Casting Shadows

This week’s Saturday Seed is for Broken Rooms from Greymalkin Designs. It’s a small idea most suitable perhaps for an early foray into the game and its array of tormented worlds.

The Seed

This seed deals with discovery and deduction, where the characters find themselves having to identify which is hotter – the frying pan or the fire.

Planting the seed

The seed is extremely easy to plant and needs no special requirements for character or group make-up. You can transition to this seed at any point when the characters travel from one world to the next. That’s it.

The Details

When the characters arrive, they find themselves in a fairly large room that shows clear signs of recent violence. Blood spatters, the smell of gunpowder, sweat, and fear, spent shell casings, bloody strips of bandages and cloth…. someone fought hard here, and very recently. The room itself had several exits in the past not counting windows and vents, but all but one of these has been carefully bricked up. The remaining access point is a double doorway in the center of one long wall. Whatever else is true about this building it is immediately obvious that the doors are intended to be the only way in or out, they go deep into the heart of the building, and someone has taken great pains to ensure this room is fortified.

No one is in the room when the group arrives, and no one comes, but through the set of double doors leading into the room come noises and angry voices that suggest whatever violence happened here has not moved too far off.

Investigation will reveal that outside the doors is a smaller room with two groups of armed and battle-ready survival-types having a face off. Line up against the walls to the characters’ left and right looking through the door, less than 3 meters separates them physically, but a gulf seems to separate them ideologically.

Perspicacious characters may notice signs indicating that wounded have not been brought through this smaller room. There were obviously many of them, so where they have gone could become important.

What is going on

Leaving the details of who the two armed groups are to you, the challenge for the characters here becomes not becoming trapped in the middle of these two groups and finding a way to continue on their way.

Does their presence tip or appear to offer the likelihood of tipping some kind of scale in favor of one side or the other? You may want to take this in the direction of  mediation, or perhaps in the direction of exploitation (Yojimbo), or perhaps your crew will seek to wrest whatever is valuable about this spot from these two gangs and take up holding it themselves.

If it were me, I would want to mirror splits in the character group in the divisions between the two hostile groups outside the door while making the broken room itself, and the missing wounded absolutely vital to the survival of the small community huddling for protection around the compound in which it is located. Basing this seed on identifying and making decisions could allow for good opportunities to explore and express inner aspects of character and have the group grasp tenuous threads or themes which will guide their behavior through the rest of your campaign.

Enjoy~