SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming campaign. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.

This next session is going to be interesting, two new members join the group for the first time.

The hook has been seeded for the party to meet up with the new members. Where it goes from their who knows?

So planning wise I need to have more options planned than I would normally. Well I say normally, but considering how new I am to being a DM and this will be my fifth session (including the taster) as such, is there really a normal? I am still after all finding out who I am as a DM, learning a little bit more each session as I journey along that path.

But so far I have used the information from the previous session to guide which hooks encounter I prepare for next.

All I know is at the moment that the party are going to the tavern to meet the new characters. Will they help them with their caper? Which is to steal a boat from the docks that belongs to Angrath?

Luckily the Lazy DM Workbook (LDW) has a docks map I can use. I just need to populate it with pirates.

I have new hooks to seed during the session. One of which uses another map from the LDW. That will also use a puzzle. And I have found the perfect puzzle to use.

I’m trying to build up the tools I have at my disposal to make sure that things are not predictable, keep the players engaged and are hopefully fun.

Thanks to the players coming up with their own hook in the last session, I’m going to push that a bit more as well, and provide a poster to the players promoting a “royal rumble” type event where the winner gets some awesome magical prize. It will be a non-lethal event, no deaths, so if they get to zero hit points they are unconscious and removed from the arena.

The Dungeon Dudes have a great video on YouTube entitled “Five Low Level Magic Items for Creative Players in Dungeon and Dragons 5e“. I might present those five items to the players if they win in the gladiator arena, and get them to pick one.

But it really is useful watching videos like the Dungeon Dudes to get inspiration. Another one I found interesting and relevant to this campaign is their video “Five Deadly Low-Level Monsters in Dungeons and Dragons 5e“. An interesting list, and discussion for sure. I’d already got kobolds and the gelatinous cube in the index card box ready to call on at a moments notice. But the other three on the list I hadn’t considered. Well not entirely I had considered a swarm of rats at some point. But their suggestion of a swarm of rot grubs warranted further investigation. So off to Volo’s Guide it was. Wow what a nasty little creature. Something like that would need telegraphing big time before hand. I’d almost be clumsy about it having the party witness an npc being killed by them. Say have them in a tavern, in barges a group of farmers carrying a body. It’s still alive. They are calling for some-one to get a cleric. Have the cleric arrive too late, but describe what is happening to the body. Have other npc’s shout advice etc.

Luckily between starting this post and finishing it off I remembered that our druid can now change shape. So now I need to consider what beasts are scattered through out the campaign to feed that ability. At the moment they can chose an ox!

But this does present an interesting situation. Which will require me to discuss with the players before hand if they will be comfortable with the subject matter. That sounds all ominous, but not really. Just the considerate thing to do. Being in Mintarn and this being a Western European fantasy setting, one way to allow the druid to see a beast such as a bear is to have a performing one, or have them fighting other beasts in the gladiator arena. It presents a situation that the players will have to handle that has a moral element to it. And is definitely a subject matter that I’d like to as a DM to discuss with the players before hand.

On when the next session will be I started that discussion off on the Messenger group this morning. No one had made a move. And it needed starting. I also proposed a date in December also for the 5th session.

I’ve also mapped out when the players will level up based on each session being worth 2 points (remember we are using the adventure league way of levelling as described in the appendix of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything). It means our new players will level up the session after the others have. There will always be that little bit of drag.