Back in this post, I suggested quest shrines as active locations on game sites, where players could go to gain a minor quest with a reward. In this post, I’m getting a little deeper into the nuts and bolts of how it might work, including a collection of sample repeatable quests. If you’re running a LARP and you think this is a neat idea, all you owe me is letting me know how it worked out. If I were implementing this, there would be a lot of discussion with the rest of the committee, and I’d expect a lot to change before it went in front of the players.

The Shrines

Let’s say there are three or four shrines on-site. One is placed conveniently for main player hangouts: maybe the Cook’s Cabin at AH Stephens, or a lodge that is part of player housing. It offers difficult or materially expensive quests, but if there are players with accessibility needs, this shrine should cater to them as well.

A bit farther out from the tavern or other primary player hangouts, there’s another shrine or two. These quests are active and combat-focused: the idea is that they reward you for doing a specific part of ordinary game stuff, maybe in a way that increases difficulty. Still brainstorming this.

Lastly, if there’s a part of your game site that players can go to any old time but it drags you out into the middle of nowhere away from other players, there’s a shrine there. It’s a nice walk in the forest, except that the forest might be full of monsters. Remember, a huge part of the point here is to get players moving in smaller groups so that wandering monsters are a more functional concept. The quests of this shrine are the easy, relaxed ones, of course.

The Quests

In general, the physical process of assigning a quest is that you’re drawing a piece of paper, probably an 8.5”x5.5” half-sheet, from a stack of such props. The game needs to produce a lot of these – I’m expecting that in a 60-player game, an average player might complete 3-4 per event, while a particularly dedicated player (or one who isn’t invested in this event’s plotlines) might complete 10 or so. I’d hope the quest props are getting returned to the shrine and re-used, but that might not be realistic. Once you draw one, you’re stuck with it until you complete it, though you can discard and redraw if a quest is not within your physical ability.

What the PCs get in return for completing a quest is any of the standard array of buffs: resistance to various kinds of damage, a few strikes worth of extra damage, protection against magic, whatever your game has. You can hang onto the quest benefit indefinitely without activating it, but ideally you’re setting players up to earn a bunch of these on Friday night and Saturday morning and afternoon, so they can survive the Climactic Action on a Saturday Night.

(If you’re also buying into my idea about magical Healing Tolerance, described in the linked post above, that applies here.)

Ideally, there are a lot of quests that get pulled out of rotation each event and replaced with new content that is tailored to whatever’s going on at that event. You really want quest shrines to push engagement with the rest of the story, because everything should be pushing engagement with the story and with other players.

I’m keenly aware, though, of what a tall order that is in terms of gamerunner energy. This also calls for some coordination with Monstertown, and some quests a lot more than others. The time-and-energy cost scaling too high is one of the most likely failure conditions of this whole idea; my hope is that it’s high-yield in terms of player activity.

Shrine-Keepers

The shrines also have PC shrine-keepers. The primary job of the shrine-keeper is pre-game setup and post-game teardown of the shrine, so that all the gamerunners have to do is supply the quest scrolls. Their secondary job is teaching players how to use the quests and marshaling player questions, so they’re invested with game authority over a specific area of the game. (If you’re unfamiliar with LARP-running, player safety marshals and crafting marshals are a normal thing; this is in a similar vein.)

The shrine-keeper gets a couple of things in return. First, these are titles and titles are status. Assume the game does the work to avoid this becoming a cesspit of OOC drama that I’m not going to try to solve at this early stage.

Second, the shrine grants a modest mechanical benefit, based on whatever your narrative for the shrines is. Are they sanctified by the gods? Ancient hero spirits? The fey? The benefit fits whatever that story suggests.

Third, they get a cut of the money and goods donated to the shrine for the quests; the rest of the donations are split between PC healers and Plot keeping a cut to remove money and goods from play. What this actually looks like is a lingering question mark in the concept. As a placeholder, let’s imagine that Plot’s cut is 25% of all money and materials. The shrine-keeper may have some amount of discretion over who is “a healer that gets a share of the money” and who isn’t. I don’t know, maybe one of the quest shrines is an alchemical guild to keep the crafting-based healers going.

Quest Ideas

Keeping these fresh and not getting too far into just… designing MMO daily quests… is the challenge here.

1. The ghuls that are attacking the town this event carry pieces of the ancient tablets of law and prophecy. Deliver four fragments to this shrine.
2. Donate five gold to the shrine-keeper’s treasury.
3. Spend 30 minutes practicing fighting in formation, or on target practice.
4. Reveal a secret to another member of town
5. Learn a secret about another member of town
6. Spend time organizing texts in the library (this involves solving a puzzle of some kind)
7. Deliver an explanation of five minutes or more on world lore that you believe to be accurate
8. Light a candle or lantern (battery-powered) from this shrine and visit each of the other shrines without putting it down
9. Teach a spell to another character, or arrange for another spellcaster to do so
10. Engage someone in a friendly game (DtD had in-world board games)
11. Host a tournament of at least four players for a game or combat
12. Learn a story about dragons that you haven’t heard before, or create a new piece of art related to dragons
13. Survive a fight against at least three enemies without using armor, Skins, or Toughness
14. Complete three full circuits of the town with not more than five other people in company
15. Donate two mystic materials or one finished consumable item to the shrine treasury
16. Demonstrate trap-setting and disarming, or observe a demonstration of same
17. Using chirurgery, harvest parts from a storm drake. Soak them in alcohol (uh, game alcohol, not real) and burn them to ash in the shrine.

The more of these I write, the more they look appropriate and fun for one section of players, but miserable for another. I think the random draw of quests might be a mistake. Maybe there are three face-up stacks and you take the top of any of those? I don’t know, I just want to avoid players sifting through 30-60 quest scrolls to find the lowest-hanging fruit that remains. That sounds awful.

Anyway. I think there’s something here that could be amazing for driving play, getting players moving and talking, and funding PC healers. This still needs significant refinement, though.

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