D&D: Let's plan our next campaign

 

If there is one positive from the past year, and there may only be one, it is that I've had plenty of time to read, prep, and plan D&D content. As I type this January, year of lord 2021, outside of the two campaigns I'm running I have 4 other full campaigns worth of content prepped into Roll20. I have this bad habit where I just want to run my players through everything, yet can never settle on what is that "perfect" module. I say, why not all, but that is a discussion for another day.

I finally settled on the one I want to run next, but it required a tab bit of work to get it to the point I was happy with. So, lets go through that process. There will be a bit of spoilers below for the module Red Hand of Doom. If you're a player, skip onto the next article please.

Red Hand of Doom is an adventure module released for the 3.5 edition of the game back in 2006. James Jacobs and Richard Baker (a Hokie!) are the authors. The elevator pitch is that there is a massive allied force of humanoid monsters who have formed under one banner beset on conquering...err....destroying the neighboring human towns and cities, because they can I suppose. It is a really good module, drawing obvious inspiration from the Lord of the Rings books where the forces of Mordor assemble and assault the fabled city of Gondor. The players are tossed into the mix at the start of these events and through their actions or inaction are able to narrowly secure victory or be caught up in the destruction as the Red Hand armies crush all in their sight.

Sounds fun right?....An unstoppable army that must be stopped all culminating into an epic siege as the heroes marshal the last line of defense before their doom conquers them. Their are a couple of issues though, the biggest being that the module kicks off at level 5 per 3.5 rules. This limits the players ties to the region unless they come up with some fabulous background tie ins...but we all know your players and especially mine aren't going to do that. I will be lucky to get a visual description of their character haha.

Checking around forum and reddit posts, it seems as if some others start with the Lost Mines of Phandelver, that's a good choice, but all of my players have played through that one at this point. Another option is Sunless Citadel into Forge of Fury...again another fine option, but I've personally run this group through Sunless Citadel before so no dice there as well. Another option was to just start play at 5th level as the module directs, because apparently some 5E players don't like early level play because it is dangerous....what is wrong with these people seriously? Ok, definitely not an option....time to home brew us something that will work then. Side note, this is something I really love about older modules, they force to think, update and adapt to the game you want to run.

So here is what I worked up, feel free to share use or ridicule as you deem worthy. The goal here is to establish the players in the setting of the Elsir Vale and specifically in the small town of Drellin's Ferry. The area should feel fairly safe / free of monsters, as these were only problems of the area's past, which will make the kickoff to the module official all the more intense and shocking. The campaign will start at level 1, no safe space in my campaigns. *insert maniacal laughter*

• Kickoff session 1 with an immediate encounter: The players are running guard duty and/or traveling with the Silverstandard Trading Company. "A crossbow bolt against the side of the caravan startles you out of your daydream, roll for initiative". I love starting campaigns like this, no introductions or tavern talk, just jump into it and let the players describe their characters in the mix of the combat scene. This encounter set the notion that some form of human bandits are working the area.
• Players arrive in Drellin's Ferry: the town is quaint, quiet and safe. Guards are lacks on their patrol. Kids playing, taverns are comfortable and inviting. There is a notice board in town with reward for subduing the local bandit gang, town wizard needs help with a supply run, and the general goods store owner as a vague request for help (spoiler: she is actually a serial killing worshipper of Orcus).
• As part of my session 0 I plan to have some tie-ins for my players within Drellin's Ferry that will assist here. One of the players awaiting a deed claim to the local abandoned and possibly haunted Vraath Keep. If I have a player playing an arcane (wizard or sorcerer) class, there is a wizard locally accepting apprentices they have come seeking. Or perhaps the character is just from Drellin's Ferry.
• The players now have several options to explore and assist the good people of Drellin's Ferry. This in turn helps introduce some of the key NPC's that will play part in much bigger developments. 
• The first night in which ever tavern the players choose to stay in. A grieving mother is there, perhaps overly dramatic, she is mourning her child who has been taken from her. If the PC's take the bait this will lead them to another encounter option.
• So to summarize here are the available options once the PC's are in town:
• Find the taken child / witch of the woods encounter
• Deliver supplies to a wizard tower outside of town. (Spoilers: the tower is a mini-dungeon)
• Go after the local bandit gang. Another mini-dungeon and perhaps a recurring villain introduced.
• Take the job from the general good merchant in town. This side quest will take the players outside of town to explore and loot a forgotten tomb...traps and undead.
• With the short cycled XP of 5th edition, the players should be pushing close to if not at 5th level by the time they take on these jobs presented here. This should put us in-line to start the module proper. During the course of these side-quest bits, the hope is to allude to a bigger danger growing on the outskirts of town. Reports of humanoid activity, attacks on travelers; the players may guess it is the same bandits they have already dealt with, but the revelation will be that much sweeter. 

So that is my plan. As we get into the campaign, I will likely modify and add in a bit more once I see what catches my players interest. The most important aspect for me is to make them take some ownership in the town prior to the events of Red Hand of Doom. Fleshing out the NPC's in town that the players will continue to work for and deal with as the plot develops will be a great spark for those key roleplay elements that will emerge later as well. Let me know what you think, how would you start a module if given the option to insert anything at the intro levels?

D&D: Let's design a castle siege!

 

So my group of players who are working their way through Rappan Athuk are about 2-3 sessions from a mass combat battle at their precious castle they've been working on throughout the campaign. Did I mention how much of this campaign has turned into a homebrew hodge-podge? Anyways, I need to work up a system for the likely castle siege that is coming. I do have access to the Strongholds & Followers book released by the Matt Coleville group, so I will be borrowing a lot from that as well as we dive in.

So the first order of business is to give my players, who are all 9th level at this point, some followers and troops that have come in support of their cause and claim to the area here west of the Forest of Hope. The Strongholds & Followers book provides a handy table specific to each class. I may skim or filter this a bit to allow for each of my players to get actual troops where some of the results are merchant and adviser type persons. Based on the amount of money and they have spent upgrading this castle through the campaign I've been tracking the progress, so I'm going to allow each of them 3 rolls on the table. That should give them a fairly healthy roster on top of the 10 guards and captain from Zelkor's Ferry, plus any of the town's citizens get pressed into service of defense of the castle as well. 

Now how should we run the lead up to the actual battle itself? I'm thinking it will take the elvish warships roughly a week to sail down the river channel towards the area surrounding the keep. Once the players resolve some in town encounters and roleplay recruiting local allies to their cause, they should have some time to prep the castle and / or harass those who seek to unseat their rule. To that end, I am going to setup a victory point tally based on the actions, wins and losses incurred during the entirety of the conflict here. 

This is a rough draft, but let us see what that looks like:

• Base Castle >> 5 points
• Castle upgrade 1 >> 5 points
• Castle upgrade 2 >> 5 points
• Castle upgrade 3 >> 10 points
• Scouting the enemy forces >> 5 points
• Disrupt the enemy supplies and camps >> 5 points for each successful attempt
• Additional defenses and planning added to the castle >> 3 points
• Player forces winning a stage of the battle >> 10 points each (planning 3 of these in total)
• Player characters winning a set piece encounter >> 15 points each (planning 3 of these in total)

The player forces are mostly covered in the Stronghold and Followers book, providing base line stats which I will have to draw for the group and the enemy forces. I'm thinking this will be an encounter running parallel to the characters encounters. 

So what gives the characters victory? I'm going to say they need to get to 100 points during the week leading up to and battle itself. They will start with 25 points based on what they spent and upgraded to the castle so far. Not getting to 100 points will not spell defeat, but that would mean a margin of success with conditions. That could include damage to the castle, loss of life to the soldiers, followers and citizens being harbored within the castle. I expect my players to win out, but I want it to feel close, bloody and dangerous. That being said I need to work on what I plan for the set piece encounters for the group....with back to back encounters this could be dicey for them, but that is the fun of it. I'll make another post once we've cleared this part of the campaign and report back on what worked and didn't. For now the players seem excited and I've let them start to meta plan what they hope to do leading up to it.

Coronavirus and TTRPG

 

"It's been a helluva year"....I know a lot of us can say that as we now venture into 2021 fresh, full of hope that will undoubtedly be crushed soon enough. My full-time job has now fully transitioned to working from home as I spend part of time helping my 1st grade daughter with her virtual school lessons. It has been a big adjustment and one that I still struggle with daily at times, and these times have also spilled over into my hobbies as well, namely table-top RPG's or as you folks may know of it as Dungeons and Dragons.

Prior to the events of 2020 my play group had already made the transition over to virtual tabletop play, mostly through the application of Roll20, which has I've become more familiar with the system have grown to enjoy for it's ease of use and accessibility for my players to enjoy as well. There are a couple of drawbacks, but I'll touch on those in a bit. This move to virtual tabletop was mostly spurred by a couple of the members moving further away, but now we can much more easily schedule our game sessions and play in our pajamas if we want to. I do miss the beer and pizza though.

As the lockdowns were set in place, along with travel and just leaving the house in general discouraged. I found my free time open up bit by bit, what was a rotating schedule of my Rappan Athuk game one week followed by Rise of the Runelords (where I'm a player) the next week. Over the last half of the year, I began running a second group through Tomb of Annihilation (5E) along with adding another game where I'm a player in a homebrew 5E campaign. Despite my wife's complaints my TTRPG gaming doubled over the past year. 

Another change was in how I engaged with the RPG content. I have always been a "read the book in my hands" person, but I now strive to pick PDF's of anything I'm using or running in my games as well. For one it makes conversion and setup in Roll20 that much easier and with a multiple monitor setup I can easily reference material as I'm running it using the virtual tabletop. I still love the physical books and my collection is extensive, but pretty soon I'm going to need a bigger hard drive for all of the virtual content now.

As much I love Roll20 and some of the cool features: dynamic lighting, auto math / macro's and the customization with the art and tokens; it is a lot more work for a DM. With my in-person games, most of the times I would think over the session while walking the dog that afternoon and just show it up and run it. Now my setup is fairly intense if the module isn't preset as some of the WoTC modules are in Roll20. For Rappan Athuk, I have to source or purchase copies of the virtual maps, load them, draw the dynamic lighting if needed, custom monsters setup if not accounted for in the SRD, custom part added to tokens and then I start to add in my creative juices. It is quite a bit more work, but when it works, it is certainly great and easy to use in session.

All of that said, the hobby, at least for me is still going great. My friends and I are still having some great game sessions making memories and stories to live on forever. I hope the same is true for many others out there as well.

Rappan Athuk: Campaign Updates, part 2 (5th edition)

 

So it has been a wild few months, hope everyone survived the holidays as we now enter the dystopian days of 2021. My group has been continuing their journey in our Rappan Athuk campaign and we're roughly 15 sessions in as I type this next blog post up. When we left off the group was taking some R&R in the small town of Zelkor's Ferry which has served as their home base throughout the campaign. They have recently funded to have a nearby castle rebuilt and made livable, but the working staff and supplies have not yet arrived to make that possible. 

I had updated the bounty board in town to provide some more choices for the group, one of those for the group to delve further into Rappan Athuk and drive out any Orcus cultist...can't say I didn't try to get them in there. They took the hook to search out a troll lair on the neighboring marshes north of town. Heading into this encounter, I was a bit worried. There was nearly 20 trolls living in the lair and they were leaded by an arcane casting shaman that was CR7 by the 5E standards. I must compliment the group here as they really were organized and strategic, bottlenecking the trolls even as they were slowing encircled. Finally dealing with the shaman as the HP totals for all member were getting dangerously low. I did hold back a bit here, not sending all of the trolls at once and the encounter balance turned out to be just right. Once the shaman had been dealt with, they were able to to intimidate the rest of the remaining trolls into scattering back into the marshes. Nice work team.....also, the conversion for 5E on Rappan Athuk is basically still working with 3rd edition treasure totals and well they definitely got hooked up here. A subject for another day, but I really hate how 5E does treasure and magic items anyways.

Scratch one off the list, next up is a gang of kobolds led by an ogre. The group is all roughly level 7 at this point and this whole encounter was a joke. A few fireballs and some diplomacy and the group was sit to collect some more castle funds. Following this, I had set a few set piece encounters as the agents of Orcus are slowly pushing to the surface as the group continues to ignore the threat there. One of these encounters was quite large and again I underestimated the overall striking power of my players. 5th edition players are super heroes, they are so pushed in this edition I'm really not sure why I continue to play it, but again a subject for another day. 

Some of the kobolds had given a lead on a group of goblins occupying a nearby fortress that just so happens to be one of the many surface entrances into Rappan Athuk. Once the group had driven off the Orcus minions for now, they decided to take on the goblins. A series of encounters as they marched their way through the fortress did not prove to be too taxing. They managed to take one of the goblins prisoner before a few of the others could flee to their city deep within Rappan Athuk setting off a dead fall to block the passage behind them, this though opened a side passage to lvl 3 and the purple worm nesting grounds. The group briefly explored here before getting cold fight and returning back to the fortress. I was sad, as there are some really memorable encounters to be had on this level....but alas....I'll just have to continue to homebrew way to kill my players on the surface.

Between sessions, I gave each of my players some private motivation to further plumb the depths of Rappan Athuk. The groups druid took the bait and ran with it. Seeking a means to expand his growing power (Circle of Fire druid), which is pretty busted already, he started receiving whispers from an unknown beings prisoned on a connecting level to the goblin fortress. This level just happens to be full of lava to go with the fire theme and there is a real nasty monster here that I've tacked on a magic item to drop from should they encounter and defeat it. Much of the lava level is fairly mundane, a trapped bridge and friendly fire giant that just wants to fish for the lava carp that swim nearby, and of course the alien princesses being prisoned. The group finished the last session having just discovered the river of lava flowing through this deep layer and the druid had wandered off, the magmamoid monster surging to his location....will they survive? Probably, because 5E player characters aren't supposed to die apparently...but I'll keep trying, until next we meet!