Vanessa
Nothing amuses me more than being able to sit back and watch my players do all the work for me. Particularly when it involves them getting into philisophical debates over good and evil, right and wrong. This past week was one such session. After setting the stage for them and filling in a few details along the way, I was able to sit back and observe.
I picked up Madness at Gardmore Abbey despite the fact that the party is over-leveld for this adventure. The thought was to simply ramp it up a bit and make it more of a challenge. It is turning into a wonderful opportunity for differing views to come into conflict. The saying goes, there are two sides to every story and then there is the truth. In this case free-thinking, do-what-you-must-to-survive is coming into conflict with freedom-loving, do-the-right-thing. All this started over a powerful magic item.
They have collected two pieces of the Deck of Many Things. The first card they found was benign, even helpful, allowing them to restore some of their energies, allowing them to battle on that much longer. The second, (in truth the first card they acquired but since it was hidden by the rogue they didnt know about it), is not so nice. For a moment, the power of this card seeps into the mind of another, controlling his actions, robbing him of his free will. With those two cards, they realized what it was that they had come across and have acquired some idea at how dangerous this item can be. They believe that it was this artifact that corrupted the abbey 150 years ago, destroying it from within and leaving it the ruined husk that they have see in their time.
Then the debates started...
On one side we have those who feel that in the course of pursuing good, there really is nothing wrong with what you do to the evil that stands in your way. If in the end, good has prevailed, then it was a good day. To them, this artifact becomes a tool to be used against the enemy, a way to stop them from hurting others, even for just an instant. They see that evil will stop at nothing to achieve their goals, so why not use some of those tactics against them.
On the other side we have those who believe that there are things that just shouldn't be done. To use the tools and tactics of the villains, even in the pursuit of good, ultimately leads good people to become that which they are trying to stop. Corruption seeps into the heart and soul easily enough, and to use such artifacts, simply opens the door wider. They point to the abbey's destruction as proof of their conviction.
So for over an hour, I got to watch this debate rage on. It started with the idea that robbing someone of their free will was not right and as they gathered more information, it quickly descended into a question of what to do with the cards. Do they use them, despite the chaos that this artifact wants to create? Do they assemble it knowing that the artifact wants nothing more than to sow desctruction and ruin into the world? Do they seek to destroy it knowing that they must first assemble it, risking the corruption it pours into those close to it?
I had set everything up for them to pursue the missions that they have been given, but instead I was given the best night ever. The night where I can sit back and watch as the players struggle to grab ahold of their destinies with both hands, only to discover that they are in a tug of war with each other.
