Tips for running Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme

I ran Shemshime’s Bedtime Rhyme from the Candlekeep Mysteries adventure book. I learned quite a few things from running it. I figured I’d share them with you, to give you a hand running your game.

Let the investigation begin... in another adventure.

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.

 

Here are a few things I learned.

 

Shemshime’s Midnight Rhyme is a horror adventure, pure and simple. The mystery portion of the game is actually very limited in scope. To be honest this scenario plays out more like a ride through a house of horrors. The characters sit in their seats and the DM takes them through scare to scare until they get to the finale where their big decision is how to finish Shemshime (if they figure it out). Make this clear to the players. They are not here to solve a mystery. They are here to survive a curse. This should help them focus less on the “why is this happening” to more of “how do we stop it”. 

 

Tied to this, find out how horrific your players want this to run. You can adjust the horror dials pretty easily on this scenario. If they are hard core horror fans and want more gore and scares, use the NPCs as the punching bags. It is very hard to scare players with character death in D&D 5^th edition. But if make your NPCs likable and engaging, then hurting them or having them hurt each other can really make things horrifying. I mean you have a child and her father as NPCs. Possessed children make for a great moral quandary, but only if the players are OK with that. 

Isn't little Gailby cute?

 

You may have a group that doesn’t want to see children come to harm, or isn’t really into gore. Then stick to the atmospheric spooks and scares. Lean into the creeping darkness, and the shadow attacks (even at this level, shadow attacks against physically weak characters can be scary with their strength drain to death ability). Have the floating books and freezing rooms make a bigger punch (maybe even creating condition affects like exhaustion). Create your own mind-bending scares. Suddenly the passages and stairs in the cellar don’t lead to where they are supposed to. Add voices calling to them in the darkness or add ghostly figures of the unfortunates who were killed by the curse before. To paraphrase my players, find out what kind of horror game they are looking for. Are they feeling more like Hocus Pocus or Hellraiser?

 

This adventure has moments that force player characters to attack other players characters, and it can get deadly very quickly. It also takes away player agency and some players hate that. Before running this game, make sure your players are good with this. If they aren’t, then lean into the NPCs, most are weak and can’t really harm the player characters. But if you make the NPCs likable and relatable, your PCs are going to struggle with hurting them, especially knowing they aren’t in control of their bodies. 

 

This adventure is best when it is kept short and visceral. I don’t think you want this going over two sessions. Break down what needs to happen in the game. Identify your natural breaking points (because they make a good place to stop, or because you can raise tension by pausing there).  Then keep an eye on the time as you run. Do your best to hit those stopping points. Remember it is better to have a shorter session in this case. The longer it goes on, the less intense the game becomes.

 

Here are the key points I identified and where to break for a two-session game.

• Set up – Meet NPCs, explore setting, the curse starts.

  

  Lurking Shemshime

  
  
• Quarantine – Varnyr’s announcement of the quarantine should happen right before your mid-session break.
• Tension moment – atmospheric scare like books moving, room getting cold or firefly behavior 
• Ebder’s Outburst – Characters learn the words to the rhyme
• Tension moment 2 – Shadow attack, finish the battle and describe a downed NPC or strength drained character and end session one.
• Singing Skull or Escape Attempt or Puppets – Start the session with one of these. If your players really bonded with K’Tulah, then the Escape Attempt is a solid one. If they want more of a Hocus Pocus style game, the singing skull is perfectly creepy. If they are more of a Hellraiser group, the Puppets scene can be brutally disturbing. Whichever one you start with, keep the other two in your back pocket in case you need to fill in some more game time. But don’t feel like you have to run them. It is more important that they…
• Find the book – Use NPCs or clues to direct your players to the book. Don’t get bogged down here.
• Book fixed – Shemshime appears at the midsession break.
• Planning – Allow them some time to come up with a plan based on the completed rhyme. If needed remind them that the adventure will end with this session. The longer they take to plan, the less time they have to deal with Shemshime.
• Battle – The players attempt to strike back, and adjust plans as needed. 
• Epilogue – Either a quick scene of the survivors leaving the cellar and getting the reward – or of the Candlekeep wizards finding the corpses of the player characters and NPCs, and a slow pan over to the book looking innocent in a pool of blood. 

 

This scenario features music, which means you really should try to include some kind of audio version of the rhyme. There are a few on YouTube to pick from. My favorite used the lullaby from the film Pan’s Labrynthand shifted the words of the poem slightly to fit. The tune is melancholy and sets a great mood. You can also cobble together a great playlist of music including tracks from the film score, or just play the whole film score to Pan’s Labrynth. This way the background music contains the rhyme as well as having the performed version form YouTube handy. 

Overall keep it fun. It can be tempting to get too dower with horror games. But this scenario isn’t so much a creeping dread story, but a brisk and punchy set of thrills with a terrifying conclusion. When you feel things bogging down too much, throw in another scare. The room gets colder. The books start moving. An NPC suddenly shrieks and runs at a PC with a heavy book. If the players get stuck on how to finish off Shemshime, use the NPCs to guide them, or decide to let whatever idea they did cook up actually work. Remember the “mystery” isn’t the point of this scenario. It is fun scares. If your players end the game frustrated because they didn’t solve the mystery in a satisfactory way then you didn’t set the correct expectations for the game. They should be enjoying the thrill ride, and even if they all get slaughtered by Shemshime, they should end the session laughing and chatting about how awesome the scenario was. 

 

I learned most of these lessons the hard way. Coming up, how I ran the game and what I would do differently.