Game Log: Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme

In my previous article I provided some tips for running Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme from Candlekeep Mysteries. Most of those tips came from running the game myself. We had a good time overall, but I was hoping for a smash success with this one. I love horror as a genre, and while I’ve been incorporating horror elements in my 5^th edition campaigns, this was the first full horror scenario I’ve had the pleasure of running. In this article I’ll describe what I did, and where I could have done things a bit differently.

 

Candlekeep looms over the Sword Coast.

I ran this online over three sessions. The first two were about three and half hours long and the last was about two hours. 9 hours total with five players. They were playing new characters for this little side adventure from our weekly Ravnica campaign.

 

Summary: The characters arrive at Candlekeep in the night and are sent to a cellar beneath the inn (which is full). Once there they meet a group of NPCs and explore this hidden portion of the library. In the morning, they awaken to a tune playing in their head non-stop. The NPC in charge seals the cellar after sending out a message for help. She reveals that the tune is an ancient curse that afflicted the library once before. As the curse continues to manifest, NPCs start to lose their minds, violence erupts and something sinister becomes more and more powerful. Eventually the PCs discover source of the curse, and are given a hint or two on how to stop it. The finale is spent trying to finish off the malevolent being Shemshime, and breaking the curse.

 

My first big change would occur before we even start playing. Setting expectations. I told my players that this was “more of a horror adventure than a mystery”. But I really should have just said, “This is a horror adventure. Your goal is to survive long enough to break a curse.” Nearly all my players created investigators of some kind. As such, they didn’t really get to use their skills and abilities that much. This led to some frustration from them, because half of their stuff wasn’t super useful. To be fair, this adventure can work with pretty much any character group. That said, their expectation was to be able to use mystery solving skills to help them in this adventure. But those skills aren’t really vital to survive the scenario.

 

This expectation also made the resolution of the “mystery” of why this was happening feel unsatisfying. One player actually said, “I don’t know what to do, because it feels like we aren’t finding any clues”. And no, they weren’t finding anything, I was handing them clues when I needed them to find them. As I mentioned in the other article, this adventure is on rails, like a house of horrors carnival ride. For a real mystery, the players need to time to search, to put pieces together, to follow up leads. Now you could restructure Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme to play out like a classic locked room mystery. But you need to put in some extra work to do that. To really run this right from the book, it is better to make sure your players know this is a horror adventure to enjoy as an experience, not a mystery to be solved.

 

Creepy drawing by a child. Always fun.

Finally establishing this was a horror game, I should have found out what kind of horror the group wanted. I didn’t ask if they were good with evil children or harm to children. So when little Gailby was in the spotlight, I wasn’t sure how far I could or should go with her character. My players liked most of the NPCs so I ended up pulling my punches when it came to violence toward them. And some player characters were never in actual peril. The main bit of feedback I got at the end was that the scenario wasn’t scary enough. They wanted more thrills, more peril. Not necessarily more blood (because I had one player who said “I’m a weenie and get grossed out easily”). But if I knew their comfort level with scary/imperiled children and that they wanted more spooky scares, I could have adjusted things to hit that mark. I also should have been very clear that a Total Party Kill (TPK) was a very possible end for this scenario. That way, I wouldn’t feel like I had to pull punches at the end, or worse drag things out into a third session. In the end they wanted “more Hellraiser and less Hocus Pocus”. I delivered somewhere in the middle and it didn’t satisfy anyone.

 

With that in mind, I had planned to only run two sessions for Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme. I should have stuck to that with all my might, because the momentum of this scenario really flagged with the third session. We have a hard end time, and we ended mid-fight with Shemshime. Yeah, don’t do that! It sucked. In my previous article I outlined the optimal way I should have run the adventure. What I did instead was spend way too much time with the set up and then tried to work in all the Events. 

 

Would you trust old Krinkle?

Knowing that the players wanted a bit more Hellraiser in the game, I would have started session two with the Puppets event, and had the NPCs go all out in trying to harm the player characters. Stakes would have been high, because the players liked the NPCs, and I could have even added some flying books adding chaos to the situation. A good strong start for session two.

 

From there we could have jumped into finding the book must faster. Instead, I let them spend way too much time trying to find the book and looking for clues, and just slowing everything down, instead of keeping it fast moving and fun. We did hit all the events. And the discovery of the singing skull was a great macabre moment. But It isn’t really necessary. I could have had possessed NPCs start shouting “Finish the Rhyme!” or have them find that scrawled in a book that falls during the chaos of the Puppets event. Lots of ways to do it.

 

Now my favorite bit of tabletop roleplaying games is the character interaction. As a player, I’m definitely an actor type with a bit of storyteller thrown in. As a DM I love the stories we make together, and that means having NPCs that I love playing. I tweaked my NPCs a bit for this game. I did my best to have each NPC find something interesting about a player character, and share a nice moment with them. This means I altered some personalities here and there, and adjusted some NPC motivations or backstories. But it was worth it. If I ask my players about this session a few months from now, I think they will remember the NPCs and the Shemshime being invincible. 

 

However, my strength as a DM is also my weakness. I love creating and playing NPCs. But I also overindulge in social interactions. In a long running campaign it isn’t so bad, if the players are also really into it. My players are, and we can have a few sessions without combat and only social and exploration events. But in a short scenario, this is not good. Once I get the players connected to the NPCs, then I need to really lighten up on the social interactions and ramp up the scares and thrills. I dropped the ball here. 

 

Welcome to the Cellar.

The set up took almost the entire first session. Now, they were all playing new characters who had not met before, so there was the good old fashioned awkward player character introductions. But I anticipated that, and we moved through them as quickly as possible. But I did spend too much time with the grand tour of all three levels of the cellar, and meeting the NPCs. I realized this when I hadn’t hit the quarantine mark by the break in session one. What I should have done was have the remaining NPCs all be in the main floor to meet at once. Instead, I sprinkled them throughout the cellar and just slowing things down meeting all of them. I did accelerate events a bit, and we ended with the fireflies going dark right before the shadows attack. Not a bad way to end things.

 

However, we started session two with a fight, and that ate up a bit of time. Then I tried to cram in all three middle events (Singing Skull, Escape Attempt, Puppets). It was too much. Add to that the confusion of the party searching for clues that aren’t really there to be found. I drip feeding them secrets as described in the events. It felt awkward and a bit frustrating. When they finally found the book and figured out how to repair it, I gave them a little time to plan… and then a little more time… and then a little more time. I should have just said, “we are ending tonight, so let’s just go with the plan you’ve got.”  I must say the in-character discussion was a blast, and I was having a lot of fun having the NPCs chime in with bad advice and distractions. But I really should have just backed off and stayed locked into our end time.

 

They started the Shemshime battle with only about 20 minutes of game time left. And things did not go as they hoped. But they were inching toward the correct resolution. Again, I should have either let their original plan work (or partially work), or just leaned into the horror of Shemshime wiping the floor with them. But because I didn’t set that expectation, I wasn’t sure how comfortable they would be with a TPK ending. I ended up stopping the game at our set end time, and said we’d finish the adventure next session. 

 

When the third session rolled around, I could tell the players just weren’t as engaged. They shifted strategies a few more time and then finally destroyed Shemshime. I did an epilogue scene and actually stretched that out a bit so we didn’t end super early, but that just made the finale feel even more sloggy. The session ended with a bit of shrug, when it should have been a cheer of victory or a bunch of laughter at getting wiped out. 

 

Music from the book sets the mood.

One last thing that happened that was no one’s fault, but that ended up impacting session one was that none of my music was working on Discord. I didn’t have a backup solution, and so the session played in silence. Normally not a huge deal, but with a scenario so focused on the musical rhyme, I spent a ton of work on the playlists and timing for implementing them. Because the first session was silent, all that establishing mood was lost. I really should have had a backup ready to go, even a Youtube playlist for individual players to run on their side to build that atmosphere. I will say that when the music did work on Discord for Session 2 and 3 my players loved it. 

 

Looking at this long ass article you might think that this mini-campaign was a failure. But it really wasn’t. Everyone had fun. They made great and memorable characters. Each of them said they would love to play these characters again. They liked the NPCs. They liked the set up and scenario of the curse. It was a nice break from our regular campaign and was a lot of fun to prep and run. 

 

But hindsight is 20/20. I could have run Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme in a way that was more fun, and memorable. It really hammered home how important expectations are to a new game. I don’t think a session 0 is needed for something like this. But if I had been clear this being a horror thrill ride, we all could have embraced it, and really made something we’ll talk about years later.