The Fall of the House of Della Squama

 This weekend, I'm going down to ConVergence in Hamilton to run The Fall of the House of Della Squama! I thought that I'd take this opportunity to talk about the genesis of the adventure and how it evolved over time.

The Fall of the House of Della Squama is set in the city of Verrazza, heavily inspired by Verona. The red dragons of Selenizia are advancing inland, and your city is in the firing line. However, you've just discovered that your dragon Prince has died, and, furthermore, was never a dragon in the first place! Now you've got three hours in real time during which you have to keep up the hoax and either defend the city or escape it with enough money to settle comfortably somewhere else.

One of the early problems that I found when creating Tirenia was that there were far more awesome Italian city-states than there were dragons to go around. I knew that I could always have the same dragons in multiple cities, but that never seemed like a good solution. Verona was one of these problem cities: iconic enough that I knew it had to appear, but not important enough to be the seat of one of the dragon families. Initially, I had the copper dragons in Vanora (name stolen from Claire's computer game Fortune's Fool), as a 'theatre state' but that just didn't seem like a strong enough concept. The copper dragons got shuffled off to their island Monaco-esque state, reinvented as hedonist gamblers. My next idea was to relocate the silver dragons to Verona, since it is the City of Love, maybe instead of Milan, or maybe in exile after being forced out of Milan by the bronze dragons. Finally I decided to just omit Verona. Surely Romeo and Juliet could find a home somewhere else?

Fast forward to the lockdown, when I was researching my way through the cities, inspiration struck. The princes of Verona were the Della Scalas - 'Of The Scale.' Their name actually meant ladder, but this sounded like the most 'Totally A Dragon For Real' name ever! I changed it to della Squama, which actually means 'of the Scale,' and made notes about how they were a family of prosperous fishmongers who found themselves in the right place at the right time, and decided to impersonate being dragons!

When ConVergence in Hamilton asked for games, I decided that the time was right to finally do Della Squama. Claire and I had been talking about doing a game of Fiasco set in Tirenia, and so this became our 'Fiasco Game.' However, Fiasco doesn't really lend itself to having a pre-written adventure: it wants to be much freer. Also, Tirenia now has quite a lot of established lore, which Fiasco doesn't like. Finally, our core 'brand' is D&D, since that's where the market is. I decided to take Fiasco and Weekend at Bernie's as inspiration while writing this adventure, and found that it worked a lot better as a D&D adventure.

That said, it's a very unusual D&D adventure. The pre-generated characters are extremely bad at fighting, as D&D characters go. On the other hand, they have immense non-combat resources, far more than a typical D&D character. I brainstormed up far more plots than the players could ever hope to pursue in three hours. The adventure is a massive sandbox, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore, especially for a convention one-off. The idea is that players should choose what they want to do, and what they want to ignore; they will be rewarded for what they do, and punished for what they don't. Romeo and Juliet provided the main backdrop to the players' actions, while many of the landmarks of Verona inspired other story elements: the awesomely named Scaliger Tombs becomes a major location in the adventure, stories about a spirit in nearby Lake Garda inspired another storyline, and the subterranean Roman city under the streets of Verona another still. Our two playtests helped further to point out which plots were a bit weak, which were superfluous, and which ones players really enjoyed and focussed on. It was quite heartening that during both playtests, players were encouraged to 'break' the scenario, and both times I'd managed to anticipate everything basically everything that they'd do in my notes.

So if you're at ConVergence, come play The Fall of the House of Della Squama! I'll also have copies of the Introductory Guide for sale, and I'm keen to play in other games and try out some new stuff! After the convention, I'm going to write up Della Squama formally and release it as an adventure and setting guide in the same short format as the Introductory Guide, maybe with a few of the missing plots added back in. Can you locate the lost heir of the Della Squamas? We shall see!

Image: The Scaliger Tombs. Photo from Wikipedia.