After our Total Party Kill in the Winds of Magic adventure, the group decided to make fresh new characters and I (for reasons having nothing to do with TPK) am taking over GM-ing. My intention is to run them through The Gathering Storm, but I wanted a sort of warm-up session before jumping into the campaign proper. And even though the group never had much of a social focus, I would like to show encounter mode in something other than combat since we haven't really explored that yet. But I could use a few suggestions, it seems.

The basic adventure idea I had was cribbed in part from one of the Gotrek & Felix stories. While stopping at a coach house or something on their way to Storm-whatever in TGS, the characters are told of a beast-man attack on a merchant who passed through this way. The son of the couch-house owners has gone missing since the attack and won't the adventurers please go and find him?

Of course the reality's a little more complex than that. A group of bandits are behind the attack, and the son has joined the group. He was wounded in the attack and is hiding out so he won't have to explain what happened to him to his parents. To make things a little more interesting, the bandit has been using a monster in the attack, though. He's captured some sort of beast-man, which he keeps chained and subdued thanks to some sort of Chaos-fueled pendant. What he doesn't know, and may not come up, is that the reason the pendant keeps the creature sluggish is it's slowly mutating it.

So, the players will get to do a little tracking through the woods, fight some bandits, the beast-man, and discover that the son is a minor player in all it. I'd still like some sort of non-combat scene prior to encountering the bandits. It's tricky, though, as my group probably tends towards the... "enough talking, let's kill them all at let the gods sort it out" end of things.

Any suggestions on something to toss in there to mix it up a bit?

If you want to make it "complicated", the bandits got the chaos creature by wiping out some (say it's a small beastman herd etc.), and so the PC's may encounter an outlying farm or so who are providing shelter/trading food to the bandits and think of them as "good folks" who protected them from the chaos creatures.

As in many historical cases, peasants not getting protected by lords organize themselves and take care of a threat, then go on to be more "enterprising".

The social part can be in dealing with peasants/farmers who are grateful.

Maybe there are some wood elves in area. They too are not worried about humans robbing each other but rather the presence of chaos creatures and were happy the humans took down some but mistrustful of fact they are using one now. They know where the bandits are and could reveal it but it takes social encounter to get the information of them

With/without that, as the PC's and bandits are ready to fight/have started, then have a real nasty chaos creatures (say the rest of beastman herd) show up, one of those classical "the only way we're getting out of this is alive is if we cooperate" where social issue is "how well do you cooperate, how long do you spend arguing about it", which translates into more or fewer fortune dice on PC's actions or misfortune dice depending on level of assistance bandits give. That would be a good time for the mutation to finally reveal and cause "trouble inside the fort".

Rob

Well, too my surprise the players went straight from finding the cart to investigating to the bandits, skipping over the villagers entirely. I guess they're learning that biting on hooks makes for a better game than running from them.

RARodger said:

If you want to do a social encounter, you could always put the farmer encounter on the other end, having the farmers ask about their missing "savior" bandits/friends. Might be some fun times to watch the PCs try to figure out whether to dodge the questions, lie to them, or tell the truth and explain the background of the situation using their social skills and talents.

Hell, they took the runaway hostage and marched him back to the coach-house under the impression it was the bandit hide-out. They were quite surprised to discover his parents had no idea what was going on. It was quite fun as they had to decide what to do with him. (They marched him around town telling the wives and family members of the bandits killed in the fighting why their loved ones weren't coming home, and are going to march him to Stormdorf to either hand him over to the Burghomeister or the temple of Sigmar... still up for debate.)

I wish I had been able to figure out suitable goals for having it play out as a real social-encounter with die rolls and cards and all. Switching from role-playing to systems has been a struggle with me with a number of games (like Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard). Fortunately it isn't one my players share. Or rather, they don't care only I do. I like rules and want to use the subsystems! But in this instance it wasn't clear what the various NPCs actually wanted (another weakness of my GMing, but I'm working on it).

Dogs in the Vineyard has been a big help in that matter, in fact. It has helped me push my NPCs to escalate encounters even when it seems they wouldn't. It's been a while since I've run at all, so I think I lost the voice in the back of my head saying, "escalate, escalate, escalate." I should tape it to my GM screen.