This week I’m trying something a bit different. I’m posting about my prep work after running session 2 of my work campaign. I’ll include a brief section on what worked and what didn’t at the end.
I’m also posting write ups of the campaign as a story. If you want to follow along with that, or if you’re the players in my campaign, this post will be full of spoilers!
I want to use this session set up the first longer arc and also to give the players control over the direction of the campaign. In order to do that, I needed to do some thinking about the general arc of the story. I want to leave plenty of space for the players to drive what happens, but I want to know:
To order my thoughts, I did some reading about story structure. This post about how Dan Harmon uses the hero’s journey in his scripts was really helpful for me. The hero’s journey isn’t a perfect fit for D&D campaigns since it focuses primarily on a single protagonist. But it provides a useful structure for a good narrative:
Even more simplified:
I want to split the campaign into three heroes journeys:
The first arc will be about connecting the players to the world. Finding allies, making enemies, and bonding as a team. I want to end this arc with the characters knowing who they care about and feeling cohesive as a party. The way they’ll be changed is that they’ll be an established adventuring party instead of a bunch of aimless adventurers.
This arc will take the characters roughly from level 1-5. Assuming 3-6 sessions for each of the early levels, that gives me about 20 sessions split across 5 arcs (one for each level). Of course, this is just a rough outline to give me a sense for pacing/planning. Actual details will depend on the characters.
The Emerald Claw is going to be the main villain for the first arc, without necessarily revealing that they are working towards a larger Blood of Vol plot. I want it to seem like the Emerald Claw is only focused on sowing political strife.
Last week, the party was attacked by goblins and a traveling companion was kidnapped. My goal was to have the players jump right in. But I want to quickly get to a point wthere the players are setting their own goals and pursuing them. Tonight I’m planning to end the goblin kidnapping arc. I’m going to end the session by offering the players 3 different paths:
So, on to the encounter planning!
The left path
The Rogue in the party had a lot of bad rolls in the first session, so I wanted to give some opportunities for her to do cool things this time around. The left path will have enemies spread across a couple rooms with some characters sleeping, giving opportunities for stealth.
The party is 6 level 2 characters and I’m using the encounter balancing tables from Xanathar’s as a guide. The first side room will be 2 hobgoblins and 4 goblins playing cards. Further on is 4 goblins sleeping.
The goblins playing cards are making a lot of noise and occasionally scuffling. My goal with this is to give a reason why the monsters on the right side won’t come running when they hear a bit of a fight, unless things really get out of hand.
There’s also a secret path that the players can use to get directly into the sleeping chambers. DC to find the path is very high – if they find it I want it to feel like they really found something special, not like that was the way they were intended to go.
The right path
This is the boss battle. There’s a trap that the rogue can detect and disarm. If the trap goes off, it’ll probably make a sound that can draw some of the goblins out of the “office” to see what’s going on.
In the office, there’s a hobgoblin named Garoth who’s the head of this group. There’s a bugbear guarding the slaves, 2-3 goblins (depending on how things are going) looking through the loot, and Havok.
Havok is a level 3 dark elf necromancer who works for the Emerald Claw. The Emerald Claw is providing secret support for Striok’s war horde, hoping to stir up conflict within Darguun and between Darguun and Breland. Havok is here overseeing a shipment of weapons. She’s cast disguise self to look like a hobgoblin shaman.
My plan is for Havok to make a brief appearance, but whenever she makes an attack or is hit, she’ll have to make a slight of hand check against everyone’s passive perception to hide the illusion. Her main goal is to hide the Emerald Claw’s involvement, so if someone notices the illusion, she will cast invisibility and run.
In case players interact with any of the NPCs, I generated a few goblin names and personalities:
In the cages, there are 4 slaves:
The Goblins won’t have anything on them, since everything is given over to Grathog. Grathog has a horde of treasure – 191 gold. If they roll below a 15, they’ll find 120 gold.
Finally, if the players interrogate Grathog, he doen’t know much about Striok’s plan:
This post is already a bit long, so I’ll keep the learnings brief. If you want any further details, ask in the comments!
So, the players went right first instead of left…
In hindsight, I should have anticipated this. I described the entrance as “lots of sounds and brawling coming from the left, silence from the right.”
In my mind, I knew the full layout of the map and so I saw the sounds as a useful tool to cover combat sounds. But for the players, who only saw the entrance, it seemed like that direction was just more dangerous. In the future maybe I can explain the dungeon to someone who doesn’t know the full map in order to recreate the fog of war.
Thankfully, the narrow corridors allowed the players to string out the villains who came rushing over from the left side. With a few very close calls, they were able to pick them off in smaller groups.
The second thing I learned was not to give such a direct path to the boss. Again, in my mind I thought that the players would see the bigger baddies and decide to take on the weaker people first. But in reality, I think I should always expect them to bias towards attacking the first enemies they see. I still plan to put some branches into dungeons, but maybe not branches that lead directly to the boss.
