Chapter Seven: The Once and Future HST

Adventure spoiler text follows:

A Joe Average vampire named Davot, disillusioned with the failures of the Mayor and Adam to put humanity in its place, wishes for the power to succeed where they failed. The Djinn, Big Bad of the “season” comprising the published adventures so far, grants the wish.

(Now, unlike previous wish-makers, Davot knowingly makes a wish to the Djinn based upon rumors he’s heard about that entity, which makes me wonder why (1) Sunnydale fiends aren’t making apocalyptic wishes left and right, and (2) none of them simply wish the Slayer out of existence. But maybe that’ll be addressed as the “season” progresses.)

In any event, Davot gains the loyalty of a combined vampire/demon army the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Adam’s heyday. (As in the cyber-demon Big Bad, not as in “and Eve”. The army isn’t that impressive.) As if that weren’t enough, the Djinn throws in the demonic equivalent of the four treasures of the Tuatha de Dannaan: a dead-raising cauldron, a fire-spitting spear, a poisonous black-bladed sword, and a prophesizing stone. Davot even gets that dragon last seen flying out of Glory’s dimensional portal as a remarkably faithful steed.

The action involves the heroes attempting to discover who’s behind the disturbingly coordinated vamp/demon attacks in town – and, of course, dealing with progressively more bruising vamp/demon attacks themselves.

Playtest: These get really nasty – the fight with a horde of vampires and the Sisters of Jhe sent to rescue them, for example. The latter are the female demons from “The Zeppo” episode, and they’re very, very good fighters – so much so that even the Heroes had to burn DPs to get in decent hits.

Once they learn of Davot’s army, the heroes can either attempt to infiltrate it on their own (if their group happens to include a monster of some sort) or ask a friendly demon to do so for them. (The text offers several possibilities for the latter, including Whistler and Clem.)

Playtest: It’s a good thing my group included a half-demon and a teen faerie, because sending NPCs out on a spying mission and waiting for them to report back doesn’t exactly strike me as riveting game play.

Davot’s recruiters will put any newcomers through a series of tests before allowing them to join the army. The text leaves the nature of these tests up to the GM, but I can’t think of many that wouldn’t involve the PCs doing something pretty un-heroic. I mean, if the PC’s a vamp, wouldn’t you think they’d want to see a display of his hunting technique?

Playtest: I just made up a demonic Gatekeeper who verified that the spies were demons – or a demon and a presumably Unseelie faerie, at any rate – then threw in an unpleasant evening with some scavenging Lei-Ach demons and a one-on-one combat with two previously slain demons brought back by the magic cauldron.

If sending off an NPC spy and waiting for a report seems annoying, cowboy vamp Lyle Gorch adds insult to injury by showing up to spill the beans on Davot in exchange for help in making off with Davot’s vampiric girlfriend – thereby rendering any PC or NPC spying mostly irrelevant.

Playtest: I would have simply ditched Lyle from the story, were it not for the fact that I’d used him in a previous adventure and that he was a big hit with my players. So, I combined the spying with Lyle’s treason, having Lyle recognize the spies from their previous encounter and work out a mutually acceptable deal with them afterwards.

Lyle sneaks the group into Davot’s stronghold – Dracula’s Sunnydale castle – where, at Lyle’s suggestion, they’re to snatch Davot’s magic items in the hopes that this will break his hold over his army.

Unfortunately, the items never were “real” artifacts – the Djinn lifted them from an obscure Victorian-era play. When the PCs either leave the castle with them or attempt to use them – the latter being much more likely, since the Djinn will wake up the entire castle when the heroes snag the magic stone – they crumble to dust. In short, the PCs have to battle their way out of the castle for nothing.

Playtest: The text doesn’t explain exactly how Lyle, of all people, found the secret entrance. The implausibility of such a generally incompetent character pulling off such a coup made the PCs awfully suspicious, but they went along anyway. I don’t think I was able to make the escape particularly convincing. On the one hand, I had to throw enough monsters at the PCs to make them retreat. Adventures should never hinge on the PCs retreating. On the other hand, I had to do quite a bit of fudging to get them back to the secret entrance without the entirety of Davot’s army catching up and overwhelming them, or at least blocking their way. I settled on a massive horde chasing them and a few demons popping up here and there on the way before finally allowing the PCs to give the army the slip.

To add injury and insult to injury and insult, despite their escape, Davot’s army manages to track the PCs down to wherever they happen to go and besiege them until the heroes are captured. He prepares to sacrifice them, but in the process has every monster in the army join him in a wish for the power to come out of hiding and destroy the humans. And in a devil ex machina, so to speak, it turns out that this is what the Djinn had planned all along. The entire army, Davot included, get burned to ashes and soul-munched, allowing the Djinn to enter our world in an incorporeal but completely mobile form, no longer limited to waiting for wishes to make himself known. In other words, the PCs just spent an entire adventure getting the living crap kicked out of them for a pre-ordained failure resulting in matters only getting worse.

Adventures should never, ever hinge on PCs being defeated or surrendering, because barring GM fiat – in which case, why play out the battle in the first place? – there’s no way to guarantee that outcome other than throwing an endless stream of foes at the PCs. And even then, you may well end up killing them rather than knocking them out, again requiring GM fiat or Drama Points to fix.

And speaking of Drama Points, they make the situation all the more egregious. First of all, their damage-reduction function will only drag out the preordained outcome. And secondly, it’s the height of unfairness to draw players into draining their characters of Drama Points for such a futile effort.

Playtest: To avoid this very scenario, I had Lyle spill the beans regarding the Slayer’s home to Davot so that Davot could take her father as a hostage. I’d hoped that this would get the PCs to surrender, but I had to settle for the Slayer volunteering to face Davot’s army basically by herself. (Well, other than some crossbow sniping at Davot’s dragon and an attempt by the group’s powerful half-demon mage to pull a clever trick. The latter got the mage fried by a sorcerer on Davot’s side.)

I see the value of this adventure as a major turning point in the Djinn storyline, and I realize that one of the key lessons of the Buffyverse is that life isn’t fair and frequently sucks mightily. I don’t, however, see the value of humiliating PCs, draining them of DPs mid-“season,” and pissing off their players for the sake of teaching said lesson and passing said turning point.

Besides, if you piss off your players so much that they don’t want to play anymore, what have you gained by reaching the turning point in the first place?