Currently, my other Sunday group has completed our second session of the prologue I’m running for our game. This is my second group in my “The Rotten” setting and while I STILL don’t have a proper name for this group (I’m calling our prologue “The Rotten Haven” but that name is built from the setting name and the current focal point of the game rather than because it reflects the game in any way other than these sparse setting details), we’ve solidly landed our group in the game. While the characters all started out fairly neutral, the past two sessions have seen them take a sharp turn towards villainy and I’ve had to pivot my preparations from being focused on building out the evil side of the game to building out the good side of the game. Sure, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not each group is truly Good or Evil, but one side is engaged in behavior that is mostly morally good and the other side is doing things that are mostly morally bad. There’s nuance if the players want to dig into it, but considering that they decided to go the assassination route and a mixture of really good rolls on my part (I rolled a LOT of natural 20s last night, even given the huge number of dice I rolled) and bad rolls on their part meant that they got found out multiple times. As their decisions snowballed, I made sure to characterize their actions a bit, trying to illustrate what kind of people they had become as a result of their thus-far undefined past adventures and were becoming in the eyes of the citizens who once saw them as heroes. All of which culminated in them fighting a battle against all of the leadership of the rebellion they’d planned to assassinate, but all at once instead of being separated into manageable chunks.

Currently, two rounds into a long, difficult fight, I give them even odds of surviving it. I give them low odds of winning it, but it’s still within the realm of possibility if they get lucky and can figure out a better way to either lock down their opponents or to keep up the “run and gun” style fighting. It’s two monks and a ranger, so they could easily flee if they so chose, but they seem intent on doing what they can to take down as many people as possible while they’re fleeing. If they manage to win the fight somehow, I’ve promised them a level-up before we carry on with defeating the rebel army that still waits for them in the morning. It’ll be massively slowed down if they can take out all of its leaders (I’ve got a formula and everything), but it’ll still be a threat considering I’ve told them that the premise of the prologue is that the rebel army will reach the palace in twenty-four hours (around dawn on the second day of fighting) due to strength of numbers. If the party can take out the rebel leadership, they can create a delay of up to seventeen hours, slowing down the rebels as they’re forced to reorganize to deal with the lack of a leader or have to contend with the chaos of losing an officer in a battle. If they can successfully delay the rebels by a total of twenty-four additional hours, then the high-ranked leader of the conflicted city will have finished the ritual he is performing and no one will need to worry about these ungrateful rebels (who just don’t understand that the power needed to protect the city requires sacrifice!) any longer.

Since the players signed on to that side of things, they’ve officially designated their characters as villains. To be completely fair, one of them definitely was a villain from the beginning, another showed a callous disregard for others, and the last one is motivated by mostly self-interest. None of them were beacons of neutrality, much less good, before this decision was made and the path they’ve strayed down has only taken them further into the realms of depravity and evil. For instance, at the start of this session, one of the players rolled a natural 1 on their stealth check and left a blood trail behind that a patrol of rebels (mostly militia headed by a couple more seasoned town guards who’d sided with the citizens) found and followed to the party. The party immediately slaughtered all but two of them in an overwhelming display of force that left the patrol of guards stunned or surprised and entirely unable to react. As they beat up the tougher guards and then started in on the militia, I made sure to describe just how disgusting the violence was that they inflicted upon these poor townspeople. Broken necks, disintegrated body parts, and corpses used as shields. Horrifying stuff, to be honest. The players seemed down with it, though, matching me beat for disgusting beat when I prompted them to describe a kill, but I really emphasized just how much these normal rebel guard types couldn’t do a thing to any of them.

The rebel guards got their own in the end. There were enough of them around that they kept spotting the party as they tried to sneak up on the place the rebel leaders where holding their planning session, all of which culminated in some hilarious natural 20s on my part, some unfortunately low rolls on the players’ part, and a handful of guards here or there that had to be silenced. From there, the other guards began to notice that some of their allies were going missing, one of them spotted something (one of the monks) on a roof above the adapted mead hall, and then they all made a little too much noise taking down the guards and then attempting to clean up the bodies. First one person was alerted, initiative was rolled, and then enough powerful people rolled well enough on their initiative at the sound of the alarm going off that they were able to catch up to the party before they could escape or hide. The battle scaled up from there, as magic items were tossed around, athletics checks were passed, spells were cast, and evil-doers where smote by the righteous fury of the light. Which was a lot of fun to do. I’ve played a lot of keyed-up villains, both of the more threatening and horrible kind and the delightfully campy, cackling mastermind kind, but I haven’t played many heroes. I got to really stretch my legs by moving in a new direction this time around. It’s been fun to bellow and call out and deflect innuendo with nothing other than the earnest desire to destroy evil on the “hero’s” part. Also, since the leader of the good guys is a powerful paladin, I get to bring people back to life, deal out huge piles of damage with each hit, and a few other things that haven’t come up in session yet (so I won’t mention them in case any of my players read this blog post). Suffice it to say that I’ve excited for our next session, whenever that winds up happening.