Side story
After our first game went relatively well, and after Rich had moved away, I convinced my girlfriend at the time (my wife now) to play with us. Also, my friend Chris was debating about gaming with us, so I decided to run a one shot for people to experiment with a different class and also so our two new players could get adjusted with how to play the game.
I honestly don’t remember any of the characters, but I remember the setting relatively well. A group of travelers have been on the run from Empress Lyn’s army when they discovered what appeared to be an abandoned mansion. They entered to find seven rooms in a massive hallway. This was a very basic encounter where players did some minor battling with easily killable monsters to give the newbies a feel for combat. There was one room that featured the diamond ray of disappearance (the mcguffin from the most famous He-man episode of all time) but alas, none of the players discovered the diamond.
Eventually, a monsterous creature battled the players and they were horrified to find that this Frankenstein-esque monster kept changing faces and it was nearly invincible. I had reimagined Man-E-Faces as a creature that was more or less a suit that possessed whoever wore it and drank the life force out of them until it was ready for a new shell. Sort of like a soul sucking hermit crab.
They killed the creature by luring it into some trap and then they entered a laboratory to find a mad doctor performing arcane rituals. I don’t remember how the scenario ended, but I know that none of the players were left alive and I teased giant tubes that seemed to contain some kind of creatures. Who knows what was going on? The players had a rough idea, but they wouldn’t know the full story for at least six months.
