The Business of Emotion: Overview
The Business of Emotion is designed to introduce new players to basic roleplaying concepts, and features opportunities for both storytelling and combat.
Lanidor has not been delivering trade goods—wheat, oats, wool, lumber—to market. This adventure takes place in the Holdenshire setting, but it could easily be used to fill in the “next village down the road” in a sandbox setting.
Narrator's Introduction
The quiet village of Lanidor is suffering from a case of the lovie-dovies. Merchants and those with other traveling professions have returned home to find everyone in town, including their own spouses, enjoying a summer of love. Within days, the travelers’ rage inexplicably passed, and they too threw caution to the wind and picked up new lovers. This debauchery has signaled a marked reduction in productivity for the city, which has failed to fulfill all of its trade contracts.
Upon investigation, the party will discover the source of this “love plague” is a gnome flower farmer. Upon the advice of a local witch , a potent love potion was brewed to drum more “emotion” to spark his otherwise lackluster sales. The pair began dripping the potion into Lanidor’s water supply a few months ago.
Meanwhile, the witch has secretly been using the magic on the local wildlife to breed cross-species monstrosities. Whether more monstrosities now roam the countryside is up to you.
How the party deals with the threat can create many further plot hooks for an ongoing campaign or serve to show new players how their actions have consequences on the world. One such plot hook could be the corpse of Hermia’s owlbear itself. Finding a buyer could be a quest of its own. A sportsman may want its pelt for his lodge, or its organs might be sought-after magical reagents.
Lanidor
Lanidor, a village a couple of days to the west of Holdenshire, sits in a fertile valley at the confluence of two branches of the Moor-run River. Lanidor is a peaceful place full of even-keeled and conservative people. The river is the primary water source for the village.
Plain in style and proud of their dependability, the people of Lanidor maintain trade contracts with many other towns within the region, exchanging their abundant agricultural production for military protection.
Background
A few years ago, a gnome named Two-lips Thistlestrip and a small group of his kin arrived in Lanidor. They established a farm north of town, along the River Trom, and began to grow exotic flowers. At first, the people of Lanidor were intrigued by the new crop, but they quickly lost interest; their plain tastes valued function over form.
Two-lips became increasingly desperate as his sales plunged. Barely able to keep his business afloat, he was approached in the field one day by Hermia, a witch who promised to help him save his foundering farm. She offered to brew an extremely potent love potion, suggesting that Two-lips might see an increase in sales if he could influence the emotions of the village.
Together they devised a plan to slowly drip the potion into the River Trom, at its source in a cave far to the north. For her part, Hermia requested no compensation from Two-lips. She used the potion’s powerful magic to corrupt the local beasts of the forest, creating cross-species monstrosities like the owlbear that guards her lair at the river’s source.
Their plan worked. Love filled the air in Lanidor and flowers sold like never before. Weeks later, though, the village devolved into debauchery. Realizing his mistake, Two-lips searched far and wide for Hermia, but to no avail. He ventured towards the mouth of the River Trom, but Hermia’s intoxicating magic had caused the animals near Lanidor to grow savage and restless. Unable to do anything on his own, Two-lips decided to ride the wave of profits and hope that no one caught on.