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Unused Scenario – Recruitment Drive

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When working out the key elements of the DDC game I occasionally come up with events and encounters that don’t end up seeing the light of day. Sometimes I recycle them and sometimes they sit in my DNDBeyond encounters list becoming less and less likely to get used. In the spirit of giving some inspiration therefore, I sometimes write them up in general terms for people to use or avoid depending on whether they see it as an idea or a warning.

In this case I had an early idea that the group might stumble upon someone working for or with the trolls in the middle of negotiating with potential allies. In this version of the timeline I hadn’t quite worked out the dynamics of the Circle of Rot or its driving principles and so the back story to this was one of attempted conquest rather than a nihilistic drive to consume and destroy.

map plan of a misty evening view of buildings on the edge of a graveyard with a large bonfire in a courtyard.

The inspiration for the scenario came from a map that i downloaded from Reddit from a post by u/Dreadmaps and was a large bonfire in a graveyard. I did some lighting level work in Roll20 to add wall boundaries and light sources once I’d uploaded it and put the player tokens in the top left corner as a default ahead of any actual encounter.

The concept was that a Tiefling druid working with the Circle, backed by some mutated ogres, would be trying to recruit a hill giant and his pet manticores. The group would have a chance to overhear some of the villainous plans and then either interrupt or sneak away from the scene, depending on how brave they were feeling.

As it turned out, the DDC hasn’t adopted a strategy of creeping about the valley in search of creatures to slay, and the concept of the trolls co-opting outsiders didn’t ring true with the way the group was experiencing the story either. As a result, the encounter has languished and been overtaken by events and power levels. I may throw some variant of it at them as a random encounter if play allows, but otherwise I throw this open to the floor.

The antagonists, if you want to build it for yourself, consisted of a CR2 4th level Druid, 4x CR2 Carrion Ogres (essentially ogres with carrion crawler heads), 3x CR3 Manticores, and a CR5 Hill Giant Sergeant. It was aimed at being a Medium difficulty encounter for 5x level 13 adventurers rather than a grand battle royale.

NPCs – Riklun’s Raiders

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I made these models a while back and thought I’d bring them up as another example of a group of mercenaries for a game encounter. I’ve nothing particularly made up for them, but I like the designs and thought I’d share them

Riklun - dark skinned dwarf with a prosthetic right arm, dark tunic, and strange energies darting from his outstretched left hand
Orc warrior in chainmail with sword, shield and helmet obscuring most of their face
Orc warrior in chainmail with sword, shield and helmet obscuring most of their face
Orc warrior in chainmail with sword, shield and helmet obscuring most of their face
Orc warrior in chainmail with sword, shield and helmet obscuring most of their face
Lamech - heavily muscled and green-skinned warrior with blue leather armour and a battleaxe held in one hand
Farrd - hulking ogre with a spear and rough furs as a mantle on his shoulders. His spear and arm are stained red with blood up to the elbow
Barrgh - large ogre in tattered blue rags easily hoisting an enormous stone bludgeon above his head

These mercenaries are led by Riklun Steelfist – a duergar psionicist who lost his right arm in a skirmish and had it replaced with a darksteel prosthetic. With his original warband destroyed in the encounter, he sought out and slew the leader of a small orc mercenary group, offering new direction and more profitable work. He rounded out the group by recruiting two ogres and an ogrillon as extra muscle and worked up a number of simple but effective ambush routines with simple labels.

Riklun portrait
Orc mercenary portrait
Orc mercenary portrait
Orc mercenary portrait
Orc mercenary portrait
Lamech portrait
Farrd portrait
Barrgh portrait

The Raiders have a small but growing reputation for tracking down bandit groups and for retrieving goods stolen from merchant trains. These jobs are often undertaken away from civilised eyes and are brutal and sudden strikes bolstered by Riklun’s stealth and psionic powers.

The two ogres – Farrd and Barrgh – defer to the ogrillon half-ogre Lamech when it comes to plans, and so those three are sometimes split off from the main force to act as reserves or a nasty surprise to close a trap. Riklun sometimes joins his orc mercenaries as obvious guards for merchants and has the ogres take a parallel path, ready to rush in when summoned in the event of an attack

Riklun token
Orc mercenary token
Orc mercenary token
Orc mercenary token
Orc mercenary token
Lamech token
Farrd token
Barrgh token

So there you go – a ready made mercenary band that can be allies or enemies as your game needs – feel free to grab the tokens and have some fun!

The Week Won’t Quit

Tim Maidment1 Comment

Last week was a bit of a pain, even if it was generally productive. This week seems determined to continue the trend but I must remind myself that its largely my energy levels that are making things feel a bit more of an effort. Feeling tired this morning was at least partially self-inflicted as I’d made plans to meet up with Lady G to mark her birthday – which was back on Sunday. A couple of hours after work down the pub included some worldbuilding for the DDC campaign and some NPC activity to brighten the players’ days – probably.

It was a bit of a late night, but not stupidly so – so a couple of coffees this morning had me right as rain to take on the next batch of meetings and updates with an eye to keeping some reserves for the Librarian game this evening. That, alas, didn’t quite happen due to life getting in the way but we did have a great natter and lots of laughter happened.

Tomorrow looks to be more meetings and project updates, but they’re mostly checking in and making minor tweaks; or discussing more strategic issues for the staff network with our executive sponsor.

So what do I do as a distraction? If you said make maps and random creatures in HeroForge – you’d be right – here’s some works in progress…

hyena-headed warrior with a bill-hook polearm and crude armour
rabbit man with axe and shield in defiant pose
rabbit-man with axe and shield kicking out with one leg
faun woman with sword and shield in defiant pose
minotaur with downward pointing horns, with large violet glowing sword
minotaur with upswept horns and large violet glowing sword
cat-woman with hooked blade and shield on guard
cat-man with hooked blade and shield advancing and ready to fight

I’ve some vague idea of adding them to my virtual tabletop as a very diverse set of mercenaries, hence the same red, grey, and white checked pattern on their robes and armour. We’ll see. Was fun to make them.

Maps and Revisions – Farm Buildings

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I’ve spent a good portion of this afternoon doing some map work for tomorrow’s game – largely setting up relatively blank canvases that I can use for set-pieces and for random encounters depending on what direction the group goes. With the massive battle last week, I suspect there may be an attempt to regroup and plan, but I’ve been wrong before.

With that said, I’ve also been quietly revisiting some of my older maps and updating them, especially where new updates have added options to ease the process of filling out the spaces with details. In particular I’ve been playing around with the various options to paint things like undergrowth and natural features rather than manually editing things in so much.

So – for comparison here is a map I made when Dungeon Alchemy first launched where I was just trying to work out how all the buildings could be made to work. It’s called Farm Buildings, and had the concept of being a farming community around a pond or small lake:

Overheap map view of a cluster of buildings around a small lake. The lake has a large mound sticking out of it. Scattered trees stand around the buildings and various small hillocks

It’s plain and simple with fields, gardens, various farmsteads and associated features. I think I spent more time trying to work out the rise and fall of the ground so it wasn’t utterly impassable or impractical. There’s no grand design. To be fair, the changes made today haven’t addressed anything like that, but I’ve got a more definite thought about how I’ll likely use it in the near future:

Overhead map view based on the previous image but with far more undergrowth and foliage and natural features as discussed in the main text body.

This feels more like a nestled collection of buildings even though all I’ve done is add rock features, trees, and bushes. Oh, I also exported this with a more 3D presentation than the more plain orthographic settings of the original. Its a bit on the large side compared to most of the maps I use in sessions, but it could work well with some larger or more mobile opponents on it to make better use of the space. All in all it feels a more naturalistic space just with these extra details painted in. It would almost certainly never exist in the real world, but it feels like it could.

I’ve a few more of these, so I’ll sprinkle them from time to time – so there’s that to look forward to

Map – Winter Forge

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Today’s map is the battleground so recently fought over by the DDC and the trolls – a forge by the side of a frozen lake, surrounded by trees. I wanted to create the sense of a place that was in use for some time, if not always by the same people. In this instance this is done through an unmade bed, furniture, a wash stand, equipment outside, a snowman near the stumps of felled trees, little things like that.

When I made the map I wasn’t quite sure how the encounter was going to run – in fact, thinking about it I don’t recall really having any encounter details in mind. I was focused instead on just creating a scene and playing with some new settings in an update. Once it was done I just needed to expand the edges out a bit in case my players wanted to run around the building or something.

Overhead map view for a virtual table top - an L shaped building by the side of a frozen lake, surrounded by trees. A short pier juts out into the lake. A path leads from the building to the bottom of the map, passing a number of felled trees.

So here it is. The trolls were mostly inside, apart from an ice troll hidden inside the snowman. The adventurers arrived from the south (the bottom of the map) and concealed themselves in the trees while they planned what to do. It could have gone any direction from here, but in the end it devolved into a mass brawl outside the door and involved fireballs and chaos bolts, keen archery and very hungry trolls. This meant that most of the detail inside the forge wasn’t seen during the encounter itself until they broke in to ransack it later.

As usual I’ve put together a zipfile ( winterforge2.zip ) with the graphic above and the text file with lighting and boundary details for Roll20 should you want to use it.

DDC – Fall of the Forge

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We picked up this week where we left off with the battle at the Troll Forge. Arwan was unconscious and ground into the soil by a frost troll while a venom troll and an armoured troll raider fought the rest of the group. Worse for the party, the trolls had been joined by Rufen, son of Irreck the Watcher. Rufen was a barbarian with features of both a troll and a hag, and he was closing on Kerne.

Things got very busy, very quickly. Thorin traded blows with the raider nearest the forge – almost enjoying himself. Kerne cast a banishment on the venom troll while Valenia managed to drop the other raider with fiery arrows on top of spell damage inflicted. Caeluma meanwhile swooped across the battlefield to heal Arwan. Within moments, and in quick succession, Arwan, Caeluma, and Kerne were down, and Rufen had moved to close on Valenia.

Thorin started a whole chain of passing potions to stabilise the fallen and get them moving again, but the fierce cold from the ice troll and splashing damage from the venom troll nearly overwhelmed the group. Thorin and Kerne managed to hurt the ice troll severely and briefly take down the venom troll. The balance of the battle tipped back and forth very closely, and then Valenia was able to knock Rufen out and properly assess the situation.

The remaining trolls were battered, there was still a chance to win this. The whole mission hinged on being able to plant Alice’s token on Rufen so he could be tracked back to the Circle’s lair – and maybe, just maybe, the DDC would pull through. Thorin was able to finally drop the ice troll, but its horrible vitality meant it would be back up on its feet within moments.

Thorin threw the token to Kerne, who ran to the fallen Rufen and hid the hag-forged coin in his clothing. Valenia in the meantime was able to take down the troll raider nearby, channelling primal energies to augment her fighting prowess. The venom troll meanwhile lost its nerve and tried to flee, only to be knocked out by Caeluma’s spells.

In the sudden calm, there was a scramble to set fire to the fallen trolls and while the raider and ice troll were put to their final rest, the venom troll was able to regain consciousness and flee. The DDC knew they probably didn’t have much time, but they still took the time to strip Rufen of his armour and weapons and salvage coin and sundries from the forge before making their own escape. Rufen was left bound and bruised in his bed.

Their journey back to the Hold was uneventful, if slightly extended by taking a more circuitous route to throw off pursuit. Their return home was greeted with enthusiasm and concern in even amounts, and they eased into the evening in equal amounts of exhaustion and relief at having survived.

Valenia fell asleep in the bar, while Caeluma and Arwan settled in to drink and blow off steam. Thorin gathered food and drink and then retired to his rooms, and Kerne retired to spend time with Karkanna and Loris while researching the nature of the magical items taken from Rufen.

And that quiet moment is where we drew to a close.

Map – Border Fort

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There’s always going to be a need for generic border fort type maps found out in the wilderness in tabletop games. It could be an official stop-over, or somewhere holding loot or an item that needs retrieving. It could be the headquarters of someone the adventurers need to meet, or indeed to steal from, or kill. It could also be a place overrun by bandits, or abandoned and then haunted.

So while playing with some of the newer (to me) features around painting in objects and turning off object collision to merge items (like rocks), I came up with a small single-storey fort next to a mineshaft. Some of the rocks nearby contain seams of some sort of metal, and the surrounding swamp-land is frozen over in the depths of winter. I set the time of day as being late afternoon, with the sun starting to get low, and tweaked the light levels so the snow and ice weren’t quite so dazzling as some of the earlier versions.

Overhead map for a virtual tabletop of a fortress in a snowy landscape as described in the paragraph below.

The building itself has an entrance courtyard that is open to the air and has both a barracks and an armoury either side of a wide entrance hall. That hallway leads to both a treasury and a dungeon, with a kitchen and a rookery for communication with the outside world nearby. I wanted the feel to be of somewhere that could hold items such as local taxes for collection, as well as hold prisoners taken locally until they can be picked up and removed to a proper prison.

I’ve made a zip file as usual (border fort.zip) containing the jpeg above and the text file containing grid and lighting instructions for Roll20 and I hope you find it useful. This map has also been published in the Dungeon Alchemy Steam Workshop under the name DaOrribleDM. Have fun!

More NPCs – Just Because

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Surprise, surprise, I’ve been playing in Heroforge to wind down from a busy day. I’ve no plans for these, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve said that and then ended up folding them into one of the games. In this instance I’ve made a tiefling investigator, and a tortle hermit, and had some fun trying out some new options.

Green and grey clad woman with red furred legs and cloven hoofs. Her red hair is tied in buns around twisting horns that sprout from her forehead and run back along her skull. She holds a crossbow in her right hand, and a ball of flame in her left. A lantern is at her feet, and the background is a slightly blurred set of wooden buildings
A bipedal humanoid with reptilian features, a turtle shell on his back and a jaunty wide-brimmed yellow hat on his head. He wears burlap trousers and has a yellow sash around his waist. Two daggers are hanging at his sides, and he has a metal trident readied to throw. He wears red and yellow fingerless gloves. The background is a blurry seascape.

Merriam Fellbane has a devilish influence somewhere in her bloodline, as evidenced by the cloven hooves, tail, and horns – not to mention the pointed ears and odd-looking eyes. Despite her family’s background, they are lawful members of their local community and well-regarded. Merriam has followed in her father’s hoofsteps and trained to be an investigator working with the local guards on cases that are more complicated than usual, or that need a quiet follow-up. A talented sorcerer with a few rogue skills tucked in her wrist guards, Merriam could well be a quiet thorn in unruly groups’ sides – or an ally if the path to bringing a villain to justice is obscure.

Overhead token view of the woman previously described for use in a virtual tabletop
overhead view of the tortle male previously described, a token ready to be used in a virtual tabletop

Fisher Rawk lives by the coast in a tidal cave, where he lives off the land. A druid by calling, he lives a quiet life preserving the wildlife and plantlife native to his area. Sometimes he has to warn off settlers from overusing an area. Sometimes he protects settlers from raiders from across or below the waves. His demeanour is wry and calm, and while not dismissive of civilisation his calling keeps him serving nature where he is rather than running after trouble for its own sake.

Circular portrait token of the woman previously described. It has a grey metallic and cog-like frame against a red background.
Circular portrait token of the tortle male previously described. The frame is a pair of blue thin metallic circles against an orange background

DDC – Punishment

Tim Maidment1 Comment

We returned after a week off to find the DDC preparing to move against a hidden forge used by the trolls. Set on the shore of a frozen lake about ten miles from the Hold, someone was making weapons and armour in what once been a mill.

Moving carefully, the DDC was able to intercept a group of armed troll raiders from the Fists of Urash and then on to the forge itself. There were signs of activity within, and a large crudely-built snow-troll on the edge of the woods.

On investigation, this proved to be a snow-covered ice troll napping in the morning sunlight and it roared a challenge that alerted the forge dwellers of intruders. A bloated poison-dripping venom troll was the first to emerge.

Arrows were launched, axes swung, and a wall of wind sent debris exploding into air before the venom troll closed on Caeluma, Kerne, and Arwan. The ice troll chased after Valenia while Thorin raced to block the forge door.

The ice troll radiated a freezing aura, while damage to the venom troll sent gouts of venom across anyone near them. A fireball cast by Kerne did little to slow them down, and more bellows of rage could be heard approaching.

Kerne narrowly escaped death in the opening moments of the fight. Protected by a death ward cast earlier by Arwan, they were able to immolate another troll raider approaching down the lake side. Meanwhile the forgemaster appeared in a berserk rage – a troll-blooded Barbarian with hag ancestry. This was Rufen, son of Irreck the Watcher, and he sprinted at the first person he saw – Kerne.

Arwan was able to bring mass healing to the group to offset the mauling they were receiving, but caught between the ice troll and the venom troll, he was himself badly wounded and fell to the ground in a pool of his own blood.

And that’s the cliffhanger we ended the session on and where we’ll pick back up next week!

Map – Abandoned River Hut

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This is another map that I went back to review following the most recent update to Dungeon Alchemy. It’s a simple location that I could use for any number of random encounters or set pieces and the original map is still set up as a fairly generic location. This one is set in a snowy landscape with an icebound river flowing through it.

Overhead view of a map showing a snowy landscape. An abandoned hut is on the left, and large boulders are on the right. A river full of broken ice flows roughly top to bottom of the image. A small wooden bridge crosses the river around the middle of the image.

The hut is a ruin, and along with the tall piles of rock and trees its a location with lots of cover and opportunities for ambush and for different elevations. You can tell its an early map as I’ve not tweaked it to have much in the way of environmental storytelling – but in some ways that makes it generic enough to be used however you want.

I’ve created a zipped file ( abandonedriverhut.zip ) with the graphic above and the text file generated on export for lighting information. The file is formatted for Roll20, but the graphic itself could be imported into any virtual tabletop of your preference. Have fun!