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Cover illustration by Colin Throm showing a one-eyed witch and some flying imps.
Our introductory Magonomia® adventure, Curse of the One-Eyed Witch (Revised Edition) by John Tibbetts, is available for pay-what-you-want on DriveThruRPG. Now with exciting new punctuation and grammar corrections! Version 1.2 was released today.
Tales of Renaissance Wizardry is a series of short adventure outlines for use in tabletop roleplaying games. Since Halloween is coming, we’ve offering a ghost story this month! ©2020 Shewstone Publishing LLC. You are permitted to use, modify, and redistribute this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA) license.
attributed to Lucan Horenbout, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Content warnings: Blood and gore, false accusations of incest
A minor nobleman, Henry Stoke, is embarrassed that the ghost of the Queen's mother appears in his hall occasionally. It's a reminder his ancestor helped with the plot to have her executed. The Queen appears as a decapitated corpse, carrying her head in both hands, and glows with a ruddy light. He finds it terrifying, and his servants keep leaving. He asks the player characters to banish the ghost.
Anne Boleyn* is unusual, in that it intermittently haunts six different places in England.. The player characters can determine her schedule. She appears at Stoke Hall only at the new moon following the anniversary of the day in late April 1536 on which the current lord's ancestor signed a deposition against her.
Many ghosts follow a routine, often ignoring their surroundings. The player characters need to prepare a way to catch Anne's attention, so they can communicate with her. She appears in the master bedroom, then walks down the stairs, through the main hall, and across to a little private chapel. This is the path she took on her first visit, following Henry's ancestor as he fled her, seeking the refuge of the Divine. No-one remembers why she follows this path, save Anne.
Her route through the house is known by the servants. The information is, however, tangled up in a complicated, oral tradition about how to avoid the ghost. Other parts of it are far less accurate – for example each of the servants carries a feather inside their clothes. They say the ghost never attacks someone carrying a feather, because a falcon was the badge of Anne's family. This is superficially true, but only because Anne has never attacked anyone. One of the ancestor's servants was in the ghost's path, and he didn't understand why the ghost ignored him. He thought it must have been the feather he carried for luck, and passed this on to the rest of the servants.
Anne wants to be vindicated of Henry's claim she was unfaithful, particularly the charge that she had an incestuous relationship with her brother, which the original Stoke swore to. She doesn't want to terrify the player characters – she's not even aware of their presence at the beginning of the encounter. Anne doesn't control how or when she appears. One simple way to let her rest is showing her a coin with the Elizabeth Regina mark: her daughter has been legitimised. As a less sweeping solution, if Henry Stoke speaks to her, cursing the memory of his ancestor and saying that all men know he lied, she will leave this particular hall alone in future.
If the player characters lay Anne to rest, she disappears from the minor hall, but also disappears from the rest of her haunts , including several royal palaces. When the royal ghosts go missing, powerful people become concerned. The queen's advisers want to know she hasn't been put in a bottle by the Spanish. This adventure may bring the PCs into the Queen's service.
This adventure is much more connected to a historical setting, specifically a fantasy version of England, than it is to a particular rule set or magic system. If your game is not set in an Earth-like setting, you can of course make up your own tragic story of a queen or high noblewoman who was executed on trumped-up charges. You’ll need a way to deliver that story to the players without a long lecture. The first thought that comes to mind is to have a minstrel sing a tragic ballad about the incident: make up a stanza or two of the lyrics and summarize the rest.
Pay attention to what spells and powers your game system provides for dealing with ghosts, and make sure to give the player characters a reason to investigate and talk to the ghost instead of simply attacking it.
I requested this adventure outline to be about 500 words long. That’s a bit shorter than some other articles in this series. Timothy did a great job fitting an entire evening’s game session into a very brief word count.
Tales of Renaissance Wizardry is a new blog series of plot outlines for Magonomia®. A plot outline is a starting point for planning an RPG adventure based on an original, unique concept. Using the outline and perhaps some downloaded maps or a bit of online research, an experienced GM should be able to prepare an entire game session in one hour or less.
These plot outlines are designed for Magonomia but they should be adaptable to most other fantasy games.
The Queen’s Necklace
by Vesna Gronosky
The year is 1579. A jeweled necklace is missing from Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Wardrobe. Since the necklace was a gift from a royal suitor, a diplomatic incident looms. The wizards are tasked with recovering the necklace quickly and quietly.
The necklace was a gift from Francis, Duke of Anjou (France), who is the last of Queen Elizabeth’s suitors. The Queen is expected to wear the necklace at an upcoming royal ball. Failure to do so will insult the Duke and threaten the marriage.
Conspirators have recruited a sorcerer, Thomas Smith, to steal the necklace. Smith breezed through the burglary using his spells. He over-relies on the spell Nothing to See Here. Everywhere he goes, witnesses remember seeing someone whom they felt they have seen around before and who seemed to belong there. When pressed, they can give only a vague description and they realize they don’t really know the “familiar” person’s name or anything about them. Witness descriptions do not even match up: two people who saw Smith at the same time will give very different descriptions of him.
Smith is lying low in a village outside London waiting to hand the necklace over to his handlers. Ordinary detective work could never track him down, but many magic spells are available that can lead the wizards right to him.
The wizards are summoned to a safe house in London by a low-ranking spy handler in Her Majesty’s intelligence service. It’s more likely the spy handler will appeal to patriotism than to greed: spies in Elizabeth’s time were generally not paid. Give some thought how to motivate the wizards.
From here, the spy handler ushers them to the next scene: an appointment at the Royal Wardrobe chambers in the Tower of London, where the wizards can interview witnesses and inspect the scene of the crime.
The royal wardrobe consists of several rooms in the Tower of London where Her Majesty’s hundreds of outfits are stored and maintained. Access to the whole complex is restricted to hand-picked royal servants. Jewelry is stored in a special room to which only a few people have keys. However, the jewelry room is often open during the day.
Thomas Smith slipped in by following along with a handmaiden. People thought he was one of the handmaidens! He had to loiter for a while until the jewelry room was opened.
Lady Dorothy Stratford is the Mistress of the Robes, manager of the entire royal wardrobe complex.
Clues to where Smith went with the necklace:
· While he was loitering, one of the guards or servants engaged him in small talk. Smith tried to end the conversation as fast as possible. The key point is that the witness asked where Smith was from, and in his panic he gave the name of the village where he was planning to flee after the burglary. Perhaps it’s Harrow on the Hill, 3 miles northwest of London.
· Nearly any divination magic, including General Divination, can reveal the town or village where Smith is hiding.
· Search for Lost Property is an obvious spell to use, but it normally requires the lost item’s owner. There’s no way to get an audience with the Queen—she doesn’t even know the necklace is missing—but Dr. Dee can give access to her horoscope, which is enough to cast the spell. Alternatively, Lady Stratford is caretaker of the necklace and you can let her substitute for the owner for purposes of the spell.
Smith’s rendezvous with his co-conspirators is set for a village he knows well. This gives him a chance to spot strangers who might be on his tail. It also means the people around will probably recognize him. He’s stashed the necklace somewhere and is using Nothing to See Here to keep watch for his contacts without being identified. The inn is too visible; instead, he’s simply moved into a big house with few people in it and is using his spell to pass as an extra servant. If you prefer, it can be the house of someone who’s away on business.
Smith’s handlers show up sooner or later. If you haven’t decided already, now is the time to figure out who they are:
Protestant agitators keen to block the Queen from marrying a Catholic Frenchman
French conspirators keen to block the Duke of Anjou from marrying the Queen of England
Spanish or Scottish spies who want to block an alliance between France and England
Really, nearly any conspiracy that fits your campaign can be behind this theft. Smith might be deeply involved in the conspiracy or he might be someone they recently bribed or blackmailed into performing this mission.
If Smith has spotted the wizards on his tail, he either goes deep into hiding or flees town entirely. Will his co-conspirators cross paths with the wizards, and what happens if they do? Maybe rumors of the theft have got out and some other interested party—a gang of London jewel thieves, agents supporting the Duke of Anjou, or some opportunistic wizard—also comes looking for the necklace.
This plot outline relies heavily on a distinctive spell, Nothing to See Here, and details of how it works. To use the plot in another game system, change Smith’s modus operandi to fit the particulars of your favorite disguise spell from that game. For example, in 5E he might be using Disguise Self . His pattern would be to impersonate a specific person who has access to a given area. The telltale sign of his presence isn’t that every witness perceives him differently —- it’s that the person he’s impersonating is seen in two different places at the same time.