Adventure Prep: When Fun and Logic collide…
Woot! It’s game week again!
Since this week’s game is the 3rd session in and around a Tomb dungeon, and since the adventure is pretty much prepped since last week, I was thinking of skipping this week’s prep article in order to focus on the campaign’s next chapter (Where Planescape meets Ptolus).
But then I realized that my game is at a particular stage where a DM has to think about how to treat the dungeon’s dynamics in regards to the party’s current resources. It brought to my mind sufficient ideas to make a post of of it.
I have had this conundrum trust onto my lap plenty of time and have had to fight against my very strong sense of logic and the urge to ‘do what makes sense’.
After having had 5 combat encounters and facing 3 traps, my player’s resources are pretty low now. Spells slots are used up, reserve points pools (Cixi’s) have been tapped and healing magic is nearing the ‘E’ line.
But here’s the thing.
You remember those Children of Sehan I talked about in the last 3 or 4 sessions? You know, those ill-designed, quasi-omnipotent Humanoid plant things that have been the interactive MacGuffins of this adventure arc? Well it so happens that on top of all the abilities they already had (Calm Emotion Gaze, 3d6 charisma draining poisoned claws, Wisdom Bonus to AC, Unflankable, Uncrittable…) they also share their awareness with any or all Sehan-touched creatures within 25 miles. Including Sehan and its thralls.
Aside: Sehan is that Lovecraftian thing sitting at the bottom of the dungeon, and it’s got the players a bit worried
So both Sehan and his Mini-Bosses know that the PCs are in the Dungeon and that they killed all of the remaining children of Sehan. The logical thing to do now that the PCs are down on their resources would be to have the baddies burst out of one of the yet unopened doors and attack to kill them
The thing is… much like making a Coup de Grace on a fallen PC, what makes sense and what fosters fun for your players are two completely different things. That is, unless your players are dedicated Killer DM fans and will take umbrage at you NOT killing them (Don’t smirk, I had a player like that for quite some time).
Bottom line, when logic and fun collide… I prefer to let fun win, everytime.
So here’s what’s going to happen (you reading this guys)?
Sehan is a patient entity….. All its thralls will most likely die but it doesn’t really feel threatened. Heck, its neighbor is a 20th level Druid that still hasn’t made a move on him…. what’s a quintet of 9th levelers going to do that’s worse?
However, most of that group has already been touched by it. Aravar, Nogard (who accepted its gift) and Crueger have had some of it in their veins. That opens all kind of nice Evil DM stuff that can make players squirm and creates quite an incentive to deal with this menace from the Far Realm.
The point is that Sehan will not send its thralls out yet, it’ll take a defensive wait-and-see position to gauge if the players will make better servants than the ones it’s about to lose… That’ll enable the PCs to rest and come back to finish the job at their leisure, keeping a sense of control of their environment (a very satisfying feeling in the world of unknowns that his being a RPG player instead of a Gamemaster).
I’m really curious to see what kind of devious plans the guys will come up with to deal with that pool of Green Glowing Slime… (‘Cuz I sure have quite a few lined up for them).
Adventure Prep: My Recent Time Management Shortcuts
Now that I made a point about the value of our player’s free time, I must confess that I don’t have that more free time than them. Ronin and Ve4grm have made good argument that the DM’s fun factor must also be taken into account and does not want to waste his/her own free time either.
But managing the time spent prepping a game has been a recent concern of mine when it finally dawned on me that I often spent 2 or 3 times more times prepping than actually playing the game (although it can be argued that prepping is part of playing the game). With the advent of writing one post a day on this here blog, prepping time is now at premium.
So I set out to look for time saving resources and I found a lot of them.
Here is what I settled for:
I take a break from preparing my game on my off week to let my brain recuperate. During that off week I brainstorm a lot about where the campaign could go, but I don’t write anything, yet. Toward the end of the off week, if we are close to starting a new adventure, I start browsing my published adventures stash (I have a lot!). I don’t usually write adventures unless an idea strikes me fancy or I can’t find anything that could fit in the campaign’s plot. I do hack existing ones to pieces and reengineer them to my tastes (a very recent habit of mine).
On the week of the game, I spend about 2 hours on Monday or Tuesday evening hacking the published adventure or sketching an adventure based on the 5 room dungeon. One of the reasons it now only takes me 2 hours (or less) is that I do not create monster stats anymore. With 5 monster books and quite a few source books with monster entries in them in my library, I decided that I won’t create Half-Fiend Drow Brabarian/Rogues mooks anymore. The later Monster Manuals (III and IV) feature a lot of pre-generated monsters with levels (i.e. nothing more than standard monsters fleshed out with class levels). While I initially thoughts these to be a waste of book space, I now am happy to have those handy.
So when a monster in a published adventure fails to catch my fancy, I switch it with another monster that has a similar role mechanics wise. You can also dig a ton of those from adventure modules and old Dungeon magazines.
I recall reading somewhere that Monte Cook recycled his critters from Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil more than once. This is brilliant because all the non standard monsters are fleshed out together at the end of the adventure. Granted, it’s D&D 3.0, but I no longer care about the difference. Anyway, I would be the only one to notice.
So now I actually spend more time creating cool encounters or making published ones cooler and less on calculating the impact of increasing a Umber Hulk by 12 Hit Dice after applying the Ghost template.
I do not draw adventure or battlemaps anymore, unless needed for a really cool idea I got. Instead, I use pre-drawn adventure maps from the net. As for battlemaps, as mentioned before, I use and reuse the same D&D mini battlemaps whenever I can.
I also started using the D&D Tiles referred to in that last link quite a lot more. I must say that ever since I organized them in a customizable bait and tackle box, using them on the fly has become a dream. So more prep-time saved because I don’t have to pre-draw battlemaps anymore (which often took 1 to 2 hours).
Finally, I generate bling almost exclusively randomly now with the Magic Item Compendium revised treasure table. It’s so much faster than before and almost always gives great piles of loot.
I’ve been doing this since I started the current ‘Seeds of Sehan’ campaign arc (about 2 months ago) and so far it’s been working like a charm.
What about your time saving tricks?
Adventure Prep: Tomb Re-engineering 101
Okay, I got sick last night, probably with the same bugs my wife and kids have been fighting these last 2 weeks. Hopefully I’ll get better for Friday’s game. If not well I just might have to pull the plug on it no matter how I’d much rather not do this.
This week’s Adventure prep focuses, once again, on adapting the current dungeon crawl (a funeral mound that hides some sort of Lovecraftian horror) in order to make it a more balanced challenge and be more interesting for my players. The last game showed that the players loved the adventure’s fluff but had maybe too much of a hard time with the creatures in it. For those new to the series, we’re still in the 1st third of my own adaptation of Dungeon Magazine’s Spawn of Sehan adventure from #146.
I don’t actually expect the players to finish up this week. So I haven’t touched the deeper encounters. If they manage to get there and the evening is still young, I’ll play them as is.
The 1st order of business is dealing with the Child of Sehan… The players have already survived 2 fights against those, so I don’t plan on nerfing the remaining creature. However, while reading the new D&D Rules Compendium, which I absolutely recommend for anyone playing D&D 3.x and still unsure about 4.0, I found a very interesting twist on playing a monster with a Gaze attack. Remember that any players who succumb to the Child’s gaze attack’s fairly high DC (Will DC 21) become affected by a Calm Emotion effect for 11 rounds.
Here’s the house rule: Instead of having all players who avert their gaze have a flat 50% chance of becoming a target of the passive gaze attack (which slows down the game), nerf the passive gaze. Instead allow the creature to make a Gaze attack against one PC with averted eyes as a swift action . So for a party of 5 players who all avert their eyes, only one gets to play the save instead of 2-3. Does that sounds fair?
Okay, up next was the redesigning of rooms that were either plain stupid (Ohhh a patch of Super Green Slime, so quaint!) or too un-fun (2 more Child of Sehan). In one of the now emptied rooms, I added a bit more Ptolus fluff… Objects and/or NPCs to act as future plot hooks.
I also made good use of Monday’s Trope concept and injected quite a few coincidences… including one that should lead to a very interesting intra-party conflict and another that plays directly into the antics of one of the players that has been spewing a LOT of in-character semi-religious drivel over e-mail these past few days.
Additionally as I was reading up on the critters found in the dungeon’s lower levels, I came upon a room guarded by 3 Specters. Yup, 3 incorporeal, non-critable, level draining (2 negative levels per hit!) undead creatures. Now I’m sure the party can deal with this but I’ve used specters against my players before and they always lead to long drawn out fights where players miss 50% of the time. Not fun. So I dug into my source books and replaced them by an equivalent encounter with creatures they have never seen and that does not have more than 2 of the 3 ‘bad’ features of Specters.
Finally, I added enough Bling to make the adventure worthwhile for everyone, including once again some items that link to other Ptolus adventures and organizations. I’m really having quite a blast here.
That’s about it for this week’s game… and this post is barely 1/2 of my usual stuff. Well, consider this a gift for the impatient. If I’m still homesick tomorrow, I’ll throw in a bonus Planescape adaptation post… I’ve finally settled on the next part of the campaign and you might be quite surprised where I took my inspiration.
Peace out and wash your hands!
Adventure Prep, Session 5: When Frustration leads to Inspiration
Okay, so this week’s game is a transition from my adaptation of the Vile Addiction adventure (From Dungeon Magazine #145) to its sequel, Spawn of Sehan from #146.
Going in this week’s preparations, I had the following goals:
- Focus the adventure on the more impatient Butt Kickers like Eric and Math to make up for last game’s Storyteller’s festival.
- Introduce Stef’s new Character, a Half-Dragon (Brass) barbarian, hopefully in such a way to be as seamless as possible.
- Prepare the jump to Planescape shortly after this game.
- Add more Ptolus Organizations into the adventure’s Fluff to build more Plot seeds to allow players to find anchors to build up their character’s motivations.
With all that in mind, I set out to re-read the adventure. It turns out the adventure sucks big time with the party’s current composition (i.e. no Rogues and no clerics). As is, the adventure is a medium-large dungeon crawl featuring a Crypt-like environment filled to the brim with monsters that seek to kill the party without resorting to bringing Hit Points to zero (i.e it features a lot of things like ability damage and draining effects).
The adventure also features a lot of different monsters that, while thematically linked feel like they were dropped randomly in the adventure (probably to showcase the critters from the latest Monster book of the time). The number of empty rooms is also very low, making this adventure likely to last 3 or more sessions… probably taking us to the Christmas Holidays.
Finally, as written, the dungeon has been looted countless times and is pretty low on Bling. Thing is, I like bling, my players like bling, and a lot of it is spent on healing items… go figure…
With my frustration level rising as I was reading the adventure, I curiously found myself in an oddly familiar, almost comfortable, position. It was too late to change adventure, I had to forge on, but I had an almost impossible situation on my hands. I had yet again painted myself into a DMing corner… But the thing I forgot to mention in that semi-neurotic post is that I’m often at my creative best when in that situation.
My 1st decision was to nix any monsters that I knew my players would hate. Level draining demonic locust swarm sitting alone in an otherwise empty room? Nixed. A cloaker hiding in a room already occupied by a monster whose abilities include making characters defenseless? Nixed. Etc. This frees up space in the otherwise overcrowded dungeons.
Then I had to address all those plant-like monsters that were seen heading into the Cemetary. Where the hell do I put them? They are dangerous as hell and I can’t cram a lot in the dungeon, the characters will get killed!!
So I decided to have a potential ally, a known Ptolus NPC living in the graveyard, giving the PCs a hand by having it deal with the drug junkies-turned walking toxic vegetables.
Aside: The plant-like creatures have a very badly designed ability that acts like a poison. Thing is, the initial damage is trivial (lose one point of x) while the secondary damage is downright lethal (It deals multiple dice of damage to a stat that is one of the usual Dump stats of D&D).
Since players have no idea what the ability does, the 1 point of ability damage risks misleading the characters in thinking nothing that bad will come from failing the second saving throw. I’ve reworked that to spread the multiple dice of damage over the initial and secondary stage, making the ability a lot scarier up front, prompting immediate restorative action.
Next, I made some of the random monsters into agents of an antagonistic organization. This makes the story more interesting as players won’t be the only one after the source of the plant-like creatures.
I finally added some extra Bling to correspond to the various challenges met in the dungeon. Where it makes no sense to put loot, I made it up by having the various organization with a stake in the adventure offer rewards to the players.
While I was doing this, and as frustration was slowly ebbing away, inspiration struck me:
The Source of these plant-like creature is an otherworldly entity. Not Planescape otherworldly, Chthulu otherworldy.
One of the characters, Stef’s Dragon Shaman, has been exposed to the secretion of that “thing” (He was dipped in a cauldron of the green secretions last session).
…a secretion that, so far, can change people into horrible things…
… and Stef wants to change his character…
…and the “thing” has a plan and sooooooooo much to offer to the frail beings of this dimension…
… and Stef’s character is quite possibly power hungry enough to consider any offer, no matter how unholy or alien… and egoistic enough to resist the mental manipulations that come with the offers…
So I wrote a short Cut-scene where Stef’s will be presented with two offers (Stef usually doesn’t read this blog so I don’t mind spoiling it too much)… If Stef choses one, he’ll wake up as a 1/2 dragon Barbarian if he choses the other well… lets just say that he’ll take the 1st choice.
Convincing his pals that its still him will be interesting… but hey it’s Ptolus! These things are almost mundane there!
When I was done with this idea, it blossomed into potential cut scenes for all other characters that may become in contact with the “thing’s” essence. Ideas that could act as foreshadowing for things to come… including a little romp in the Planescape setting.
These scenes will allow me to tackle my next DM’s challenge: Roleplaying the interface between a completely alien mind and player characters. I’m going all out for a series of insane “WTF!!!” moments… I’ve pulled it before, I know I can do it again!
So there you go… when painted in a corner, break the freaking walls and blame it on Lovecraft!
Adventure Prep, Special Session: Introducing Newbies to D&D
Since PM posted his first ‘Perspective‘ post yesterday, I thought it was the perfect timing for posting this Adventure Prep/Response to PM’s post
Next Friday, PM has agreed to get a few friends together and allow me to DM an introductory D&D game. I feel honored to be entrusted a mission so many of us geeks have botched one way or the other… and that is showing D&D to new players without flooding said newbies with too much Crunch!
PM seemed to have been briefly exposed to a GURPS space game a few years ago but it left him more confused than curious about the hobby.
It’s okay PM, Gurps has a tendency to do that… I know, I GMed the damn game for 10 years. But believe me there are ways to ease smoothly into a roleplaying game.
Aside: Heck, if you can handle Descent : Journeys in the Dark and Arkham Horror, I’m not too worried about your eventual grasp of D&D’s mechanics. After this week’s game, if your still interested, I suggest you check out the online rules of the game here. Also have a look at Stupid Ranger’s excellent Orientation 101 series.
My goal for this night is to bury the crunch under enough fluff that you won’t have to worry about rules and mechanics. I want you guys to trust me with the rules and explore the flavour and genre of the game instead.
Aside the second: Essentially, I’ll be applying my own advice from the Forming post.
Along with PM, there’s going to be Vince, one of PM’s friend’s I have yet to meet. There’s also going to be Mike, Franky’s big brother, with whom I played some World of Warcraft. Mike’s played older versions of the game as well as a lot of other games (probably the same ones as Franky) but he feels rusty. Franky will also join us to provide support to the other players and round out the party to an even and iconic 4.
My choice for this evening was to go for something as simple as possible but at the same time close enough to my natural style to allow me to show the game in the most comfortable manner. I choose vanilla D&D 3.5 (i.e. just the core books) because that’s what I mostly play and that’s a game where I can DM a 1st level adventure for a full evening without looking into the Player’s Handbook or the Dungeon Master Guide.
In fact I’m toying with going commando and discard the use of a battle map or any other form of formal tactical representations of the game. I’ll ask what PM wants and decide from there.
As for an adventure, since I want something exceedingly fluffy to distract the players from the rules, I chose to start with Paizo’s 1st Pathfinder adventure ‘Burnt Offering’. While I agree that it’s an overkill for a D&D demo, it’s a great introductory adventure and everything in it is ready-to-play. Plus, if the evening is a success, I’d like to turn this game into a mini-campaign.
In order to allow jumping into the game as fast as possible, I photocopied (in color) the Pregenerated characters (Fighter, Sorcerer, Rogue, Cleric) and plastified each into a neat 3,75” X 8” card. Also, I choose a D&D painted figurine for each character and a full set of polyhedral dice. I put each set of dice and one mini in a ziplock bag.
On Friday evening, I’ll give out a bag and the plastic card, one pencil and a blank sheet of paper and we’ll be ready to start with a short description of the character sheets and the game’s most basic mechanic:
Whenever you attempt an action that has some chance of failure, you roll a twenty-sided die (d20). To determine if your character succeeds at a task you do this:
- Roll a d20.
- Add any relevant modifiers.
- Compare the result to a target number.
If the result equals or exceeds the target number, your character succeeds. If the result is lower than the target number, you fail.
I’ll answer questions for about 5 minutes and then we’ll dive into the adventures of the residents of the Village of Sandpoint.
I hope it will go well. I’m open to suggestions, from both player and DM readers or from the new players themselves.
Adventure Prep, Session 4: The Dynamic Dungeon Crawl
Image Source: Wizards of the Coast (I’m baiting for a Cease and Desist letter, I know… hope this falls under fair use)
Last time we left our current D&D game, I left my players in the middle of a Sewers-based Dungeon Crawl
taken from the Vile Addiction adventure in Dungeon Magazine #145, much to the dismay of some of the party members.
Now this week’s game is all ready and I could sit on my non-negligible butt and watch some nice BSG actions. The setup is mostly a 5 room-dungeon and the players went through 2 rooms already.
However, since we stopped right in the middle of it more than 2 weeks ago, I now have had plenty of time to think about how the PCs actions and the choice made so far affect the denizen’s plans.
As it happens, the players carved through 2 ‘guardian’ rooms:
- The Otyugh
- The Ambush by the gnome-like Size-increasing Spriggans.
Furthermore, the party’s resources are still pretty intact (except for the some of the Duskblades spells).
If I play the remaining baddies smartly and since they know the party is there (some hidden sentry already alerted the complex) I have a few choices to adjust the denizen’s strategy:
- Mass all the remaining baddies in an all out assault. Smart and logical from a purely tactical point of view, but I risk mauling the PCs and killing a few, which scores pretty low on the player fun scale.
- Create a diversion and run for it. Not very interactive for the players who will just feel the dungeon is now empty, they probably expect some sort of Boss Fight trope.
- Create a diversion and regroup for a final stand. That would be the default choice. Once again it somewhat lacks interactivity bit it sounds better to me than the previous one.
- Attempt to parley with the invading party so the baddies can size up the party and plan accordingly. This offers a nice occasion for some Role-playing for my RP-starved storytellers and could lead to a surprising resolution.
I probably will end up mixing parley and another choice depending on the player’s responses and attitude. The Baddies have an agenda other than killing the PCs and I will keep it in mind while interacting with the characters.
And while they talk, time passes… 
Aside: Having evil NPCs attempt parley remains one of the hardest thing to do, you’re basically serving the bad guys on a silver plate to trigger happy PCs. That is, unless you take some precautions or initiate parley from a Mexican Standoff position, which is harder to pull if you have Chaotic Jerk characters. Setting up a believable parley encounter, complete with a clearly defined BATNA* for the bad guys (other than ‘charge!!!!’) will probably be what consumes the most of my prep time on Wednesday night.
As you can see, ending a session in the middle of a dungeon allows for the DM to re-define the dungeon’s dynamics and modify it ways that the players will hopefully enjoy more.
*Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement…. yeah I was a project manager in a past life.
Adventure Prep, Session 3: Adapting a published adventure
Image Source: Paizo’s Dungeon Magazine
Two players can’t make it to the game next Friday. According to our social contract when 2 or more players are missing, we try to move the game back one week. While this extra time could allow me to prepare a super extra awesome adventure, I find that I spend enough time on prepping as it is. So the extra week translates into playing online games (WoW, D&D online, Magic the Gathering Online).
According to my current campaign plan, the next adventure arc will be a pair of scenarios taken from Dungeon Magazine (#145 and 146) called The Seeds of Sehan. It as quite a few elements I think the players will enjoy. Of course, I need to make some major adaptation-fu on it to be used in our game.
First I need to move the adventure from an ancient city in the Yatil mountains of the World of Greyhawk to the city of Ptolus, placed in my home-brewed world. A world which mostly consists of a map drawn when I was 13 and the legends of our past games. That’s not too hard but I need to place the adventure in the right neighborhood. Since the adventure has a backdrop of misery and drug abuse, I’ll set part of it in the poorest neighborhood of Ptolus.
In the second part of the adventure, the PCs are supposed to move into the arid wilderness and go after a MacGuffin (Damn! Writing these things to make them player-proof ain’t easy!). I’d rather have the whole adventure inside (or under) the city. A quick review of the adventure shows me that I can place the MacGuffin in the city’s Necropolis (Cemetary by day, Undead & Demons party at night).
After, I need to replace the adventure’s hooks to get the players to want to participate in it. This is where the decisions the players made and the people they met before can be re-visited (and it does build player buy-in when done properly). It’s also where I can introduce new organizations (Ptolus has a ton of them).
Since the characters have done some official badassery in the last session, I can use their newfound fame. I’ll have the organization in charge of keeping what’s in the Necropolis actually IN the Necropolis ask the PCs for help. New weird shambling humanoids have started appearing somewhere in the city and they are going to the Necropolis. While the organization will clamp down the Necropolis, the PCs will be asked to investigate where these creatures come from.
There are also elements in the adventure that allow further development of the characters story. There are undertones of criminal syndicate turf wars and evil feys that will probably make good role playing material if the players bite.
Lastly, I need to actually go into the encounters themselves to Cool them up. There are a few uncool things in the adventure, namely an encounter with 3 Rust Monsters.
Aside: One of my gripes with D&D 3.x is that while PC magical gear is taken into account in determining challenge and while wealth acquisition is literally a driver of power progression there are a LOT of monsters that break this equilibrium by destroying gear. And gear destruction, no matter how it’s handled, is never well received by players.
Would I have to re-design the rust monster, I would make it a monster that ‘stole’ an item’s physical substance for a time. It would jump on your plate mail +3 and suck it’s substance away, leaving you with some sort of shadowy armour that lost all it’s abilities and bonuses for 24 hours. Players would be annoyed, but not pissed. Hmmm… I just might very well try that.
Making these changes to the 1st adventure is what I’ll spend time on next week. I hope the players will like the resulting adventure.
Game Prep: The Mental State
Preparing an adventure represents about 80% of my game prep process. This includes stating the Bad Guys, setting the difficulty of the various Non-Combat challenges and creating loot that the players will appreciate.
Aside: One of my last D&D 3.5 purchases was the Magic Item Compedium. This book is phenomenal and a preview of what 4e will be about. A very small part of it are Treasure Generation charts that are 10X easier to deal with than the one in the DMG. And any magical loot generated by them are now always on par with current character levels. It is part of my D&D 3.X top 5 list, along with the 3.0 Dungeon Master Guide, The DMG II, The Tome of Battle:Book of Nine Swords, Dungeonscape and the Fiendish Codex 1.
That being said, I often use published adventures, but when I do, I tweak the plotlines to fit the campaign. I also significantly alter encounters to make them more fun to the players (I get rid of unfun monsters and lame traps, I modify the loot for stuff the players will find more useful, etc). It still takes a lot of my free time (but DMing is my main hobby so I don’t mind).
The other 20% is not related to the actual game, but my mental state. You see, I really dig DMing. Preparing a game is one of the few activities that brings me to the Flow state of mind (creating clever simple quality processes, or resolving a lab incident are also Flow inducing, but this ain’t a Job Blog).
I don’t know if any of you have reached this state but it can get scary. The High Energy thing the Wikipedia mentions is spot on. So much so that I can’t for the life of me have a good night sleep after a good prep session because I feel so energized. This week’s session killed me and I spent a lot of Thursday as a Zombie at work.
So to recuperate, I always try to finish Prepping 2 days before the game. It gives me a good night sleep on Thursday night. I also allows me one evening to watch some Battlestar with my wife (which I worship , she takes over parenting duty for my 2 kids during my game nights). I take one hour (no more) on Thursday evenings to clean up my gaming room (the place is buried in Rulebooks, Notes, Post Its, Maps and Minis), putting minis into little encounter boxes (put map on table, Dump box on map, combat starts! How neat is that?) and wiping the latest artistic masterpieces my 4-year-old daughter left on my Vinyl Battlemaps (You should see the Butterfly men and the Mean Big-headed Ogre she drew… She’ll make a good DM I swear, she’s bossy enough for that).
Then, before the game, I visualize each encounter, think up clever quotes and phrases for the NPCs. On Friday evening, I open a bottle of beer to socialize with my work-tired players as they arrive, order food and shoot the breeze until we feel we are ready to start the game.
Its a good life I tell you.
Adventure Prep, Session 2
I’m still shocked that people other than my close friends actually read this and even more shocked to have been mentioned by other DM bloggers. (I’m not going to Ego it up by linking to their post, but these guys have gotten added to my DM Blogroll).
Oh and this is not a Meta-Blogging post because it’s considered bad form by some.
Yesterday evening was spent doing the actual Adventure Preparation for Friday night’s game, our campaign’s second session. As you may recall, last game did not go all that well.
Now it kills me that I can’t give you the details as some of my players actually read this (I have an idea on this, wait to hear about this in a future posts). However, I can still outline my thought process and leave out important stuff.
After the last game, I started a discussion with my players on our Common Game page where I suggested that they go after the last game’s bad guys for some serious Buttkicking. They accepted.
Aside: Yup these are classic railroads you see here, I use them occasionally and usually with my player’s consent. However, these were Out Of Game railroads. I proposed something and the players agreed. Had they said no, I would have been ready with the next part of the campaign.
Earlier this week I drafted my 1st adventure plan in my DM Wiki.
Other Aside: I’m sorry I can’t post the Wiki, its a walking Copyright Infringement. If you are curious about using Wikis for adventure planning or as a group page have a look here for our last campaign player Wiki. (More on this later, I have a project brewing for this here blog)
The 1st draft of the plan looked like this:
- At the Elven Stronghold of Ptolus, have a scene where PCs and their new allies learn of the whereabouts (a Ratmen’s Nest) of the escaped fiends and plan an assault, gearing up. Allow players to rebuild characters to better face Fiends.
- Setup Sewer encounter with remaining Fiends and a few mooks.
Now, I wanted to add a little more flavor to the adventure, have the players meet common denizens of the Ptolus Sewers without having it feel like a Random Encounter (I don’t use those unless I have to). So I added a new scene between the 1st and 2nd one:
- On their way to the Fiend’s hideout, the PCs will meet a group of [Non-Hostile Sewer Denizen] who happen to have [Useful Object] that would help them in their quest. Obtaining said object should not be through fighting this group.
Then I started thinking that I should give my players an encounter to allow them to truly test out thier abilities and let them shine. An encounter with no bosses, plenty of combat space and a lot of crunchy mook. So I got me another scene.
- Further down the ‘path’ the PCs meets a group of [Quasi-generic Mooks] who have in their possession [Potential Plot Hook]. Fighting is expected.
Pondering on the different faces of Evil, I thought this scene would be a nice occasion to test my DM challenge of making believable evil characters. So I added a few traits to these guys to make them memorable.
I was ready to start writing. Just as soon as I finished a Magic The Gathering Online (MTGO) Draft on the Beta (Procrastination, how I love thee!).
Then I found the Rule of Cool and thought to myself ‘I have an okay adventure here… it needs some more awesome’.
So last night, after getting killed in round one of a MTGO Draft, I went back to my 4 scenes plan and looked where I could cool it up for my players.
- Scene 1: Give my Brilliant Planner players toys to plan the assault. I gave them a CR8 equivalent treasure of Divine magical items to plan their assault. (They know about this already)
- Scene 2: Put [Non-Hostile Sewer Denizens] in huge trouble, so big that only the PCs can help. If they want to, of course. Put said source of trouble in a weird place complete with color maps. Use never seen before creatures. Give names to NPCs. Give choices to players. Bring in less-used skills that some players have invested in. Give them possibility to become heroes in eyes of NPCs to awesome up my players who thrive on being super cool.
- Scene 3: Make [Potential plot Hook] a part of Ptolus’ flavor and a Roleplaying/story element for future adventures. Give players a hard choice to make as a group that will affect their reputation in the City (to make my storytellers happy). Use another colorful map.
- Scene 4: Switch Big Bad Boss for a newer somewhat weaker Yugoloth found in the last Dungeon Mag (If the scene is cool enough, the players should not mind). Use the best color map I have and exploits its features. Allow opportunity to assault the hideout in different ways to reward planning. Add satisfying loot and a follow up plot-hook for the future adventures against the Yugoloth. Finally, plan an escape route for the possibility of a recurring villain.
That’s what I wrote last night. Took me about 3 hours (Stats, loot, DC checks). But boy am I looking forward to that game.
As for my players, well reading this should give y’all plenty of hints.
Cheers
