Commission piece for client and their friends’ Steven universe ocs!! Def one of the biggest pieces I’ve worked on, was really challenging but I’m happy with the results!! :DD
My players were interested to hear the prompts I gave for these, which was honestly just a fun self-indulgent writing exercise. I wrote them all agnostically so as to not predispose the painting process but it was quickly picked up upon that these were SU-related.
Future Vision (Intellect)
Precognition as a physical sense, with a disorientation truly on par with blindness whenever it is unavailable. A cloister of ancient oracles. Being charming by knowing what someone is going to say. Being annoying by telling people what they're going to say. An addiction to surprises and novelty. Navigating the misty rivers of time. Running effortlessly while blindfolded.
Whispers (Physique)
Literally explained, the ghosts of the dead trapped in subspace, instructing you semi-subconsciously. Beginner's luck. When your hands move on their own. Spontaneous crying that makes you realize you are near a mass grave. At its most focused, multiple personality disorder. A chorus of habits and knowledge and unfinished tasks. Shivers but if it were explained in Star Trek via pithy analogy.
Kindergarten (Intellect)
Growing living gem-people out of the ground. Jewel-cutting. Looking at someone and instantly knowing their life story. Indifference to environmental destruction. Genetics mixed with color theory. The opposite of gardening, killing plants to create living dirt and rock and light.
Shapeshifting (Motorics)
The promise of wearing another face, ignoring how it could also allow you to entirely discombobulate. Being able to change into anyone and picking the same person over and over without being asked why. Making your arm big and stretchy to punch something. Ultimate subterfuge, or becoming a dog for some reason.
Empire (Intellect)
Knowing your role in the fascist machine. Ballroom dancing, wearing a corset, marching in heels. The beautiful laborer on a propaganda poster. Overwhelming exertion to play a pointless, graceful, brutalizing game.
Re-Formation (null)
Hope, a new you, metamorphosis, self-actualization made physical manifest. Delightful total obliteration, without any implied edginess. Marrying your soulmate. Growing up. Fighting for your life, begging for a sword, and one materializes in your hands.
Outside the ice-encrusted windows, across the expanse of snow beyond the colony's perimeter, you spy the trundling form of a blue Gem. A Quartz, judging by her build, if you look past her slouched form struggling to limp through the knee-deep frost. Her path points perpendicular to the facility, marching towards nothing but a distant horizon, like a blue ant crawling across white sand.
Then without even a look or a start, she makes a turn and begins running. A frightened animal moving before thought. She struggles up the snowbank, towards the membranous sails of the treeline. And then she is gone, disappeared behind the bone-white curtain.
Homeworld has lost contact with Druse Sector Colony 29, a research facility on the Empire's outskirts, set in protected space on an icy world constantly beset by electromagnetic storms. Protocol dictates a vessel be dispatched to investigate and provide any assistance necessary, and the Diamantaires are closest as the crow warps. There is no welcoming party when they land. There is no one at all. Just the shards of a scientist at the foot of a shuttle that never made it out of the storm.
Damn it's been a while. I expected to whip together another write-up as a kind of pre-planning for a new adventure, like comparative homework and self-critique. Then the adventure went on for over a year, whoops. That'll certainly be a fun self-critique 7 more adventure posts from now.
I lump my first 3-and-a-half adventures into a kind of self-embarrassed class of early works, excreting through my older notions of running games and slowly discovering through experiments and frustration the actual seeds of good tabletop storytelling, to the point where I regularly find myself being very jaded about the whole field of ttrpgs for its deluge of surface level knowledge that misses the point of storytelling in the first place. Expect a video essay at some point of me complaining about the sphere of DMing advice youtube, trying to stab at the heart of what makes games actually compelling. As such, I have to show my ass here and talk through the stories that still make me self-conscious.
But through that angle, there is something that has haunted me about Here Comes Another Thought, for all its tropes and its lack of a player-driven denouement, I managed to touch on the feeling of something striking, and even more than that and more than any other adventure I've done, it feels so full of a promise that if I can just build the genre pieces right, the machine that emerges will be my greatest yet.
That, much more than even my other successful adventures which can feel so ephemeral, so tightly bound to their very particular plots that they defy replication, HCAT feels like an outright prototype. The faces and names may change, the horror itself taken another form, but the grand scheme will reappear again, sharpened and constructed. Until then, let us autopsy its progenitor.
A Gem, ground into dust, parchment, and pigment.
The Together Breakfast scroll is probably the most interesting artefact of the show, amongst a whole host of one-off magical items in S1 that could each be great episodic focal points for an SU campaign. It defies explanation even after equipping the rest of the show's lore. And the basic concept of a kind of information hazard entity is interesting too.
I have a personal penchant for "radioactive" threats, things so close to infections as we know them yet operating with a kind of totality that defies expectation, annihilation accompanied with rules, rituals of curse-breaking built from fundamental understandings of reality, the closest thing we have to sufficiently advanced technology appearing as magic: an invisible specter that disintegrates you.
Gems, for all their playing-at-biological proclivities, cannot get sick. But obviously, they can. They are "solar powered robots", and even robots die next to an open nuclear reactor. There's a borderline to play around here, to infect a gem with something that neither reduces them to a sickly animal, nor simply shuts them down like an unplugged computer. They are thinking machines, and those are always the most discomforting when the thinking is broken, not the mechanics.
Empty World
Druse Colony 29 is a snow-covered taiga, its organic life too primitive to seed the kindergartens necessary to make it a full-fledged settlement world. Its forests are painted from a repeating brush, devoid of speciation, a single kind of dead-looking tree dominating the ecosystem. Clouds of its pollen swell up ahead, joining into EM storms that wrack its skies, plunging even advanced Gem systems into communication blackouts for days at a time.
The Empire has set a lightning rod into the snow here: a military research facility specializing in EM studies, a common element behind Gem technology and common bane to their hard-light existence. Among countless other possible pursuits, the scientists here seek to create pulse weapons from personal to shipborne size. There is a careless fantasy growing here, of the Armada being able to destabilize the crew of an entire ship with a single armament, another weapon on top of countless others to maintain control.
As stated, comms blackouts are not uncommon, but the importance of 29's studies demands an answer nonetheless. The installation is relatively small, only a few hundred gems on a military research base that can barely dock a cruiser like the Handship, surrounded by a lonesome and primordial wilderness.
To summarize something I could ramble about endlessly: my adventure development process typically starts from some half-clever idea, inspires a couple big twists or interactions that I want to build a story around, and then formulates into setpieces that usually bookend the story. My biggest struggles and timesinks form in the connective tissue: first in the progressive sense - how do I move the players from one scene to the next I want them to see - and then in a more screenwriting sense - how do I make moves that are efficient, engaging, exciting. Expect an extremely wrong and virulent rant from me on just how much the ttrpg community fails in providing real resources to combat that struggle, but that's for another day.
Thus, I spent a tremendous amount of my planning time for this episode trying to ensure a very standard framework of horror stories: trap the players inside the house, cut off their means of escape or calling for help, and set the stakes so that every moment wasted feels like a step closer to death. Magic barriers, low technology, and a broadly uncaring adventuring world make these relatively trivial to insist in a traditional D&D adventure, but in sci-fi we have to pull a couple strings.
Once in orbit, the Diamantaires still only receive silence from the research colony, and a huge storm hovers on its horizon. If they want to investigate, they have to get down, and to land in one piece, they have to go now.
The bright lights of the bridge burn eerily against the darkened forward viewscreen, looking out over the gloomy facility under the impenetrable cover of thundering clouds. Landing lights and idly lit fixtures speckle the surroundings, but nobody comes to greet the new arrivals. Just ahead on the tarmac before the open ramp of a colonial shuttle lies a smoldering scene that forms of a trail of scorched and broken components leading up to the shattered remnants of a gem, just a stone's throw away from the potential safety of the ship.
Investigation paints a facsimile of what might've happened: a colonial scientist on the run, desperately dragging a replacement capacitor behind her for use in the ship, firing some kind of EMP weapon behind her. Her pursuers caught up, forcing her to abandon the capacitor, but still only gaining a little more ground before being smashed to pieces against the ground, the victim of a vicious rage.
Past the landing bay is an arterial entrance into the facility, but its electronic lock has been forcibly sealed to keep intruders out (or in). The Diamantaires pool their various talents, physically wrenching the device open, powering its remote terminal, and hacking its command interface - deciphering through the entrenched passcodes of a seemingly nonsensical datadump readout - eventually breaching into the sanctum. As the doors open, a sharp snap sizzles in the air, followed by a white, destabilizing flash.
Of course, a lot of the perfunctory nature of the horror setup could be skipped with a certain faith in the players. While you're screaming at the horror movie protagonist to just leave the house, they insist on staying, for reasons. Some players can buy into the compulsions for adventure, others will continually question the realities of it, not even necessarily from an intention to burst the bubble, but to find the limits of that reality and therefore define its realness. So they say gamebreaking things like "Let's leave and ask someone else for help."
In this case I let my paranoia get the better of me here, and with my screenwriting chops still needing practice, here's the final construction: the party is forced into landing for the sake of completing the mission in a timely manner, and then ambushed by an left-behind EMP trap, keeping them on the planet long enough to get locked onto the surface without a way to phone home through the storm, eliminating the time they'd need to get cold feet and run back to the ship.
The EMP knockout is something I consider pretty offensive now; I could more easily railroad the party into the adventure by pressuring them to land through the storm, then tell them it's too dangerous to lift off. My players for their part have never fussed about this development, and the ambush could just as easily read as interesting as it could come across as impetuous.
Justin "Alexandrian" (one of the few online advice DMs I respect) has a few good lines about all this across a few videos, one being that if a player wants to challenge you with a easy-to-say suggestion that completely breaks the game, call their bluff and tell them to give you a week to rebuild the adventure. At which point, the player smiles and says "nevermind". More than an actual sequence of events, it's a helpful adage to keep in your conscience. If I were redoing this adventure now, I could carry the same trust for the players, letting them dare to back out and end their fun early. Then wait until later to sabotage the ship in a less heavy handed way - and there's definitely perpetrators in the story to have done so.
The Gem In The Snow
Our musical companion throughout the facility.
The party rejuvenate in turns, Plume Agate being the first with her Yellow Court nature slightly resisting the electric blast. As she collects the party's gems, she overhears the nearby shuffle of footsteps, strangers running around near the landing pad. But on a search she finds nothing, their faint trails leading off and over facility ramparts, and with her team indisposed, she's in no tactical condition to chase after ghosts.
Entering the station, the team takes shelter from the incoming storm and begins following the facility map from the emergency landing pad to the main lab as the closest notable fixture. Passing through skybridges and overlooking corridors, the party spies the first real sign of a living soul remaining on Druse 29: a lone Quartz trundling through the snow, before fleeing into the wilderness as if on some unseen chase.
The lone blue gem is one of the more memorable moments of the campaign among our group; I think I got really lucky with a certain kind of striking imagery, and why I really respect the potential of a horror adventure beyond the industry standard of just throwing an invincible monster at the party to bite at their heels. The distance put between the party and the first living person they've seen in this episode set in a particular kind of helplessness far more effective than the usual kind of puzzle-locked door that tabletop games rely on, and I've been dreaming of ways to play with these kind of communicative barriers (with another example immediately after) ever since. So I'll stop patting myself on the back about it here lest I spoil any of my future revisiting of the topic to my players.
After a spirited debate over whether to push on or break from the facility to pursue the gem on the horizon, the party agrees to continue to the research lab. They are stopped by a security bulkhead entrance, locked down by a double-turnkey mechanism, forcing the team to separate and somehow find a way to coordinate a simultaneous unlock procedure.
Splitting the Party
Plume and Titan take the west branch, with a sudden turn down a battle-scarred corridor bringing them face to face with a hall of automated EM turrets, deployed in seemingly frenzied fashion against some intruding threat. Dodging weaponized lightning, they push through to the security station, finding most of the components utterly - deliberately - smashed. While Titan remains topside to stand guard, Plume descends into the underworks of the station to try and restore basic power.
Shouldering her way through the claustrophobic passages, Plume suddenly begins hearing the frantic cries of the Star Rubies, begging for reinforcements. She launches into a sprint, fighting through the tight corners of the sentry tower's mazelike basement, only to eventually meet with silence at a dead end. She is alone down here, and always has been.
Shaking off bewildering distraction, Plume restores the station's power and returns to Titan. Still there are no signs or calls from any other gems, but the local computer maintains a record of old messages. Under an inconspicuous header, a routine-looking maintenance message belies its true contents.
Subject: AUTOMATED RESPONSE: Coolant Tank Diagnostic: All OK
-
Quibble, hope you can read this, I figured I might get past the communications lockout this way. What in accretion is GOING ON? We’re in the middle of a global lightning storm, we can’t even get an SOS out, but they’re locking all the ships???? That means there’s a reason to GET OFF THIS ROCK. RIGHT NOW. This isn’t just about that thing with Sixes and whoever else, something is seriously WRONG and nobody is telling us ANYTHING. Do you remember hearing anything going on in the upper tech lab lately? Something new they were working on? Whatever happens next, please stay safe. We don’t need to stick our jewels out. If you ever need help, you run over here and get me, orders be damned.
P.S. if you figure out a way to respond, can you explain the end of your last message? Is it like a riddle?
Other messages remain corrupted or garbled, repeating nonsensical gibberish and phrases. Communications with the two Diamantaires' counterparts result in only a small amount of timed static. As they effect repairs, something activates the motion sensors on the remaining turrets outside. And then, nothing.
I'm usually staunchly against splitting the party, to the point where I usually enforce it on my players as a soft rule. Mostly because they typically invoke it in order to enact a very poorly thought-out plan, but it's also just a basic disruption to the typical game flow to have to silo a particular player and put the bulk of progression on them. There are good ways to do it (this being a potential example) but my adventures just aren't usually built for it to do off-handedly. For instance, my players love interviewing npcs, and doing it as a one-on-one just leads to a lot of semi-ooc backseating by the peanut gallery.
Overall this segment taught me that split parties work best precisely when they invoke and underline the flaws they otherwise create in a standard adventure: the lack of safety net in case of an enemy, uneven exchange of information, and the added barrier to coordination. A lot of elements come together in a horror scenario to make the split team an effective tool instead of just a novelty.
That said, we did encounter two problems: first, this was still the awkward early days of the campaign, and everybody is more quirk chungus in their younger past. It's hard to maintain a spooky mood when people are posting tenor gifs regularly. It was funny looking back over the message logs and seeing this behavior drop off as the situation grew more dire. This is probably a thing to resolve in a kind of session 0 discussion, if you can predict it.
(Aside, I'm not anti session 0, but I personally do tend to lean on expecting my players to be adults who can adapt or speak for themselves, rather than "needing to baby them" ahead of time - or tell them to take the game more seriously and be less silly. It just comes across to me as more respectful to put that onus on people, rather than admitting up front that you are anticipating them to be disruptive or delicate. But this is genuinely just me being stubborn, your mileage varies.)
Secondly, also a consequence of my players still learning some of the ropes of tabletop roleplaying: whenever it came to uneven exchanges of information, players were relatively tight-lipped. Somehow, things someone experienced on their own didn't embed as like a secret you'd be eagerly wanting to share. Instead, I think it came across more like a roadblock to progression later, where instead of being able to just move on, one team had to divulge a piece of info that only they had. As I ran the split teams in separate private message channels, the others couldn't just review notes to catch up, either.
I don't have a great answer to this except that some elements - like the parties seeing/hearing each other as hallucinations - could've been pushed further, to make some moments absolutely begging to be discussed. At the same time though, leaning too much on a false image makes it obviously false, and then tension disappears as players know to ignore it. Having an npc involved to prompt the party with questions also would've helped. In the same way dnd adventure need baby puzzles to adapt to the attention spans of those at the table, you have to be cognizant of the fact that at any given time, every player has misinterpreted some part of the game, whether it be a game rule, the layout of the room, the description of the location, the tools available, or what the other plays know. Call them stupid if it helps, I just accept it as a fact of life at this point.
Meanwhile, the Star Rubies and "Pygmy" Amethyst march down the darkened east wing to its security station. There they discover a similar ransacked scene, alongside a series of temporary holding cells, with one's forcefield still active, containing a semi-catatonic Amethyst guard. When trying to open up the cell however, the system goes haywire, shorting out what little power remains in the tiny station. In the dark, chasing after the projected light from their gems, the Amethyst lunges into a wild attack.
Once the two Diamantaires subdue the ravenous gem, she quickly begins losing stability, trying desperately to chant her final words, too stuttered to discern, before her lightform finally gives way, leaving behind only a cold, dulled gem.
The two agents affect their own repairs to their station, again finding the local comms system barely adequate to determine timing for the turnkey operation. Beyond static, all they receive back is a shrill transmission of an overheard conversation, seemingly Titan admitting that her and Plume will be ready to shatter Pygmy and the Star Rubies when the time comes. The Strubies shout a frenzied insult into the comms before breaking down in tears, but resolve to continue the mission.
Looking to avoid tedious debugging, the east wing Diamantaires go for a more manual solution to the problem of the simultaneous turnkey operation: using the Gem equivalent of flares as a kind of candle-wick timing device, the Strubies remain at the station to activate the unlock procedure, while Pygmy sprints to the west corridor to tell Plume and Titan when to activate theirs.
With the security overridden, the three teams rush to reunite in the middle, arriving just in time to find Pygmy in a panic, fighting off empty air, as if beset by a ghost that has long since left. As the agents share what they've discovered thusfar, Plume asks if either of the other gems yelled for help earlier. As each gem gives a strained and resigned negative of an answer, Plume Agate shakes her head and says, as if it is the most normal thing in the world,
"What a comet does would be truth to a mirror."
The memetic virus begins to exhibit itself; the cause is also the vector. For the Diamantaires, their infection begins when hacking the door to enter the facility; I constructed the puzzle as a stream of gibberish-seeming data, with the password labeled but randomly placed within. Each mechanical check made by the characters gave the players another glimpse at the code. Unbeknownst to them, the colonists had begun unconsciously embedding the phrase into their everyday work, even the basic computer maintenance routine for a sealed door.
Jumping ahead: although it's the denouement in particular I'm most critical of, I left Here Comes Another Thought with a kind of negative opinion overall since its physical structure is very thin. This is before I started to get a better grasp of the kind of screenwriting needed for adventures, in working transitions and resolutions or pulling from common toolkits like the three clue rule or the five room dungeon. My opinion only began to rehabilitate itself after the fact, when my players would reference it as one of their favorite adventures.
But there's a lot in the double-turnkey segment that shines and carries some of my favorite little moments in the campaign. Foremost, it was a playground to do what I've come to learn are my favorite things in tabletop: mystery, surprises, twists. Again, I think the field of DMing advice and shared knowledge really misses the mark here; so often scenarios are pitched just as kinds of enemy-type dungeons (this time you'll fight zombies; next time you'll fight dragons) or as vague promises of medieval politicking (you must stop the baron's plot to overthrow the kingdom after investigating the ransacking of caravans).
Generic examples aside, there's just such a lacking in stories, as in things that you can tell other people about, actual reasons to immerse yourself into a setting, instead focusing on encounter setups to maximize what the epic natural 20 gets you or, at most, focusing on someone's original npc blorbo (not that I'm immune to deploying blorbos, of course). HCAT's concept is relatively thin: essentially a zombie disaster, a memetic hazard infects an isolated facility of gems. But it was neat enough for me to want to pursue it for all the tiny follow-on effects that are novel for tabletop: playing with perceptions, hallucinated imagery, and inter-party suspicions. Each node of the adventure could be a grab-bag of moments to raise questions from the players, and listening to the players pontificate aloud about the situation they're in is ultimately why I run the game.
The central hub bunker lab. I was still keeping my maps very rudimentary, knowing that my compulsions would one day get the better of me and that every future map would get more advanced and time-consuming to draw. I also kept things clear to accommodate the swarms of tokens that'd be appearing later.
With the main security door unlocked, the team proceeds to the central lab, or at least the remnants of it. What was once a design stage for prototype EM weaponry has been put into a more practical arena. Automated turrets stand vigilant at most of the lab's immediate corridors. Shards of countless gems lay on the scorched crystalline floor. Set in a hub akin to the Handship's central palm chamber, the lab is surrounded by avenues of entry and escape, some strategically blocked by makeshift barricades of heavy cargo containers or EM sentries, each chiming in alert upon spotting the Diamtaires, but unable to fire on drained batteries.
Another chime from one of the central computers presents a juryrigged tracking interface for the whole facility, detecting lightforms throughout the immediate perimeter. Aside from the party, the only signals are errant ones temporarily flashing near the emergency landing pad, but nothing concrete. Outside the facility, just on the edge of sensor's range, a mass of lightforms wait in the forest, too many to count.
The lab computers are damaged, but the ones that remain provide a greater record of what's occurred, ranging from a log of routine messages transmitted to the Empire, additional messages coded as "exceptional conditions" that were logged but failed to transmit, and a final series of messages that were forwarded to the main command relay station, still pending an attempt at transmission and unreadable from here.
Within the available logs, the facility's chief scientist Larimar delivers her regular reports with studious tedium, contents masked by binoclard language until the ending addendum, where she reports a minor insubordination incident from an errant Jasper. Expecting the transmission to fail to reach her superiors through an incoming communications blackout caused by the planet's storms, she resolves simply to rejuvenate the disruptive gem as needed.
Larimar's following reports continue to degrade, first reporting eight new incidents involving low level gems in the engineering section, then countless more. The storm breaks, but the subspace relay is actively sabotaged by an unknown gem. The apparent mutineers make no demands or explanations, only providing agitation and violence.
The next report plays on. Larimar is somewhat slouched over now, the tiredness visible in her eyes. The background is less sparsely populated, with fewer gems working, hunched over screens that appear brighter now that all light from the outside has been shut out by the storm overhead, save for the silent, slow-motion streams of lightning in the farthest distance.
“The situation has stabilized, but I know it’s not going to last. When the first storms ended, we had a sort of reprieve. We had to fix the relay, but otherwise a lot of the personnel calmed down, some in the brig even seemed to be acting normal, though they still won’t tell us anything. Others are simply AWOL, but otherwise, we weren’t seeing the kind of damage we had before. Then the next storm came in, and the situation worsened. And then we had nightfall, and we lost control. I have three gems from R&D and the command station shattered. Definitely more elsewhere. It’s just chaos.”
Larimar rubs the bridge of her nose for a hard moment, before she continues. “Most of the gems aren’t even at the colony anymore. Once we had daybreak, dozens of them just, ran out into the hills. In this kind of weather, they must have a deathwish… But I think it also proves, this is not organized. If it was, this would be over by now. They had us overrun, fighting for our lives, and then they just stopped.”
Although I was able to write a lot of interesting log entries from Larimar breaking down the unfolding disaster, I lament the amount of textdumping I did in this chapter. The easy answer is to dole information like this out in shorter bursts, but this is again where I talk about ttrpgs requiring a certain amount of "screenwriting" talent, to find ways to do so that fit into the logic of the scenario. Strewn-about notes and audiologs are a staple of the horror game genre, but I was hung up on the logic of segmented and protected information in the facility, and so missed relatively easy opportunities to seed big chunks of information earlier (like in the security stations or perhaps on a dropped and damaged data pad at the ship landing zone). Finding Larimar's shards while next to a fairly unremarkable story about a rogue Jasper would've made for a good early hook.
The other issue with loredumps here is that while the players may enjoy reading and asking certain questions, it's inherently a less interactive format than something like interrogating an npc, with less followup to explore details in the mystery or clarify details. Even an interactive AI or projection is probably for the better, or something constructive the players can immediately do using the information they've just read. In this case, I was just seeding the logic of the backstory required to justify the whole adventure, but nothing actionable to solve it, not even information to eliminate theories, such as revealing that the affliction the gems were suffering is not an organic virus or something directly similar.
That said, not having npcs made this the first episode where the party was largely talking to each other instead, and largely on an emotional, actual roleplaying level, rather than just about the mission. A kind of ttrpg bechdel test perhaps. As junior as most members of the group were, it was an important milestone that needed to be reached.
This adventure also taught me not to put generalized computer systems in front of my players, as they're so desperate for info that they start asking for every possible way they can hack into old messages and logs just as they imagine they could on your grandma's old windows xp machine. It's a kinda unsatisfying way of interacting with the adventure (the players just keep making hacking checks or asking to click into every program they can think of), and also requires seeding a lot of potentially optional clues to make it worthwile; HCAT was just far too linear to support it, at least.
By the way, if I were to do this adventure again, I would probably remix all the gem types involved; I see Amethysts as a bit more exclusive to the Earth and related colonial matters now, not just a generalized type of guard or soldier or hauler (at least, not for a location as secretive as this), and Larimar of course is an ice sculptor - I just associated her with ice in general, painting them in the role of a scientist on an iceball planetoid, despite her research having mostly nothing to do with the stuff.
In the present, the approaching storm poses a similar fate for the Diamantaires, with eventual nightfall an even more pressing deadline. While Plume Agate attempts to fulfill the team's fallback objective of downloading the facility's mainframe database, Pygmy attempts to follow up on some of the lab's more recent impromptu research: viral infections among organic creatures. Most of the only studies revolve around Humans kept at Pink Diamond's Zoo, Pygmy's old posting after her service to the Empire during the Rebellion.
In preparation for a fight, the team tries to restore the lab to the defensive posture its prior occupants repurposed it for, recharging the EM turrets, restoring physical barriers, and establishing triplines for alarms and EMP traps. Distractions regularly get the better of them. Plume falls into a compulsive rabbithole of EM research, convinced it could be used to magnify the capability of her electric whip if she just spends ever more time searching for that eureka moment. A tripwire mine is set up down one hall, but the Diamantaires won't realize until later that the charge for it is still sitting in one of their belts, in a more harried moment.
When the storm arrives, the tracking display ignites into a sea of approaching gems. Upon spotting the party, they scream and pour in like ravenous animals, horde after horde. The Diamantaires are pushed in from defensive positions until they are fighting back-to-back, narrowly scraping by until the assault wave finally relents along with the weather. In the desperate battle, the Star Rubies and Titan tearfully put aside their differences and suspicions carried over from the last adventure and fomented by treacherous hallucinations, resolving to fight together for a cure to the affliction slowly taking them over.
This is one of the closest-run fights the team has ever had, before or since. D&D and most other systems follow along the usual metric where a character is just as capable at 1 HP as they are at full health, so there's already a lack of a palpable gradient in terms of figuring when a fight is going to turn the wrong way, made even more extreme with built-in swingy systems like critical hits. The encounter very much put the players at the brink and what I expected to be a TPK, but a couple well-placed EMP grenades eventually broke the swarm of attackers, and the players reconstituted themselves from there.
Genesys has an easy system of handling hordes as single units with an attack that gets stronger with each added mook. Running this in D&D at the time, I broke up the hordes of attackers similarly into units of about 5 gems apiece (sending in about 15 groups overall), each unit with a very inaccurate attack per member, but also Pack Tactics to encourage the players to avoid being surrounded. I could've adjusted difficulty by lowering the number of units dynamically, but it took time for them to overcome barriers to begin actually striking at the party, so by the time the danger was present, the full allotment had already been thrown into the room.
The encounter was exhausting, but in the way you might want such a tense defense to be. Like most things in the campaign, I think I got lucky. Overall, if there's any advice I will give for similar prepped-defense scenarios, it's offering the players an abundance of free tools and adding more that conjoin with their abilities if possible. It adds variety beyond just attacking into the mass, and becomes its own fun kind of prep session as players optimize defenses.
Drinking the Coolant
With Larimar's final log messages being their only clue towards tackling the affliction that increasingly disrupts their thoughts, the party plans to traverse from the lab station to the command relay building. Following along the trail of the previous scientists, they find the underworks of the facility connect near both points, and so descend into the techy tunnels underground to sneak past the remaining hordes of maddened gems.
Claustrophobic, cold tunnels, primed for an ambush.
They are also starting to generally hallucinate: Pygmy spots a couple humans in a fetal position in a corner of the maintenance shafts, coughing and wheezing, leading her to think this is all just an experiment similar to the fusion mutants, and is given the idea to sterilize the station. The Strubies begin to hear the comet-mirror phrase more and more often as whispers from the gems in the lab, and hints of a Peridot stalking around the halls prompt her to want to leave quickly. Plume feels the need to get lost in electrical research, after unlocking the potential of her whip, to the point that she may end up frying herself apart trying to conduct greater voltages.
Traversing through the tunnels, the team encounters another catatonic gem, this time a Larimar, but are ambushed by invisible attackers: Moonstones, the hidden sentries of the Empire's most secretive places, living surveillance units set to a life of secrecy and enforcement. Now driven mad by the comet virus, their strength is set wild, uncontrolled but vicious.
A Moonstone - in another time, in other maddening circumstances.
Fighting invisible enemies is always a good bread-and-butter interesting encounter. D&D offers a simple spell to almost completely negate it, but when one of your players forgets that she has it, it forces more creative thinking and therefore more fun. Seeing that the nearby pipelines are full of coolant, the Star Rubies crack it open and drink straight from the tap, then begin spitting on their attackers to reveal them for takedown, a fun little option opened up by gem imperviousness to minor problems like extremely caustic or toxic fluids, and a frequent callback reference in our group for out-of-the-box thinking.
Reaching the abandoned relay station tower as night sets in, the party searches desperately for any final clues left by the chief scientist tackling a cure to the infection. The broadcasting relay has been damaged beyond repair, even if there weren't a caustic storm passing overhead, but Larimar's final transmissions still remain in the buffer. Taking time between defense preparations, she first dictates a general quarantine message, prompting any receivers to abandon the colony and ignore any further messages, video, audio, written, or otherwise, lest it result in disaster for the rest of the Empire.
Larimar activates a time-delayed self-destruct contingency for the facility before signing off. Or at least, she believes she does; when prompted for the command codes, she absentmindedly enters "what a comet does would be truth to a mirror" without realizing.
Then, in a final personal memento, Larimar works through her thoughts, considering and then discarding the notion that what has terrorized the colony is some form of viral agent akin to that which infects organic life.
Unlike all the other recordings of Larimar that you’ve seen, this one takes place in the main research lab, recognizable from your time there. There’s a sudden realization that clicks enough to make you realize you’ve been losing track of time, too lost in thought to really pay attention to what’s unfolding. You’ve retraced Larimar’s steps in reverse: from her death, to this report in the lab, to her emergency broadcast at the command station. The only place left for hope to exist is here.
“You were the greatest minds and problem-solvers that what a comet does would be truth to a mirror were ALL looking at this like a LOGICAL. PROBLEM. But if it’s not logical, what do you do? I think,” Larimar interjects to herself, “you make the problem *worse*. A new affliction! But if we can’t figure out where this one came from, how do we find another? Well, it’s NOT a virus, so you DON’T find it. You. Just. Think it. That’s what SHE did!”
“The Jasper didn’t read it - just, stumble upon it written in the dirt, words she heard from a ghost: what a comet does would be truth to a mirror.” Larimar looks like she’d throttle you if she could. She screams the next words, not in indignation, but in speaking truth to power. “SHE! WAS! BORED! So she had a thought, random words put together to say something interesting, what a comet does would pass the time. And it KILLED YOU!”
Bitter Escape
Larimar's final video log - while preparing the replacement parts necessary to repair the emergency shuttle - dictates her plan to use the warp-travel-comfort system to scan her lightform, feed the data to the colony's master computer, and have it generate a new viral phrase to override the old, a new one every picosecond until something sticks. Like a program stuck in an infinite loop, the truth-to-a-mirror phrase slowly paralyzes gems over time, eating more and more of their thought process, but an equivalent phrase tailor-made for the gem can interrupt it like a pinpoint Rejuvenator.
Though it all played out pretty clean, the denouement is what I lament most about this adventure, a puzzle solution the players are merely witnesses to without contributing to the solution. It's a tall order given the nature of the pathogen, plus the desire for a sense of tension as the infection takes hold without any clear sign of a cure. Maybe that's looking at the wrong pivot point though: the players shouldn't be expected to develop their own cure, but instead put the pieces together to uncover Larimar's as a puzzle in its own right, instead of how the game actually played where the party is merely moving from A to B to physically find her logs.
But that is basically the mystery-within-a-mystery format, which I'm a huge proponent of (especially when the two mysteries appear unrelated, one being a sleight-of-hand misdirect from the other)... but it does essentially require plotting two adventures at the same time. Again, my kingdom for helpful ttrpg screenwriting advice. That said, I could've used even more basic dnd advice at the time, focusing on the broader map of the facility and finding ways to allow the players to diverge from the main railroad and utilize different locations to advance.
I definitely remember struggling at the time to come up with a logical series, building the virus framework and its conclusion, and knowing what I had wasn't fully satisfying. It's pretty much the refrain I always have in adventure design, trying to sharpen an idea without overworking it or expending too much time in the planning phases, when the improv at the table is what makes the game come to life. I think I also limited myself too much too early in the process, trying to keep the adventure to a relatively short number of possible encounters, whereas going wild with ideas could've given me a more malleable storyline that I could then edit down into a shorter sequence.
My biggest 101 DMing advice is always to cannibalize: jot down every campaign idea you have, minor or major, and then allow yourself the flexibility to change them so they can easily be dropped into any adventure you're currently running. The longer your list, the more options you have to fill in the gaps, helping you get from point A to B without the need for a railroad.
Thus the Diamantaires have their mission: return to the Handship and upload Larimar's cometary cure program to the colonial computer, repeating the escape that the scientist failed to complete. With that in mind, the team must consider making good on the scientist's final decision to sterilize the facility, eliminating any remnants of the infection, especially if the party fails to survive.
At first it's a simple question of not having the means... Until Plume Agate reveals that she was privately given special orders by their command, that if there was any significant catastrophe that risked the colony's research falling into the wrong hands - such as a miniature rebellion or mutiny - then she was authorized to initiate the facility's self-destruct, equipped with its core kill-phrase. Selfishness getting the better of them however, the party quickly resolves to risk leaving without the contingency.
Also a common part of the genre, I tried seeding the adventure with an element of suspicion in Plume Agate, who is given an extended private briefing in the beginning, urging her prioritize the colony's research and the safety of the Empire as a whole, at the expense of the colonists or even her teammates. Unfortunately, Plume's player is too nice. Stick to using this trope with a npc or a morally pliable enough pc. In the adventure itself, I pretty much had to cough and remind the group of this plot point, though it wasn't too integral to begin with.
One last run, as fast as you can.
The team waits until the storm ahead breaks, just before nightfall, to begin their escape back to the Handship. The usual twisting or locked-down corridors of the facility are a deathtrap now, leaving the best option to clamber wherever they can, vaulting fences or navigating through lightning rod pylon fields. It's not long in their journey that the remaining infected gems catch wind of them and begin a frenzied pursuit, as if knowing this will be their last chance to take down the interlopers.
Through vicious struggle and determination, the party breaks away from the building mass of violent gems, making careful use of chokepoints and obstacles along the way. As they trundle through the snow onto the landing pad, the Star Rubies spy a familiar Peridot approaching: their "mother", the gem that created them, her stone still shattered into pieces. They dismiss it as another frustrating hallucination, until the Moonstone smashes into her.
Although the party had dealt with a small squad of the invisible gems before, their last ounces of strength make fighting even one Moonstone turn into an agonizing ordeal, with time of the essence as the other gems chasing them continue to follow their trail. Pygmy and Titan are poofed in the ambush, but Plume and the Star Rubies soldier on with their gems back to the Handship, initiating liftoff so as to put them a safe distance from the facility's crazed gems while Larimar's cure goes into effect.
Still, doubts remain. The poofed gems - including the Amethyst encountered in the security station brig, the Moonstone defeated on the landing pad, Pygmy, and Titan - go into the lightform scanners first, encased in the marble transporter for necessary fidelity. Each one comes out seemingly as they went in, with only a simple "process completed" message from the colonial computer to indicate anything was done. Larimar had no proof that program would work, having never had a test subject to try. The remaining Diamantaires agonize over the system, whether they are doing enough or nothing at all. Before taking the final plunge, they send out a distress beacon to repeat a message similar to Larimar's warning to quarantine the colony. It takes them half an hour to deliver the message without polluting it with memetic hazard.
The Star Rubies de-fuse, one of them volunteering to wait before going into the scanner, to watch if any of the gems re-form without the virus. Plume and the other go next, emerging from the marble transport pod as mere gemstones. The lone Struby watches their jewels carefully, body frail and mind fried by the long night of fighting and the viral phrase incubating in their consciousness. Hallucinated voices from the gems lying on the floor become a furious cacophony, and in desperation for just a little moment's peace, a little more time to think, Star Ruby lifts up her mace...
The Diamantaires regain consciousness together in an Imperial holding cell, minus one Star Ruby. Each of them carries a hazy memory amongst an otherwise clear head, of descending into the marble chamber and having their already overwhelmed mind flooded with a cascade of thoughts, phrases, dreams, all now forgotten, including any lingering questions about comets or mirrors - with the exception of one equally strange phrase, haunting, but in the way only a distant but powerful memory can do.
The team is debriefed by their commanding officer, Commodore Tsavorite, flanked by Emerald admirals. They interrogate the decision to leave the colony intact, to risk the spread of a memetic hazard that could've destroyed all gemkind. But once admonishments are out of the way, congratulations are in order: Larimar's program was a success. The rescued Amethyst was the first to reform, and able to explain the situation and preempt other arriving ships from annihilating the colony from orbit. The infected Moonstone turns out to be a mystery, apparently undiscovered amongst the survivors, and now gone missing or worse; a rogue gem carrying secrets that the Empire would kill to silence.
Finally, they return the missing Star Ruby, who still hasn't reformed after seemingly dispatching herself to protect the other helpless gems from her infected rage. Her sister holds her tearfully close, begging her to be okay, to hear those words of a haunting dream that replaced the nightmare: "What then will you do when you ask her your last question?"
And spoken true, she wakes up, forgetting what a comet does would be truth to a mirror.
Every episode I've done haunts me in a small way, like an old piece of art whose craft you've now surpassed, but Here Comes Another Thought does it maybe more than any other, and I'm still very excited to get back to this kind of genre adventure with the tools I have under my belt now. It underlines a lot of my favorite things to do as a DM, and now that I'm less hamstrung by the initial must-do concepts of my first "season" of adventures as I planned them, I can see the potential in combining those elements with other pieces that I hadn't managed to fit in.
I had no real drama planned for the ending sequence, it's essentially just a kind of stepping-through-the-portal moment, which in any tabletop game may contain some mystery on its face but you ultimately know you'll have to do it anyway. It's a moment of tension right before the credits, but in a show where you know there's more episodes left in the season. But somehow my players let doubts manifest from nothing; there's a kind of naïveté they had in these early games where they were still convinced that I was going to maim them as soon as their guard was down. Those doubts ultimately created several moments of commiseration (glossed over or skipped here) and a finale that felt very in line with our roots in the show.
I try to appreciate my players a lot but these writeups always serve to remind me the luck I have with them, that for all the flaws I can find in my own art, they seem to take effortless pleasure in highlighting the parts they find loveable for some reason. I originally left this episode feeling quite exhausted, that I had dragged friends through a perilous slog, but while re-reading the logs it's heartwarming to see the moments where they put in so much care and enthusiasm that I hadn't seen before, highlighted in their thoughts and commentary during the ending.
Even a bad adventure can be saved by its players. I think this is a fact recognized often but indirectly in tabletop, with its modern focus on promoting improv and interpersonal drama among players. There's a part of it I resent; I don't think it's enough to give players a locked door and then make them manifest the fun in opening it. I believe a DM's responsibility is as much to tell a compelling story as it is to facilitate movement through it. But the improv still matters, it's the empty space on the canvas that you are forced to leave behind in every adventure. Maybe that's why each one I write carries so much self-doubt, haunting me before and after, like an unsolved problem, a riddle trapped in the mind. There is no right answer, just the meaning to be searched for in the one to replace it, and the one after that and the next one still.
Hey all! This is a NEW release of SaiThumbs! SaiThumbs is a free extension for Windows that allows you to directly view Thumbnails for PaintTool Sai documents from directly within Explorer.
Malachite and two Purple Star Sapphires! AKA an ankle biter and her two enablers
just some Mean Girl™ gems that appear later in my Spinel fic! (their designs aren't exactly original, Malachite is heavily based off of a tertiary One Piece character, while the twins are heavily based off of Sherri and Terri from The Simpsons, and are aptly nicknamed such in-universe LMAO.)
put some info about their gem castes under the cut if you are at all interested!
Malachites are a now rare, low-ranking gem caste meant to assist kindergarteners in Era 1, when they were common. Their primary role was to prepare and poison a planets soil for Injectors by systematically digging through the earth. Since Injectors have improved dramatically in Era 2, the need to produce any more Malachite gems was diminished completely, so there are significantly less Malachites than many other gem castes. Come Era 2, they were primarily used as guerilla soldiers and cannon fodder.
A Malachite's primary tool in her arsenal are her teeth and jaws that can bite through some of the toughest material, from solid rock to steel. They are physically weaker than most gems, and generally lack any proper defensive capabilities, but they are fast and can dig through earth with ease. Their teeth produce a specific kind of poison that weakens the earth's resistance, allowing Injectors to produce gems with no issue (before Era 2.) This poison can harm other gems considerably, while other Malachites have an immunity to it.
Personality-wise, most Malachites are generally toxic and thrive off of drama. Ironically, they are mostly all bark, and little bite.
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Star Sapphires are an extremely rare aristocratic gem that were discontinued and mostly 'decommissioned' pre-Era 2. Like regular Sapphires, they are able to see into the future. Thought to be functionally the same, they were made to essentially be status symbols for gems of high authority. But their foresight abilities are far more powerful and can do more harm than good. This posed an real threat to the Diamonds, so the stark few Star Sapphires who were made were shattered before they could ever think of rebelling, yet they had predicted this outcome, so those who were shattered knew they would be restored thousands of years later come Era 3. They didn't see a point in fighting back.
A Star Sapphire can weaponize her foresight, not only able to give glimpses of the future to her enemies, but fabricate false "futures" for them as well. This can not only be extremely disorienting and distressing, but it could lead one into a disastrous outcome, creating that same future for themselves that was never meant to be, i.e. a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are also capable of levitating, most preferring to levitate at all times, not wanting to touch the ground with their feet.
Star Sapphires are, more often than not, extraordinarily jaded, listless, disconnected, and a bit cruel. Their enhanced precognition makes life boring for them, so they can sometimes derive a sort of pleasure in messing with other gems using their abilities to keep things "interesting".
steven is a really funny character actually. he never went to school. one of his powers is astral projection for no real reason. hes a musical prodigy. he was so traumatized by the end of the show they had to make an entire epilogue series about it. he spent seven years looking like a 3rd grader. he was even bisexual
he didn’t have a bellybutton. he actively chose to eat super crispy bits of potato that got left in the deep fryer. he lived in a house but his dad lived in a car within walking distance of his house. he could revive people from the dead. all of his clothes were concert merchandise. he had an outdoor washing machine. he was put on trial for murder. he broke both federal and state child labor laws
Digimon's Dilemma or When the lamest guy you know, designs cards for the game you love.
We are playing Magic the Gathering.
we both have 20 life, and I just played a 5/5
In your hand you got a murder spell and a 1/1
If you can only use one, what would you use?
Simple, isn’t it? you remove the threat.
This kind of threat assessment is the bread and butter of card games, it is probable and most likely that in this hypothetical game this song and dance will repeat multiple times, I will keep playing gorillas until there no more in my hand and after you remove all of them, you will eventually play your bird to push for game, and I will most likely have a response to that somewhere in my deck.
So what then? Who wins? What's the point of all of this? We show up Saturday afternoon to locals to see who has more gorillas and more Doom Blades in their deck? What are we doing, what is our problem?
You are staring down a Destromon, in your hand you have a Tao, green plug-in, Sakuya and yellow plug-in, a Kyubi in raising ready to promote to the field.
A straightforward play that represents the removal of our latent threat, You Evolve into Sakuya, deal 6K then play the option for free that means another 6k destroying destromon. but also during this process w can easily draw into Sakuya X, Valdur arm and a yellow scramble. Of course this is hypothetical. but bear with me here.
If you have the memory, and you WIll have it, are you really choosing? For the uninitiated those last 3 cards in this board represent a 5 security attack for a net cost of 1 memory. In a game state where you spent one attack at some point of the game, it means game. For a total of 4 memory we removed our threat and pushed five sixths of the victory condition. All while preserving board presence.
So what is the problem here? Is it Sakuya? the often called fabled yellow MirageGaoGamon? maybe. Is it Valdur Arm? you know maybe but I am writing this to go beyond “X card is a problem digimon is dying.” I want to explain to you what the foundational problem this card game has, and how no matter what we do it cannot be fixed by a banlist.
I am so tired of youtubers doing this video or podcast every other week, where we look at the history of the game and realize BT1 warGreymon is weaker than BT14, but don't actually look at the cards and spell it out. Is the same as Pokemon videos telling you the HP has gotten much bigger in 30 years, like no shit sherlock but what does that even mean?
This is BT1 Wargrey, when he evolves, he gains SEC+1 and Is impervious to security effects of cards. He is a tempo card designed for aggro, it is a silver bullet against control decks with multiple security options.
This is BT14 Wargrey, He can evolve on top of a LV3 for 4 memory, as it evolves it gains RAID for the turn which lets it attack into you opponent digimon, and also immediately attacks. While you got a tamer, which in this deck may as well not be a condition, it gains PIERCING and SEC+1. This card has a catch up mechanic, removal and aggro, you are promoting Agumon, scratching your nose and paying the 4, Killing your opponents most problematic digimon and chomping 2 security cards off the top.
Now look at me, let me tell you a secret. Digimon players will tell you this card is bad. why? Well for starters it has no protection, so it folds to you opponent interacting with (what a crime), also it needs to attack to remove and third, the raid is temporary, which in digimon now, is the biggest crime ever-
But if this bad card can embody my gripes I will use it, In digimon cards do not offer you any worthwhile decision making, your deck has centralized Ramp, Removal and Aggro, after all protection is not a real issue if your opponent dies. which is how the card design has finally skewed this year. Every deck that has the semblance of a grindy control game style is given a win condition card that puts to shame stupid ass game testing blue win condition cards MTG prints as a joke
But this doesn't have to be a problem, sometimes you need a rocket launcher tag, in a way pokemon kind of wants you to feel that tru their travesty of a silent arbiter ass game dynamic.
Let's go back to the gorilla vs 100 doom blades scenario. If you are savvy you will have found the solution, in that match up the control player wins, if they can draw more doomblades than their opponent can find gorillas. If the Gorilla player can bait enough doom blades to stick at least one gorilla they win. The third wheel in the cosmic dance of Aggro and Control is card advantage, resource management. Now look across the table at the digimon player and look at their 8+ hand card they have after they dumped all their resources on the board and pushed for game. (because remember every time you evolve, you draw 1 card.)
I've been really nostalgic for Steven Universe lately, and I have so much love and appreciation for the show I grew up with, so I thought I should make something nice to sort of give back, y'know? Anyways, I hope you enjoy. <3
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.
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