Being pale subterranean jellyfish, flumphs shouldn’t just suffer penalties on attacks and perception checks while in the sun, but should wrinkle and shrivel like raisins. They’re even less suited to been removed from their cool damp caves than the drow. Thankfully, with a half dozen tentacle limbs, they can always hold a parasol.
This session is really just a continuation of the previous session: a travel adventure from point A to B as the party hits a few locales of note and encounters a few minor wandering monsters. Thankfully, I don’t need to worry too much about pacing. I can end as they just reach their destination, or if there is time I can continue after they reach the town, rest, and then plan their next move. If they rapidly blast through events then they just spend more time in town and I improvise and react to their unpredictable shenanigans.
This is also the second session where I’m down a player. The dragonborn paladin is absent for two weeks because of work related overtime (he’s a teacher and too busy marking exams to come out and play).
The player characters have mostly reached level 10 or 11. At this point of the campaign, travel adventures have become less interesting. Teleportation is often blamed for ruining travel at this tier, by making long journeys too easy. But this is less of a problem and almost more of a cure for lame travel adventures. At high levels, most characters have so many resources that a single encounter in a day of travel cease to be threatening. It’s hard to put a creature on the board that will prove a genuine challenge to a fully rested party that is freely able to nova. In 5e this is even harder as even non-spellcasters now have limited use powers that can be spent to maximum effect in a short fight.
There are four ways around this problem. The first is simply to have multiple encounters in a single day, thus sidestepping the problem. The second is changing the rate of recovery, so a “long rest” is a week rather than overnight. Effective use of terrain is the third method, by sapping resources through exploration encounters or natural hazards that can drain away hit points or make a single fight more devastating. The last solution is to using much more powerful monsters.
I don’t want to change how long a rest is for a single session, and I had a three-encounter adventuring day last session. So this session will likely be a couple higher Challenge Rating encounters, possibly supplemented with terrain.
Knowing I can throw a high CR at my rested party, my first choice becomes a purple worm. I like them and even have a mini, but haven’t used one before. They’re a little high, but I imagine they can take it. I might even have to buff the hit points a little.
My players are experienced gamers and know how to build characters. In general they’re going to rip through monsters straight out of the Monster Manual, and this has only grown worse as the party has gained levels. I regularly give my critters 75% hit points rather than 50%.
Knowing my party will likely rip through it, and wanting something a little more memorable than an encounter in a flat, empty plain, I’m thinking an ambush on a cliff-side pass. A narrow walkway with a cliff face on one side and a drop on the other. It’s easy enough to line up my Dungeon Tiles boxes for the path, with the drop being the cliff. And then I can place some styrofoam terrain along the top of the tile boxes for the cliff, so the purple worm can burst through the cliff, attacking a creature on the trail, and then potentially burrowing back into cliff.
The current overarching goal for the party is to venture into a foreign nation (The Grigorian Imperium) where they plan to assassinate the God-King Grigor, thus freeing the slaves held by that nation.
I’d also like to have some of this session focus on humanizing the people of the Imperium (the Grigorians) as well as those who worship the God-King and follow the state religion (Grigorites). Possibly even differentiating the two.
Grigor is basically a giant racist who believes humans are the best of the D&D races, and others are somewhat inferior. Specifically the planetouched races (tieflings, genasi) who lack a soul. And as they lack a soul, it’s not immoral to use them for slave labour. Slowly reiterating these points to the party is necessary at these points, and over the next few sessions I’ll have to repeat it to them through the voices of various NPCs. Because as any teacher will tell you, the best way to learn some information is to hear it multiple times. And since I don’t just want to talk AT the players as the DM but TO the player characters as an NPC, I need to set-up situations where NPCs will be introduced who can fill this role of repeating the world lore.
Meeting an escaped slave is one way. This is useful for providing the other perspective (that of the slaves) but also because they can provide a route through the mountains. Having a safer route helps speed things along.
Encountering some “benevolent” Grigorites might also be nice. This is dangerous as I don’t want to present a religion of hate and racism overly positively. But I also don’t really want them to be cartoonish one-dimensional fantasy Nazis. They need to be realistically complex people who are capable of both goodness and evil who just happen to have a religion that believes something monstrous.
Plus, this way I get to ask the question “is a horribly unfair and racist society better than no society?” Which is a valid concern in a crapsack largely post-apocalyptic world. I need to set-up any potential consequences of having the God-King assassinated—presuming the PCs succeed—so the fallout seems natural and not arbitrary. Because you can’t just kill the living god of a religion AND the head of state without causing some problems.
Things pretty much went as expected. The two combat encounters were easy and largely unremarkable diversions. The kind of paint-by-numbers combats that occur when everyone rolls adequately and all the strategies go off as planned. Wholly forgettable with little risk and entirely predictable expenditure of resources. Textbook and not boring at the time, but not particularly exciting.
What was memorable was the filler roleplaying encounter that occurred early on in the session. I had planned to have some halflings encountered in the previous session as the party passed through a town. But I had forgotten as the party went all murder-hobo and stole an innocent shopkeeper’s livelihood.
To add a break to the travel, I added a small band of halfling traders. Most of the halflings in my world live in the frozen tundra facing away from the sun, in the ice and snow of perpetual night. I hadn’t done anything with them yet, and wanted to include this people and their culture, just as a not to halflings being different. Trying to emphasize their nature as wild hunters, I decided to reference Netflix’s [i]Castlevania[/i] and had the halflings say they only cared about three things: things they could eat, “eff”, or turn into sled. Which broke my wife and became a recurring joke that session.
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.
In the last session of my Borderlands Campaign, the party teleported to the far side of the map in order to venture to a distant theocracy (or thearchy) in order to foster a slave rebellion at the urging of one of the new PCs in the group, possibly aided by assassinating the god-king who rules the nation.
It’s a curious choice of activity and one prompted by the backstory of a PC rather than overt scripting on my part. It’s partially what I wanted from the campaign, albeit a bit more dramatic of an upheaval for the world than I was expecting. While I want the world to change and shift in response to the actions of the PCs, this might be a larger change than I was planning for. Removing a head of state is a big change.
We’ll see how it goes.
But this is still a half-dozen sessions in the future. Right now, the PCs still need to make it to that nation, crossing a deadly, monster inhabited mountain range. The group planned out their route for the next couple weeks of travel, meaning I can loosely plot out the next couple sessions with some degree of certainty. It’s nice to have a concrete plan.
I called my session slightly early last week, rather than improvising an encounter I was largely unprepared to run. I was uninspired and drawing a blank.
As the group is high level, a fight with some big humanoids might be fun. I don’t think this party has faced trolls before, and they should be able to take out quite a few at one times. Three or four at least. That might be fun.
And I have some variant trolls in my 3rd Part book Revenge of the Horde by Nord Games, and a Huge size troll makes for a lovely and terrifying boss. (Disclaimer: I did some editing for the book. So I have a soft spot for that product and pull it out whenever I have the chance.) Again, I have some pretty big troll miniatures that can work nicely for said boss, and I do like basing encounters on minis.
Aside: Of all my minis, trolls seem to come with the greatest variation on size. Most of my WotC trolls are fine, but I have a couple teeny-tiny Pathfinder trolls that look like Medium Creature on Large bases. And the next Paizo troll looks Huge on a Large base.
However, looking at the part’s current location in my campaign setting Word Document, the region they are passing through is rife with necrotic energy and overlaps with the Plane of Shadow (aka the Shadowfell aka the Shadow World). So an undead encounter might be more suitable. I can save the troll encounter for later. Heck, even later in the session would be fine, as trolls might work just as well later on, when the party actually hits rough terrain. That becomes a potential climax for the session, or cliffhanger for next session.
Returning to the first encounter, there’s no shortage of undead I can use. Perhaps a bunch of banshees and wraiths. That might be fun and nasty. Nothing says “dead elves” like a banshee. Despite the low CRs, you don’t want to use more than two or three banshees in a single encounter: that’s a lot of saves against AoEs, increasing the odds someone will eventually flub the saving throw against their death wail. Just knowing that if they fail they’ll be knocked to 0 hit points will add some terror to the banshee’s presence.
After the above, I have two good tentpole combat encounters. Along with some travel and roleplaying, this is probably enough for a session. But to aid the exploration aspect of the game, I should add/ brainstorm some incidental encounters for the journey. I discussed incidental encounters in a blog post a long time back. To quickly reiterate, these are small little sites of interest that can break-up the journey and make it more than “You travel across the hills for three days. Nothing happens.” These might be odd ruins, signs of monsters or game, places of mystery, or just animals being weird. Heck, they can even be pausing at the edge of a mountain and enjoying a magnificent view of the surrounding valleys. Something to include in the travel montage. Ideally, these should be interesting enough that the players ask about them or interact with them. So they’re active and engaging in the game and not just listening to me talk.
While I have to combat encounters planned, and have some ideas for a framework to set-up one of them to be more than a random wilderness encounter, it won’t hurt to think of a third or even a fourth encounter. Combat can be swingy in 5e, and a quick nova and some good rolls can cause a combat to rocket past. It won’t hurt to have some smaller encounters on standby to pad the session.
As I mentioned last blog, just having a list of a half-dozen ideal monsters can help. I don’t need a full random encounter table so much as a few options for flavourful fights.
Okay… when writing this blog, I used the phrase “I can loosely plot out the next couple sessions with some degree of certainty. It’s nice to have a concrete plan.” Then, the following day, a player hit me with a warning that they might be missing the next couple sessions.
Crud.
That will derail things. And I hate forcing the story to progress with a PC absent. So much so that I normally I have a rule against playing twice with a player absent. But we’re finally moving along with a homebrew story following the Tomb of Annihilation.
However… the story will be starting in a region where planar energies are bleeding from the Shadow World into the Mortal World. It doesn’t take much to imagine someone accidently stepping from one world to the other via a shadow crossing. The character could be snatched up, and go missing like that, justifying their absence from the story. And then return, possibly after more time has passed for them. This PC also joined the party some time after the campaign started, and was a level behind. Which has been slightly awkward since they were the tank. But it occurs to me that if they are in the Shadow World and having side adventures, this might be an excuse to slip them some extra experience. Also… it might be fun to do a Shadowfell one-shot. Four pre-gens for the other players and then tell the story of the dragonborn pally’s return to the mortal world, letting them be in the spotlight for some time. Do some additional playtesting of homebrew options, like my tactician class. Maybe the artificer if WotC can get that out in time.
The initial encounter(s) was nicely terrifying, as two of the four PCs eventually failed saves against the banshee. Meanwhile, another PC failed repeated saves against the Energy Drain of wraiths and specters, and had their maximum hp drastically reduced.
Following the first batch of undead, I had more “spawn”, giving the PCs just enough time to take a short rest but not the long rest they craved. They attempted to continue their rest and more undead “spawned”. Since the party was attempting to rest after a day of travel they had to forced march and hope to get out of the region rife with undead and necromantic energies.
If you *really* want to hurt a party, force them to forced march overnight. Everyone racked up ridiculous levels of exhaustion with just a half-dozen hours of extra travel. I followed this with a final very simple undead fight, which felt much harder given how weakened everyone was.
The rest of the session was generally pretty generic. Saving villagers, killing trolls, minor dungeon crawling. While fun, this was largely like every other session of D&D. If you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a dozen times. Really, I just wanted to have the adventures do something heroic so their reputation and “legend” would grow and spread in that region as well.
Also memorable was an improvised encounter in a small town. The party stopped to ask about magical potions, hoping to find one that removed exhaustion, if such a thing existed. The only one that does is potions of vitality, which are Very Rare and thus 5,000 gp or so. Possibly more. After finding out the price, the PCs opted to just sneak into the vendor’s wagon and steal them rather than pay. A bit of a dick move. Murder hobo behaviour at its finest. Hopefully I can find an excuse to have the party visit that area again and show the consquences of that bit of theft.
Things are also on track for where I expected the party to be in this journey. While I haven’t given much thought to the next session or leg of the journey, it should progress easily enough.
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.
