimily from the water toward a PC that just made his save against aboleth mind-messing and can see the Horrible Truth.)

 

[Aeolius]

...they have been sent from their village to eradicate a small community of Evil (kobolds, orcs, feral gnomes - some roughly human-shaped evil creatures)... The players will only then (hopefully) realize what their characters have done and recoil in horror.

I would go one of two directions. Either make the "evil monsters" undead, as PCs might not feel so bad about eradicating them in an unusual fashion. Then make them a unique form of undead that can only be killed by immersion in salt (the sea). Or make the "evil monsters" witches; everyone knows witches loathe salt.

Or perhaps the PCs have been instructed to dispose of the evils in a sacred site; a blowhole that spews holy waters (in actuality a blowhole that leads to a cavern that empties into the sea).

With an aboleth and other slimy, tentacley bits about, I might even be tempted to incorporate taint .

 

[Psimancer]

Problem is, I can't figure out why they should toss Badguys into the sea. As that is the reason a horribly powerful aboleth needs them, I can't figure out a way around this.

The “Patron” gives the PCs poison/potion/something to pour into/onto the badguys before dumping them in the ocean to feed and kill a “greater evil”... lets just call it a marinade

 

[Amaroq]

The "bad guys" are a village of pirates; by local custom, pirates must be buried at sea.

Alternately, there's the viking custom of sending the dead out on burning ships; that could certainly be adapted locally.

The ideal thing here, though risky, is something that causes the party to think of "the sea!!" rather than having you instruct them to use it ... for that, the "its an undead that resurrects unless there is sufficient salt" really works.

Maybe they're an odd form of troll that slowly regenerate unless you put salt in the wounds (as opposed to using fire) ..

.. maybe the village are "Evil Fey", and "Salt" is one of the legendary means of keeping them from coming back. You could stop a step short and have the "patron" give them a bunch of salt to put on their weapons but say he hasn't figured out how to keep them from coming back on the next full moon, and that's the party's job. (Sufficient Religion and Arcana knowledge checks point them towards using the sea, but they feel like they had to "work" for the "answer") ...

 

[Celebrim]

To begin with, you are making a basic mistake of DMing - deciding what the events in the story are going to be before hand.

You can't do that. I can promise you its not going to work. Even if I gave you a perfect explanation for why the PC's would be tossing creatures into the sea, it wouldn't work. Something would 'go wrong' somewhere else in the plan.

As a DM, you should never get too heavily invested in the idea of scenes. Scenes are for books, or movies, or plays or something. But in RPG's, the PC's get to decide how the scenes play out - you don't.

 

[Bob the Wonder Dog]

Some clever ideas here. Thanks.

Making the "bad guys" undead would be easier in some ways, except they are normal farmer and fishermen families. Most likely the players will decide to act at night, sneaking from house to house to have any chance against so many. Undead don't often live in family units. And I want them to feel a little bad about slaughtering, just not so much that they won't do it...

Evil salt-soluble fey (man-eating slugs? probably not ) and/or disposing them in a sacred site sounds somewhat plausible. I'll probably go with that.

Giving them a "sacred oil"/poison to help out could work with this too.

To begin with, you are making a basic mistake of DMing - deciding what the events in the story are going to be before hand.

This is intended as a rather heavily scripted prologue - an introduction to get the characters together and started as adventurers. An alternative to "you all meet in a pub and decide to go adventuring together".

I want a bunch of ignorant country bumpkins to have a reason to stay together and go into the world to do very dangerous things.

The intention is to, after these events, have them banished from the places they know and let them decide if they run away to parts unknown or maybe become outlaws in their homeland.

 

[S'mon]

To begin with, you are making a basic mistake of DMing - deciding what the events in the story are going to be before hand.

You can't do that. I can promise you its not going to work. Even if I gave you a perfect explanation for why the PC's would be tossing creatures into the sea, it wouldn't work. Something would 'go wrong' somewhere else in the plan.

As a DM, you should never get too heavily invested in the idea of scenes. Scenes are for books, or movies, or plays or something. But in RPG's, the PC's get to decide how the scenes play out - you don't.

I agree; and as a player the suggested plot would seriously annoy me. You players' mileage may vary of course, but deceiving the players out-of-game in this heavy handed manner ("Those zombies you killed were really innocent children!") seems like a really bad idea to me.

 

[S'mon]

This is intended as a rather heavily scripted prologue - an introduction to get the characters together and started as adventurers. An alternative to "you all meet in a pub and decide to go adventuring together".

I want a bunch of ignorant country bumpkins to have a reason to stay together and go into the world to do very dangerous things.

The intention is to, after these events, have them banished from the places they know and let them decide if they run away to parts unknown or maybe become outlaws in their homeland.

Look, if you want that to be the premise of your campaign, it is much better as a written hand-out that players read and agree to buy into when they start the campaign, NOT as something that you railroad them through. It's like the old captured-by-slavers trope: the wise GM starts the campaign with the PCs waking up in the slave pens, NOT with a railroaded capture scene.

 

[Gilladian]

I have to agree with S'mon - just tell the PCs the story of what they did. Don't try to make them play it out.

You can tell it as a very moving cut scene - tell them the story as their PCs are sitting around a campfire after just having accepted their first mission. It's a crappy one, and the PCs are wondering why in heck they are doing this; and you tell them they remember all too well why - and then narrate the previous events.

Or whatever works for you/your group. I'd HATE the plot you're pushing, as an experienced PC. And an inexperienced PC might just get the idea that "free will" is window dressing, and he's just here for the ride...

 

[Ravellion]

I have to agree with S'mon - just tell the PCs the story of what they did. Don't try to make them play it out.

You can tell it as a very moving cut scene - tell them the story as their PCs are sitting around a campfire after just having accepted their first mission. It's a crappy one, and the PCs are wondering why in heck they are doing this; and you tell them they remember all too well why - and then narrate the previous events.

Or whatever works for you/your group. I'd HATE the plot you're pushing, as an experienced PC. And an inexperienced PC might just get the idea that "free will" is window dressing, and he's just here for the ride...

I agree with this. What you've written is a pretty cool background and reason to go out adventuring. It seems like a less than enjoyable game session however.