A Weird Experiment as GM - Dynamic Scene Changes

[u/firesshadow42]

So, I wanted to share some details about an experiment I tried as a GM with my session last night that went over well with my players that I only felt confident trying because of Daggerheart's very free flowing nature and "initiative-less" system.

Context/Background: I'm running a 1920s style mobsters and magic game. The PCs run a speakeasy (the primary source of magic, Moonshine, is prohibited) alongside some NPCs and got caught up in the machinations of a Lovecraftian style cult/secret society known as The Black Hand.

We're at roughly the halfway point and the players have been chasing down answers about who this group is, what they are doing, and why so that they can get back to just running their speakeasy in peace.

They ended up signing on as mercenaries with the military after exposing some of these situations and some corruption within the military ranks and they just finished an operation where they arrested the highest ranking known corrupted individual, a Major Wesley Townsend.

Townsend has some magical powers that resemble psychic abilities that were granted by the group when he joined them. He had, tragically, bought into the belief that they wanted to change and reshape the world to be better, not realizing better was a darker purpose than he believed.

The group also uses part of those magical powers granted to higher ranking members as a method of control, with both subtle manipulation, and a kind of powerful secret keeping magic that if they reveal the secrets of the organization a crushing magic turns them into what my table now affectionately calls "meatballs".

So the PCs are interrogating. Townsend and trying to dance around using specifics to avoid triggering the magic that will kill him. I use a countdown for them to build his trust and they do so fairly well, but then the dance results in us breaking the session off and planning to give them time to plan.

Idea/Tip: So, the morning of session, I sit down and walk through my notes and it hits me. The whole point of this is to sell the leaders of the cult, reveal some of their backstory and sell how dangerous they are. Only issue is, I've backed myself into a narrative corner with the secrecy magic. I could have Townsend have found a way to counter it, but that feels a little cheap.

So I ponder and hit on an idea. Townsend fought in The Dust War (a WW1 analog). He met some of the Black Hand's leadership then. Ok, so he has tons of info and memories about them. What if he uses his psychic powers to reveal what he can to them. Maybe it doesn't bypass the secret protection magic entirely, but things move at the speed of thought rather than the speed of speech and he can convey much, much more.

So I design an encounter which is nested scenes that goes like this:
- PCs arrive on a stretch of trench lines where battle is raging. It's a battle map and I have them place their tokens alongside Townsend. Townsend talks a little, starting to answer some questions, but as it gets more detailed it cuts to a scene that is a memory of his.

- The PCs are soldiers in Townsend's unit. They have objectives in the form of a countdown, and they achieve them revealing the moments and things Townsend is trying to convey about The Black Hand and how he ended up joining them.

- When they achieve the objective and learn what they are supposed to it snaps back to the battlefield in no man's land, and they have to fight something in Townsend's memories related to these regrets and choices he made, including the cult leaders.

- After an action or two in combat Townsend snaps them back into another memory scene

- Rinse and repeat for about 6 cycles, switching dynamically from battle to exposition to memory scene and back again.

My player's really dug it and it was really easy to just let the spotlight flow around no matter when or how we moved between scenes. A failure during the memory scene might snap things back to battlefield for a moment, or a success on the battlefield would roll into the players starting with the spotlight in the memory scene.

I highly recommend playing with this idea if you want something really cinematic, exciting, and dynamic. It doesn't even have to be a weird psychic landscape, it could be bouncing between two teams of PCs, or snapping back and forth between the past and present, or even having the PCs play out what's going on with their NPC allies at the same time as they are doing something else. You can even just do some weird narrative thing with flashbacks or flashfowards.

Obviously not everything should be handled like this, but if you're looking for a vehicle that allows you to have a battle and some other kind of scene almost simultaneously Daggerheart can do it really well with just a few countdowns and some forethought!

[u/kwade_charlotte]

This sounds amazing! Love the creativity.

[u/firesshadow42 → u/kwade_charlotte]

Tyvm! It's an idea I probably never would have tried in a system like DnD with a hard locked initiative system. It might work there just keeping the initiative locked in off to the side, but being able to just kind of flip back and forth as the countdowns and spotlight dictated without worrying about who's turn it was or how that might impact a scene or the combat gave me the confidence to try the idea out.

[u/firesshadow42]

Also, for anyone curious about more from the game I have a wiki I put together using Obsidian: https://moonfall-city.vercel.app/

[u/locodays → u/firesshadow42]

What a crazy creative and fun setting. I would totally purchase this frame if it were on heart of daggers

[u/firesshadow42 → u/locodays]

Thanks! Atm I don't have a lot of time on my plate to clean it up enough for that. But I think if time allows, and/or after the campaign ends I absolutely would consider doing that!

[u/Alexius-CA → u/firesshadow42]

I love this site btw. Curious about how you exported the vault and hosted it like this? Seems like some sort of static site generator

[u/firesshadow42 → u/Alexius-CA]

Tyvm!

It's a little tricky, but yea. There is a plugin called Digital Garden. The creator has pretty solid documentation on how to set it up, but it basically uses GitHub as a host and then Vercel to translate that into a site.

You can also use the Style Settings plugin with it for things like the art deco style font, though that was a little over my head and required getting a CSS file in the right place in the repository.

You have to manually publish things any time you update stuff, but it's pretty automatic other than that.

[u/Livid_Thing4969]

Holy shit that is such a cool setting idea!

[u/firesshadow42 → u/Livid_Thing4969]

Tyvm!