Casting Shadows

This Saturday Seed presents an idea for Leagues of Adventure, a great Ubiquity-powered game from the clever fellows at Triple Ace Games.

The seed
This seed involves stumbling from one peril into another, and is entangled with the strange people and places one meets in the unexplored reaches of the planet, while one is desperate to get away from something terrible. 

Planting the seed

Planting the seed is simply a matter of having the characters in a metaphorical frying pan, and providing a bit of fire to escape to once they get their bearings. In essence, during a lull immediately following a tense and exciting escape from danger, this interlude could be provided providing context for the player belief that things always go from bad to worse. Of course, it will be their own decisions which bring on the worsening of conditions, but what can a poor GM do?

The details

After an exhausting trek through difficult terrain such as jungle or tundra, the characters can reasonably conclude that they have escaped from an environmental threat or eluded a pursuer and can rest. Low on supplies and weak from exertion, the group needs a place to camp. Following the signs of the land, they encounter not only a place to rest and recoup, but an actual village. Water and supplies of regionally and seasonally appropriate food are visible from the outskirts of the village, but there is no sign of life. No fires are burning, there are no sounds of children or of work being done…

With a brief examination of the area, the group will uncover all the evidence they will need to conclude a massacre has occurred here. Bodies are found in similar states of decay and brutal dismemberment in most buildings of the village, with signs and tracks suggesting that the violence moved from building to building, dragging its bloody prizes behind it. 

While the group is searching, battered, bloody, and sore from their previous perilous journey, a small band of tough-looking European explorers enters the village, carrying the fruits of their hunt. Well-armed and equipped, the group of explorers are rightfully suspicious of the characters and their ties to the atrocity laid out all around. 

What is going on

Have the other explorers been to the village before? Why have they arrived as they have, after hunting? Could they have massacred the people here and are now seeking a scapegoat? What could have caused them to do so? If the explorers are innocent of the slaughter, why do they suspect the characters on such circumstantial evidence? If they did not do it, and the characters did not do it… who did it? Again: why?

Enjoy~