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Mauve Shirt
2018-06-20, 07:03 PM
Hello nerd friends!

I am running a GURPS one-shot and need assistance. It is writing assistance, not numbers assistance.

So, players sent to town to fight zombie plague. Eventually lead to mad wizard castle. Mad wizard castle is full of illusions and more zombie fun.
Final room, mad wizard is possessed of super speed and strength and is generally a hardy guy who wants to kill them. Great. Fight fight fight.

Mad Wizard has magic item hidden beneath an illusion that occasionally shoots out invisible waves of NOPE. These waves of NOPE are minus to HP but add to will saves against illusions. The player must figure out that their pain is to their advantage, discover the magic item, and destroy it to stop the zombie plague.

I want it to be unclear that the win condition is to destroy something in the room and not the wizard himself. But they do need some sort of riddle or clue in the previous rooms in order to figure it out, I'd imagine.

I am bad at riddles and clues. Help!

Elanasaurus
2018-06-20, 08:27 PM
Hmm. You could have, in the previous rooms, pictures or copies of the object the item is disguised as, maybe next to a more immediately important item so that you can explain it more easily. Then in the boss fight, the players know to look for that object. But if they forget, or didn't figure it out before the fight, they wouldn't be able to do much.

Or you could make the waves of NOPE slow enough to notice where it's coming from, by stating the order in which the players get hit. The problem there is they may not know to destroy it, and if they don't move around enough, the order they get hit won't change.
:elan:

MrSandman
2018-06-21, 02:37 AM
You could have them find the wizard's diary in which he writes about the magic object.

HendrickWellman
2018-08-03, 04:03 AM
Perhaps the players could have encountered a similar apparatus as the trial in an earlier room. Therefore they will have more of an understanding of what they are looking for and how to deal with it.

Kardwill
2018-08-03, 04:51 AM
The waves of NOPE could manifest in extreme headaches, during which they can see the illusions around them glitching, including the one protecting the artefact?

If the artefact is ancient, they could have found writings, engravings or other depictions of the thing right in the middle of disaster/zombie zones?

DeTess
2018-08-03, 04:58 AM
If the pc's have some sort of magic-sight around them, they could notice that the magic controlling the zombies isn't coming form the wizard?