hi guys!

im atm running a campaign on the 4 gods of chaos in which every god has an arch-deamon in the old world.

a little paragraph on the storyline:

the heroes are called to the leader of the sigmar-cult and he tells them that there are rumors about manifestations of the chaos gods in reikland. he fears that if these arch-deamons become too strong they might be able to summon up the destroying power of the chaos-gods themself and destroy life in reikland. so he wants them to hunt these manifestations down and neutralize them, if possible. in addition the leader of the witch-hunters is somehow involved in this. in the end it should come down to a big bad guy operating in the background, who has to be tracked down aswell.

so far the PCs have encountered the deamons of nurgle and tzeentch. those encounters were nearly only combat related and had some riddles and puzzles involved. for khorne i already have a plan, since he is more or less the god of war, so this might be a big battle between the heroes and the legions of evil

but now i am totally stuck on what to do with slaneesh. i want them to feel the narcissistic touch of this deamon. and i want it to be very little combat oriented and more on a social basis. maybe with a cult of nobles they have to track down or something like this.

im also pretty sure i want it to take place in a big villa with lots of rooms and hidden places to explore.

but i can just not come up with something decent at the moment. how to set up these nobles? what kind of hints should they give to make it possible to discover them? how would you think a slaneesh-cult would operate? and how would they react if they are discovered...?

so many questions in my mind and no answers there as for now! ;-)

can someone maybe give me a hint or do you have any ideas?

thx for your time and all answers!

greetings

neph

The first thing that popped to mind is a masquerade ball at the villa. This would allow the players to show up in constume with masks (covering their identities if they are already known by the agents of Chaos). The players may know there are agents of Chaos about, but don't know which ones they are behind the masks. Clues could be garnered by social interactions, hints in conversations, etc. A dance with a costumed guest may allow a player to notice a deformity under the costume of his partner, for example. Observation checks may allow a player to see the person dressed as a Greenskin slip away allowing exploration of the manor as this person is tracked down. Of course there must be a cult chamber hidden in the basement as it is discovered the daemon is being summoned to corrupt/replace/feed-upon/convert the unwitting masked guests that aren't yet spawns of chaos.

How come this sounds familiar?

Since this is the last daemon, there should be some large surprise/culmination for the players. Were you planning on the witch-hunter named above being a good guy or bad guy? Good guy has him masked at the masquerade and revealed at a dramatic moment to help the players. Bad guy leads to a dramatic moment where he is, "unmasked", and found to be an agent-leader of the Chaos cell.

it does sound familiar, but it is a huge idea! thank you there.

that really woke my imagination again!

putting them into mascarade will be awesome, since i got 3 dwarfs in the group hehe! i can already imagine them trying to figure out nice costumes!

Glad I could be of help.

A funny, surprising moment could be the quiet person dressed up as a Wargor/ChaosWarrior is unmasked and found to be......a Wargor or Chaos Warrior.

If you use stands or minis, you could have them placed at the ball representing the costumes which could run the gamut of Wtich Hunter to Greenskin. Add a marker under the stands to indicate they are not what you are seeing, but in costume. They can have their marker removed and the stand swapped with what they actually are if revealed.

wow, those are some awesome ideas you come up with!

i already started writing on it again. the costume ball will be held in the mansion and to get in they will have to find a darkelf hidden in the city to bring them in. maybe this elf will also be the one sneaking away from the ball then, so they will have to figure out she is the bad guys first! ;-)

You could also have them infiltrating a secret society or a guild...

To keep things nice and exciting for the ball scenario, start murdering people at various points. Nothing like a blood curdling scream to keep things lively.

hmml, infiltrating also is a pretty neat idea

and yeah, i plan on having the cult take victims down to the basement one by one until a certain number as they need them for their sacrifice at the summoning ritual

maybe ill safe the infiltrating for khorne, as the dwarfs might be more believeable to enter one of his cults

Well, the entirety of the Edge of Night adventure is centered around a masqurade ball thingy kinda like this. so maybe thats what you are reminded of? Also it might have some nifty ideas for your own

Cabello said:

Don't have it. It could just be that the mysterious "costume party" theme has been used over and over in written stories and in TV episodes so it sounded familiar from the start.