drwormdcg - Tumblr blog

drwormdcg · 6 months ago

Text

The Diamantaires go undercover among upper crusts to stop a heist, but they'll have to figure out what's being stolen first - if some partycrashers even give them a chance to do so.

As the pinnacle of "you had to be there" stories, other people's D&D games are invariably fucking BORING to hear about so I'm still experimenting to try and make these after-action reports interesting. I can't quite write them like published modules with statblocks and DCs since these early adventures weren't particularly tuned or play-tested more than once and I'm too lazy to look back over my old notes anyway. But as I write up more episodes I do want to present more material other DMs can use even just as an outline (color coded blue), along with my own self-indulgent director's commentary, how my players reacted, and what I might do differently if I were to run the adventure again.

Continuing off the smashcut opening space battle at the start of One-Dimensional Chess, Homeworld has tracked the pirates to an ecumenopolis in the heart of the Empire. Intel indicates that their ultimate destination is the estate of an illustrious Morganite noble and dabbling archaeologist (or more accurately, a collector of artifacts uncovered by her subordinate Andalusites).

The pirates are expected to make off with something from Morganite's collection during her upcoming ball, posing as guests as they do. What intel lacks is the why or what the pirates are after, and the party's commander, Commodore Tsavorite, is just as interested to find out their motives as she is to capture the thieves. Thus, the PCs must infiltrate the event ahead of time when only verified guests are in attendance, pose as noble guests themselves, and determine which newcomers may be the thieves, holding back on apprehending them until the true objective is uncovered.

Spoiler Outline for the Adventure

Briefing: The party receives the intel and a makeover to blend into the party at the illustrious manor.

Dance: Schmoozing with noble gems and collecting intel while awaiting the arrival of disguised thieves.

Hostage Crisis: The thieves break in brazenly, and a three-way fight ensues when a rowdy Violet Sapphire throws bubbled gem mutants into the mix.

Artifacting: The party catches up with Violet and get a lead on the target. They discover a tiny gem named Cubic Zirconia guarding a robotic vault that comes alive and attacks.

Escape: The party subdues the vault just in time for the pirates to catch up and threaten them into opening it. When it is revealed that Zirconia was the heist target all along, Violet makes off with them.

Chase: The pirates are on hot pursuit of Violet and Zirconia using speeding hover vehicles to fly between towering skyscrapers, with the players hot on their tails.

Debrief: Violet uses her future vision to escape while the party apprehends the pirates and are left with more questions than the Empire is willing to answer.

Goals

My adventures always start from the seed of a main idea that I then work backwards to coalesce into a progressive story, cannibalizing other lingering ideas and gimmicks I've had in my back pocket to add meat as necessary.

The main inspiration for this episode was a pretty basic gag idea, what I call the Dog Named Treasure story: a noble asks the party to find her Treasure and after trawling through a perilous dungeon, they find out it's just a dog named Treasure. It's a cheap twist on the old dingus quest, and I'm a sucker for surprising my players and still had this one in my list of random ideas and notes from prior DMing days. One variation of this story is that the guardian supposedly protecting the treasure is the treasure.

Other goals I had in mind:

This being the group's second adventure after the basic sort of dungeon tutorial that the first one was, have the party engage in a more social setting and setup.

Similarly, establish how their characters act when not in the thick of combat

Give a taste of Homeworld aesthetics and civilian life. Let them meet some gem nobility that range from tolerable to annoyingly bougie.

Resolve the pirate attack from episode 1 and set up loose threads, characters, and mcguffins for the future. I didn't actually have a plan of what Cubic Zirconia could do, but I knew they'd be useful to have for later. If I changed my mind and decided to stick with a pure episodic format, I could ignore them or bring them back for a short sequel that just tidied things up, since so little verifiable information is given here.

In this very early adventure, my list of goals is short, tepid, and kinda wishy-washy, and some like #2 or #3 aren't even really in focus beyond the beginning.

Obviously the point is to put focus on the most important aspects and use them as a guide to develop the whole structure around. But making a list of your personal DMing goals and inspirations for an adventure is also a good late-development exercise, because once you have a first draft you can start to see the interesting things your adventure inadvertently does that are worth more attention and focus. It's also just a moral boost to step back and see the forest for the trees that you've grown.

One extra goal that I think this adventure created without my explicit planning is that it spawns some of the first seeds of rebellion in the party. One Dimensional Chess ended on an emotional note between NPCs that prompted the party to show mercy in a way they had to keep secret from the Empire. By contrast, And You Weren't Invited shows that the Empire has its own secrets, and the party must answer for themselves how comfortable they are on that. I'd like to say that this was something I noticed and latched onto for the plot of the third ep, which delves directly into unleashed imperial secrets and their danger, but that was just serendipity, and a writeup for another day.

Briefing & Dress-up

Tahiti, the party's gem on the inside... of the party.

This briefing is handled by "Tahiti" Pearl, not an official Diamantaire member herself, but a kind of associate of the branch who assists missions taking place in the most urban and illustrious parts of the Empire. Although peppy and streetsmart for a Pearl, she operates purely in a non-combat role.

Tahiti helps gussy-up the party to fit in among the ballroom crowd. The Star Rubies are presented in ascetic fashion as little-known but high-value gems, Plume Agate is given cover as an associate of Morganite, Titanium Quartz is in attendance as a victorious marshal of a recent organic purge, and Pygmy Amethyst is given free reign as servant-escort to any of the other three. Although Plume is fitted and eager for the night out, the other soldiers are left gritting their teeth as they look forward to schmoozing with the bourgeoisie.

Briefings are always something I have trouble with in trying to deliver a lot perfunctory information to the players without typing up a novel. I should lean on cold opens a lot more, but my biggest reasoning for the mission setup format is that I usually have to tidy up several constraints to the adventure in order to facilitate a twist or a certain progression later on. In this case, I had to ensure the players didn't just try to win the game outright by skipping the whole party, attacking the pirates on sight, and calling it a day; they actually have to interact with the conceit of the heist and its target dingus, even if they get the jump on all the thieves.

I think players can instinctively sense this method of DM attack however. Even as mine rightly look forward to whatever the next adventure brings, they cannot help themselves but throw very skeptical and often biting questions at whoever delivers the briefing even if given by someone as charming as Tahiti (such as "why would a Morganite be trusted with such dangerous artifacts that a pirate would steal?" (answer: the artifacts aren't known to be dangerous, which is why command wants to know what the pirates are really after)).

That said, I did a decent job of misdirection here by giving the players a fun activity at the same time as I was answering boring questions about the mission: making them describe how they were going to dress up and disguise themselves for the ballroom.

Morganite's Estate, a resplendent tower complex set out high above the long-forgotten surface of this gem colony, its windows looking out over the cityscape and starry night sky.

I made this map to give a basic lay of the land and lend itself as a planning tool for this reverse-heist adventure. My private roadmap for the adventure was a lot more linear, but I still felt the need to have some implications for the level so that the players would feel like there was more of the world open to them. This kinda bit me in the ass later, but it's mostly a consequence of my improv skills having not been too honed at the time.

I also think I lacked on the planning side, and if I were to run this adventure today you can bet this entire estate would be so packed with events that I'd be hard pressed not to force the players to go through the whole manor. This gets into an entire rant about how to puzzle out plots and stories which deserves a huge blog post of its own, but for now let's just say my outline was a mixture of being both too tight and too loose, and signs of that begin here on this briefing map.

At the Ballroom

The party arrives at the estate, disguised as noble guests. They begin to carouse with the crowd, splitting up to go one-on-one with various NPCs for information-gathering and conversation. Morganite gives regular tours through her halls of artifacts and is expected to arrive later to do just that (though the players know better that she will secretly be avoiding the estate until the operation is complete).

This is just about the lightest of social encounters, letting the players wander and converse a bit and poke at the scenery to get their bearings, but there's not much at all to find here until the action starts. In hindsight, I'd seed in a lot more information that could be gathered from the party guests, things either tied to the artifacts (perhaps giving motivation for the players to do some stealing of their own) or indirectly implicating the pirates that are to invade later on so as to flesh them out before they merely become hostiles.

Orange creamsicle.

Plume Agate is accosted by an old acquaintance from her innocent pre-Diamantaire days, an overbearingly chummy Orange Zircon. It's an old standby that when the protagonists are in disguise in public, someone who recognizes them should always show up. Beyond adding complication, I also wanted to give a prompt to one of my players to help fill in their own backstory. Nothing set in stone, I didn't even detail really how Zircon and Plume knew each other, just pitched her out for them to use however they wished.

I don't usually dwell on the players' past much at all for my adventures, mostly because I already have my hands full with the plot itself, but also because it feels much safer to give them material to write new stories and give exposition in-character if they want to refer back to the past. This could of course be a more cooperative task, but one of my biggest drivers for DMing is being able to surprise my players, and letting them in to write up future bits of the adventure spoils that fun for me. I also think that when dealing with the same characters for years-long campaigns like this, you need a lot of space for people to adjust as their tastes and interests shift, rather than tying them down with the plot itself. Finally, with mostly newer players in the group, I didn't want to tie them down with the pseudo-homework of backstory development while they were still learning how to play and adapt to the group as a whole.

While I'm on the topic of my own self-indulgence, this ballroom party also marks the introduction of someone who essentially evolved into my DMPC.

Sitting nonchalant among the attendees is Violet Sapphire, waiting patiently at a game of Cuts & Quartzes for an opponent to arrive, only to explain that Sapphires are forbidden from games of chance in the Empire; she just uses the situation as an icebreaker. Initially, she is playing her hand softly, giving snippets of info and flirting her way to the party's side, where she's the first to notice that the next guests to arrive may not be so amiable.

I'll probably detail her a lot more in a future character profile, but for now it's enough to say that Violet is a troublemaker. My inspiration started from my early exercises in reskinning D&D to fit the SU setting, and being very interested by how easy you can fluff almost any random bonus as predictive powers. I'm also personally a sucker for time-based abilities of all kinds, and in thinking of all the mischievous ways an undercover Sapphire could put them to use, Violet was eventually born and fit especially well as a wrench to throw at the players amidst their adventure.

Ballroom Blitz

Like a Peridot with teeth, not including her dogs.

Dispatching the doormen and bursting onto the dance floor are the pirates, a menagerie of gems lead by a Nephrite armed with a makeshift hand cannon and a Serpentine with her trained alien hounds. While the party were expecting to have to suss out thieves arriving as guests, they're now caught amongst the groups of nobles being treated as hostages, with their own disguises priming them to unleash an ambush in return.

The pirates are a motley crew but focused on their task, with little time for chatter beyond threatening the guests to stay put and maybe harassing the players in disguise if they look cute. They promptly split, one group led by Serpentine to hold down the fort while Nephrite takes her subordinates to trawl through Morganite's museum to look for their target artifact.

Serpentine relishes the opportunity to frighten the nobles with her dogs and sniff out troublemakers, but otherwise sticks to a careful watch. Her default mode of conversation is screeching. In combat, she stays behind her comrades and ties foes up from afar with her bolas, allowing her blink dogs to teleport in and sink their teeth into helpless prey.

Not caring much for stealth or the safety of civilians, the party looks for the first opportunity they can to initiate an ambush. Pygmy quickly shapeshifts into a Pearl to avoid being seen as a threat until it's time to strike, and the Star Rubies take the inquisitive advances of two handsy Rubies to ready a vicious suckerpunch. Violet Sapphire begs her newest friend Titan to relent and use the spectacle as an opportunity to run. When they refuse, she doubles the chaos in order to make her own exit. Delivering this episode's titular line, she unleashes a duo of gem mutants onto the dancefloor, leaving them to fight both the thieves and the Diamantaires while she makes a dash for the hall of artifacts.

Violet's best friend, Petrichor. Shown just for example; for this episode, Violet deploys lesser mutants Cookie and Lovecraft, which she is willing to leave behind in order to achieve her mission.

I really love 3-way fights. They're inherently dynamic narratively and mechanically, allowing players to choose sides or pit enemies against each other. It's also a method of combat balance that I don't think I've ever seen mentioned in DMing advice: if one player is taking too much damage, simply have an npc focus on a non-player target (especially easy with mindless enemies like the mutants or blink dogs). If they're doing too good, have both sides focus on the players. No stat changes or dice fudging necessary.

This case also allows Violet to be antagonistic without becoming kill-on-sight. Besides the pirate gems, this fight was a very easy setup that just leaned on reskinning the Putrid Undead Spirit statblock into the gem mutants (stink effects refluffed as their nauseating, fear-inducing visage) and using Blink Dogs verbatim; they're a very neat vanilla creature that I think fit right at home in the sci-fi-ish context of SU as some alien organics. If I had to draw them again though, I'd probably do a more cartoony design (I don't draw animals much at all).

Morganite Estate battle map, for both early and later battles. All my maps are made to fit the default Roll20 grid. I imagine gem noble structures as casually being skyscrapers, so any off-map areas are just sheer drops to the abyss below. The north and side wings host artifact galleries, while a small jetty for hover vehicles feeds directly into the central ballroom.

I started the campaign intending to do theater-of-the-mind combat and skip drawing battle maps, and immediately learned it just doesn't work in dnd. Okay, your group is different, but mine really love needling me with questions during combat ("Will they forget me if I run behind this pillar? If I shove them against someone, will they start fighting each other? If we tie a rope between us, can we hit both of these enemies as we move past them?"), so not having a clear visual reference of distances between combatants just wastes way too much time with players asking where others are, like fighting in the dark.

So this was my first attempt at a map, very open, lazy, and uninspired, again wasting a lot of space on areas fights wouldn't take place in so as to give the implication of a wider world. Besides just kinda learning how to do this properly for the first time (I'd done simple dry erase maps in ad hoc fashion in the past, but nothing beyond similarly simple arenas), I was also deathly afraid of setting a precedent of significant work I'd have to do every adventure. One of my big life lessons going into this whole campaign was to cut my planning down to a minimum, since overplanning had killed my last campaigns.

Of course, I was right: this created a precedent and now I usually draw multiple detailed maps per adventure, though it doesn't take egregiously long since I've developed my sort of personal standards and tools for doing it, like outline widths or how I add texture. Check out my archive if you wanna see some of my half-decent maps for later adventures. I still don't have any particularly strong secrets about map design beyond saying to add cover, verticality, and interactibles whenever possible, but I'm still collecting tips as they come.

The obvious suggestion is to just use existing maps, but my perfectionist instincts take over pretty easily. I could kinda argue that I want the cartoony aesthetics and virtually all maps you find online are about gritty realism, but honestly I just make maps now because I always have a particular mental image of a scene in mind and drawing helps me explore and reinforce that. Also, my players pog whenever they get to see the new map.

The Library Incident

With the first batch of pirates and mutants mopped up and all the civilian party guests having fled out the front door in terror, the party is free to roam the manor of pursuit of either Violet or the remaining pirates.

I mentioned earlier that I briefed a map bigger than I intended to actually use just as a way to add verisimilitude, and here's where it bites me. Seeing the other pirate group leave the ballroom through the west door, my players assume they continued even further west toward the library. After putting a locked door in their way, describing it as clean and untampered with, and reminding the party that the bulk of the artifacts are elsewhere, the average Player Brain works in mysterious ways and they were seized with the compulsion to break into the library regardless.

None of them knows how to explain it. My theory is that Player Brain is inherently skeptical, and when presented with a straightforward fact, there's an instinct to try to guess the twist and then get ahead of it. Just moving forward all the time feels like running at the wall with the tunnel painted on it, and being a player means being really susceptible to narcissistic injuries and being made a fool of. I'm especially representative of this whenever I'm in the player seat.

This results in the party running into an empty library searching for any excuse to keep them there. Some pre-planning and better improv skills would probably let me turn this false lead into something useful, but at the time I was just scrambling for passive-aggressive ways to tell them that none of their objectives were here, so this is a bummer part of the adventure that rests plainly on my shoulders. At best, I scrambled together a clue about the eventual vault, but it was nothing much.

As a DM, my most common minor conundrum is how to convey information to the PCs without leading them on. The more you describe a thing, the more their attention is drawn to it. When it's an optional or hidden kind of thing, it becomes an issue of prompting an interaction so much that you might as well be railroading. Sometimes it's fine to force a player choice while making it feel like it's theirs (that's basically what adventure hooks are), but I feel sour about it when playing around hidden information that I want the players to uncover on a more fair basis. It's about finding the right balance of encouraging exploration without playing on their behalf.

A lot of this is true in the inverse situation, how do you fairly instruct the party that the direction they're headed is a red herring? This puzzle is easier with planning, but improv'ing it at game time is dicier. The misfortune of letting the players get into trouble is that the instinctive player reaction is to feel railroaded: even if the mistake is obviously theirs, ironically being allowed to run down a dead end feels just as forceful as being warded off of it entirely.

Overall, I consider this more just a symptom of a lack of planning for this adventure, or rather a kind of lack of conceit. One loose idea I had in mind was for a kind of Diehard style of conflict, the PCs operating more stealthily and on their wits to separate and deal with the pirates while maintaining their hostage cover. In trying to run a zippier campaign without the overplanning I was guilty of in the past, I ran this early adventure hoping I would get the kind of dynamic plot I was after just by chance (and build some of the accommodations in the map to match), and ended up with something so straightforward that the players ended up desperately hunting for twists, like caged tigers looking for enrichment.

I could probably justify the simplicity as it was still a time of tutorials for my players, but if I were to run things again I could easily double the length and use the time to make the party range around the mansion, solving the pirate situation in discrete but escalating encounters that would build to the showdown over the vault. Personalizing the pirates into a more fleshed out force would also create a more interesting dynamic, as both the players and Violet all vie against them and with each other for their own ends. This is still a setup I want to tackle in the future, so I'm chewing how to take it on more completely and competently without verbatim repeating the Morganite ball. We'll see where I end up a couple years from now.

Preemptive Heist

The Diamantaires catch up on Violet Sapphire as she leisurely picks at a door to the artifact galleries. With her mutant surprises already spent, she redundantly surrenders. She explains the pirates are elsewhere in the mansion, searching for the key to an ancient vault in Morganite's possession, but which Violet has already acquired. As such, she agrees to lead the party to the vault and fulfill a prophecy of her future vision: that the party will succeed in opening it and acquire its treasure.

Vault battle map token. An ancient security device and one of gemkind's first recorded instances of an interactible intelligent interface.

The vault is located in the north wing of the mansion, backlit by gallery windows overlooking the city and the starry night sky, but otherwise unlit while Morganite is not running tours through her collection. The vault is a mechanical cube 8 feet tall on each side, and nominally floats gently off the ground above one corner. Without hovering, the vault weighs near a ton and is nigh-impenetrable except by heavy industrial means, which is more likely to destroy its contents in the process than open it. At the center of each face is a thin slot a few inches across. Violet possess a small diskette that fits this slot, which she purports to be a key. On the key itself, the word "Gasketball" (gem basketball) is written in ancient gem symbols.

The baby, oddly reminiscent of a certain prism artifact.

Standing beside the vault is a stubby Cubic Zirconia, a toddler-sized and toddler-brained gem. A successful Kindergartening check informs the party that Zirconia are typically only created by accident, when an injector breaks and its gem-nutrient contents are spilled on the ground. Because of the gross waste of resources that this represents, creating Cubic Zirconia is a crime punishable by shattering, explaining their rarity. Zirconia gems are not known to perform any official role or possess any abilities, treated as little more than novelties to own, similar to Pebbles.

Zirconia doesn't know much and has seemingly been left out by Morganite as a gallery curiosity and to admonish any guests who might mess with the floating vault. "Don't touch!" But she's not really too determined to do her job, nor concerned about the party since they just seem like another tour of visiting strangers. She doesn't have much to tell the party beyond Morganite's instructions for her to stay there and tell guests not to touch the artifacts.

Upon inserting the diskette key into the vault, a rudimentary digital display appears on its main face, prompting the party in ancient gem text for a password. To their surprise, there's no room for error as the vault becomes its own defense system when the wrong reply is given. Its hull becomes a heavy battering ram as it zips in rigid lines through the gallery, crashing through walls in simple-minded intent to crush the players. Its dense exterior makes it incredibly difficult to damage, but baiting it to charge out the exterior windows prompts it to struggle to fly back on its own power, leaving it stunned on the gallery floor while its hover engine recharges. Violet looks after Zirconia on the sidelines, giving buffs in the form of shouted advice and predictions to the party.

After enough beating and loud metal pipe crashing sounds, the vault is subdued and willing to communicate calmly again, prompting for the passphrase again but with a simple interactive AI interface. Although programmed with a rudimentary intelligence and a kind of pearl-like demeanor to serve a specific owner, the damage it's sustained leaves it amenable to speaking with the party, but annoyingly unhelpful when it comes to actually opening up as it seems to ignore any spoken password, including the one written on the inserted key.

Violet babysits while the Diamantaires puzzles out the vault.

Ultimately, the solution isn't to give the password directly, but to get the vault's AI interface itself to say it out loud. Zirconia can reveal this as she's seen Morganite take things in and out of the vault before, but translating unhelpful toddlerspeak is its own kind of puzzle. With the password inputted, the vault's interface disappears and its metal faces reconfigure to be ready to open on a simple turn of the inserted key, just as the party are joined again by some other guests...

I had a ton of fun in this segment just through interacting with the party alternatingly via Violet, Zirconia, and the annoying vault AI, each giving their own sly, half-helpful hint to the puzzle. The vault is just a variation of what I think(?) is a classic dnd puzzle: the sentient door that needs to convince itself to unlock (with many frustrating variations on why it won't just open like it's supposed to). It's not really a logic puzzle, more what I call a fuck-around puzzle, with some discrete parts the players can mess with and try to figure out how they slot together.

I think having Violet there to reassure the party that they have everything they need to solve it helped tremendously, but I have to admit my players give me poor marks on this one, for some reason! There are many parts of this adventure I mull over how I'd improve or do differently, so it's funny that this one gag puzzle is the one thing my players vocally dislike and that I myself am still smitten by. Their conversations with Zirconia were some of the cutest moments that have happened in the campaign. Years later, I still think back to getting a setup as easy as Plume Agate asking her "what's the magic word?" (as in, the password to open the vault) only to be answered with the full-chested pride of a polite toddler shouting back "PLEASE!"

I also had fun running the vault as a temporary charging bull encounter too, although you may want to play it a little more fairly and only have it become hostile after a certain number of failed attempts or if the players just try to brute force the thing open.

Hostage Crisis

Just as the vault is primed to open, the remaining pirates make their arrival, their Nephrite leader pulling Orange Zircon along at gunpoint to ensure the party hears them out. Suspicious of any traps or additional defensive measures tied to the vault, they're more than happy to allow the party to complete the opening and then relieve them of the contents, eager to see an artifact fabled "to grant the powers of a Diamond". Seemingly validating Violet's prediction, she steps back with Zirconia to keep her safe, looking to the party to complete the reveal.

Of course, with a lot of tension and flourish, the vault opens only to reveal nothing inside. Suspecting trickery, Nephrite turns her blaster cannon on the party, demanding to know: "Where is the Cubic Zirconia?!" While everyone's attention was on the vault, Violet has already backed away to the nearby elevator with the little gem in tow, racing up to the top of the tower to make her escape from the landing pad.

Incensed and with nothing to lose, the pirates retreat via marble transporter (i.e., the ball that WD!Pink Pearl uses to phase Steven into White Diamond's ship), embarking onto hovercraft in pursuit of Violet. Detecting their escape on remote scanners, Tahiti Pearl smashes through the gallery windows atop her own commandeered craft to give the Diamantaires a lift and a chance to tackle the pirates.

This segment is pretty much just a static cutscene and a kinda manufactured twist on my part. I could probably forgive Violet's sneaking away if I had some player interactivity with the hostage crisis itself, but they're kinda both forced reactions. For what it's worth, the Star Rubies took the opportunity to dive after the pirates after they began teleporting, placing them immediately in the fray once the chase map appeared.

The presence of Orange Zircon adds some stakes, and a heartfelt conversation for Plume later as the two finally recognize how far their two lives have diverged.

An extremely basic map made using Roll20 primitives, depicting the racing fliers zipping dangerously between gem structures. Also pictured: beta versions of a bunch of tokens.

I played very loosely with the handling for this encounter since D&D is so light on effective chase rules. Since all the vehicles are running at roughly the same speed, the drivers of each craft just make checks to ram or jockey for position, trying not to be in the path of an oncoming obstacle before the round ends and the environment transitions to the next snapshot position of the race. I originally started with the full racetrack all on one map, but it was too difficult to predict or constrain the running battle in such a way to ensure it'd stay interesting.

I'm still no expert, but overall I've found that chase scenes do lend more to theater-of-the-mind setups, prompting the players with unexpected problems as they appear each round on the path ahead, but keeping a battlemap handy to track the hand-to-hand stuff here was also necessary. Every leap between vehicles felt perilous. I'd love to run an encounter like this again sometime in our current system, Genesys, where cinematic effects are way more part and parcel of the standard dice results. It could also buff out the sharpest corners of play here, like cases where drivers were out of position or behind in the pack and had nothing to do for their turn when they really just wanted to jump off the wheel and punch another driver, as most commuters do.

Party Over

While the Diamantaires are busy fighting with the pirates, Violet steers the chase through a dangerously narrow channel, slowing her pursuers down just enough for her to get some distance and make a dramatic escape. Her hoverspeeder crashes in a fiery inferno on top of a warp hub, but investigations reveal no sign of her or Cubic Zirconia, until security footage is obtained showing her waving goodbye with a smile before disappearing atop a warp pad. Frustrated by her escape, Titan crushes one of the gem amalgamates underfoot, much to the ire of the Star Rubies.

The Diamantaires are semi-successful: the main party of pirates have been apprehended and their target was identified. Violet Sapphire has escaped, but her infiltration and predictions of the entire operation don't leave much room for critiquing the Diamantaires. The presence of fusion experiments is also arguably a more important cause for concern than the theft of some seemingly worthless gem. When asked about the mutants, Commodore Tsavorite gives virtually nothing. Once again, it validates an earlier warning foretold by Violet Sapphire in the halls of Morganite's mansion: "You can ask, but you won't like the answer you get."

I had kinda poor feelings about this episode for a long time until my players started singing its praises relatively recently. It sorta felt like the first "real" adventure for the party after having gained their footing in the tutorial run. Everyone had been getting their bearings, but by now the dynamics and personalities were beginning to solidify. Narratively, it was also a low point for the Diamantaires, marking their first partial defeat and exploring their capacities to handle failure. As the DM I'm biased from my vantage point where I'm always critiquing the dynamics of an adventure's plot progression and trying to reconsider how to fill the players with agency while still giving them a curated experience that hits the key ideas inspiring me in the moment. From there, it's easy to miss a lot of the little personal moments and the bits of accruing character lore that are impossible to plan for and only become visible in hindsight.

At the time, I measured my success pretty strongly by how quickly I ran an adventure, but now that I'm more used to the slow pace that my players take everything, I'm in less of a hurry and wish I could've expanded on the hostage crisis conceit and build toward more solutions than the players just beating things and letting Violet cheat at a getaway. I talked at the end of One Dimensional Chess about advising DMs to simplify and avoid overarching plots, and putting my thoughts about And You Weren't Invited down like this has shown me that I still need that as a kind of a reminder to myself too. Even my current adventures fall prey to frameworks that take a bit of effort to pitch than can fit in an easy paragraph.

I think if I could sum up my misgivings about this episode, it's that it is basically an assemblage of a lot of neat but little ideas that had still been buzzing in my head for years. Rather than the Dog Named Treasure twist, I think my central conceit should've been focused on how the players handle the manor hostage crisis, and then filling out from there. Violet and the vault and the sky chase all could've shown up just the same, but in service of the players exercising their wits against that primary problem and encountering those elements either as faux-rewards, extra challenges, or satisfying ends. I think the makeover sequence at the very beginning represents this really well: a silly side idea that slots in perfectly in service to the plot and, most importantly of all, focuses on the players.

Until our paths cross again, little one.

7 notes · View notes