Adventure Frame for Magonomia - The Gullimore Ghosts

As a preview of our upcoming Magonomia supplement, 101 Adventure Frames in Enchanted England, here’s the completed text of another of the 101 frames” “The Gullimore Ghosts” by John Tibbetts and Mark Lawford.

I promise not all of the adventure frames are about ghosts or cemeteries. We are posting this in October, so we couldn’t resist.

About Adventure Frames

Many game masters don't play published adventures as written, but rather use them as a source of ideas for their homebrew games. An adventure frame is just the essential plot structure for a one-session adventure—the part people are most likely to use. It's the spark to set your imagination running. Details of specific scenes, characters, and challenges can be filled in as the game master wishes. An experienced game master should be able develop an adventure frame into a customized story in about thirty to sixty minutes.

Shewstone Publishing's adventure frames are presented in "hook, line, and sinker" format, originally developed by Jolly Blackburn in Shadis magazine in the 1990s. The hook is the opening scene or scenes that motivate the player characters to participate in the adventure. The line is the set of fun events and challenges that make the adventure worth playing. The sinker is a surprise, usually a plot twist, that makes the adventure unique and memorable. The sinker can often be omitted if you want the plot to be more straightforward. Finally, preparation notes give you an idea of what homework the game master should do to get ready to run the adventure.

The Gullimore Ghosts

Stock image from 123RF.com. Used with permission.

by John Tibbetts and Mark Lawford

Summary: Find out why ghosts are congregating at the town of Gullimore

Content Warnings: Death, desecration of graves

Genre: Mystery

Place: A small town

Time: Any era

Length: Medium (2-4 hours)

Hook

The (fictional) market town of Gullimore has a ghost problem. Ghosts arise every night, screaming and pleading for peace. It started six months ago with a single ghost, but now there are at least a dozen. No one has been harmed, but the villagers cannot get any sleep. Gullimore is at a crossroads that many merchants travel, and the disruption to trade has become so severe the sheriff (a high official responsible for public safety) has offered a reward to anyone who can put the ghosts to rest.

Line

Arriving in Gullimore to investigate, the PCs find that they aren’t alone. Others have heard of the problem—and the potential reward—and have decided they will solve the problem.

If the PCs have any particular rivals, they may be present and ready to make trouble. Other, less experienced investigators try to tail the PCs to learn what they know and to try to get the jump on them. Others still are there to sell charms to the townsfolk to ward off ghosts and to ensure a quiet night’s sleep. It’s as though the investigators are as much a problem as the ghosts themselves.

As for those ghosts, they appear to be recently dead—within the last six months or so, which aligns to the length of time the problem has been ongoing. There is no shortage of witnesses, and the fear and dread has turned to annoyance. At night, during the witching hour (between 3 and 4 o’clock), the investigators flock to the streets to try to commune with the ghosts, to catalogue them, and to ward against them.  All the while, the ghosts wail and complain at their disturbed rest.

Speaking to the ghosts is not very informative. They know their names and something of their former lives, but they’re obsessed with being unable to rest and are fruitlessly searching the for what disturbed them.

If the PCs ask the townfolk who the ghosts are, they find the spirits are not local, but there are witnesses who recognize them. One identifies old Rob, a stonemason from yonder town. Another identifies Meg, a farmer’s wife from the other end of the county.

Following the trail to those locations, the PCs can find the ghosts’ graves and can determine via magic or physical inspection that those final resting places have been robbed and the bodies removed.

Sinker

The ghosts are rising because body snatchers have been digging up graveyards throughout the area and stealing the corpses to sell to physicians in the nearest city (likely Cambridge or Oxford or somewhere with a university or medical school). The hauntings are directed toward the body snatchers, who must be caught and the bodies returned to their graves to end the nuisance.

The body snatchers are Bill Tanner and his son John, and they have some limited magical power bought from a theurgist, specifically a kind of ward that hides them from ghostly attention (see the attached spell description). The Tanners live in a quarter of the town that the ghosts mysteriously avoid, and their tanning business takes them across the county collecting animal hides and bringing them back to Gullimore for treatment—a perfect cover.

The bodies have been sold to the medical school, studied, and then buried in unmarked pauper’s graves in the nearest large cemetery.

Preparation Notes

You may need a few fellow investigators, each with their own motives and methods, some of whom are schooled in the magical sciences. You’ll also need to note that there is a small district of the town that has remained free from the ghostly invasion. When asking questions in that area, the PCs will learn that the neighborhood is actually where the haunting started, which suggests someone has done something to change things there.

Keywords: Ghosts, body snatchers

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Drintera Behind the Screen: Death for Player Characters

by Andrew Gronosky

This article is from Drintera® Magazine issue 7.

Death for player characters is a controversial subject in the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) community. There are two valid, competing schools of thought. The first is that a TTRPG is primarily a game that involves decisions with risks and consequences, and the death of a player character should be one of those consequences. The opposing school of thought is that a TTRPG is primarily a story, and the death of a major character derails the story if it happens without narrative logic behind their death.

Illustration by Aaron Lee, ©2016 Sine Nomine Publishing. Used with permission.

This is, of course, a matter of style and preferences. I feel the need to mention PC death because it's the reason resurrection magic exists in Drintera. The game master will have to decide how easily player characters will have access to resurrection magic—if at all.

The Death Talk

Most TTRPG rules dodge the question of when PCs should die. They say the game master can change or alter the rules however they want . . . then leave the game master adrift. Okay, fine, you can do whatever you want. But what should you want?

I strongly recommend you establish guidelines for your table about character death. Have the "Death Talk" between the GM and the players, then record your decision. Bickering and hurt feelings are predictable outcomes if you don't discuss the mechanics around player character death ahead of time. If your game system is bold enough to take a stance on PC death, you can, of course, play those rules as written, but you still need to discuss them to ensure everyone knows what to expect.

Options for PC Death in Your Campaign

I present a range of options here for how to handle character death. Note that your campaign may change from one approach to another over time. If you're playing a game like Dungeons & Dragons where PCs unlock resurrection magic by reaching a certain experience level, your campaign will transition into the "death is temporary" approach at that point. 

The quickest path to consensus is for the game master to review the options and then narrow the field by ruling out any approaches they'd be unwilling to enforce. They can then present the remaining options to their players.

Death Can be Fun!

You can play a fantasy TTRPG as a survival challenge, also known as a deadly campaign, killer dungeon, or (according to one interpretation) "old school." Everyone knows their character can be killed by a single bad decision or by plain bad luck. When a player character dies, make a new one. In the first decade or more of Dungeons & Dragons, this was the assumed style of play.

The GM needs to tell the players to not get too attached to their first-level characters. Don’t invest time in a deep backstory. The dice give, the dice take away. This approach works best if you have a stable gaming group whose members know each other well. I wouldn’t recommend it for convention games or other open tables unless it’s extremely clear what the players are signing up for.

The game master is still expected to be fair, but they're not expected to guarantee that every challenge is surmountable—players are supposed to know when to run away. Expendable non-player characters, called "hirelings" in the old days, might accompany the player characters, and they can be demonstratively killed by the GM when they want to show the party that a situation is deadly. The game master can also provide opportunities for the heroes to meet allies during the adventure so replacement characters can be recruited easily.

You can play a deadly campaign serious or silly. The serious version is a tense endurance contest to see who can make it to the end of the adventure while amassing treasure and/or achieving narrative goals. The silly version has the GM create deadly situations as a form of artistic expression, and then players give awards for the most entertaining PC death. Everyone remembers the time Brenda's paladin fell down a pit trap into a gelatinous cube, or the time the whole party was turned into a sculpture garden because they really, really thought they could handle that medusa.

There are two pitfalls to a deadly campaign. First, some players might halfheartedly agree to it then resent it when the dice kill their character. Second, players might start intentionally manipulating each other into deadly situations. You need strong trust and an adventuresome (but not foolhardy!) attitude to make this genuinely fun.

Death is Temporary

It's become a trope in fantasy TTRPGs that protagonists can be brought back from the dead. Not all game systems allow for this—low fantasy systems in particular tend to make death permanent. Nevertheless, resurrection magic is part of the culture of fantasy TTRPGs, and we’ve included it as part of the lore of Drintera.

The game master will have to decide whether and how player characters can come back from the dead. If you're playing a system where player characters unlock resurrection spells at a certain level, the decision is made for you when the characters reach that level.

If you use resurrection as an option, there are two things you need to decide.

The first question players should ask is whether player characters should have access to resurrection earlier than the rules require (or, in games that don’t have resurrection rules, if they should have access at all). Resurrection can be made available through religious centers, NPCs, magic items, and even divine intervention. Some players probably expect when their character dies, the other PCs can just bring their body to the nearest temple and have it revived. You can make it that simple if you want to.

The second question is what to do when resurrection isn’t possible. Most resurrection magic requires an intact body. It’s possible in a fantasy game for a PC to die in a way where the body isn’t recoverable. They PC might get disintegrated or something. Then what? The GM and players must have a mutual understanding whether irrevocable death can happen or if the GM will use their authority to prevent it.

Death is Permanent

While stopping short of actively encouraging PC death, some GMs and players prefer to play character death according to the rules as written. If the dice say a character dies, they die. If the rules say nobody in the party can cast raise dead, the character stays dead—it’s time to make a new one.

At the time of this writing in 2023, my sense is this is considered a hardline approach. The main arguments in its favor are that the risk of PC death makes the game challenging and that it adds suspense that ultimately makes the game more fun.

Communicate early and often if you intend to make death permanent. Note that this option is about how to adjudicate character death when it comes up, not how deadly the encounters should be. That's a separate question. 

Death is Negotiable

Another approach is that when a player character would die, the player can negotiate a less serious outcome with the game master. Maybe the character sustains a life-altering injury, such as loss of an eye or a limb. Maybe the player agrees that the character's prized magic item is destroyed. Maybe the player agrees their character falls into a coma and needs to be dramatically rushed to a temple or magic healing fountain.

The challenge is to apply this equally to all players. The negotiated outcome must be equally serious, or as close to it as is feasible, every time a character faces death.

Death is not an Option

In some gaming groups, it's the game master's job to prevent player characters from dying, and they're expected to overrule the dice to do so. For example, the GM might reduce the damage of a hit to a number that leaves the PC alive but incapacitated.

The most likely problem regarding this approach is that if it hasn't been discussed openly, some players might implicitly expect the GM to do overrule the dice to prevent a PC from dying, only to find that the GM is committed to the rules as written. Then one or more players get upset when a PC dies.

You may be able to create a house rule about PC death that prevents misunderstandings. For example, whenever a player character would die, they're instead knocked out for a half-hour of real time or until the party reaches a safe resting place. It's always helpful to have rules that your group wants to follow instead of rules that can spoil your fun.

Just Wing It

This is the only common approach I can't recommend. Many GMs and players think that because the rules say the GM has to exercise judgment, the GM should just overrule the dice at whim. It's easy to be consistent, and therefore fair, if the GM is intervening to prevent a previously defined outcome (death of a PC). It's an entirely different matter for the GM to habitually alter the dice results in secret to vaguely "make the story better." By making secret rulings on the spur of the moment, the GM is not creating a game table that’s fair to all the players.

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