Running #DarkSun: Keeping PCs on the Move

[trekhead]

If you read the 4e DARK SUN adventure Marauders of the Dune Sea you'll note that there's a shrine with fountains filled with clean water drawn from a deep aquifer. Once the PCs have eliminated the various creatures from this underground locale, it… kinda seems like the sort of place where you might just set up shop and stay for a while. There’s enough room to sleep indoors, fresh water, and if you can forage or bring in food supplies it will give you a defensible location, as raiders or monsters have to come in the same way that you did to reach the shrine chamber. It’s six days away from Tyr, so you have to do some work to stay supplied, but it’s a reasonably decent set of caverns and carved rooms to stay out of the noonday sun, with its own water supply. Why not turn it into a base of operations? (In the core adventure, the raider Yarnath and his crawling citadel take over the place, but part of the point of the crawling citadel is that it keeps on moving, so you could always come back later and reclaim the locale.)

This kinda problem crops up a lot in DARK SUN: The PCs wipe out the monsters at an oasis, defeat the bandits at a camp by a canyon with a stream, or defeat the defiler threatening a local watering hole, and now they have a safe place to stay. How do you get them to move on?

John Wick talks a little about this in his analysis of the John Carpenter movie The Thing. You can’t stay in the base, because the Thing might get you. You can’t stay out on the ice, because the cold will kill you. You are constantly pushed from place to place because you need things in different places, so you can’t stay put. In DARK SUN, this means that (until high levels) no base is ever self-sufficient enough; there are always problems, always reasons for you to head back out into the dangerous wastelands or the oppressive city-states, because you must stay on the move to survive.

If you haven’t given the PCs something to chase (a “pull,”) you have to give them some trouble that makes their base untenable (a “push”). In Marauders of the Dune Sea, the easy solution is to make a “pull” in the form of a reason to find the rest of the Crown of Dust. (In the base adventure as written, just having the piece that you find in the old cavern doesn’t send you off to find the rest of it.) But if your PCs have hunkered down in a “safe place” outside of the city-states and you need to encourage them to move along, give them a little “push.”

D10 Roll           Push

1. The local water source dries up. PCs can only stave this off for so long with magic or psionics, especially if there are more inhabitants locally than just the party.
2. An overwhelmingly powerful enemy discovers the location (roc riders of the dragon’s army, a mighty templar, a member of the Order looking for a secluded place to study, etc.). While initial forays of enemies can be repulsed, the PCs must flee before the place is overrun.
3. A small group of undead stumbles across the place and attacks. They are not too difficult to dispatch, but they spread a magical disease (which killed them in the first place) that causes people who contract it to waste away and become undead. It’s resistant to magical healing so the PCs must go forth to find a cure before everyone dies.
4. Two critical members of the community come to blows over a disagreement, and the community can’t survive without both of them (say, the local water cleric and the local farmer). Assuming one doesn’t kill the other, one of them chooses to leave, which puts the community in a precarious position. The PCs must either track down this person and settle the matter or find some other way to supplement the lost critical resource.
5. Wood, stone, and leather items start showing signs of excessive wear, some even crumbling as soon as they’re touched. Too late, the PCs discover that a huge nest of sand mites has taken up residence. The mites burrow through rock, cloth, leather, and wood indiscriminately, leaving such objects weakened or reduced to little more than dust. Damage to the community infrastructure becomes too severe. The PCs and other residents must flee, burning whatever is infested so that the mites don’t spread. Eventually the mites reduce everything to a massive conical hive of powdery dust.
6. A significant earthquake cracks the ground in the area, collapsing buildings and caves, shifting watercourses and draining reservoirs, and possibly making some areas inaccessible. 1d4 people are killed and 1d4x10% of the community suffer injuries. Damage to community structures is too severe to recover; everyone must leave and find somewhere else to go.
7. The weather when the PCs first stopped in the area proves to be a fluke. A massive heat bubble settles in over the location and it becomes impossible to survive during the day. Even staying indoors and underground, it’s so hot outside that nobody can work or sleep. Unless the PCs find a way to magically control the climate, they have no choice but to pack up and go somewhere else.
8. Old haunts start appearing all throughout the settlement. Though they can’t physically harm people, they cause alarm, bad dreams, sometimes even possessed sleepwalking. To settle the curse of the haunts the PCs must travel to a distant place where someone who betrayed the whole community that lived here before fled with an item of great value, and return the item to their community.
9. A member of the Order decides to use the community for a variety of telepathic experiments. Spying on them with clairvoyance, this psionicist stirs up trouble, causes accidents, and destroys valuable property from a distance. The Order member’s powers are too strong to stop for anyone below epic levels. The PCs must either abandon the settlement, or go find someone who can stop this interference-such as a psionic hermit in the remote corners of Athas who doesn’t wish to be disturbed, or a powerful preserver able to shield their settlement from psionic intrusion; whoever they decide on, they have to figure out a way to make it worthwhile for their erstwhile patron to help.
10. While digging through the sand and soil to excavate a room, furrow the ground for crops, or bury a body, the PCs discover a broken object with a faint magical aura. Investigation (with detect magic, legend lore, object reading, etc.) determines that it’s a powerful enchanted necklace, but it’s missing several stones, which were removed and sold in various city-states. To reawaken its power the PCs must track down the seven stones (say… one in each city-state?) and return them, then find or train a preserver strong enough to “restart” its magical powers. Each time they re-acquire a stone, though, they acquire more enemies, who start to close in on their base of operations…

Hopefully these will give you some ideas to kick your PCs in the rump and keep them moving!