I’m in the process of revising my guide to Worldbuilding and thinking on improbably world design, such as placing the horrible wasteland of pure evil across from the agrarian nation of peace and nobility. Although, it worked fairly well in Lord or the Rings, as Mordor was literally visible from Gondor. But the transition between these locations has got to be rough.
At the end of the last session before last I knew the plans of the player: they were going to attack the forces of the Imperium garrisoned at the city they had just reached. The tortle druid scouted the building to find out where the forces of the god-king were stationed, so they could “free” the town while on their quest/ mission to kill the god-king and end slavery in the land.
This made planning simple: I needed to be ready for combat in a city. Likely two or three encounters with guard patrols.
I can play it by ear as far as building the encounters. While I could just build a completely balanced combat encounter, I’d like to aim for some “realism”. Plus, if the party is sneaky or coordinated, they might be able to eliminate the patrols without raising the alarm. So I should plan to be reactive to their actions rather than scripting the encounters.
I can crunch the numbers and find out how many guards should reasonably be in a town that size. With over five-thousand people in the city, there should be fifty or so guards. Maybe less. Some would be patrolling the road and surrounding farms, so there may only be 10 or 20 in the city proper, working shifts to patrol the streets. Maybe 6 during the day (patrolling in groups of 2) and 4 during the night. The party might be able to ambush a group or two before they signal for reinforcements and rally for a major offensive.
Because I had some time, I dusted off my TerraClips and build a cityscape. Over a half-dozen buildings with nice wide streets and narrow-ish alleys for combat. Generic enough to serve as the map for a couple combats.
(I love my TerraClips and wish I’d bought more city sets before they went out of print. I wish WorldWork Games would bring them back.)
I should also do some thinking on the number of slaves managed locally, given the party’s primary goal at the moment is “free the slaves”. It will help to know who owns the slaves and where in the event the party decides to stage a mass-liberation.
The previous session was a one-shot that ended with the separated character making it to the city where they hoped to be reunited with their allies. The session would start with the groups finding each other and then filling each other in on what was missed.
I’d also like to include a bathhouse drake, from Kobold Press’ Creature Codex. Mostly because I ended up chatting with the creator on the ENWorld Discord, and they were excited to have been published. So, suddenly, the town needs a bathhouse. Which actually works nicely as I described it being rainy previously, and the player characters would be covered in mud after a couple days on the road. A bathhouse would be the perfect place to reunite.
I remember the end of two sessions ago, when the players declared their next course of action: “we’re going to kill the zealots in this city and free all the slaves we can on our way to the capital.” I kept a straight face while thinking “that is a STUPID idea that’s going to attract a ridiculous amount of attention“. But I kept my mouth shut.
Then my players showed up for the game and declared, “yeah, were were thinking and decided that just attacking the guards is a dumb idea. And we’re going to keep a low profile.“
Well, there went all my prep, including the giant 3D city grid.
Enter an all-improv session. I just laughed and rolled with it. It was a dumb idea and I didn’t want to force them to stick to it. I know if I had pushed the issue or made a big deal of it, my players would have gone along with their old plan. But it’s not their fault I over-prepared or didn’t plan for other decisions
Instead, they had a spontaneous travel adventure including an encounter with some werewolves and a few guard patrols, one of which went badly due to overreaction and poor diplomacy on the part of the players.
It was a very different session than I planned, but it still had some amusing moments. Such as when the tortle druid got infected by lycanthrope. And them, a couple days later, when they murdered a patrol of guards, and had the druid wild shape into a wolf to maul the bodies to “frame” the werewolves, only to discover he enjoyed the taste of blood a little too much….The session ended when they reached the edge of the Briar Ruins. Which are basically a set of ruins I added to my world’s map while creating the setting to pad the area. It’s basically a city completely covered by brambles, like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, for “reasons”. A generic adventure location. They saw that and decided to investigate, which gives me a framework for the next session.
This session was several weeks back, but I’ve been delaying posting this because a key aspect of my planning for this session took place on an episode of Behind the DM Screen on the Tome Show network. But due to snow and likely the editor’s schedule, the episode hasn’t appeared yet, so I’m posting now.
From the start I knew this session was going to be about the dragonborn paladin, Scalus. Scalus joined the party late, as his player was brought in as a replacement when another player was suffering a severe case of “life” and was uncertain if they could continue attending the game. Because he was just forced into the game in the middle of a narrative and never had as strong a background, Scalus has just sort of been there.
When Scalus’ player found himself busy with work and likely to miss a session, rather than have him fade further into the background, I thought I’d have him separated from the group and sent on a side quest. That I’d make him the start of a session, rounding out the party with some pregens.
Scalus was being pulled into the Shadow World. My version of the Shadowfell. Or “The Upside Down” as my players quickly nicknamed it. Which isn’t inaccurate.
My encounters pretty much write themselves: undead, maybe some evil death cultists, and more undead. Possibly an aberration of some kind. Basically a dash of horror. Really, once a DM has the potential creature type, making encounters for this level is generally pretty easy. PCs are roughly equal to a monster with a Challenge Rating equal to 1/3rd their level. Give or take. For pregens at level 8, I can use four CR 3 monsters for a decent fight, a CR 6 and two CR 3s, one CR 9, or something close to nine or ten CR 1s. I can pretty easily look at some CRs and throw minis onto the table.
There’s also have a number of spooky graveyard and bone strewn poster battlemaps to use. Which makes it easy to pick locations I want the encounters to be set.
I also kinda want to use a shadow dragon. Because they’re neat and don’t see nearly as much use as other dragons. This is overlapping with another thought in my head.
I’m trying to give the characters little small perks as the gain levels. Unique powers and small bonuses related to accomplishing personal quests and completing goals. And Scalus needs one. And he should get one at the end of this side quest.
I brought the character into the campaign a level behind everyone else, to avoid overwhelming him with a complicated character. And Scalus just never caught up. This session will help a little, but he’ll still be a tank that’s of a lower level than the rest of the party. As such, a bonus Hit Dice will really help him: boosting his overall hit points, but also letting him recover from fights.
Remembering the character of Dhamon Grimwulf from late Dragonlance novels, who had a dragon scale afixed to his body, it might be neat to do that to Scalus. Especially with the scale of a shadow dragon. A single black scale marring his body. But then I need to set-up a situation where that’s an outcome. What kind of situation would end with him and the shadow dragon being chums, or a hostile shadow dragon using its dying breath to ram a scale on him.
But with that neat story element, I do wonder if just giving him a Hit Dice will be interesting enough.
I was on a show. I’ll edit in a link once the episode goes live.
I discussed things and tapped the hosts, Sam and Jeff, for advice. Through their suggestions I was able to weave the disparate strands of my ideas together. I believe it was Jeff who suggested having a quest giver just assign the quest, which helped skip over the narrative “why” for the adventure. Since I wanted to bring in a shadow dragon anyway, this suggestion suddenly made it click: the quest giver should be the shadow dragon! Of course. He tasks Scalus to help his party in exchange for a trip home and maybe a boon.
Bam! With that one missing piece, everything else in the adventure clicks into place.
I made four pre-gens for the game: a gnome bard using the College of Threnody, which I wrote for my Heroes of the Mists Ravenloft book, a hexblade warlock from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, a blood hunter from the class written by Critical Role’s Matt Mercer, and a tactician (to further playtest the class I accidentally invented in an ENWorld thread).
I was very happy with how my tactician handled at the table, and the player really enjoyed the character. It was a nice combination. Always nice to get some extra playtesting in.
I chose to have that adventuring party already together, presenting them as local heroes who had participated in a number of exciting adventures that occured off camera. I did my best to set-up things as a crossover. As if this was some other campaign where Scalus was the “very special guest star”.
Things came together fairly quickly at the end. I had the central story and the assigned quest, with some brief investigation that had a main location and a couple possible red herrings. I was initially worried because of the potential problem of the PCs picking “the right path”, which might speed things along too fast and lead to a very short and potentially unsatisfying adventure. Thankfully, my players went the obvious route and hit both red herrings, padding the adventure while also resulting in a much more evenly paced session. This would have been a terrible published adventure, but it ran perfectly this one time at the table.
It’s nice when things work out. Fun was had, which is always the goal.
If you liked this review, you can support me and encourage future reviews.
First off, I play in a Star Trek Adventures game every other Saturday at 3:15 EST, streamed on Twitch and archived on YouTube. I also regularly post STA content on Continuing Mission.
I have T-shirts available for sale over on TeePublic!
I have a number of PDF products on the DMs Guild website including my first level 1 to 20 class, the Tactician. I’m excited by this and think it turned out surprisingly well, despite almost being an accidental creation as the result of message board discussions.
Also available are products like the Rod of Seven Parts, Traps, Diseases, Legendary Monsters, a book of Variant Rules.
Additionally, my book, Jester David’s How-To Guide to Fantasy Worldbuilding, is available for purchase on DriveThurRPG or Print-on-Demand through Amazon. The book is a compilation of my worldbuilding blog series, but all the entries have been updated, edited, and expanded to almost two-hundred pages of advice on making your own fantasy world.
