The way I am going to break down the night is describe an event or encounter, and then discuss what my thoughts for that were and why I did what I did.
Episode 1:
Opening night: 20 April, 1215 Talendian calendar
I feel like most of the time people get too hung up on how to get adventuring groups together. It feels like it wastes a lot of time and is usually akward. So for this campaign everyone except Sam were in the group at the start of things.
The party is near a small town called Durrisburg, they have taken up residence as the local heroes and are running patrol around the town when they come across a group of kobalds attacking some poor guy in the middle of the road. There are 7 Kobalds and this is roughly a CR 3 fight. I gave a couple of the Kobalds PC levels to make them tougher and dropped the weaker ones to 1 hp, kind of in the style of 4e minions.
This was a pretty basic encounter, first one of the campaign, since I have two brand new players in the group, one who played 1e ADnD and nothing since, and 3 experienced players. So I wanted something simple that would let them get a feel for combat. took a little time, I may post the encounter map, but it was super straight forward and fun- Kobald sling guys had exploding rocks- good stuff.
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| I dropped it in sideways, but I think you can tell this is a road, anything outside the road I consider rough terrain. |
So at this point I want to open things up for my players, let them use some of those skills. I like skills. I want them to have a chance to know about this keep, or use the information in the books nearby to look it up and do some research. Turns out they did not do that, but chose to use diplomacy to gather information. Now they know where they keep is, and have a desire to look for it. Insert Deus ex Machina.
Collins asks Sam to go with the party, as this may be related to the way he was transported into this realm. Sam, not knowing any better says "Sure!". Now they gather up supplies and get ready to head up to a dungeon 1.5 days away. Before they leave Collins hands Sam a scroll with Magic Mouth cast on it, telling him that if the town needs help the scroll will tell him.
The idea here is that I wanted a reason to make the players leave the upcoming dungeon at some point, I had a few ideas and settled on this scroll. The thinking is when Collins does something to trigger the spell the scroll will scream at the pc's "get back to town, get back to town!" I thought it would help me control the pacing and if they were about to go into an encounter I knew would take too long for the session I could pop that thing and end the session that way.
They head up to Dooms Ward Keep without incident and fight through a couple of Kobalds who are working for these Death Cultists. They peel through a number of standard traps in a very dungeon crawl manner. They fight their way into the first level capture a Hobgoblin lieutenant named Borgan and learn that there is a dark ritual under the keep that is being performed by Belfast were he is sacrificing people. They also find an enchanted sword on him that was blessed by Tyr. They want to go downstairs- I pop the scroll. Session ends and everyone gains a level.
Over all the session was pretty straightforward and we got a good amount done, the players know whats going on and there was even a little roleplaying happening. They even captured the hobgoblin instead of killing him! Pretty good stuff. The new players are getting a feel for combat and the older player is pretty grumpy since we use miniatures and he was very used to the style of theater of the mind where you can do all kinds of stuff in a round- 1e was a 1 minute round as opposed to a 6 second round. In general I feel pretty satisfied with how it went.
Like I said, I have some maps I may add to this at some point to give some context, but let me know what you think.
- Ubercroz
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