Adventure Prep: Of Planescaping and High Intensity Hacking, Part 2

I’m preparing for next Friday’s game, the year’s first, which will also coincide with a new campaign arc. I’ll also be marking my 35th birthday and my 25th year as a Dungeon/Game Master. Weeeee!

Nostalgic Aside: My 1st dungeon was drawn on a piece of graph paper, was filled with death traps, had a White Knight in one corner and a Black Knight in the other and was typed (on a typewriter, a IBM cost more than 5 000$ back then) by my mom as a typing exercise.

My second one was a forest filled with monsters and had the D&D Cartoon’s Dungeonmaster appear to give a quest (to the protest of my 14 year-old friends who hated the show and said that the DM was not a character… umph!)

As mentioned in part 1, we all have been looking forward to start some serious plane walking in our game. I’ve finally settled on WotC’s only 3.5 Planescape product: Expedition to the Demonweb Pits (Paizo’s Savage Tide being another recent planescape-y adventure).

The original premise of this level 9-12 adventure is that the players get sucked in a portal that sends them on Sigil, where they meet with a shady character who requires 3 services. Said services allow the PCs to resolve the mystery that brought them there in the 1st place and show them the way home. Ensues a nice railroad ride through some pretty cool encounters and locales, sending players into numerous planes including a few forays in Lolth’s own plane on the Abyss, culminating in crashing quite a swanky Lower Plane party.

I’ve said a few times that I dislike this product because there are, to my tastes, significant holes in the adventure’s crunch (I started that thread). I also know that some of the railroads are so obvious that even my rather tame and amiable players will scoff and want to go explore the Outlands instead (be it Planescape’s or World of Warcraft’s).

But the adventure is full of detailed scenes in multiple planes, has some very cool, fully detailed combat encounters, great handouts and some butt-kicking demon-slayin’ loot.

And it looks just too damn nice…

So like I said in part one, I now feel confident enough to hack this adventure as much as needed to make it engaging enough to my players to play a significant part of it through.

In order to do so, I reworked the main plot to involve my campaign’s bad guys, the Yugoloths at both the brute, the intermediate and the overlord level (in fact we ended last game with an ambush by 4 mercenary yugoloth’s on the PCs).

The biggest change I’m making is moving all the Sigil encounters into Ptolus. I’ve already placed a fiend/celestial inn in Ptolus’ Necropolis… Yup, an inn in a Graveyard, I like the idea a lot. So did my players apparently, because they went there as soon as they heard about it… and already met one of the adventure’s NPC’s.

I also made sure that I would get player buy-in the adventure by focusing on stuff they would like. For example:

Aravard (Elf Arcane Archer/Duskblade mashup, played by Math): The adventure features Drow agents of Lolths and some sort of conspiracy that threatens the already battered elven nations of my world.

Cixi (Iron Hero human Archer, played by Franky): Her people are imprisoned on Carceri because of a thousand-year-old transplanar pact, she wants to know more about that and find hints of her original homeworld.

Cruger (Hellbred Crusader played by Eric) : The adventure is about killing demons with the DM-added bonus of dodging devils who want his soul back. Enough said.

Nogard (Half-dragon Barbarian played by Stef): Loot! More power! Oh look, more magical loot! (I must confess that I might have to work in some sort of draconic sub-theme to please my scary STR 28 half-dragon friend)

Lillie: (Pixie Shaper played by Yan): Exploring the Outer Planes and an Epic scale story of demonic pacts and politics.

I also prepared the terrain by writing new rumours and news on my whiteboard, creating enough hooks to start the adventure in more than one way (the players already acted on one, by visiting the Inn at the end of last game).

However, there are a few things I have to watch for to prevent the adventure from going sour:

• The adventure, as written, has quite a few ‘bottlenecks’ of the type “Talk to X, or roll skill Y or be stuck there”.
• The main NPC is somewhat annoying because of its weird speech pattern (that I have to translate to French, no easy task).
• The adventure’s big bads are actually easier to kill than many of the monsters in the book, I’ll have to hack the crunch to make the final fights more epic.

So Friday’s game will focus on:

• The Yugoloth ambush outside the Styx’ Oarsman (the Necropolis Inn) and possibly finding hints of where the ‘hit’ was ordered from (Adding a more Ptolusy flavour to the adventure).
• Getting enough downtime for players to gear up (while we enjoy the little treats I’m planning, see below)
• Introducing the adventure’s first few encounters.

Finally, to celebrate my B-day and my quarter century as a RPG geek, I’ve bought a few bottles of Sparlking Wine and I’m having a local caterer create a special Sandwich plate. I think I can expect some very passionate Role Playing and quite a few tactical blunders after that. For once I can wish the players will sink to my level of poor tactical skills. 😛

I expect the adventure to take us to our summer break in May. Then we’ll decide if we go on or start a new 4e campaign in September.

Wish us fun and luck.

For those who aren’t my players and want more details, see the behind the scenes ideas for the adventure here. You must register to the forum however, just as a precaution for overly curious players.