Players of my “_Must Be Thursday_” game, STAY OUT!!!
Don’t ruin the surprise for yourself.
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So I’m starting my first MotW game this week and I have the monster picked out, but I’m struggling with the Countdown. The concept is a little town has had a series of child abductions. The hunters are going to discover that they have been taken by fish-men in the sewers (based off Deep Ones, servants of the Cthulhu Mythos god Dagon) that need the human children to lay their eggs inside to breed more. The children will survive this but it turns them into loyal minions of the fish-men. The town sheriff was the child used to spawn the current generation of fish-men and has hidden things from the investigation of the missing kids. My issue lies in figuring out the events for the Countdown.
Well, what’s going to happen if the Hunters don’t get involved? What’s the end goal of the monster? You might need to make them a bit more sinister, since, as written, it sounds like there will just be another generation of seemingly peaceful fish people.
End goal would be to breed more and more until they control the whole town. They kidnap and essentially brainwash children, that isn’t sinister enough? And I understand the Countdown is “what happens if the hunters dont get involved”, that’s what I’m having problems with.
“Controlling the whole town” is a sinister end goal. Maybe I’m thinking in Dungeon World terms here, but it seems like the Hunters could just walk away from the town if they wanted to.
There’s noting wrong with that happening, it just… I dunno. Maybe it doesn’t feel high stakes enough. Will the “outside world” care if this town gets taken over? Maybe not.
You could leave it as is and turn it into an arc. Like if the Hunters don’t stop the threat (or end up walking away), turn out the town is just the first part of the fish people’s plan.
Fine, what if the children don’t survive the process? Dead kids should be sufficiently horrible enough, I assume? But then I don’t have a good reason for the sheriff to be their minion.
If possible, get a kid directly linked to a Hunter…maybe one of the hunters has a child, or a child is a witness, or something like that…and then, if the hunters aren’t moving fast enough, you can have that child abducted, too.
I mean, the countdown is pretty obvious, right? More and more children disappear, more and more Deep Ones(ish) replace the town. So the countdown, were I doing it, would feature an increasing frequency of disappearing children, including (and especially) children of significance to the hunters.
You could also have the disappearances become increasingly bold as time progresses. It starts with, say, a random kid. Then it steps up to a couple of kids. Then, a whole group of kids disappears during a field trip. Then, kids are disappearing over recess at the local elementary school.
Finally, the reaction from the town can be part of the escalating terror. Local government shuts down, mayor declares a state of emergency…schools are under National Guard escort…posters are ALL over the town…and yet, kids are still disappearing, because the Deep Ones are using the sewers for access and no one in the town realizes it (because they’re not badass hunters).
Oh, one other part of the countdown, too: you said kids come out of the process unhurt but brainwashed, right? So you could have a few kids return. And they could refuse to explain where they were, and insist that they just got lost or something, and everything is cool.
All that sounds good, but I guess I’m still a little lost on how to turn all that into the specific 6 Countdown events.
Maybe there is a alpha child that leads the other children into dark places where they get kidnapped and that is what the sheriff was, all the other children die during the process of birthing fish people or are turned into the fish people themselves.
FWIW, I have run several games of MotW and I have never once used the countdown rules. At least, not strictly off the page; I just come up with a list of bad shit that can happen, and when the players are lollygagging, I activate one of the items off the list.
For my first game I want to try doing things just how they suggest and I can tweak what works for me better later on.
Okay so here’s what I’m thinking…
1: A child out in the woods after dark goes missing (there’s totes a rain runoff tunnel somewhere out there)
2: The local pet store is broken into and all of the fish are gone (the fishmen need to carbo-load before laying eggs)
3: That first child’s friend tells the sheriff something had been following then and the sheriff “doesn’t believe” her
4: The sheriff kidnaps this second kid and makes it look like she ran away
5: The fish people drag their kidnapping victims into the school and throw them in the pool for egg-laying
6: Kids with eggs inside them, bad news, you lose
Colin Spears I missed that the first time and deleted my post when I did found it; you’ve sounded confrontational in this thread a couple times now (to me at least). Just looking for complete details so I can try and help. I’m Sorry that I missed that detail!
I wasn’t trying to sound confrontational, but I could say the same of your posts too. Text without tone of voice can easily be taken the wrong way, I think many internet arguments could be avoided if people didn’t assume the worst. My point being that no ill feelings were intended.
Rad!
Does my theoretical Countdown work for you? Is it the kind of thing you were thinking of? I’m not sure what sort of support NPCs you have in mind, if any, so I just tried to think of what an episode of X-Files or Warehouse 13 might involve.
Yeah, I think your Countdown gives me a better idea what to do. I may do as Ed said and just drop it from future games, but I want to try it for my starter game.