One of the most interesting features of my "Mists of Lamordia" campaign is that the PCs have a patron, Rebecca Van Richten, of distinctly uncertain motives. She has been nothing but helpful to the PCs, but they also know that she's been lying to them, and fairly extensively at that. So there have been several discussions about just how far they should trust her.
She has now fallen out of the campaign permanently (we're getting to the endgame), so I'm now free to elaborate...
One of the conceits I've taken for 'my' version of Ravenloft is that the realm exists in a strange time loop - every hundred years of so the setting resets back to where it was. But it's an imperfect reset, in that some things remain from where they were, some characters remember what has gone before with varying levels of accuracy, and some things are moved around.
And so it is with Rebecca Van Richten - in this iteration she was born Rebecca Van Buren, fell into the orbit of Rudolph, he was warned away by her family, and then following a great trauma she became convinced that she was in fact the niece of the famous monster hunter. In previous iterations she has always been in his orbit, filling many roles: rival, lover, student, wife...
The consequence of this is that Rebecca could have been trusted about everything except the details of her own identity and family. She could have been a great help to the PCs. But because her story just didn't add up, they didn't avail themselves of that aid, and have to face the endgame blind.
And that is probably the single thing that I am best pleased with in the whole campaign - the players spent a fair amount of time teasing out that thread, genuinely did uncover almost all of the key details, and then made the interesting choice of how far to trust her. The fact that they made the 'wrong' choice is a feature, not a bug.
No comments:
Post a Comment