Making WBR: Subject 04
Another time-lapse art video about the making of Jonesy Babbitt, The Dreamer from Warped Beyond Recognition. This one's available for everyone!
Jonesy, the fourth test subject in Warped Beyond Recognition, is a pretty wild character to run, and it's possible to have a lot of fun and really surprise your players with him! Here's a video about creating his illustration for the book, plus some thoughts on running him.
So Jonesy's big thing is illusion. He can conjure up all kinds of mirages to scare, distract, and confuse the player characters, and you can use this to great effect as a Warden by simply describing things that aren't really happening. The players start getting very paranoid once they realize that you've become an unreliable narrator. (They're not necessarily completely in the dark: they can make Sanity saves to dispel the illusions.)
But it's when Jonesy is really freaked out that things go truly wild: the world around him transforms completely into fantasy out of his own mind. The player characters will find themselves suddenly thrust into a completely different place, with no apparent way out!
You'll want to have an entire separate module prepped in case this happens, preferably in a different genre and for a different system. An easy way to do this is to use one of the many one-page adventures floating around on RPG blogs, like Trilemma Adventures, and find a powerful NPC to replace with Jonesy. Generally, I'd recommend using something you can run as a one-shot.
The players must find Jonesy in this new world and convince him to return with them to reality. It's up to you how you want this to work: he could be the king of the realm who sends the players on a quest to prove their worth, he could be the boss of a small dungeon the players must explore, he could be the dragon sitting on a massive horde of gold. Really whatever you want.
For a system to use, I'd run something simple, like The Vanilla Game or Knave 1E or 2E. I've made a guide of rough conversions between d20 games and Mothership in HUNDREDS, my book of sci-fi d100 tables, which I'll share with you here:
If you run Warped, I'd love to hear about where your players wind up!
