Lessons Learned 23

The party had several rumors presented to them as side quests between the last arc and the new, upcoming arc of the campaign. They chose the adventure into the Underdark, fearing they would face Illithids (Mindflayers) or the Drow, but still went in. They found Troglodytes, being chased by Quaggoth, who had been sent by Kuo Toa that were worshipping an Aboleth. Oh, and there was a Purple Worm, too, but the party was not supposed to fight that one, it was just a goad to get them moving.

I think I have talked about all of this before in previous posts, but wanted to ponder on it more. As well as talk on into the next arc of the campaign. I had built the last side quest from pieces chosen from the Monster Manual, but with no real plans other than the quaggoth were chasing the troglodytes at the behest of the kuo toa, who's were praying to and serving an aboleth, and incidentally, said aboleth was using the kuo toa's odd ability to create their own gods through belief to strengthen its own power. The purple worm was added later when it became obvious they party needed a goad to drive them out of their comfort zone (cautious approach that was taking way too long). I really did not expect the party to fight the worm, only run from it, and I could move it around at a whim to guide them away or towards other things. But then they tracked it down and used a polymorph spell on it that the worm failed to react in time and failed its save against, and suddenly the party is using it against their enemies.

It was brilliant! Utterly stupid but brilliant nonetheless. If the worm had acted before the spell was cast or it had made its save, the two party members involved in the tracking and spell casting part of the plan (the other three party members were well away from them) would surely have died. The three remaining party members would have had to continue on without the other two (no resurrections or the like in the party at the time) and utterly failed against the kuo toa and an upgraded aboleth. Or they could have tried to locate at least a little of their friends' bodies and gone back to the surface (by teleportation circle, if they remembered they had it, a long walk if they did not) to get them resurrected and then try again. The second option was also pretty much doomed to fail, because the kuo toa and aboleth would have been even more prepared for the party, and would not be playing nice. That is, if the purple worm did not simply TPK the lot of them in the first place. 

With luck, however, they managed to pull it off. The lesson here is, as the DM, I got to write the beginning of this "story" (there are rumblings in the deep and the party needs to take care of it), the ending (the party succeeds if they kill or drive off the aboleth, or simply convince the aboleth to leave by getting the kuo toa to stop worshipping/serving it), and who was involved. Beyond that, setup was even easier as I decided to come up with maps on the fly, and since we were using Roll20 due to COVID-19 and a statewide isolate in place order, I was not terribly familiar with that program, so improvisation was the way to go. Yes, the party would have faced a much tougher threat if they had avoided the worm - the kuo toa want to capture you, usually to make you into their slaves, but in this case to give the party to the aboleth and let it mind dominate everyone into servitude - but going after the worm was much more precipitously dangerous as opposed to being merely dangerous for a longer period of time. 

Therein lies this post's lesson - even as unscripted as you make your adventures, your party can still surprise you. And that's kind of the point of playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, the players face problem X, but this group may choose solution A, that group will waffle between solutions B and C, and yet another group will surprise you with solution Purple Ostrich. I have been having a lot of fun playing pre-generated adventures, The Shattered Gates of Slaughtergarde and Red Hand of Doom from 3e/3.5, and after the adventure I talked about above we have already had 3 sessions in the updated Against the Giants found inside Tales from the Yawning Portal collection of adventures, as I did not have to do much in the way of session prep. Yes, there was some prep work, especially transforming the 3e adventures into 5e-friendly fares, but very little deep investment of time. But as little as I had to do for the purchased adventures, for this little sidequest, I did amazingly little as well.

I had originally heard of the idea of using an adventure generator from the Web DM folks, as one of them was using basically a random table to make the games for his Spelljammer campaign. These side quests were very much like that, but I kept them as simple as possible - pick a monster or combination of monsters that sounded interesting, figure out a location that made sense to encounter them (or even made them more interesting), and then add that combo of monster and place into my game world. Shadows are terribly interesting if you pair them with a necromancer who has turned their generation of new shadows from the bodies of slain foes from hours into mere rounds, especially if they are also encountered in a subterranean realm where no sunlight can normally reach. A skull lord is a much higher level of challenge than my party was, but what if it could only exist on the Prime Material for a few rounds before being recalled? There were other ideas - some tied into a character's background (sometimes you just cannot avoid that one player who wants to write so much outside-of-the-game fiction that some of it will eventually worm its way into your game), others tied into other character's in between campaign downtime activities, but nothing screamingly unexpected and world-changing in terms of D&D adventures. Sometimes you throw curveballs at your players, and other times you give them the #2 combo they've always ordered from their local fast food restaurant - it may not surprise them, but what they get they will enjoy.

There you go, bunch of ideas, some funny stories, hope everyone enjoyed the ride.

Good Story, Bad Game

The party, newcomers to the adventuring life, had answered the summons by the village, and had trekked into the dark caverns to clear out the bloodthirsty goblins residing therein. Triumphant but still battered, the party returned to the village to find the local lord had finally deigned to show up with his retainers. The party didn't care, they had taken the job from the village overseer, and the overseer was who the party was expecting payment from, not this lordling that couldn't be bothered to take care of his villeins properly. 

Yet the lord had other ideas. Embarrassed that he had been proven to be lacking in attending to his sworn duties, he had gathered all of his warriors and rushed to the village to find the adventurers had already performed the necessary extermination. Now here they were about to receive gold that should be going to him in the form of taxes, as this was his land, after all. This was a feudalistic society, not some anarcho-syndicalist commune. The lord ordered his retinue to seize the gold and any other treasure the party had gotten from the goblins. The adventurers protested, but they were very much outnumbered, and not high enough level to matter, so they handed over the villagers' gold and the mere pittance of coins they had gotten from the goblins. Oh, and the +1 dagger the rogue had found on the body of the head goblin. 

"This is fantastic!" thought the lord. "My men didn't have to fight anything, the goblins are gone, and I still got my taxes. Plus this beautiful dagger! Isn't the next town over complaining about orcs?" And so the lord, laughing up his sleeve, mentioned the orc problem of the next village over in passing to the adventurers. He would wait a few days, and then follow them with his war host, see if he could arrive in time to repeat the act.

All of the above is an idea I had recently on something to inflict on my D&D party, I have not actually done that to them yet. Having been a medieval recreator and studied our actual history, I could see some feudalistic lordling doing that to a party of D&D adventurers. Let the adventurers take care of your monster problems, that's less wear and tear on the folks that you have to buy healing potions for, but adventurers aren't covered by your health insurance, now are they? And isn't there some quote about teaching a man to fish so you can beat him up to take his fish everyday?

So why not make your game more "realistic" and do this too them? As the title of this article suggests, the above makes for a great bit of fiction, and while we DMs are "telling a collaborative story with the help our players", that doesn't mean this story makes for a fun or interesting game. By having the lord be more powerful than the party and basically telling them to hand over their hard won booty or die, you have stolen their agency and killed any desire in them to adventure further. That is, unless your ultimate goal was to have the party deal with this lord, this is not a good dose of realism to inflict on your party. Which would make an interesting game - how is the party dealing with little Lord Fontleroy? Outright killing him? Political assassination by going to his Baron/Count/Duke/the Queen? Peasant revolt? What are they doing afterwards, taking the lord's place themselves or giving it to a peasant or one of the lord's old retainers? - but only one time and only if the party themselves are interested in playing along with it.

Just a quick idea I had. Sorry for the long hiatus, been very busy since the beginning of the 'Rona, as my business turns out to be critical, and also my job as well. Looking to finish up several other drafts I have had bubbling on the back burner for a while, and will be posting them soonish.