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D&D Ideas — Rescue

Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is rescue, which we discussed in our weekly live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of rescue in Crones and Their Cravings heroes hope to rescue a group of baby dragons from a grisly feast in a cottage of hags and their mephit chef. You can get Nerdarchy the Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy plus snag a FREE GIFT by signing up here.

Nerdy News

Incant an invocation for the week that was! Learn the secrets of why Nerdarchist Dave sucks at RPGs, bargain for the best combat Eldritch Invocations a Hexblade can muster and play a new game! Might we suggest Shadow of the Demon Lord? Plus our weekly hangout, a live chat with an industry pro and a new chapter in the Zoo Mafia RPG unfolds to round out this week’s Nerdy News. Check it out here.

Delving Dave’s Dungeon

You’ve gotta love a good rescue quest in your RPGs. I’ve had two come up as a Game Master in two different games. In my Under the Dome 5E D&D campaign the characters wanted to rescue Master Dyson, head of a gladiator school to which one the characters used to belong. One of the Grind Barons held him prisoner for basically trying to organize the gladiator schools into a union. It took the characters the whole session to work out the best course of action and how to execute their plan with a couple of trips to different NPCs and rooting out a traitor along the way.

The other rescue mission happened in Zoo Mafia RPG, which you can watch on Nerdarchy the YouTube channel. One of the NPCs is Outback Alice who works as a journalist for the Daily Zoo. She gets into a bit of a jam and the mob leaps into action to rescue her. [NERDITOR’S NOTE: With their own ulterior motives of course!] You can see the Zoo Mafia RPG live play playlist here.

Ideas for D&D Rescue Quests

• A beloved NPC needs rescue from the adventurers’ enemies.
• Adventurers are being blackmailed into rescuing someone they don’t know or they know is bad.
• Adventurers are hired by an NPC to rescue another NPC.
• Adventurers find themselves in a prison and need rescue themselves.
• Adventurers need to rescue a soul or spirit from the underworld.
• Player missing your D&D session? Their character gets kidnapped and the adventure for the evening is getting them back.
• Some of the powers of the adventurers go missing and they need to mount a rescue mission to get them back.
• A warlock’s patron has been captured and beseeches the party for rescue.
• Dark gods imprison a character’s deity and it’s up to the adventurers to break them out.
• The sun vanishes after being stolen by a dark entity. It’s hidden in the realm of shadow. and adventurers must travel there to rescue the sun and return it to the sky.

These are some ideas off the top of my head. The best rescue quests will tie directly to the adventuring party. Got any daring rescue adventure stories to share?

From Ted’s Head

Rescues in D&D are a classic and only moreso iconic when the person in need of rescue is noble child. Regardless of who you are rescuing the rescue is a great quest. Piecing together clues, following tracks, overcoming traps and obstacles and defeating the captor makes for great and potentially hilarious moments when the adventurers inevitably do something stupid or unexpected — or when the dice decide the story takes an unexpected turn.

You can turn this trope on its side very easily.

We recently played a game of Shadow of the Demon Lord. (Great game by the way.) We are several sessions in and received a quest to rescue none other than a nobleman’s daughter. The kidnappers demanded a high price for her return and the father just wanted his daughter back. No worries — our group was on it. After some ridiculous stuff later we have defeated all but one captor and they seem to be following the girl’s instructions. Well, this was weird. It turns out this kidnapped girl was possessed by a demon.

Oh, crap! Demons are no joke in this game and we honestly thought we were all going to die. Thanks to some good strategy and good rolls on our part we won the day. Sadly there was no saving the girl. This of course teaches a great lesson. You can always run the trope and embark on a rescue adventure but what if the person you rescue is not who you think they are or it is all part of a plan and you are not returning the kidnapped person but a shapechanger, doppelganger or something even more insidious? The group could continue on thinking they performed a good deed when in actuality they did exactly what an evil entity desired.

Was it all the girl’s plan to get away from a life they did not want or are they sadly already dead so the evil can continue?

If the adventurers stick around the next steps involve even more unfortunate events befalling the family. People might begin to think the family or estate is cursed and then things only get worse. Superstition can go a long way to making more evil happen because of neglect. One small rescue gets turned on its side and becomes a cornerstone of a whole campaign of evil within a town. Can the adventurers unveil the threat before it is too late? Can they find and save girl? Maybe this is the final part of the adventure — to locate the real captive and get the final piece of the mystery, bookending a campaign with a bizarre rescue.

From the Nerditor’s Desk

Doing research for this terrific topic I discovered something about myself — I’m a big fan of rescue adventures when it comes to D&D. During the live chat with Nerdarchist Ted I touched on more than a few of these quests. On further reflection I realize something very important about these kinds of adventures regardless of the specifics.

Rescue adventures include an element of tension by their very nature. Someone of something is not where it ought to be, usually in danger and so there’s a no time to spare. Rescue quests keep the action moving because the rescuers cannot be certain of the captive’s fate. This unifying quality of rescue adventures functions both as guiderails for a game and at the same time motivation for bold and unexpected action on the part of the players.

A little trick I mentioned during the live chat serves me well whenever a rescue is in order. As long as the characters stay on task the subject of their rescue remains relatively safe — until they’re not. The rescue might involve picking up a trail and tracking captors to where the rescue proper takes place, traveling a long distance, researching a means to enact the rescue and many other factors besides. During this time whatever purpose the rescue target serves stays on pause. The peril begins only when the adventurers can do something about it.

This works when the players find their own characters in need of rescue too. In my own setting there’s a mythical creature called Goldhorn attached to folklore and if things go sideways it’s entirely possible a character becomes trapped in cyclical curse wherein they become trapped as the mystical creature themselves. Many characters have heard the tale and grown curious but the journey there is so long and challenging by the time anyone could encounter this scenario they’d have the means to enact rescue from this strange fate.

I’ve run adventurers where an entire party could use a rescue too. Stuck in a place without means of egress physically, magically or simply because of a siege situation the means of rescue present themselves sort of through the character’s actions. I only present the scenario and it brings me great joy and satisfaction when players bite and do their utmost to overcome the circumstances. The greatest example of this from my experience happened after the party defeated a major nemesis — a void dragon — and the resulting explosion sent some of the characters and their NPC crew to the Nine Hells.

For a couple of weeks we alternated sessions between the group in hell and players whose characters didn’t get shunted there played the NPCs. They didn’t have much of a plan but I noticed everyone started using spells, features and other abilities they never had before like casting geas and fiddling with the inner workings of the Emerald Eye (a very strange sentient gemstone NPC). At all times they desperately sought to survive and find a way back home.

Meanwhile their counterparts on the Material Plane thought they were straight up dead and pushed forward on their larger quest — also a rescue of a sort — fending off dimensional usurpers on the Rock of Bral. When the warlock got distintegrated he found himself in a plane of pure light where a potential new Otherworldly Patron presented itself (it’s a long story). The warlock made a selfless choice to learn the fate of his fallen friends trapped in hell and rather than return to life he bargained for their return. See how it all worked out? I didn’t have a clue how they’d escape hell or how the severely depleted remaining group would stop the bad guys but the players found a way to make a rescue possible. And don’t worry — the warlock came back too, only weakened and with a new body and Otherworldly Patron.

In all the cases of rescues in my D&D games it all comes down to timing. Even when players take up a rescue quest purely for profit when they make those choices human nature dictates they don’t want to fail so they almost always stay on track. This means the players are also complicit in the tension surrounding a rescue, which leaves a huge space for their agency and for the DM to play around with too.

*Featured image — Several hooks could lead adventurers to the cottage of picnic hags where a family of dragon wyrmlings has been captured. For instance the picnic hags might have captured a friend of the party and are poised to eat them. It is up to the adventurers to conduct a rescue mission! Check out Crones and Their Cravings along with 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop right into your games in Out of the Box!

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