{.right} Halberds and Helmets Podcast Doppelgängers are for the urban adventure when you no longer know whom to trust and how to safely uncover the conspiracy.
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Hello, this is the Halberd’s and Helmet’s podcast. My name is Alex. I’m here to talk about doppelgängers.
Doppelgängers have a conveniently German name. Doppelgänger is a double walker, somebody who looks just like somebody else. And one cool idea I think that many people think of when they read the doppelgänger monster description is that the party is in the dungeon, they’re exploring some rooms, there’s some sort of adventurer or somebody to be rescued who’s a doppelgänger who will kill one of the player characters, replace them, and then the game goes on and suddenly you discover, oh my god, Michael isn’t actually Michael, it’s a doppelgänger. But it never worked out that way. It just doesn’t work that way.
So the first problem I think is that players are super suspicious. And once they’re a tiny bit suspicious, they’re already going to watch the doppelgänger. If they manage to rescue somebody, they join the party and they’re super interested in picking up a weapon and helping the party out, that’s great. And then maybe you keep them for two or three sessions and you have a random encounter at night and you roll that die and the doppelgänger comes up and then the doppelgänger says – you as a referee say – that doppelgänger picks Michael’s character to keep watch…
That’s just how I run it, right? I don’t ask people in which order they want to keep watch. I don’t roll for on what watch does the night encounter happen. I do it on demand basically. So I roll the d6 to see whether there’s an encounter at night. If a one comes up, there’s an encounter. Then I roll for the person that is on watch and they can pick some other player character as being on watch with them. Those two are fully armed and prepared and can roll for surprise or for spotting the enemy or whatever. We don’t need to actually know who had the watch when nothing happened.
One example of when the doppelgänger could strike is during that watch.
But then there’s also another problem. I’m assuming that the players don’t want that. They don’t want to be on watch with a stranger. So they’ll tell me, no, this prisoner that we freed, they’re not going to be on watch or maybe they’ll be on watch after many sessions. But then maybe after many sessions they’d also say: Hey, why isn’t this guy my retainer?
And is it really fair to have one of the characters that is a real retainer by the rules to be a doppelgänger? It sort of starts getting into that territory that I don’t like. This is when players will get legitimately angry at me. The player is going to be angry at me, the person.
They’re not going to face palm and say, Oh, I knew it. I knew it. We should never have done this. Because in the situations where I’m just refereeing and then there’s this trap and it’s somehow announced beforehand and the players really, they know that something is up, but they still choose to risk it. And then there’s a setback. And that’s exactly what I’ll do. They’ll moan and groan and everything, of course, but it’s not my fault. It’s also not really their fault. It’s just bad luck. And that works really well at the table.
I think using doppelgängers as a kind of gotcha monster is bad style. It just leads to an atmosphere at the gaming table that I don’t enjoy. So doppelgängers are not good at infiltrating the party. There’s hardly ever the chance for them to kill one of the party members while they’re on watch. It’s also not feasible to kill a party member that’s walking at the end in the shadows. The last one up is going to get killed by the doppelgänger and then it’s just missing or how’s that going to work? I just have so many doubts.
So then the next question is: Where do we see doppelgängers? They must be killing NPCs then and infiltrating society. And that is something that I can get behind because now we can have urban adventures where some ruler is a doppelgänger. And then we find out that the chief of the guards is also a doppelgänger and the cook is also a doppelgänger. And Oh My God, there are so many doppelgängers! It’s an infestation.
And this surprise moment, maybe even that suspicion beforehand where there’s rumours of people being not themselves or something like that. That’s an interesting adventure. It’s an interesting urban adventure to discover this conspiracy of doppelgängers, I guess, to actually uncover it and to try and fix the situation, not kill innocent people and just find the doppelgängers. How do you do that? That’s a part where I can see how doppelgängers might work in my campaign.
What I find really boring is when there’s a room full of doppelgängers on the fourth level of the dungeon and the players open the door and okay. Hi, my name is Michael. I live down here. What? Of course not. My players are going to stab them all or take them prisoner or be super suspicious. There’s just no doppelgänger moment.
And the doppelgänger moment is a moment where their doppelgänger abilities make a difference. And that means they need to take the shape and form of somebody else. And it has to be a game about discovering them or uncovering them and setting things right. That is the real doppelgänger adventure, I think. That’s hidden somewhere in the monster description.
Doppelgängers are also intelligent. They have names, they have relationships, and they have a magical ability. And in my way of thinking, those are the sources, the natural sources of spells. And so naturally, you can learn doppelgänger-like spells from doppelgängers. And incidentally, it works out quite well.
There’s one spell called *disguise* where you can just change your face, make yourself look like somebody else, and *shape change*, which allows you to change the rest of your body. Those are second and third circle spells. And the next one up would be the actual *shape shifting*, which would be a fourth circle spell, which means that you need to be level seven or eight in order to cast it. And with shape shifting, you could turn yourself into a dragon, for example.
With doppelgängers just being limited to the lesser two spells of these three, they can change their faces, they can change their bodies, but still remain roughly humanoid, but they cannot turn into eagles, dragons, and just shape shift as they want.
And so these first two doppelgänger-like spells, you can learn from them. It’s like meeting an NPC magic user. You can talk to them, you can beat them up and tell them I’ll spare your life if you teach me those spells or something like that. Or maybe you’re a lower level character, third level elf or magic user, and you can learn the first of these two spells and then come back two levels later when you’re good enough to learn the next one. Shape change is a third circle spell, so you need to be fifth level.
Treating monsters as sources of spells is something that I like to do because then there’s a reason to interact constructively with monsters. But you don’t just kill them and loot them. Maybe your players have some more interesting ideas like resettling the doppelgängers and have them live underneath your castle or something like that. I’ve seen that in a campaign where I’m also a player. Other people have done that.
So yeah, why not? You can make friends with doppelgängers. I think there’s nothing inherently necessarily evil about them. It’s just that the infiltration that they do, this kind of taking over society that is super creepy and it creeps us out like in that movie where the main character puts on the glasses and then he sees that all the important and rich and powerful people are actually terrible aliens and he takes off the glasses and then everything is just as before. This idea that all the powerful people are actually reptiles or whatever the conspiracy of the day is, it works okay in a game. You can think that, oh my God, this ruler is not acting as they did before. Is he a shape changer, a shape shifter, a doppelgänger? And if so, how are we going to uncover this plot? Who are we going to trust?
And this feeling of not being able to trust anybody, this feeling that you have to slowly test people and see whether they are the good guys or the bad guys. I think that is a good doppelgänger adventure.
Yeah, so uncovering plots and learning disguise and shape change, two spells that make you a bit like them, I guess. Yeah, that’s doppelgängers.
I hope you use them well.
Cheers.
#Halberds and Helmets Podcast
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Generating the transcript of these 10 minutes took my laptop over an hour using `whisper`. And if you read it, it doesn’t read well. The written word and the spoken word are very different and it’s only when you see the one in the other that you realize how weird it is. People reading their prepared statements. Or transcripts of the people talking freely into their mics. There’s something that feels off about it.
I know some people say podcasts should absolutely have transcripts. I usually never go and to read them. I’d rather read a well-written blog post instead. So one might say: I should write a decent blog post about doppelgängers instead of posting a transcript!
It’d be much shorter, too.
– Alex 2023-02-17 10:37 UTC
