In this session our party left Queen’s Cove to escort the town contribution to the islands tribute to the Red Rage. Their journey started off eventfully with Sahuagin attacking just before dawn. They also had to clear the road from a fallen tree. And discovered an abandoned guard tower. At Mintarn they were rewarded handsomely for their efforts, and got a chance to spend their reward in a bustling market.
Post-mortem
SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following part of the post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this part of the post and join me in a future one.
So session 3 has happened.
If you remember in the past week I wrote about alternate methods to handle travel within D&D (you can read the post here). For this session I went with the method described by The Angry GM. The other link that summarises the method was really handy in prepping.
It allowed me to produce the following notes to refer to during the session.
For the encounters I went with rolling a d4 to chose which members of the party were on watch if/when the encounters happened at night.
Before the start of the session I made the decision that even if there was going to be no encounter during the travel that I’d have the tiles out for camp. Otherwise if I only put tiles out when there was going to be an encounter I’d be sign posting to the players something was going to happen. This way I felt it’d be less obvious when or if an encounter was about to happen.
Instead of rolling a random encounter if need be. I had a page of about four encounters noted down. I knew that the Sahuagin was going to be one, and then I chose three other creatures that could possibly attack. My notes for these encounters were so simple, the name of the monster and the quantity. With the official D&D Monster Cards for each of the monsters at hand I didn’t need to open up the manual, or as previously make note of the stats. All I did was note down the HP on a bit of paper, and tracked the damage received on a bit of paper.
The encounters were not just fights, I also had a hazard that needed dealing with. I used a group challenge to clear the road from a blockage. I took this from The Adventures in Middle Earth journey section. I liked that it was not just a simple pass or fail. But had degrees of passing and failing. Which resulted in getting benefits or some kind of set back.
The discovery I had planned was an abandoned guard tower. Which if they checked it out would mean that as the notes show slow them down, but additionally not noted I had them rewarded for checking it once they reached Mintarn.
Overall from my point of view I think the travel went well. I think it was more interesting than the two suggested methods in the DMG. I’d certainly use it again. However I think that the next two bits of travel (depending on the hook selected) are better suited to one of the other alternatives.
Let’s look at the only combat encounter of the session, which was the Sahuagin attack. Mistakes were made. I forgot about the NPC characters with the party. They didn’t actually get involved. This was picked up by a player near the end of the combat. But I explained they wouldn’t get involved, especially the driver who was just a commoner, not a fighter. And that the fighting was what they were getting paid for.
Before the session I had seen that Sly Flourish in his YouTube video about prepping for the Lost Mines of Phandelver first chapter had talked about having an npc somehow cast Aid on the party to help give the level 1 characters a better chance against the threats they would encounter. I thought this was an interesting idea, and made the NPC guard a paladin who knew the spell. Just incase.
Kobold Fight Club had the Sahuagin encounter of three attacking Sahuagin as hard. Four would be deadly according to that. So I erred on the side of caution and had three attack the party. I think this was too easy for the party. It should have been at least four I think. I should have thrown in an extra Sahuagin during the combat.
The players had been warned at the start that there had been reports of the Sahuagin attacks happening along the coastal road. So I was happy I had sign posted the threat enough. Luckily the dice allowed the raid to happen.
If you remember I was using the Sahuagin attack as a hit and run. So I wanted the attack to end randomly with the Sahuagin making a run for it. The encounter would not be playing to it’s natural conclusion. I used the dice countdown as used in the WOIN system. So at the start of each round I rolled the dice pool of 4d6. Because this was a short fast countdown a four or above would result in the die being removed. Naturally the players were unaware of this going on. And I thought it worked really well. Definitely something I’ll use again.
I messed up the attack of opportunity rule! ‘Nuff said about that I think.
There was something new I tried. I picked this up from the Dungeon Dudes from one of their YouTube videos. Not sure which one. And it wasn’t even planned before hand. It was just something that I did out of nowhere. When a character killed a monster I asked them to describe their killing blow. I’m not sure it entirely worked. I’ll give it another few tries to see if it feels better.
Jonathan printed off an A4 sized colour map of the Mintarn archipelago for me to give to the players. Plus he kindly did an A3 sized colour map of Mintarn. I think the island map helped a lot with the players to see where they were in the world. Plus it will allow planning by the party when they get adventure hooks. The town map was very handy for the players I thought for showing where they were within the town. I used coloured cubes to represent the characters on the map, and show their individual locations. The draw back was that players got distracted by features in the map they hadn’t come across. But it did allow me to point out points of interest as they were taken through the town.
I am trying to encourage the players to make the maps their own, write notes on them, etc. We will see how this plays out.
I’m really not too happy with how Mintarn played out. Especially the market section. I think it was too open, and the players were almost at a loss what to do. My prep could have been better also. I hadn’t thought about the deities the temples worship. And I was asked that question! I didn’t handle this that well. Could have been a lot lot better, especially with the improve and roleplay.
The session started off with a big foobar, which I realised near the end. I forgot to explain absence of character! Oops.
My descriptions still need a lot of work, the index cards helped. But this is an on going work in progress.
It was interesting when the players searched the abandoned guard tower. Well more looked inside and went up on the battlements. No one searched the room itself. I had a small magic item and some copper coins for them to find as a “reward”. I did drop hints at the end of the session that they should have searched the room. Failing an investigation check is different to not even looking. And those that went in their passive perception isn’t great, so I didn’t feel they would catch the glint of something.
I thought handing out post it notes with hooks on worked well. Although the party has come up with their own adventure hook. They got fixated on the gladiator arena within Mintarn. I will have to work that into the planning.
I did give Jonathan a players cheat sheet. Which summarises what actions can be made, why and what falls under certain ability checks. I’m waiting to get some feedback on how he got on with that.
The players finally got some home made print outs for the magic items they picked up in session 1 in the pirates lair. Which I was happy to be able to do, and I think the players found this useful.
From time to time I’m going to pin to the player facing side of the DM screen reminders of the Matt Colville advice, and this was one of those times. Written on two dry erase index cards were the two quotes “Death is always a possibility…” and “Anytime you are out numbered…”. I think these are useful things to remind players of on a regular basis.
I had a lot less stuff with me this time. Here is a photo of the stuff I took with me, minus my DM folder. Which I did take, and I’ll cover in another post.
1. Sand timers in various time increments.
2. D&D Dungeon Tiles Reincarnated – for this session there were tiles from both the dungeon and wilderness sets. But only the ones I needed.
3. Mechanical pencils for players that needed them.
4. Post-it notes
5. My dice
6. Blank notepads for players if they have nothing to write notes in.
7. Index card box (will a brief describe contents below)
8. Meeples and wooden disks and cubes to represent npcs/monsters, etc.
9. Scatter terrain to populate maps.
10. Folding dice tray and area effect template.
11. Pens, dry markers, clips, ruler, dry marker erazer.
12. Minis of creatures
13. Players Handbook
14. Dungeon Masters Guide
15. Big book of Battle Maps
16. Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Screen Reincarnated
Ok this post is getting long. Luckily it’s not print with limited space.
So what is in the index box?
I have the initiative and combat reminder cards from the D&D Essentials kit in there. Along with a handful of dry erase index cards, a selection of D&D Monster stat cards, plus other useful stuff. But I feel this will need a post of it’s own to do it justice, possibly with the my DM folder.
For these two classic pieces of cannon fodder I’m going to suggest using one or two of the NPC’s from Appendix B of the MM.
