Ye Olde Inn

Hi everybody,

I just want to make a 10 quest books with skaven... There is not so much quest pack about them and I find them very cool. "Return of the Witch Queen" is a great fan quest pack, but the Skaven aren't very "alive". I want to tell their story through the 10 quests.

I have thinking about the german tales, "the flute player from hamelin" which told the story of a man that can go away rats with his magic flute. So the emperor decided to pay him to clean the city from the rats. He uses his flute to bring the rats to a river and kill them by making them jumping into the water.

It's a very cool story, and I want to make the artifact card for the magic flute, that can hypnotize the skavens.
Else, the begining of the quest pack could be like this :
"The emperor has found an underground ruined city under the castle. Morcar has send troops from darknesse's underground : the skavens. They prepare their attack, hidden in heir caves, willing to go to the surface when they will be ready for a raid. Everybody's in fear in the realm... You must kill all the skavens, and bring they out of the city."

So it's just an idea. Is anybody wanted to help me for building this quest pack?

ah, the "Pied Piper" as we call him in the US. Sounds like a good idea; you should go with it.

Personally, I don't like skaven, I find them by no means "cool", but rather unstylish in a fantasy setting, plus, they are Games Workshop stuff
But I like your idea, I always like quoting a classic, an killing off the skaven makes it even better

Is there a way to include the second half of the tale, too? You know, the major rejected to pay the pied piper his agreed fee, so the piper used his magic pipe to lure the town's children away.

It comes to my mind that the heroes could be hired not to find the flute, but to free - and hire - the piper, who is held somewhere in the dungeon. After that, the emperor could refuse to pay (this could just be told to the heroes by Mentor), the piper lures the children away and hides them in a dungeon, so the heroes would now be sent to find and rescue them (and perhaps pay the piper).
But at the other hand, it would me more fun if the heroes could play the flute themselves, having a horde of skaven following them.

Or you can make a Quest pack -
Quest 1. - The heroes fight against the Skaven, finding them too many to defeat.
Quest 2. - Mentor has found legends about a magic pipe that can enchant rats and related beings, so the heroes venture to find it. Of course, they try to use it at once, and make some comical effects (skaven following them a little distance), but must find out they lack the musical talent to use it properly.
Quest 3. - Mentor tells them, that the flute can only be played by it's rightful owner, the pied piper, who is for good reason held captive far away by the scaven. The heroes go and rescue him.
Quest 4. - Now they escort him to the scaven stronghold, so he can work his magic (besides lots of skaven, there should be also some of their allies, e. g. orcs, which the heroes have to fight off).
Quest 5. - Everything seems well, when Mentor tells the heroes that something has gone wrong: the emperor, enraged by the exaggregated price the piper asked, had refused to pay him. Now the piper has lured the capital's children away into a deep dungeon. The heroes must find him, free the children, and either pay him off or kill him. He could have charmed some skaven to serve as his guards.

Big Bene, in Quest 3 why wouldn't the Skaven have already killed the Pied Piper if he poses such a threat. Perhaps he is actually kidnapped by some other party who wants to control the skaven for their evil purposes?

A friend of mine say the pied piper of hamelin is a cautionary tale about paedophiles, but I don't believe it is. I think if he did kidnap all the children he would be killed rather than paid off.

thanks a lot big bene & ethica, you have done such a great job !! (big bene in particular !) Hail to you !
Sincerely, a lot of very good ideas, that's exactly what I expected to make. (but it wasn't so precise in my mind)
I will certainely make a 10 quest pack, so it miss 5. But it's a very good begining.

PS : The skavens remind me the animated film the secret of nimh, by don bluth, released in 1982.
The idea of them come from this film, I'm sure about that. So it's certainely due to my childhood, when I saw this film again & again & again, and now, I love the skaven.

gravaillon wrote: The skavens remind me the animated film the secret of nimh, by don bluth, released in 1982.

I too can't see skaven without thinking of the Secret of Nimh.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe that the movie was titled "The Secret of Nimh", although the book was titled "The Rats of Nimh". Also, one of my all time favorite books/movies. Jeremy just cracks me up!

Here is the trailer :

Ethica wrote:why wouldn't the Skaven have already killed the Pied Piper if he poses such a threat.

I thought about this, too. Just considered it a minor problem that can be solved when working out the details of the Quest.

Ethica wrote:Perhaps he is actually kidnapped by some other party who wants to control the skaven for their evil purposes?

That's a brillant solution! Shame on me I didn't think of it!

Ethica wrote:A friend of mine say the pied piper of hamelin is a cautionary tale about paedophiles,

That's rediculous. It's widely accepted that the tale refers to a historical icident when a great number of children/young people vanished - e. g. to join the children's crusade or simply dieing of the plague.

Wikipedia:
The theory with the broadest support[6] is that the children willingly abandoned their parents and Hamelin in order to become the founders of their own villages during the colonization of Eastern Europe. Several European villages and cities founded around this time have been suggested as the result of their efforts as settlers. This claim is supported by corresponding placenames in both the region around Hamelin and the eastern colonies where names such as Querhameln ("mill village Hamelin") exist. Again the Piper is seen as their leader.

Ethica wrote:I think if he did kidnap all the children he would be killed rather than paid off.

To my understanding, he didn't nap the kids in order to press the citzens to pay him, but simply to take revenge for them not having payed him.

I just reread the tale and found there is a version, where the piper leads the children into a deep cave - that's perfectly fitting for our campaign!

And now to something completely different:
NIMH is still my all-time favorite animated film, but don't even think about drawing a connection to those sorry skaven!!
The rats of NIMH are real animals, given conscience and intelligence by events out of their control, and struggling to live with this gift and find a place and rule to play for them in the world. The skaven are just lame fantasy monsters that GW came up with when searching for a "new" theme, i. e. one not copyrighted.

so I will make my skaven more like the rats of nimh rather than the GW background... In my mind, Skavens are rats of Nimh. Some mutants, obliged to hide under the cities, because humans are afraid by them. So they live by theirselves and hope that one day, they could go up again, into the city and be accepted like they are. They are some freaks, human freaks, not monster. That's how I think that the skavens should be.