I’m currently running my home DnD group through the Turn of Fortune’s Wheel campaign, and – for reasons I won’t spoil in this introductory paragraph – by the start of session two, I really needed to kill at least one member of the party. Not wanting to interrupt the players exploring all the fun oddities of Sigil, the metropolis at the centre of the multiverse, with a sudden fight scene, I had to get creative – and so was born the interdimensional doomsday food festival.
The spoilers start here. Turn of Fortune’s Wheel takes place in DnD’s Planescape setting, which you could think of as the backstage to the multiverse. Sigil is an impossible city built on the inside of a donut on top of an infinitely tall spire. That spire is at the centre of the Outlands, the neutral plane that connects to the heavens, hells, and all the other Outer planes. Sigil itself is linked to everywhere and everything by a myriad of portals hidden in every nook, cranny, alley, and backstreet.
For reasons that the players don’t understand at the start of the adventure, their characters wake up in Sigil’s enormous Mortuary with no recollection of how they got there. Little do they know they are snarled up in a multiversal glitch which has dislocated them from time and causality. If they die, another possible version of them will soon pop into existence somewhere nearby, with all their memories but no idea how they got to be where they are.
Chapter one of Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is rife with ways for the characters to get themselves killed, from over-levelled enemies to almost-unavoidable death traps. Killing a party member nice and early lets the DM reveal the gimmick of the campaign, and gives the players time to think about whether their alternate characters should be merely be cosmetically different, or have totally different DnD classes, DnD backgrounds, even DnD races.
That’s how chapter one is supposed to go, but fortunately for my players – and unfortunately for me – they’re hardened dungeon adventurers who were keen to get out of the obviously unhealthy Mortuary. Deathtraps were disarmed, encounters snuck past, and large amounts of the dungeon simply ignored. They walked free into the streets of Sigil with nary a stray hair on their head.
Good for them, but not so good for the flow of the adventure. A central motivation for the party is supposed to be working out why they’re not fully tethered to causality and the flow of time; but they had no idea that was even an issue. For their own good, I was going to have to kill them.
Chapter two of Turn of Fortune’s Wheel can be summarised as “the gang messes around in Sigil”. While there are some recommended encounters, the purpose of the chapter is for the players and DM to have fun exploring all the whacky and wild things that are possible in a metropolis that connects to everywhere else in the multiverse.
While I could have offed the party with an impromptu invasion of demons, devils, giants, or whatever else I fancied, that would have sold Sigil short. I needed something that said ‘cultural melting pot’ as well as ‘death trap’, and preferably something the players would choose to attend of their own accord. And what could fit the bill better than a food festival?
A food festival has an element of competition, a dangerous density of people, and an expectation that the barkers will invite the players to try all kinds of novel things. I could offer my party a buffet of death traps, and they would walk towards them willingly. The lethal encounters I whipped up were:
- An Azer mixologist from the elemental plane of fire who simply does not understand why he shouldn’t put heavy or radioactive metals into the drinks.
- Cake cultists attempting to sneak a necromantically tainted cake into the baking contest, offering free samples.
- A prize-winning casu marzu cheese, infested with rot grubs.
- A giant beer barrel large enough to swim in (or drown in, if you don’t have the stomach for it).
- A hot wings stall run by devils, with their home-grown 12 quintillion scoville hot sauce.
- A cloud giant shopper who trips over a halfling, dropping a 20 ton wheel of hard cheese like a rolling boulder trap.
Despite the rolling cheese massive causing casualties among the general festival audience, it was the cake that finally got the kill.
The encounter with the cake cultists is actually part of the module, but it’s supposed to occur completely unprompted in an underground passage at the end of the chapter. Moving it to an actual food festival made it a bit less obvious that eating the cake would be a very bad idea. Two party members scoffed a slice, dooming them to have their heads turn into vargouilles and fly off their shoulders. Success!
I have mixed feelings about the Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse supplement. It provides a decent overview of Sigil and the Outlands, and a serviceable adventure framework that gives the players an excuse to wander wherever they want. But a lot of it feels skippable or replaceable – which is what I and my players have been doing.
For more detailed thoughts on the module, check out Wargamer’s Planescape 5e review. We’re still waiting for new campaign books to arrive since the updated rulebooks hit the DnD release schedule, and it will be interesting to see if the style of adventure writing stays the same or shifts with the change of edition.
If you like this sort of nonsense, I have more to recommend: check out our guide to Modrons, and why you should add Worst Gnomes to your setting.
Source: Wargamer
