It’s Halloween week here at d20 Radio. In the spirit of the holiday, I’m bringing you a short adventure idea that can be used for your fantasy games. But it’s probably a little bit different than you’re thinking. I’m not featuring a well-known movie monster or eldritch horrors that man was not meant to know. Oh no. That would be too easy. Vampire manses and castles haunted by death knights are passe. Instead, I’m going to send your characters to a place where no one is who they appear and unseen danger may lurk around every corner.
Your investigation into the Count Vladius’s various nefarious activities has hit a wall and you aren’t sure how to proceed. You’ve angered the captain of the city watch and have been promised jail time if you are caught outside of the Count’s manor again after dark. You’re sure he’s actively working against you – after all, no one can ignore the strange lights and sounds that emanate from the windows in the early morning hours. And the bureaucrats that run the day to day business of the city make getting any kind of official paperwork an epic quest that will take you all the way to level 20 before you find anything incriminating. You know that there are several people within the city that are sympathetic to your cause and would help if they could, but they risk too much to take direct action to help you.
But lucky for you, you have learned of a party that will be taking place several nights from now that promises to be a veritable who’s who of well-connected socialites. This seems like the perfect opportunity to make contact with those who would back you in a situation where so many people are gathered and preoccupied with their own business. There’s just one catch – this isn’t a normal party. It’s an event that started several decades ago that has become something of a yearly tradition for the city. The tradition has even spread to several of the outlying villages, though with notably less pomp and circumstance. Instead of just going to the party, people adopt an entirely different persona for the evening, coming up with elaborate costumes. Sometimes these costumes are based on popular and notable figures, such as famous singers or noted adventurers. Sometimes they are cleverly made up and bear no resemblance to an actual person (people still talk about the time five years ago when Rosa Crewer went as a trapped door and poked everyone who passed under a specific mantle with a dulled needle). Regardless of how you dress, the idea is clear – forget about your own worries for a night and come together to socialize and celebrate the harvest.
That’s right. I’m sending your characters to a costume party. I hope you’ve been keeping up on the latest pop culture of the campaign world. This is a great chance for your players to flex their RP muscles and have a little bit of fun with their characters that would border on “too meta” much of the rest of the time, and can be a fun way to inject some modern pop culture into the game for a session in a light hearted way that could come back up at fun points later. Let them develop new personas for their character – if the wizard wants to drape himself in furs and go as the last barbarian king of the north and attempt feats of strength all night long (obviously subtly helped by his magic since the player had a keen eye towards optimization and took Strength as a dump stat) then let him. Maybe the cleric decides that he is a fan of the traveling bard Edwin Shearer and wants to sing songs off key through the entire party (just make sure to let him meet his idol at some point, even a powerful adventurer and servant of the divine deserves to be star struck).
This is also a great way for your social characters to shine in ways that they aren’t commonly called upon to do. “Eye of gold/Thigh of blue/True is false/Who is who?”* When people are actively cloaking their actual identity in a different character, they may offer up information in different or unexpected ways that the characters will need to decode. It can also be an opportunity for the socially stunted monk to get some groans from the group by playing this setting’s version of “The World’s Greatest Detective” (because he didn’t want to give up his sweet martial arts displays for the night and he won an argument with the GM several months ago that batarangs would totally count as monk weapons if they were used in melee) to boldly (and wrongly) make statements and draw conclusions about party goes based on bafflingly confused displays of both inductive and deductive reasoning.
Unlike many other adventure ideas, the overall usefulness of this session might be very little to none at all depending on how you use it. Regardless, I think it could be a fun way for your players to play a different character for a night in a way that isn’t as contrived and overdone as “everyone pass their character sheet one player to the left.” What do you think? Is this an adventure seed that you would have fun running or playing in? What kind of costume ideas can you come up with? Sound off below.
*From “Masquerade” Phantom of the Opera
Ben Erickson
