Drinking from the campaign firehose
Here’s a neat variation for The Vale of the Azure Sun based on a trick from Josh Gregal: for characters who take a ride with the Blue Sun, rather than a perception roll to know any answer, give them thirty seconds with all of your campaign notes: the Blue Sun adventure itself, all of the adventures they’ve already run through, whatever world notes or book you use, and all of the adventures you’re thinking of running. If you keep a campaign diary, include that as well.
In Josh’s game, this was the result of “releasing hundreds of years of magical witch smoke at once” by “[boiling] the tent of a powerful witch in order to make an ingredient of Milk of the Crone”.
…the cauldron they were using grew a face, arms and legs, stood up, started screaming “oh no!” and busting through walls. Since I figured they would chase it down to subdue it, I prepared a random table to determine what happens when somebody gets the cauldron’s liquid on them. I stole an idea from The Dungeon Dozen by Jason Sholtis and let a player peruse all of my notes (campaign binder, a tablet with all my stuff in Evernote, and the pocket notebook I carry with me) for 30 seconds after some fluid got in her character’s mouth.
The effect was like drinking from a firehose and I don't think she actually gleaned any info!
The point here is to emulate dangerous cosmic insight by inundating them with far too much stuff in far too little time. If some of your notes are handwritten and your handwriting sucks, all the better!
- The Dungeon Dozen: Jason Sholtis
- “All monsters, all the time”
- So You Ate the Fruit of the Forbidden Bush of Enlightenment: Jason Sholtis at The Dungeon Dozen
- Twelve effects for eating from the tree of life…
- The Vale of the Azure Sun
- There are things in this world that defy all logic. Places that no door enters and no road goes, where the maps exist only in the minds of madmen.
Update: added link to Jason Sholtis’s original Dungeon Dozen post.