Thought experiment: Druid’s homeland while the Druid is away
[Spoilers for Plantes Collide]
Suppose the Druid is away from her homeland, when an already established cursed place starts consuming everything there. Obviously, the Druid’s spirits would make an effort to alert her and try to get her to come back home.
But what if the Druid ignores their pleas?
Since Shapeshift requires the Druid to call upon the spirits, it seems like they could take her powers away until she began the journey home. But that seems heavy-handed. I wouldn’t want to do that unless they were utterly desperate.
Also, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on in different places. I want the character to feel pressure, but I don’t want to force the players to go that way.
How would you handle it as the GM?
This issue may not come up, but I don’t want to be unprepared.
#Druid
Off the top of my head, start revealing unwelcome truths when they shapechange. The wolf they turn into is guant and sickly and weak from hunger.
Maybe tweak the monster moves they get, too. So the wolf’s “relentlessly harry prey” becomes “voraciously consume flesh”
Have this get worse and worse, with familiar homeland shapes manifesting as more and more corrupted, accursed forms.
I second Jeremy Strandberg. Give them some debilities as well on 6-s always connecting it back to their homeland’s infection. Don’t shy away from dark visions, sudden debilities, or messages in the grunts, chirps, and barks the druid hears on their journey on other move 6- rolls too (if it’s more fictionally interesting). If they still ignore it and your front consumes and kills their land fully, I would probably eventually make them either pick a new class (that made sense in the fiction) starting from level 1 or at least lose shapeshift and pick a compendium class.
Perhaps on their next 6- shapeshift after their land is fully destroyed make them go straight to last breath (changed into something that is dead). Give them a deal to take one of the many death related compendium classes you can find here in the tavern.
Hope you have fun with it!
It sounds like an opportunity to turn a Bad End into a compendium class. If the Druid doesn’t arrive in time they could turn to ghost or spirit form and through a move generate hold that spends towards restoring their Homeland by defeating an invasive menace.
Cool, thank you!
The Druid’s homeland is huge. Even though the threat was built up to be catastrophic, it ought to take more than a few sessions to [SPOILER] overthrow the natural order there.
Revealing the threat in little ways that build, through the shapeshift move especially, fits perfectly. And it’s a lot better than having the spirits simply give the Druid an ultimatum like “come home or no powers”.