Saturday, April 9, 2011

H: Home is your ...

Aah, the joyous moment when an adventurer, or an adventuring party, stakes out a home of their own. Sometimes the moment is relatively mundane -- setting up shop in a certain suite in an inn for the duration -- and sometimes, not so much.

I've had PC parties go the inn route; they've also received small flats (in Sigil) or land for building in a chosen village (in more "mundane" settings) as rewards for services and general derring-do. (that one group then managed to give away the village to a tribe of monastic ranger werewolves is mostly irrelevant. but amusing to comment on.) While I love the founding-a-barony-etc bit at name level, by no means do I make my players wait that long if they want to set down roots.

Which brings us to "the temple-warming party".

Way back with a particular group of players, after defeating an especially bizarre group of bandits and turfing them from their mostly-underground lair (and dealing with their mysterious contractor literally falling dead on the doorstop of their inn suite after receiving the item he'd wanted retrieved), a great debate went up as to what should be done next. The winning comment was more or less as follows:

Cleric player: I wanna take over the lair!
me: Ei?
Cleric player: Yeah! I'll use it as a temple 83
Cleric player: And everyone else can live there.
Everyone else: Sweeeeeeet.
Cleric: We'll even bury the nameless dead guy and Craig's ranger in the new crypt! They'll be the first of many no doubt ~
me: ... *snrk* Go for it.

He was quite serious. So we had an entertaining evening of "preparing the temple" -- clearing out the underground pool of alligators, removing the bodies, sprucing everything up nicely, laying in supplies and whatnot that were purchased from their ill-gotten adventurous gains -- and then it was time for the temple-warming party.

I can't say that I remember all of the details; it's been a long time. Suffice to say that the temple-warming party involved:

- two funerals involving acapella dwarf singing
- filling the alligator pool with ale and swimming in it
- the half-elf fighter-mage's formal gown being snitched in order to dress the party leader (a thief) in it after he passed out

Good times ~

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

The last but one Pathfinder game I was in started with us clearing a tiny village that had been entirely zombified. Once we were done, there was no living person left who had lived in the village. So, my first reaction, "What do we name our village?"

Took the DM totally by surprise. I spent the rest of the game recruiting people to live there and buying needed materials for the village.

Who would not want a place to call home?

Anonymous said...

How long before a band of intrepid adventurers arrived to clear out the temple and acquire some loot?

Mothman's Dog said...

As a DM, I can count on one hand the number of times this has happened, twice a wizard buying an inn and... and... I know I don't need all the fingers on my hand to count them, but...

Worse, suggest it to most gamers I've gamed with and all you get are mystified stares.

The one time I played in a group that tried to take over a lair after clearing it out, the DM glared angrily at us and said no.

Renting a room at the inn, though...

Chris said...

...clearing out the underground pool of alligators...

Philistines! Who'd want to tear out a lovely period feature like that? Except possibly for the resale value to aesthetes.

@GSV: starts singing *Cricle of Life* ;)

Tomira Eliyes said...

My bard is still pissed about the cleric giving away the damned village. After she'd paid for her new burrow to be dug and everything!

Anonymous said...

that's a great tale!
It is a crowning moment when a player decides their PC needs a home. Instead of limiting the game, it can actually make things more fun, as you have just shown :)

C'nor (Outermost_Toe) said...

@Tomira:

Why did the cleric have the ability to give away the village without the consent of the rest of the group?

Tomira Eliyes said...

@ C'nor

See "tribe of monastic ranger werewolves". I don't know that the cleric realised what he was doing at the time. None of the other PCs were present when he did it -- it was right after a big battle against a combined force of Scro and Orcs. But it boils down to the party being too scared of the werewolves (even though they'd acted as allies in this instance) to argue the point.

With them.

With the idiot cleric, on the other hand...

(He/his player probably would have argued that his parents founded the illage and he'd been there longer than most of the rest of the party had been alive, etc., but that'd just an attempt to cover ones own ass.)