“We see that you remember us, even if you don’t search for us anymore.”

A tall lithe woman stands on the top of one of these giant creatures with her fishy lips curled up in a sneer.

Boom, drop the players into that introductory scene. The fish people who are the descendants or maybe just the people who were lost in the neon seas are coming to exact their revenge upon the land and the people who abandoned them, or did they abandon those on land.

The players are going to have to first escape or be captured and taken to the under water city under the Neon seas. I think it should be something that the players do have a choice in, they can do either and both would offer some different challenges. First, if they escape, they are going to have to be on the run as the forces from the water are going to try and take back the land. If they go down into the underwater city, it’s going to be an escape that they have to eventually complete, not from a jail cell, but from the fact that the city is surround by leagues of water and they can’t breath underwater, yet.

From there, the story can go a number of different ways as well, but eventually it’s going to be about the players learning about the Neon Sea and what happened. As the story goes, this group of people traveled to the lands in search of a new continent to start their lives on, and to see what they could make for themselves. But things on the voyage didn’t go as planned. Thorogoth the Brave, whom the players were celebrating might have been more of a tyrant who led the people on ships not through storms and destruction, but through sacrifices and pain as they got rid of those who didn’t follow him in an effort to appease the god of the sea.

But not all who were being thrown over weren’t great as well, in fact, on the way to the new continent, several spies for the old lands were on the ship and were thrown over into the Neon Sea. And these people have been stirring up this return that is happening all to claim back the lands and to finally be able to send word back to the original continent about the lands and about what might be found on the new lands.

I would say depending on what the players do, that’ll determine what they find out about first. If they run, they find out about Thorogoth the Brave first, if they are captured, about the spies and the plan to return to the continent. So the players will need to get both sides to reconcile because eventually those from the original continent will come, and they are considered “bad” for some reason.

Now, there are a few ways you can go with this, they can unite as a group after taking out the spies against those from the original continent. Or they can pick either side to back. I want for this game to have a real sandbox feel and for them to start to understand the depths of the culture that they are in and also probably start to learn more about the continent that they are on as it’s been a few generations but the people have never really left the shore area and moved further into the island. Just kind of give it some funky things about the continent, probably dinosaurs somewhere on there, hidden ruins of ancient civilizations, and probably things that are going to make them question if this continent is the paradise they had hoped, maybe even finding out, and this would be a twist I would enjoy pulling off, that this new continent is actually their old continent, the one that they had before their previous continent and that this whole situation had actually played out before to some extent.

I wouldn’t weave in all of that at once, but start to lay the groundwork for a lot of those things and see what the players latch onto in terms of what you’ll make most important in your story. Normally there is a more defined end goal, but in this, we have people from the previous continent coming, are they really a BBEG, probably not, people from under the Neon Sea, probably not the BBEG either. So see what happens when things are a bit more grey, or in this case neon.

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Alright, now that everyone reading this doesn’t care about being spoiled, let’s hop into the game. So the troubles, if you didn’t read the article about the TV show Haven from yesterday, are basically issues that manifest in people, it can be touching someone or something and they explode, it can be that you don’t feel anything, which works fine for a Barbarian fights through pain, instead there is just no pain. But it’s bigger than that, every 27 years these troubles are activated and someone, in fact, probably our crack team of heroes or one of them anyways, is sent in to save the town and restart the 27 year cycle.

Now, you give a player free will with their character and they are going to see the end of the 27 year cycle coming, and a lot of players are going to want to try and stop it completely instead of just stopping the cycle. In the show, Audrey Parker is the key to getting the troubles to stop and then restarting the 27 year cycle. But in the show she falls in love with Nathan Wuornos, a detective in the town, and he wants her to stay and they want to solve the troubles for good. Now, I doubt that the players are going to have characters fall in love, but who knows, they might. But even if they don’t, most of the time, unless a player has completed their character arc and feels like they have nothing more to do with that character, they’re going to be attached to the character and want to keep them alive, so hence, they need to figure out a way to stop the troubles, but also not have to restart the cycle.

Probably more to explain at this point, the troubles are stopped when Audrey, in the show, or the chosen character, goes basically into a stasis for 27 years only to come back out when the time is up and the troubles are coming back. And for elves, that’s not that long, for dwarves, they have a few lifetimes of going through the cycles, but for humans, you get maybe two of these cycles in the prime of your life, so that’s why the love angle worked well for the show (granted the show isn’t elves and dwarves fantasy either). And when I say stasis, I mean trapped basically in limbo, a space between dimensions and worlds.

So we have a lot of the set-up, how would you pull something off like this?

I think there are a handful of interesting things you can do. First, I think that this is a good chance to have a larger group game. If you have one consistent person, the “Audrey” character who can make it to most if not all sessions, you can have a rotating cast of PC’s supporting them. Have them deal with an trouble per session, and by deal, I don’t mean kill the troubled person, that generally causes more troubles to manifest and troubles are in a bloodline, so the next generation would have the troubles show up. I mean, there can be conflict and there should be conflict, probably with a group who is hunting down the troubles, so almost a rival group with pretty unlimited minions and an almost untouchable boss that the players can fight. But since it’s a one and done with the stopping the troubles for good and not having “Audrey” disappear as the main over arcing story, that means it works well for having people drop in and out without missing that much.

Next, the troubles themselves, in the show “Audrey” is immune to all the old troubles, which is probably a good thing, because they can be nasty. But other people aren’t, and I think that’s where you can have some fun. “Audrey” might be immune to getting blown up if she’s touched by someone with that trouble, but the rest of the party isn’t, so how can you deal with that, plus “Audrey” can still die to a sword through the chest or any other natural means. And there’s someone who draws pictures and if something happens to the picture, like a branch on a tree is pushed, it’d push that branch in real life and break it off, so you can knock someone out that way, such as “Audrey” even though it was caused by a trouble, or explode the house around “Audrey” dealing her shrapnel damage, even though “Audrey” can’t be exploded herself.

Also, give the other PC’s troubles. In the show, Nathan, who is Audrey’s closest friend in Haven and who she ends up falling in love with can’t feel pain or touch, so he gets his hand broken, he can’t feel it, he gets shot, he can’t feel it, his hand is touching something dangerously hot or cold, he can’t feel it. Give the PC’s troubles like that. Give them the ability to heat something up to a scalding temp or free something small instantly, give them something that’s powerful but not too powerful. Don’t give your PC the ability to explode someone, they would just immediately take the town hostage.

Finally, keep this localized. Keep it in a single town that is off on it’s own away from everything else. Make it harder to get to, hard to run away from, in fact, you could use the mists like those that surround Castle Ravenloft and Barovia in D&D already where you can’t get through them, you walk in and then you just walk back out into the same town. But even if you don’t force it through magic to be localized, keep the troubles and the stories close to that town. The reason for that in the show is that the troubled would be killed or experimented on if their troubles manifested outside of Haven, so Haven is a safe haven for the troubled, make that the case for your town as well. The secondary reason for that is that if you start and end in town almost every session, you can have players drop in and out.

So end game for this, it’s about stopping the troubles once and for all. This stasis should have a physical manifestation that they can destroy. But that shouldn’t end the troubles, give them a false end, instead, for a final epic arc, give them a chance to go and find that untouchable being that wants to kill off all the troubled, give that being a way to actually end the troubles, and maybe even have them live in limbo and have the town be their experiment, again stealing some of this from the show. Use that to end it, but give them a timeline because once “Audrey” isn’t in stasis at the right time, things need to go from back to worse for our heroes and the town, and the world, probably.

So, would you play in a game like this? I think that I would run something like this, but I think that it might be harder to pull off than some games. There are definitely some trickier things, such as the players just running away from the town to stop having to deal with all of the issues that crop up. I think a session 0 where players really work together and develop the town with you, or at least plenty of people they care about in the town, you’d be able to get them to want to stay.

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In Locke & Key, it’s a story about a family who return to their father’s family house and the kids start finding magical keys throughout the house. Right there you have a basis for a game of D&D, so let’s see how I’m going to suggest turning it into one.

To start off with, you are likely not going to have kids nor, in a heavily fantasy setting, do I think that you’ll want to have a particular house or single location where all these keys are stored. Instead, you have Ashiri, a famous wizard from thousands of years ago, who legend has it, created many magical items and drove the fields of magic forward. No one knows what she created, but there are a lot of people who would love to get a hand on her work. Unfortunately there are a lot of con artists out there as well who claim to sell her items.

The game would start around discovering some sort of clue to the location of one of these items. Or the location, maybe, of one of the places that she worked, something where a lower level party is going to be able to do a dungeon crawl through it. Come up with a reason, such as the manuscript with it on having just been found as to why people haven’t gone there to loot it before. And don’t just give the players the information make them buy it, somehow, they can decide if they want to owe a favor later, agree to give away 75% of what they find, or something like that.

Give them a dungeon crawl but when they make it to the place, they find a locked door, not magically locked, from the outside, but something that a rogue would be able to pick, a wizard magic open, or a barbarian bash open. Let them get inside, and then that’s when you start having fun, you close the door behind them, even if the fighter or barbarian bashed through it, the door reconstructs and it’s magical, so immune to all damage, can’t be picked, and while the wizard can cast magic on it, if they have identify, they’ll know that it needs a particular magical item to open it, but what that item is, who knows.

Then give them a dungeon crawl, and hide a couple of keys in there. Don’t make them easy to find, but with two keys in there, and again, if they have identify, they’ll know they are magical and match up with the door. But only one of them should allow them out. The other one should do something else. I like the idea of the mirror prison from Locke & Key, where a player character might end up getting trapped. And maybe even have them find a third key that they think will work on the door but is more like the head key from Locke & Key where it goes into the back of someone’s neck.

I wouldn’t really put a ton of monsters in this dungeons, maybe some skeletons or something undead that Ashiri could have used as guards, but this place is meant to have been sealed up for a long time. Instead give them challenges and puzzles. Maybe there is a trap in a hallway that they can see because there’s a dead skeletal person in armor who has been cut in two. Well, they know there’s a trap there, and with a perception check they can see where blades or something that had cut them in two and also spot some pressure plates or something on the far end of the room that stops it. So give them things to do that focus on the characters abilities.

Once they get through this and have dealt with all the traps and they’ve headed back, I don’t know that you need to double cross them, but maybe have it that the person who got them to do this was blackmailed by someone else to send someone into get this, because the last person they sent in had failed, can even be the dead guy cut in half, so you could start tipping off the players. Or if the players get greedy, have someone come after them and start chasing them down. But while doing this, start hinting that the keys work anywhere, and have given them a clue to more of Ashiri’s locations.

Eventually, I think the campaign ends with them finding a near immortal version of Ashiri who has been twists and corrupted by some sort of magic. There can be some lesser bosses along the way, those who just want the keys for their own nefarious purposes. But make Ashiri someone who isn’t hiding away in one of her former places but is living publicly somehow. That’d make the players questions some of the things, or maybe Ashiri has been cursed to never enter her former places because she was going to bring on the end of the world. But go with an epic climax like that where whom the players thought someone was, it wasn’t the case.

I think that there’d be good buy-in pretty often from groups of players for this, and there’s a lot of room to play with it as the DM. You can create keys that do anything, which is the great part, and you can borrow from Locke & Key. The Head Key, from Locke & Key would work great if someone has gone insane and they have to go and rescue themselves from their own head or something like that or go into someone else’s head to try and pry out some information that they don’t remember. The Echo key to bring back a twisted echo of someone, especially if it’s a fallen player character would be amazing twist on things.

So would you play in a game like this or run one? What sort of character would you want to play?

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