D&D Mini-Dungeon help needed

[LAYF]

Okay

That its off scale is important to note, i think I'd put in a mesureing stock or line somewhere around the compas... but thats just me...

Nice to see its dueable in PS two...

And nothing wrong with deltas... i made them in all my original maps, befeor i was arrested by the riverpolice (yea.. thats a thing from the cartographers guield....) and learned how to place my rivers proberly now i only make them now and then,,,,

[thinkslogically]

Really? River police? That's awesome!

[LAYF]

Yep realy

[M0rtimer]

"Halt criminal scum! Take a look at this- Do you see this? A river does NOT flow that way! May you spend two weeks in the corner of shame and learn from your mistakes!"

[LAYF]

Well... a bit more polite... but something like that

[thinkslogically]

Do you think we should implement a Corner of Shame in the god school? For excessive imagination perhaps

[LAYF]

Son.. Dads not mad... Dads dissapointed




Hehe....

[thinkslogically]

I'm only messing

Though I do think that placing too much value on what is correct in a real world setting could stymie some of the more bizarre creations that people could come up with. I guess you really need to know the rules before you can break them though huh?

[LAYF]

I know

Yea... thats true...


Any ways... back on track.. still need help with anything?

[thinkslogically]

Nah I think I'm good thanks Just working out the actual mechanics now like what loot goes where and a template for the NPC guys mostly. I've got a lot of resources which I've dug off the interwebs over the last year or so, so it's just a case now of pulling it all together into something that fits the ruleset.

I'll post tomorrow and let you all know how it goes Wish me luck!

[thinkslogically]

Just back, and as man was that a lot of fun! Will write it up tomorrow for you guys but it went really well (and yes, the players threw all my plans out the window and surprised me with some cool stuff) so it was fun totally exhausted now tho!

[LAYF]

So... What happened?

[thinkslogically]

OK, so if you've been reading this topic so far, you'll probably know that I wrote and ran a mini-adventure on Saturday for a few friends which worked out pretty well, in large part due to the cool ideas and advice you guys have given in this thread Now before I explain how the adventure went down, bear in mind that we are all a bunch of total newbies. Three of us had a go at running Kobald Hall for some combat practice about a month ago but for various reasons it just wasn't that much fun (the combat felt slow and grindy, there was no real story because it was really just a pre-made tutorial and there were only 3 of us so there was a LOT of rule-checking and the two players each had to deal with 2 pre-made PCs because no-one else showed up Still, we learned a pile of things and for this time round I wanted to try building my own adventure so we could have a bit more story and RPing while also bringing in the majority of the mechanics. But this was pretty much do-or-die for whether we wanted to keep playing D&D or not.

Fast forward to yesterday's session. This time around, we have me DMing and 5 players, 3 of whom are totally new to the game. We've got a basic square battle grid for any combat (with coins for tokens) and a couple of sets of dice. That's about it.

So, first off we spent about an hour building the guys' characters using the Wizard's of the Coast Character Generator via my D&DI subscription. It's got some quirks (like it seems impossible to build a character using the Players Handbooks as the only source), but it's otherwise awesome and sped things up massively for us. It's also how I was able to make the monsters I wanted really easily and pick a reasonable selection of treasures. So, character sheets printed and we're ready to go. The party consists of:

Human wizard
Halfling rogue
Elf Ranger
Dwarf fighter &
Drow cleric

Part One: Waking Up (spoilered for size)

► Show Spoiler

First off, the players wake up in a dark, wooden room with no inventory. They realise their hands are tied, but that's about it. Those with low-light vision are able to see dark shapes in what appears to be a series of cages, while the Ranger starts yelling to see if anyone yells back. A couple of strength checks later and the Fighter and Ranger are free of their ropes and set about helping to untie everyone else through the bars. The Wizard eventually remembers he has a light spell (which we obviously name Navi) and everyone starts trying to get out the cages. The Fighter tries to pick his lock with his fingers (which goes as well as expected) before trying to break the bars but fails the strength check. Meanwhile, the Rogue has found a small gap between two of her bars and successfully squeezes through to freedom. The Ranger and Fighter continue to rattle their bars, but the dice hate them so the Wizard makes an intelligence check and figures out how to dismantle the hinges on his door. The Ranger finally breaks the hinges off his cage door and they set the Cleric and Fighter free. They listen at the door, don't hear anything and head on out into the next corridor where they find a door opposite, a trapdoor leading up and another leading down. The Rogue listens at the door opposite and hears some scrabbling & scratching noises.

They all decide to split up at this point. The wizard heads down to the next level and finds a partially flooded wooden room with a bunch of crates and stuff lying around. The Cleric, Fighter and Ranger decide that scrabbling noises are bad and charge upstairs to surprise whoever's there (which is no-one) and find another identical wooden corridor. The Rogue is feeling more ballsy and heads straight into the (dark), noisy room. Bear in mind that the only source of light at this point is downstairs with the Wizard and that halflings don't have low-light vision. SO she barrels straight in, while everyone else is yelling at her to NOT do it, cocks up her perception check and is immediately assaulted by 2 swarms of rats. She runs back into the corridor but forgets to shut the door, and we have our first battle!

The wizard climbs back upstairs and starts shooting magic missile while everyone else tries to figure out where the hell they should be standing (the Cleric blocks the ladder completely by standing at the bottom of it to heal the Rogue). Once they sort themselves out the battle goes pretty quickly and the rats die of being punched!

Everyone now decides that splitting the party is a bad plan and head upstairs en masse where they find the crew quarters (and some miscellaneous stuff like waterproof bags, oil lamps and a few silver pieces) and the break their way into the armoury where we end up with the Fighter, Rogue & Cleric with 2-handed weapons, the Ranger dual-wielding a pair of scimitars and the Wizard with a staff as well as leather / chainmail armour and a few ranged weapons. Since I figure I'll distribute the cool items as we go, they roll perception (Rogue wins) and the Rogue finds a pair of Feyweave Sandals, which basically allow the wearer to fall from anything and land gently on their feet if there's a safe area within 5 feet as a daily power. She puts those on and we continue on.

The Rogue and Cleric decide to discuss their new shoes while the others go back down to the flooded hold to see what they can salvage and eventually come back with some rope, a few candles and some other bits and pieces. THey listen at the trapdoor above them and hear seagulls calling and the trump of footsteps on the deck.

Of course, anyone else alive must be an enemy, so two of them peek up and see a bugbear kicking the door to the Captain's cabin. The Ranger & Rogue sneak onto the deck and manage to hide behind the mast. The others are less subtle and pile out onto the deck where they find a pleasantly surprised Grem (L5 bugbear wielding a homemade 2H-warhammer) who's just happy for someone to talk to.

Then ensues the single longest conversation I've ever improvised in my life where the players basically learn that Grem is also a shipwreck survivor who's been on the island for about a month. The night after his shipwreck he encountered 'drowned men' coming ashore from the sea who attacked him, but because he's a badass, he was able to fight them off, doing enough damage to their numbers that they've avoided him ever since. The creatures mostly come after a recent shipwreck, and seem to head towards the abandoned village on the island. He has no interest in fighting for its own sake, so he keeps out the way of the creatures and they maintain a sort-of truce. He's currently salvaging whatever he can find on board the various ships that wreck on the shores so he can attempt to pay for passage home if he ever spots a ship that comes close enough to signal that doesn't wreck. But they also mostly have a decent supply of booze and food, so he's not in any particular hurry to leave. Also, he has no idea where they are in the world.

After that, they agree to help Grem loot the ship and negotiate (really badly) on how to split whatever they find.

Grem batters down the door to the Captain's cabin and the PCs attempt to loot a locked chest they find at the foot of the bed. The Fighter attempts to pick the lock, sets off a poison dart trap and is immediately unconscious. The Ranger asks Grem to smash it in instead, which he does, but he also finds the bag of gold before the PCs do. Fortunately, there's a Belt of Vigor in there though (+1 to healing surge value), so the Ranger grabs that while the Fighter wakes up. The others meanwhile have found the galley and enough rations to feed the group for three days, bringing their inventories back to a more normal starting level.

Grem agrees to take them ashore, so they head back to the beach and part ways; Grem heading to his hut with his loot and the PCs heading for the village.

[We're about 2 hours through now so we break for pizza]

Part Two: The Village

► Show Spoiler

The town as they found it was completely ransacked - muddy ground, doors wrenched off their hinges, junk and broken goods scattered everywhere, and not a single person or animal anywhere. A lot of this section was written to accommodate the player's actions if they'd met Grem before they'd found the loot on the ship and failed to negotiate with him (had Grem looted the place first, they wouldn't have found those sandals and would have had to barter for weapons etc.),so the only places of interest were the Temple, Town Hall and a hexagonal tower in the town centre. They split up again and find some more information in the temple and town hall which basically explains that things started to go weird after a fisherman pulled up a strange jade stone in his nets and brought it back to the town. It was sent to the Alchemists in the central tower to study and shortly afterwards ships started running aground and the attacks from the 'drowned men' began. Most of the town was killed or fled in the attacks.

The PCs started putting it all together and then headed to the Alchemist's Tower in the central square.

The tower had no visible door (illusory wall) but they did spot a small window up the top of the tower. It was too small for most of the party to fit through though so they ignored it and eventually (via perception / arcana checks) found the door and entered the lower floor where there was a desk, a large, neat rug in the middle of the room and a flight of stairs at the back. The rest of the room had been looted and there was crap everywhere. The Ranger wanders up to the rug, has a cursory check underneath it and sees more flagstones. So he decides it's boring and heads off to the stairs. Unfortunately, the rug is covering up fake flagstones which dump him unceremoniously into a spike pit which knock him straight to -2.

Then everyone else freaks out a bit and struggle to fish their unconscious elf back out the hole. My favourite suggestion was from the rogue who offered to tie a rope to an arrow and shoot him with it then haul him out I mentioned that would probably kill him, so eventually they just lowered someone down to pull him out & heal him back up a bit.

Getting the idea now that the floor=bad, the rogue checks out the rest of the room and detects a couple more pressure-plate traps and successfully disarms them! Hooray, they cry! Onto the next level. I get them to work out what order they go up the stairs and the Fighter immediately fails a reflex check and puts his foot into a spiky leghold trap. Seems that computer games don't have enough trapped stairways! Anyway, he gets stuck in there for a couple of turns with an increasingly sore foot while the others question me relentlessly about how the trap works exactly and what it's all made of (PRO-TIP: figure that stuff out in advance next time!). A strength / dexterity check later and the Fighter's free again and up they go!

On the next level, they're starting to learn about traps and the rogue & wizard detect and disarm an alarm trap covering most of the floor. They decide the ladder up to the top level is safe, and then meet a talking trapdoor which offers them this riddle (yes I used it in Escape!):

A puny human is travelling to a village where all the inhabitants are habitual liars,completely incapable of speaking the truth. The neighbouring village though is full of everyone who got pissed off living with liars and vowed to only ever speak the truth forevermore. The two villages have been at war for decades, and if you visit one village youcan never visit the other one because they'll kill you on sight. On the road to his destination,the puny mortal fleshbag comes to a crossroads where he meets a heavily armed villager, standing next to a sign which reads: 'For directions, ask the guard. One question ONLY!' What question should the pathetic fleshling ask the other pathetic fleshling to make sure he gets to the right village?

It doesn't last long though because apparently one of the group is just shit hot on logic puzzles and gets the answer in about 3 seconds. Oh well! They all head up the ladder.

In the top room, they surprise a young man tending to his sick and dying master who's lying on the bed. The room stinks of refuse and excrement and the breeze from the small window isn't enough to vent the room. The jade stone was sitting on the table.

At this point the young alchemist starts screaming at them that he doesn't trust them and they're creatures from the sea, and 'NO! Don't touch the stone! It's all that's keeping him alive!' and I let the players know they're in a skill challenge. What I had intended was for them to calm him down (2x diplomacy checks), discover that the stone was essentially controlling him (perception / arcana) and then remove the spell (arcana). If they failed, he'd attack them (built as a L2 wizard with mostly terrain-altering / trap-based powers). About halfway through the (in-character) conversation, the wizard's player asks, "So, can I not just throw that stone out the window?" My response to all their suggestions through the game was essentially, 'yes, you can do whatever you like' (which actually helped them NOT do really stupid things like set themselves on fire or whatever because they got the message that I REALLY wasn't going to stop them), so I told him to roll an agility check to see if he could grab it off the table. He failed and the young alchemist freaked out and tackled him. The other players start shouting things they want to do, until the rogue pipes in...

Part Three: In which my plans go out the window

► Show Spoiler

The conversation then went like this:

Rogue: "If he's on the floor now, can I throw it out the window instead?"
Me: "Sure, roll a dex check and see if you make it" [Success] "Yup, the stone flies out the window. The young alchemist screams and runs to look out the little window..."

[Everyone stops speaking and all stare at me to see what they've just done. I let the silence sit for JUST a little while.]

Me: "With another yelp, the young alchemist barrels past you and out the door to get the stone back."
Ranger: "Shit! Quick I'll chase him!"
Wizard: "Me too! After him!"
Rogue: "I'm going to jump out the window."

Everyone shuts up.

Me: "You... what?"
Rogue: "I'm going to use my fancy shoes to jump out the window."
Me: "Ah shit, I gave you magic shoes..."

Bear in mind, with my powers of DM-foresight I knew that there was potentially a big tower battle coming depending on what they did here. I had (wrongly) assumed that they would save the shoes' daily power for a time when they really needed an escape route or something, but no. They just wanted it for badassery. The Fighter and Cleric stay behind to watch over the old guy and then chaos reigned.

Me: "You land gently on the ground and find the jade stone has landed safely in a pile of mud."
Rogue: "Great! I grab it and run! This thing's going back in the sea!"
Me: "Uh... Right."

And here's where all my plans go out the window and we end up in a footrace back down the road towards the beach while I desperately wing EVERYTHING

Forget movement squares, forget the geography, forget how close they all (technically) are to each other. For easiness, I take everyone's relative speed and put them in the order that they left the tower, so:

Tower ---- Wizard - Ranger - Alchemist - Rogue ---- Sea

And for the purposes of fun and speed, everyone can basically keep running or pause to make an attack.

The rogue runs
The alchemist casts some Icy Floor spell at her, but she avoids it and keeps sprinting
The ranger (who's fastest) attempts a tackle, but the Alchemist dodges and keeps running while the Ranger ends up on his face
The wizard and the rogue keep sprinting
The alchemist tries again with a sleep spell which works brilliantly and the rogue is unconscious and down! He grabs the stone and tries to get back to the tower where his master is.
The Ranger is on his feet and decides that his best way to tackle an oncoming runner is with an intimidation check, but he cocks it up.
The wizard asks if he can cast magic missile, and I say yes, but it probably won't stop him...
"What if I rolled a natural 20? Like this one?"
"Then I guess you got him in the leg! He goes down!"

(By now there are six people around the table on their feet, literally yelling at four coins in a line )

The ranger grapples him to keep him down and the wizard does an arcana check and discovers the nature of the spell that's controlling the alchemist (everyone is now SCREAMING at them to take the bloody stone back!), but fails the check to remove it, the alchemist wriggles free and he's off again. The rogue wakes up and is back in the chase.

The Ranger tries to tackle the guy again, and this time makes the roll so everyone's back down in the mud. No-one takes the stone back yet, but the rogue appears and sits on the guy to make extra-sure he's not getting back up. Finally, the wizard removes the spell and the alchemist stops struggling.

Phew.

He explains that the stone took hold of his master and (presumably) himself sometime after it arrived in the village. They knew it had to go back to the sea, but they also knew they would die if they did that while under its power. He begged the players then to cure his master before throwing the stone away, so the wizard goes back to the town with him, leaving the Rogue and Ranger on the road, holding the stone. Which starts to whisper to them every time they fail a will check They keep passing it back and forth and getting increasingly edgy until finally the others yell that it's safe and they throw the stone back into the sea, completely avoiding all the battles I had planned by doing something FAR cooler

The next day they head back to Grem's hut and find a little boat has washed ashore containing treasures and some more magic items. The players assume it's a thank-you from the sea creatures and settle in to enjoy a month or two of drinking sailor rum while waiting for a ship to pick them up.

-FIN-

So that's how it went down really. There were probably a bunch of dodgy rules-calls made but we had a LOT of fun, and I'm more interested in that really than in adhering perfectly to the rules. The players were all involved in agreeing what checks should apply to each skill as well, so it all felt very fair and I think they've had a decent taste of most aspects of the game now. Except combat, but whatever

I've also learned a lot about that style of game too and actually really enjoyed winging it. The players really got into it which was a huge help and it was great fun having everyone break in and out of character without feeling weird about it. Not that there was much characterisation going on, but I think that'll come as they get to know their own PCs.

[LAYF]

Sounds like it went wat better than the small kobold fight then

So its safe to asume you'll be keep playing this?

[Wolfie]

DM plan ... DM plan... DM plan.... Curve ball!

Yep, that's usually how my D&D adventures go.

Sounds like you had fun. Great job!

[thinkslogically]

If we can keep playing games like that where it's more about skill checks and fast battles than massive amounts of combat then I think we will aye We're just getting into figuring it all out (as you know) so we're still working out what aspects we most enjoy playing as a group but yeah, I think we'll stick at it for a while longer

[BadgeAddict]

It sounds like you all had fun...does anything else really matter. There aren't that many Dnd games that i hear about where people are standing at the table and yelling.

[GathersIngredients]

► Show Spoiler

Thank you for sharing that with us. Sounds like you had a good time.

[thinkslogically]

Afternoon all! So, this D&D (4e) thing has been trundling along with our group now for a while, with each of us having a shot at DMing over the last few weeks in order to get a better feel for the rules etc. However, we're now at the point where we'll probably start thinking of doing a longer campaign (not necessarily a L1-30 deal, but certainly a series of multi-session adventures) and I'm looking for a few ideas for the campaign-plots if you don't mind helping. Tropes, cliches and tongue-in-cheek are absolutely fine (we've got 3 media-studies / film critic / producers on the team and there's nothing that's going to be particularly new anyway, and I might as well acknowledge it) and will likely comprise a bunch of lighter-themed side-quests, but it would be nice to have a larger storyline to fit into as well. Actually, it would be nice to have 2-3 larger story options available so that they can choose between them, and to make the world feel more realistic if things trundle along even without their intervention (and forces them to choose between who to help since they can't help everyone).

Anyway, at the moment the plan for the first tier L1-10 (ish) would be to have the PCs recruited by a guy who wants them to recover / steal various artefacts which he needs to fulfil some purpose. As far as the PCs know, he's a legit victim of banditry or whatever and just wants his stuff back, but there will be subtle clues along the way that his motivations are not what he says they are. Anyway, it will eventually turn out that the guy is attempting to open a rift between the mortal plane and the Underdark (or whatever D&D planes are called) in an attempt to free someone he cares about from the service of a demon / devil following a deal-with-the-devil gone bad. The idea being to force the PCs to show up at the final ritual summoning so they can destroy the devil / demon / whatever on the guy's behalf and free whoever it was who was taken in the first place. Maybe it's a tiefling trying to kill the demon that his ancestors sold their souls to and he wants to end the contract? Or maybe their being manipulated by some larger BBEG (layers of puppetry!). Depending on what happens, the PCs then either have to spend their higher levels fighting their way into the Abyss (to undo / stop some catastrophe they have inadvertently been dragged into) or fighting their way out of it if they end up in servitude / killed themselves during the battle. If the PCs don't get involved, then the guy will find another group of adventurers to help him out (who the PCs may or may not bump into along the way), but the Bad Thing will happen anyway and might force them to pay attention then.

Another idea was to have some guy who wants to allow mortals to design their own fate and free themselves from the influence of gods / devils by cutting off the mortal realm from the rest of the planes and / or restarting the first war between chaos and the gods in the hope that they will destroy themselves (think someone like Lord Asriel from His Dark Materials trilogy). Problem is I've got no idea how this would work in a D&D setting, but would set up fairly easily for a battle between chaos / law rather than the usual good / evil divide.

Something else could link more to the mechanics of the game itself, by having e.g. magic is draining / losing potency across the realms and no-one knows why. The PCs are then enlisted to go and discover why. Maybe linked to the deaths of e.g. dragons in the world because of too many heroes killing them for gold. This could potentially be a nightmare re. game balance, but you guys might have suggestions?

Finally, there's always the option of just running a sandbox world with a bunch of not-very-connected dungeon crawls (for Glory and Fame!!) which does exactly what it says on the tin. Pretty boring though.

A couple of issues / caveats:

• I kind of want to make use of the other planes available in D&D, but I don't like the idea that PCs can ever be powerful enough to directly challenge the gods themselves. Maybe act as significant players in a diving game, but gods who can create the fabric of existence should not (IMO) ever be challenged by individual mortals. So god-fighting is out for my game.
• A 'modular' campaign would be preferable in case RL takes over before we can conclude the entire story, so a series of mini-mysteries / mini-bosses en route to the final BBEG woudl be good I think and means no-one will feel like we didn't achieve anything on the offchance that we can't finish the whole story and allows for other GMs to slot in and out at the end of each section if RL happens.
• I fully expect the players will go off the track as soon as is humanly possible, so having a self-sustaining campaign happen in the background is pretty much what I'm going for. If the PCs don't participate then a certain sequence of events will continue to unfold anyway until they are forced to pay attention and either do something about it or allow events to unfold and for bad shit to go down.

-----------------------

One last thing - I will be speaking to the players next time around about the kind of game they want to play, but I'd like to have a few options to suggest to them too based on what could be done.

[BadgeAddict]

One of the best ways to keeps people from becoming too overly-powerful too quickly is by limiting their ability to spend the gold they find. Allow me to explain. Im in a pathfinder game currently, on the edges of the known world, although we make sizable amounts of gold now and then, and my character is a profiteer of sorts (loot makes him happy) there is nowhere to actually spend the money, no shops, no nothing. This forces us to rely on the GM giving us magical items (which he can control what we get) instead of us simply "Buying" whatever it is that we want.

As for an ever-expanding idea/main theme.

I nearly joined a game recently, the GM gave up because he could never find enough people to play.

The Odyssey

Simply take this classic tale, already filled with monsters and beasts and challenges and gods and islands, etc and recreate it in a playable D&D game fashion. It was glorious while it lasted in the one I was in.

[thinkslogically]

heh! Yeah, in the 5-6 sessions we've had so far, I'm the only one of the DMs who gave out any loot beyond a bunch of gold, and aside from a couple of bars there has been NOTHING to buy except beer and goats (don't ask). I quite like the idea of having 'adventurer prices' in shops where the prices basically go up exponentially for anything sold to an adventurer because they are pretty well going to be richer than kings after a few dungeons. In a world economy as weird as that in D&D, I would think there are more than a few jokes to be made.