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| A glimpse of the true power in the Temple of Elemental Evil. |
Ruros Ralpar sounded the retreat, but his cry was cut short by a terrible pummeling from the earth elemental's mighty fists. He dropped like a wet sack, and the others had seen enough. As much of the party fled through the purple curtains to the north passage, Ganth Ralpar moved to retrieve his brother's body from the darkness of the temple.
As he gripped the slack form of Ruros, Ganth looked up in time to see the elemental reach down to crush the life from him. It was very quick.
Yet no one else saw this. The remaining members of the party fled to Hommlett, where they make a painful re-evaluation of their situation...
This upcoming weekend, we're going to have to re-evaluate the motivations of the remaining characters in the campaign. As time has worn on, and replacements have trickled in, the player party finds itself lacking a good motivation to enter the Temple. In sync with their characters, the players have pretty much decided that dissolving this party and creating an entirely new set of characters will be the best answer.
In doing so, they will create a commonality of cause that unites them and makes way for new characters coming into the game. There's been a lot of discussion about this, and there are alternatives...but it comes down to the following.
We have decided to play these games, in their published form, with their published rulesets. This has been a tacit agreement from the beginning, otherwise I would have just started a "Free Range Greyhawk" campaign like we used to do back in the 1990's. We're not blending rulesets or making up houserules, the nature of this endeavor is to play the rulesets as they are written. The purpose for that is so we can see, in painful detail, the complete evolution of the published Dungeons & Dragons works throughout the years.
So, it's not your typical campaign.
Since that's defeating the purpose of our experiment (which I have spoken about many times before), we have pretty much decided that the evil characters in the party will seek greener pastures, since there's no evidence of any sort of incentive in the Temple. The players themselves struggle to come up with a reason to keep adventuring in Hommlett. In this manner, they have effectively roleplayed these characters out of the game.
Now, some GM's would just allow them to keep their characters and either handwave motivations away and simply not worry about it. Some GM's would let the characters wander off and then follow those new adventures. I would probably do one of those as well, whichever the players preferred, if that were in the scope of the campaign.
In this campaign, when your character loses motivation...that character will leave the area, retiring to the purview of the DM. You can make a new character with new motivation.
There's been a high death toll. For the current players, the morale effect has been to demoralize their characters in their endeavor to explore and defeat the Temple's power. The players themselves are not demoralized, much to the contrary. I can see how this could form a paradox for some folks reading it, but I assure you I am in no danger of being relieved of Dungeon Master detail for quite some time.
This upcoming Sunday when we convene, I will hold a sort of "hearing" among the surviving player characters. There has already been much discussion of this up to this point, so I'm going to boil it down to this:
You, as a player, must give me one GOOD reason why your character will continue on this mission.
If the majority of the survivors cannot, the party will be dissolved and new characters will be created. A new jumping off point has already been decided.
To any of you who think I'm being too heavy handed, remember that this has been coming for a long time and all the players know it. The players are not disgruntled...far from it in fact. They are clamoring for more! Yet, this is one of those cases of being roleplayed right out of the scenario.
I know we're all looking forward to this next session, so remember - this week we start Advanced Dungeons & Dragons at 3 p.m. sharp. Be there for the hearing or you won't be heard!
See you on Game Day!