Witch Stories
November 2nd, 2010
Hello everyone, and welcome to Grave Plots, where we bring you new adventure ideas and plot hooks each and every week in order to get your creative juices flowing and enhance your game experience. As you know, each week’s Plots revolves around a central theme, however, you may not know that I also take requests. If you would like to suggest a possible theme, feel free to email me. As for this week’s installment, we will be looking at some potential plots involving one of the most iconic villains from fairy tales and folklore: the witch.
Snap Judgment
In this adventure idea, players will be forced to make a choice with only very limited information, a choice which could have dire consequences not only for the PCs, but also for one innocent person. In order to get the most out of this plot hook, you will need: 1) PCs who have a very well defined morality and a deep commitment to a particular philosophy regarding life and death; and, perhaps more importantly, 2) Players who enjoy moral conflicts in theoretical situations, and who have a strong investment in making decisions they believe to be ethical. While other groups can still get something out of this hook, if your group tends to behave in a completely apathetic way towards crises of ethics then you should probably look towards another hook.
The hook is really quite simple: the PCs encounter a knight while traveling between towns. The knight, a youth in his mid-teens, greets the PCs and asks (or demands, depending on your campaign setting) for their help with a task. The knight explains, somewhat abashedly, that last night while traveling on the road he encountered a young woman apparently in need of escort. When he offered her help, she graciously accepted and they traveled together a short time before making camp. While they made camp they got to talking and the young woman attempted to seduce him, and even though he should have known something was wrong right then and there, after letting the woman down gently he decided to forget the whole incident. But before long the woman revealed herself to be a witch and used her magic to subdue him, robbing him of all his gold as well as his most sacred possession, his magic sword Helencourte, before fleeing. He knows she’s still close by, and if the PCs would help him recover his gear he would be personally indebted to them. Should the PCs agree, the knight guides them to the site of his camp and helps them track the witch. Shortly thereafter, the PCs encounter a young woman apparently lost in the wilderness; at first she seems relived to see the PCs, but when she notices the knight she looks terrified and begs the PCs not to kill her. She quickly tries to explain to the PCs that the knight tried to force himself on her and she had to use magic to defend herself, and that she only took his things to teach him a lesson and prevent him from attacking any other helpless women. The knight then cries out that the PCs will not be deceived by her foul lies and charges at her, his war horse his only weapon. In response to this new threat the woman cries out to the PCs to protect her, even as she readies her spells to defend herself. If you know your group to be exceptionally self-interested, she may offer them the knight’s magic gear if they will aid her.
The actual guilt and innocence of the situation is left entirely to you, as is any additional information you want to give the PCs as little clues to give away the guilty party. The aftermath is also up to you - perhaps the whole exercise is a test to judge the PCs’ worthiness in some fashion. For example, perhaps the knight and woman are in on it together, and if the PCs don’t defend her he intends to attack them, but if they behave in a chivalrous fashion then he may offer them some reward. Perhaps the woman really is a witch and the knight just an illusion, the whole situation arranged for her own deranged pleasure.
A Night of Terror
If you like stories of exotic terror and supernatural revelry, then this hook is for you! The PCs, as noted heroes or as mercenaries for hire, receive a letter from the new mayor of the town of Engville, asking for their help to save his town before it’s too late. On the way to Engville, particularly observant PCs may notice that a thin red line runs in a circle around Engville approximately 2 miles outside of the town, encompassing the hills to the north, the outlying farms to the east and west, and a good portion of the forest to the south. When the PCs arrive in Engville, they find the usually sleepy collection of shops and houses that make up Engville seem to have gone into hibernation. The mayoral manor is easy enough to find, being the largest structure in town and conveniently located in the town’s center. The mayor’s secretary, a terrified looking older man with little to no hair left on his head, greets the PCs warily before sending them in to see the mayor. The mayor is a young woman, possessed of the kind of casual beauty that always seems easier to ignore than it proves to be. Her bearing marks her as being more annoyed than worried, though her mood visibly brightens as the PCs enter her office. She asks them to sit and begins explaining the situation.
Apparently the town has a long history of superstitions, involving various supernatural entities gathering in this town every 20 years to commune with witches and torment the mortal souls trapped in Engville in pursuit of their dark revelry. Some stories even claim that the witches and demonic entities inhabiting the town claim townsfolk as lovers or muses in order to gain dominion over their souls. She actually goes on in great detail about the exact nature of each individual superstition with a cold sort of detached clinical amusement, a process that could take hours. The details given should invoke all the darker aspects of the fantastic, the bacchanalian and dark insanity; for inspiration, I recommend any scenes of madness and joy found in Greek myth (particularly the stories relating to Dionysius and the nymphs and fauns), any material you can find on Walpurgisnacht relating to both to modern pagan practices and the actual saints day celebrations in central and eastern Europe), high production value black metal music videos (you can use youtube to find the videos and even mute the sound if you don’t appreciate the genre), and any kind of horror fantasy you can get your hands on (your local librarian can probably suggest some good titles).
The mayor explains that some of the older folks have even managed to convince themselves that these ridiculous superstitions have some kind of basis in fact, and as this year is the 20-year anniversary of the last such alleged incident, panic has struck the town and she has barely managed to maintain order. To make matters worse, someone, probably one of the younger villagers, is pulling pranks designed to increase panic and prey on the superstitions of the townsfolk. Again she talks at length of these events, going into the exact details of what’s been happening and how it relates to the previous superstitions, and, again, this could take a long time. Next, she runs down a list of possible suspects and why she thinks each person might be involved, being as verbose as ever. She really tries to avoid pinning down exactly what she wants the PCs to do and spends most of her time trying to delay their meeting until midnight that evening, employing tactics like calling for meals and breaks, discussing strategies for everything and negotiating a proper contract, offering ever more opulent and tempting rewards.
If the PCs get fed up and leave then that’s the end of the adventure and they should feel good about getting out of a, frankly, very nasty situation. Should they actually wait out the mayor’s long rant, then at midnight she smiles with a nasty satisfaction as the full moon turns blood red and she dawns her black witch’s cowl. She welcomes the PCs to the communion of darkness, explaining that she is glad they decided to stay; after all, they are to be the evening’s guests of honor. Following the hour of midnight, a number of very strange things happen. The area marked by the thin red line is suddenly surrounded by a jet black wall bearing the images of grinning demons and mortal men and women engaged in impossible sexual positions, and giants come down from the hills, fey emerge from the forest, witches and warriors garbed in black chain emerge from the homesteads, and terrifying demons descend from the sky. The assembled hosts of twisted nightmares begin a dark and chaotic revelry as they murder one another, drink the blood and consume the flesh of the fallen, engage in perverse sexual activities, profane accepted religions with blasphemous parodies of their most sacred rituals, and engage in acts of temptation or torture of mortals, including PCs who are unable to ward off the supernatural threats, without discrimination. The exact duration of this living nightmare is up to you, perhaps only an hour, making for a fairly unusual encounter; perhaps for a day, making for a horrific one-shot; or a week, making for a short adventure filled with repeated chaotic encounters; or perhaps a whole year, making for a long adventure with a focus on resisting the evil all around the PCs; or even for 20 years, making a campaign where escaping the village and wandering a terrifying expanded hellscape in search of a way home becomes the central focus.
Well, that’s it for this week’s Grave Plots. I hope you enjoyed this foray into witch-themed adventures, and until next time, allow me to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.