A Witch Shall be Born

I just finished reading the Savage Sword of Conan's version of "A Witch Shall be Born". I'm reminded again that this would make for an excellent arc in a campaign. There's a number of good adversaries highlighted in the story, Salome; the lost twin of queen Taramis, Constantius the Falcon; leader of the Shemite mercenary company, Olgerd the greedy and cruel desert chief, and the monster that Salome had summoned within the dungeon bowels of the desecrated temple of Ishtar. While it's not something that can just be translated verbatim into an interactive adventure, it has nice starting points. A fallen city, political intrigue, scandalous and titillating debauchery by the villains, environmental hazards after being abandoned in the desert after being defeated by the Falcon and his men, a dungeon crawl to rescue a beautiful queen and finally a large raid battle against a giant hideous monster that had grown strong from human sacrifice to it.

This is definitely making it's way into my next D&D campaign.

I wonder though if it would make a good MMO adventure? Warcraft has gone for the far more traditional dungeon crawls for all of it's instances. You run through a hallway and fight things in the way until you clear through to the end and fight the boss. There are very few alternate strategies to these adventures. Rogues can't sneak past the guards and drop the defenses at a critical moment, characters can't enter town and have the "face" guy make some critical alliances (not that Warcraft has any social skills really aside from the half ass faction system), nor can one do much of anything other than choose an alternate pathway to a boss.

Actually that's not entirely true. You can use skills like stealth to play the game in a different manner, but that has the feel of unintended content bypassing rather than having different party makeups having a different experience. These stealth runs are fun because they do change the experience from the typical (and very much near exclusive) party of tank, healer, DPS. But this works despite the design intent, not because of it. And often the designers must go back into a zone and make changes to prevent players for daring to use their stealth to sneak past enemies.

I think that there is a lot of room for experimentation in this area. Warcraft has shown us how simple dungeons where you kill everything from point A to point B can work when you polish them up. Don't feel that I'm being dismissive of this, the polishing was the hard part, most other MMOs can't seem to get that part down. But there is so much more that could be done in terms of dungeon and adventure design and remain a simple Hierarchical State Machine and not branch out the possibility of action, or introduce a million ways to exploit. Here's to future adventures in MMOs to ramping up to the bar of the pulp serials of the 1930s.