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Where to find chickens.

- At egscomics 

Commentary

"Look. I have the one dungeon designed, and the one thing for you to save.

I don't care where you decide to go, or what you decide to do.

You're going to find a dungeon that matches the layout of an abandoned mine, and there's going to be a chicken in there.

My descriptions might change, and it might be a bit weird if you choose to check a shack at the top of a hill or something, but we're using the one layout I've got to work with."


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Comments

Anonymous

Oh, easy, the floor of the shack collapses underneath them and dumps them into the mine/dungeon.

Wild Card

Placing bets now on the chicken being a polymorphed dragon that is the Big Bad at the end of the dungeon.

Anonymous

> either way, they will I await the shenanigans derailing THAT.

Some Ed

And thus Ellen proves herself to be a better GM than I was the first time I tried taking characters through a campaign world which I carefully crafted over a period of months. I was in high school at the time, and I was way ahead of the class in every class I actually cared enough about to study. So I had a lot of time for those months, especially since some of them were summer months and I had no life. I started that planning intent on avoiding anyone being able to go off of my rails. The campaign world was a continent, and there were exactly 0 ships that were ocean worthy. Offshore, yes, but nothing that could sustain the sort of major storm that players were actually guaranteed to encounter should the try going elsewhere. Of course, doing a whole continent takes time, even a "little" one, and the more time I spent on fiddly setup in some areas was time I couldn't spend elsewhere. My players knew about the work I was doing and we had a date set up for the first game in this campaign world. We were continuing with their characters from the prior school year, so they were in a defined location. I'd focused my efforts on all of the directions from that location that seemed interesting to me. To guide them to where the most stuff was, I provided them with a rough map. They were at one corner of the map. North, northeast, or east would take them to the various adventure hooks I'd left in the previous game but hadn't developed enough for them to go to. There was a road to the west which went back to civilization. I didn't really have this area well prepared, but I at least had another map for it. It was where they'd all come from, and their character backstories all said they had wanted to get away from there. They hadn't spent nearly enough time adventuring to really want to go home yet. There was a road to the south east, but it was disused and nobody went there anymore. NPCs far more advanced than them had suggested it would be pure suicide to go *there*. There was a hostile nation in that direction, and their border guards were elite forces. Given all of this information, I felt fairly comfortable running the campaign. Wherever they could plausibly go, I'd be ready. They went to the south west, into the swamp I had nothing on apart from it was a swamp.

Some Ed

No, the chicken who was "kidnapped" was the mayor's daughter. That might sound kind of kinky, but the mayor's secretly a chicken, which is why he's hiring adventurers for this rather than taking care of the family business himself. So it really isn't that surprising the mayor's daughter is also a chicken. Of course, she wasn't *actually* kidnapped. She went willingly. Actually, that's not the right way to put it. She asked Marik for assistance and he provided it. You see, there was this rooster she's attracted to. Who, as you suspected, happens to be a polymorphed dragon. So while I think your base premise is wrong, you're also kind of right, and I'm a bit too confused about the complexity of the situation to know whether to take your bet, or if I'm on your side of that bet.

AstroChaos

And here I was expecting a chicken shaped dungeon with a mine at the end 🤔

Thisguy

Ah yes, the inverse of the railroad GM. The GM that, rather than force the players to follow a plan, moves the plan to follow the players. And I’m fine with this.

ijuinkun

He's a giant chicken, I tell you! You've got to believe me!

KC

I remember reading once the difference between the webcomics "DM of the Rings" and Darth & Droids" (the first being "what if the Lord of the Rings movies was a DnD session" and the second being "what if the Star Wars prequels were a DnD session") The first was described as a campaign that was ridiculously railroaded by the DM to the point of it being almost hilarious what lengths he would go to get the campaign back on track, and the second was described as if the DM just went along with the players hairbrained schemes and desperately rewrote the story on the fly to keep up with the unfolding chaos.

KC

Nothing wrong with a little "copy paste" when it comes to plot points. Sometimes when all you've prepared is a dungeon with a chicken, a dungeon with a chicken is what the players get

allanfranta

"And at the end, after the Dragon Incident leaving the mine, they all sat down to enjoy a BBQ chicken picnic before slinking out of town ahead of the Mayor's guards."

Ardent Slacker

It took me SO long to learn to do this. XD

Daryl Sawyer

Or even a segment of a trail they're using, the ground weakened by recent rains.

Some Ed

Me, never. I mean, I enjoy the end result, so it's fine, right?

Jenora Feuer

In stage magic (particularly with card tricks), there's a general technique known as a 'force', which is where you arrange things such that: - The participant gets to make a choice - The magician makes sure all choices lead to the same end. The details of how to perform a 'force' differ depending on the rest of the trick, but it's a pretty common technique, and it's something equally applicable to being a GM in a gaming session, yes...