When writing Reap and Sow, my adventure for the Book of Seasons: Equinoxes, I wanted to capture a lot of complex feelings at once. I wanted to capture the wonder of living in such a unique and unforgiving environment. The simple pleasure of sharing a meal with friends. The loyalty of those friends. The frustration of being trapped. The dread of feeling that it might always be that way. In short, I wanted to write a story about what it’s like to live in Southern New Jersey.
In my adventure, the party is trapped in the mysterious Needlepoint Forest, an analogue of the Pine Barrens of my childhood. They can’t get out, no matter how hard they try, because of a disagreement between the Jersey Devil and his mother. The enchantment on the forest, born of resentment, corrupts those who spend too much time there. James Leeds was once a human, and his monstrous friends were humanoid too, before the forest twisted their negative emotions and made them that way.
New Jersey is just like that sometimes.
Originally I had written the adventure so that James, his mother, and his friends could not change, physically or emotionally. They were a warning to players. This is what happens when you linger too long in Needlepoint Forest. That idea didn’t last past playtesting. Maybe it’s because I’m a big softie. Or maybe being a big softie is just part of my Brand.
Recently I’ve been going through the RPG Writer Workshop marketing course. One of the lessons has you work on a writer identity. It reminded me of years ago, before I started writing for RPGs, when I sat down and asked myself, “What do I want to write?”
“In my stories,” I wrote, “there should always be a solution. It is never too late to turn things around.”
Tragedy has its place, but it isn’t with me.
Anyone who has played a game with me knows I tend towards comedy. If you’ve played Hair of the Dog, or seen the work I do with Willy on clown-related projects, you might imagine my impeccable sense of humor bleeds through when I’m running games. I can only imagine how jarring it was for my players to end up in the world of Needlepoint.
My players learned about the enchantment and investigated the forest. They pieced James’s story together. And then they ran into the poor boy-turned-devil-man, who felt threatened and attacked.
The group sprung into action. First, they cast hypnotic pattern on James to incapacitate him. Then, they tried talking at him in every language they knew. The tiefling realized James’s fiendish nature. He spoke to James in Infernal and asked him what was going on.
That’s when I slipped up and, as James, called the effect a curse. The word “curse” has different connotations in Dungeons & Dragons. The word curse implies that the effect can be removed. That is exactly what the knowledge cleric thought when she desperately cast remove curse. Her last words were, “I hope this works.” Ironic, for a Believer.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. But the session was two minutes to ending. The table looked on expectantly as I described the light emanating from the cleric’s holy symbol. The light encircled James Leeds as well before erasing his curse and returning him to the angsty embodiment of the New Jersey Teen (those are all three separate links, by the way).
I don’t think I had ever seen the group so relieved. They clapped. It was only the second time I’d seen them clap at the table (the first was when they reunited two archfey after eight hundred years apart). This group of players saw hurt and suffering and decided it was time to stop it. They had pulled out all their spells and stops and abilities and hoped that, somehow, what they were doing was enough. Maybe their solutions weren’t perfect, but maybe, just maybe, they’d work. And because of their efforts, James and his friends began the long road to recovery.
New Jersey is just like that sometimes.
Book of Seasons: Equinoxes is out now! You can get it here.
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