As usual I need to start this type of post with the usual default copy and paste warning to the players in my play group.

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.

This next session is going to be a “difficult” one to prepare for.

The reason being that no adventure hook was actually picked up at the end of the session. It’s a decision the whole group needs to make, and we were one adventurer down last session due to illness. So it was left with the party back at the tavern waiting for their companion to get better.

Now that leaves me a window to actually offer and try doing something with the party suggested by Matt Colville (yep hardly into the post and he gets mentioned) about downtime. I think I can make this work. Particularly for a couple of the party. I could for instance talk to the absent player and have him do a side quest by himself that happened whilst the others were off doing stuff on the main campaign. They faked being ill and went off and did X. Or the rogue of the group I think could go off and explore the city during the night whilst the others are sleeping. So I’ve messaged them to see if they are interested.

In the meantime I have an idea that the group may want to take part in the gladiator games in the next session. So I need to research how to run such a thing in D&D, and also make it so it’s not boring. There will be no death in this. If they reach zero hit points then they become unconscious and out of the tournament. Healers will be on hand to help them recover to full health. There will be magic items up for grabs as the prizes.

I also want to seed going back to the guard tower that the party found along the coastal road. I know how that’s going to work. For awhile I was unsure what creature or creatures would be the cause of the guards and workers not being heard from. I had toyed with the idea of goblins, dryads, knolls or even an ankheg. But hadn’t made a decision. Then after watching the Colville video on Action Oriented Monsters for another reason (see below), he covered the ankheg. That was it, I’ll use the ankheg as an action oriented monster for the encounter.

Another seed I’ll prepare is the Traitors’ Graves and the lost black dragon Lashonna lair. This will be the catacombs adventure from The Lazy DM’s Workbook. It’s going to be full of undead naturally. If only I’d been getting undead miniatures! I like the idea of using the undead lair from Jim Murphy with this dungeon. It’d mean changing one of the locations or adding it as a secret room to be discovered. However I’m pretty sure I’d like to use a Lich as the boss for the undead lair, and as the overall main baddy for the dungeon. But a level 22 creature for a level 2 and 3 party! So naturally I’d have to go through the process of adjusting the Lich stats. In the Murphy video there are some suggestions on how to run the Lich boss. But then I remembered the recent Colville video about action oriented monsters, and thought I’d give that a watch as well. That gave me food for thought also. So I think in the next post I’ll look at how I adjusted the Lich to be used with my party of adventurers.

I do now have a wish list of miniatures I’d like to add to my undead army. Such as a minotaur skeleton, or the t-rex skeleton. Plus some oozes like the gelatinous cube to use as well. But getting your hands on them is a real pain in the UK, they seem out of stock everywhere. Or if they are the third party has hiked the price up in that age old tradition of supply and demand and exploiting a situation by trying to scalp the unsuspecting or desperate. Which thankfully I am neither.