Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

The 5th Editon playtest campaign.
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EvilGenius
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Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

Post by EvilGenius »

I was considering some different possibilities as HoD was developed over 6 years, and I'm going to put some of them here if you're interested.

The first alternate development, which I'm going to include in the published version, is that the identity of The Master could have changed to different characters. For me, it was always going to be the green dragon. PCs vs powerful dragon was always the overall goal of the campaign for me, not least because of the Dwarven campaign that I ran years ago, which concluded with a very successful and entertaining battle against a red dragon. I wanted to follow up on that adventure and see if I could deliver another epic dragon fight with a different type of dragon.

But during development, The Oracle and Hravja became so well developed (to me) that I considered that they could each easily have been "The Master", with slightly different aims. I also considered that The Book of Infinite Souls could have easily been a bit more sentient and could have been The Master, manipulating creatures to come and free it.

In each of those scenarios, the dragon would still exist and be trapped in the Donjon, having tried to get in to claim the Book, but the PCs would have the opportunity to team up with the dragon in order to confront whomever was the true "Master". The adventures would still include entering the Book at the end to remove the ability to devour souls.
Last edited by EvilGenius on Sun Nov 08, 2020 10:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

Post by EvilGenius »

There were also a few points in the adventure when the PCs could have found out a whole bunch of information early, specifically, when Brigga and Quarion went on their first extra-planar jaunt to Brigga's displaced stronghold, they encountered a bunch of Intellect Devourers. If one of the monsters had successfully eaten a PCs brain, then I would have replaced the PC with a near identical "Devoured PC".

Since the Intellect Devourer knows everything that was in the devoured brain, that monster/pc would know the PCs entire backstory. So I would let the devoured PC continue play as the intellect devourer with a shiny new "Brigga suit" and have the recovered memories half overpower the intellect devourer so that it kind of thought it was the PC, but would act a little weird. The player would be given the pcs backstory (knowing that the pcs were clones, for example) but wouldn't just blurt it all out to the others. Rather, the PC would reveal pieces of information in reaction to other things, casually revealing that the PCs were clones, for example, if faced with a deadly situation ("oh, it doesn't really matter if Quarion is killed by that monster, that's only his clone body, his spirit will probably just go to the next clone body").

The other point at which the PCs could have found out a bunch of information early was when The Oracle offered to reveal information if one of the PCs was given over to him. Onarra offered to be traded for info, which was friggin awesome, btw, and if the PCs had allowed it, the Oracle would have revealed the same level of "here's your whole backstory, as told from the perspective of this one character whose mind I've just read".

Interestingly, if Onarra had gone through with 'sacrificing' herself, she wouldn't have been killed or anything. The Oracle would have traded her to The Master's servants and Onarra would have had little side adventures via email as they tried to turn her to serve The Master, and she would have either escaped eventually or she would have been turned and then set free to come back to the pcs with an 'escape story'. :D :D
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

Post by EvilGenius »

Character stuff:

I liked how the character stuff played out, for the most part. But there were a few things that could have gone a little differently.

Onarra -
Right from the beginning when Tom gave his character background, I knew there was going to be a subplot where Onarra would be replaced with her 'evil twin'. What I also considered was that the character that Tom was playing wasn't actually Onarra, but was in fact the twin, Miette, who was a little more crazy than she thought. That wouldn't have had much effect on the overall story, but would have given another layer of mystery to unravel for Tom, and led to the classic trope of both of the Onarras showing up together, both insisting that they were REALLY Onarra, only to have Tom's in- game revelation that the character he was in fact playing was NOT the real Onarra.

Jareth -
I had planned out several of Lance's plot points early, like recovering his Moonblade, which would help him to recover his memories of everyone's prior lives but then Lance decided he wanted to play a human instead of an elf. The plot points didn't really work as well for Quarion, so I came up with the elf-to-human curse and that being a reason that 'new' Jareth became a druid in his current life.

But it was possible during the adventures for the curse to be partially lifted. Using info found at Quirinseyru's, Lance could have completed a side quest to lift the fey curse which turned him into a human. The end result would have been Jareth turning half elven. He would have kept the benefits of his human racial traits (so he wouldn't have lost a skill proficiency or a feat, or example) and would have gained some 1/2 elven benefits and would have been eligible to wield the Moonblade.
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

Post by EvilGenius »

Bannock -
I had considered a sort of reverse development for Bannock. Everyone went through a "we're good guys but in our former lives we were good guys who turned bad" character revelation. I was considering a revelation for Bannock that in your former lives, he was secretly a bad guy who had turned good under Quirinseyru's tutelage, which is why Bannock was so, ahem, angry, currently. :wink:

I ultimately decided not to do that because I wanted Bannock to become a Leader of Farweald and I didn't know how Jon would react to 'you're secretly kind of reverting to your original, evil tendencies..." story point.
Last edited by EvilGenius on Mon Nov 09, 2020 1:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

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Balisar - this was Zack's blue dragonborn sorcerer

I was going to do a family plot point for Balisar where his blue dragon ancestor was killed by The Master. The Master would have recruited Balisar, and then Balisar would have discovered that the Master had killed his ancestor, leading to a dramatic turn back to the PCs.

Balisar's stronghold got zapped to the Astral Plane, so there was going to be an adventure on the Astral Plane where the PCs explored Balisar's stronghold. At the end, they would have found a githyanki and a githzeri fighting. They would have both implored the PCs to help them vanquish the other. If the PCs intervened, they would have ended up with the one they helped as a henchman.
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

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Quarion - In Quarion's backstory, he and his brother, Jareth, fought and killed a 1/2 orc necromancer and some minions who slew Quarion's father. I was considering a sidequest that saw the 1/2 orc raised in undeath as a wraith/spectre/vampire who was set on revenge against Quarion. I planned on having that be the 'big boss' of the adventure when the PCs found Quarion's elven village, but honestly, I think everyone was a little burned out at that point so I cut that plot point to move the overall story along. Plus, I really wanted to keep the Dapple plot in Barovia, so it just ended up feeling like a little too much and not quite enough left in the tank.
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Re: Hearts of Darkness: Butterfly Effect

Post by Fen's Ego »

The story takes a life of it's own.
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
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