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 post is going to be my to do list for the next session and some thinking aloud.

The magic items that were given to the party as payment in advance for escorting the tribute I took from the YouTube video Five Low-Level Magic Items for Creative Players by the Dungeon Dudes. To save you clicking a link, the items were Bag of Holding, Robe of Useful Items, Immovable Rod, Deck of Illusions, Decanter of Endless Water.

Which means before the next session I need to create item cards for those items. But I also need to work out what patches the robe has. And I’m tempted to use a deck of real cards for the deck of illusions.

The rod and decanter will be very useful for the party on their sea bound travels. But I’m looking forward to seeing how the party will use these items.

A big decision I need to make for the next session is what happens and how I handle the travelling at sea.

I’ve discussed in a previous post a while back the options for handling wilderness travel. Which this basically is. I think my deciding factor should be the duration/distance of the journey.

What makes this one a tough decision is that I’m looking at about a day and a half of travel each way. Which is borderline. At the moment I’m tempted to describe the journey. But it’s also a great opportunity to try out a version of the method described in the Tomb of Annihilation campaign book.

I’m so tempted to have sahuagin attack the party again. But this time they will be attacking with sharks, and one thing I picked up from the Rising Tide book was that they used a craft called a manta made up from the wrecks of other ships.

This is how it is described in the book when one is encountered:

‘The oblong barge used by the sahuagin to travel above or below water was much smaller than most of its kind that the young sailor had heard described… the manta had been cobbled together from ships wrecked at sea or scavenged from shorelines. The boards were stained green with undersea scud from being submerged for so long, but fitted neatly into a wedge shape that made it very maneuverable. It rode low in the water, but the finned shapes of the sahuagin could be seen hunkered down on the benches. They paddled furiously, moving in response to a measured cadence, totally focused on their prey.

Jherek had heard stories about mantas that crewed as many as six hundred sahuagin, but firsthand stories were few and far between. Most men who saw them perished in the sea devils’ attack. From his initial estimate, he guessed that there were forty or fifty sahuagin aboard, easily twice the number of crew aboard Butterfly.” Extract from Rising Tide by Mel Odom, Wizards of the Coast (18 Mar. 2013).

Story wise I could have the sahuagin attack while the party has the tribute. This would mean the party would potentially have to deal with the repercussions of losing the tribute.

If they manage to get the tribute to Hoondarrh’s lair on the isle of Skadaurak. There is some good info from WotC in an old Dragon magazine article (here) that covers Hoondarrh’s lair. In that article it describes this island lair as…

“… a vast complex of subterranean rooms — in fact, a recently-built “dungeon.” It has no less than three shafts where a large red dragon can fly in and out with wings spread; one of them turns back to angle almost straight up into a mountain peak, and there ends in the main treasure cavern.

The rest of the island is honeycombed with trap-filled false lairs. Some of these are even home to a few bold brigands, whom Hoondarrh suffers to live because they amuse him with their furtive diggings, and they have learned not to dare any open assault on his main caverns. From time to time he snatches one up and dumps the man in Baldur’s Gate or Waterdeep or Athkatla, to babble tales of the vast and rich lair that sprawls through the very heart of the isle of Skadaurak, and so lure more adventurers hence.

Though Hoondarrh is not known to possess any sentient servants, his lair seems alive with golems and gargoylelike automatons of various sorts — and even with captive monsters that are kept ravenously hungry.”

So far I’ve not found any maps online for Hoondarrh’s lair. Which means I’m going to have to come up with something map wise myself based on the above description. That’s assuming the party don’t just drop off the tribute at the most convenient spot and make their way back to Mintarn.

So that’s my things to do and thoughts for the next session so far.