I scared my players so badly that they never went back
I’ve been running a game of HoTDQ for a party called The Hovengers (I had to rename Greenest to Hovil) for about six years now, and we’re still in Castle Naerytar. Why? Partly because there are six players and scheduling is hard, partly because I keep thinking up side quests to add in! Here’s a story of one that didn’t go at all how I expected.
The party is in Waterdeep, and are looking for jails and dungeons. Bree, a halfling monk, knows that her father has been taken prisoner somewhere. Using the sending spell, they’ve learned that her father is in a stone cell, but he has no idea where, because he was essentially teleported into it. They learn that there is a large manor house in Waterdeep that apparently has dungeons underneath it, and go and try to investigate.
They find that the citizens of Waterdeep come to this manor with problems they want solving, and they exit holding a piece of paper which they appear to read in confusion, but then leave looking happy. The party takes a number from an attendant and sit in a little waiting room, waiting their turn to be seen. Now that they’re inside, they distract the attendants and manage to sneak off to investigate the dungeons. They find some interesting stuff there, maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime! But that’s not what I’m here for today. While they’re speaking to a prisoner, his eyes glaze over and he says “The Council of Waterdeep want to speak to you, now” and guards show up to take them upstairs.
The party enters a long hall with beautiful stained glass windows all along the left side, the early evening sun streaming through them, and enormous double doors at the far end, through which they are told is the “receiving room” where the Council of Waterdeep will speak to them. As they walk down the hallway they discuss their strategy. They want to know about what they found in the dungeons, they want to know where Bree’s father is, they think maybe they might be able to learn something about the Cult of the Dragon. They steel themselves, push open the double doors and-
There’s a sensation of a whirl of motion, and they find themselves stepping into a long hall with beautiful stained glass windows all along the RIGHT side, the LATE evening sun streaming through them, and enormous double doors close behind them. The players at the table all go “WHAT?!”, and I reach into my little folder of secrets and pull out six pieces of paper. I give each player a note that is written in their own handwriting. On the note is written:
“I, <character’s name>, declare that all former issues I reported have been addressed to my satisfaction. I further renounce any right to the memory of this audience, along with any desire to reclaim it once the memory has been lost. I write this in my own hand as a record of my agreement, with the other Hovengers as witnesses, and leave personal information as proof that it was I myself who wrote it:
<a secret that the character has never told anyone else in the whole world>”
As the players read their notes and compared them, I think it’s fair to say they all just about lost their minds. Not only did the characters have no memory of writing these notes, neither did the players. Because, technically, they didn’t write these notes.
Flashback to a few weeks before this session, I reached out to my players with a request. “You know how in the past I’ve given you so-called handwritten notes to give you guys information, but they have always been typed out? I think that ruins the vibe a bit, so I’d prefer they were actually handwritten, but I don’t want them all to be in my handwriting! So would you mind each writing a note for me? I promise there will be no obvious spoilers, but also don’t share what I ask you to write with each other, just to limit how much information is being given out ahead of time.” I claimed I’d be giving each of them different notes to handwrite, but instead I gave them all the same note. And when each of them had dutifully written out the note, I scanned them into the computer, opened an image editing software, and painstakingly rearranged the words they had written into the order that I needed. The note I’d asked them to write was irrelevant, but constructed to read like something that could feasibly be important at some point in the far future of the campaign.
Now, this is all very cool, but I had a problem. I know my players, and this is a mystery being dangled in front of them. “What did the Council of Waterdeep tell us? How are the issues going to be addressed? For God’s sake, what issues did we even report? Why did we agree to lose the memory of this conversation? etc etc etc”. So I had a contingency plan: I actually asked them to write three notes. The first was rearranged into the shared part of the note above, the second was rearranged into the secret, private part, and the third note was in case the players went “fuck this”, turned right around and barged back into the room again. In that event, they would have the same experience of a whirl of motion, they’d have the same notes in their hand, but with a bit of extra text at the bottom:
“DO NOT TURN AROUND. DO NOT RE-ENTER THE RECEIVING ROOM. GO TO THE NORTH GATE, AND CONTINUE YOUR MISSION. BELIEVE ME, BECAUSE I AM YOU. THE MISSION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE MEMORY.”
And hey, if they still weren’t satisfied and tried again, then I planned to narrate them entering the room and having some kind of conversation. This time, they managed to convince the council to allow them to keep their memories, and so the players would remember it too.
So what actually happened when I ran the session? I gave them all the first version of the note, and five out of the six players went “oh hell no, we got to get the fuck out of here right now”. If I had had to bet, I would have put it at a 95% chance that they would go back in at least once, but I completely underestimated how terrifying the players (and to be fair, the characters), would find this experience. They had just encountered something that had the ability to erase memories. They knew that they could do it many many times per day, because they’d watched people go through the same experience on the way into the manor, and the number they took in the waiting room was in the hundreds. As far as they knew, this council had the power to ERASE THEM FROM HISTORY, such that no one would ever avenge their deaths because no one would remember them. And so they got the fuck out, out of the Manor, out of Waterdeep, and have basically done their best since then not to think about the unknowable power that ate their memories and told them they were satisfied with the experience.
If you read all the way through, thank you! I’ve been running this campaign for six years, but it is still my first ever campaign! Does that make me a novice DM? Who’s to say. If you like this idea, feel free to use it in your own campaigns, on the condition that you come back here and tell me how it goes in your game! This encounter is probably top three for me in the list of “times I think I knocked it out of the park”, so I’d love to hear more player reactions to it.