Musical Inspiration Challenge: Part 10: The Second Encounter

If I Could Change Your Mind by Alan Parson’s Project

Ok, we’ve got a storm crashing in. Our party just fought their way past a terrible seductive siren and her minions, the storm echoes in the distance, the walrus statue must be recaptured, the town freed from the Hellknights. The party is getting a pretty big pile of stuff they have to take care of, but that’s why they’re heroes.

Blood pumping! And uh..

More easy, slow paced progressive stuff.

Well, heh..heh, uh.. I need stalling time. Onto the lyrics!

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I prefer to spend my time in solitary ways
Keeping myself to myself
Can't pretend that it's been easy since you went away
Living with somebody else

If you should change your mind
If you should turn around and look behind
If you could see me the way I used to be
At the risk of bringing back the sorrow and despair

I would do it all again
Holding on to memories and pretending not to care
Knowing that the show was soon to end
If only I could change your mind

If only you would change
If I had the chance I'd do it all again
I would do it all again

I remember windy shores on melancholy days
Drifting along with the tide
And the joy of simple things and ordinary ways
Taking it all in my stride

If you should change your mind
If I could let you see what lies behind
If you could see need me the way it used to be

Even for the moment of the happy times we shared
Living in my dreams since then
At the risk of losing only castles in the air
Come with me and we can try again
Oh, if I could change your mind

Can't pretend it's not been lonely since you went away
Oh, if I could change your mind

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Ok. I can work with this.

As I stated earlier, these are set piece encounters. An actual adventure is like a feast, small appetizer encounters, tasty entrees, but there are always masterpieces that need to stand out. So by this point, our heroes have battled past the seductive storm siren, and probably fought some crabs in the tunnels, and then had it out with a few of the Hellknights. Assuming the party hasn’t been ghosting the place like some level in Splinter Cell, the Hellknights should be aware of them but (natch) can’t really mass the amount of resources to assault into the weird pirate caverns under their complex without leaving the exterior undefended, particularly with the search going on for the walrus statue and with the storm coming in causing them to lose control of the town below.

So one of the Hellknights, a lieutenant decides to go below with a few of his people, and tries to do the unexpected.

A social encounter.

He tries to convince the party to table their nonsense until they can find the walrus statue. This is good for two reasons. It lets the players more organically find out what the hell the HKs are up to (“We’ve already lost our home once before, we won’t lose it again, not after all this trouble!”), lets the social or sneaky players do their thing, and gives the players the benefit of cutting the HKs in half or getting a lead from the HKs on where the walrus is Clue-style (“We know for sure it’s NOT in the left vault”).

And if the players can convince the HKs, who are good at the whole order and maintaining things perspective, to help with the storm coming in, they might be able to engineer a happy ending for a lot of folks. This tends to make players happy. Still, even if they can convince this lot, their boss is still hell-bent on her course of action, and the HKs won’t help fight her since that would require that they truly betray her and their companions, and there are some things you just can’t do.

Speaking of her..