#228

Cartographic Curiosities

I did some hard thinking about the campaign this week, trying to get to the root of why the wilderness exploration didn’t feel as satisfying as it could.

Well, that’s simple: the players run away from things a lot. They explore a hex, decide everything looks too dangerous to interact with, file it away for later, and move onto the next hex. This is because they’re squishy and have had some rough defeats. But why are the player characters still so squishy?

I realised I’ve been too stingy with magic items. They need more. Given they have a party of 5 PCs and 5 retainers with class levels, they should have somewhere in the region of 2 to 5 magic items: but so far they only have one, and it’s only magically efficacious against fairies.

Alright, where do they get magic items? That’s easy: dungeons and the hoards of big monsters. Which they’re avoiding… because they’re so squishy… argh.

So I’ve decided to add more “mid-boss” enemies. Monsters which give them a run for their money, but which they can defeat after a tough fight, and which just so happen to have a useful magic item in their lair or on their person.

I also went ahead and pre-rolled a bunch of random encounters, because I’ve noticed that if I roll a random encounter at the table I’ll often just improvise it rather than roll on all the little tables, which leads to them being kind of samey and not as cool as they could be. So the next time they encounter a wyrm, it won’t just be a horible monster which can kill them with a look, it’ll be Ximmerian, a wyrm which loves riddles and will give away minor magic items if you can answer it correctly. I even have a list of easy riddles prepared! There’s no way I’d have been able to improvise a riddle contest off the top of my head. And when they first venture into the evil haunted part of the woods, they’ll find a corrupted man-eating centaur ripping apart some poor knight: the centaur will be a tough opponent, and oh look! In its cave there just so happens to be a cool +1 mace which is especially effective against the undead!

I think there’s also an element of the players being overly cautious. So hopefully having a few magic items under their belt will help boost that confidence.

Sylea Rising

This week we finished the first arc of the campaign. The players met and were harassed by an old enemy (now a fairly important man: the commander of a battleship) and got some heavy foreshadowing that he’s going to screw them over in the near future. Then they made their way to the Ancients site they knew of, met some 300,000-year-old robots, destroyed those 300,000-year-old robots (to prevent them from activating a self-destruct sequence for the whole site), explored a structure which baffled them, and then they baffled me!

Not one, not one, of the players recognised my description of a stargate.

Ok, I didn’t call it a “stargate”, but I did describe a large metal circle, twice the height of a man, which was held up and could freely rotate, with symbols representing constellations around the rim, next to a weird control panel covered in buttons with those same symbols which, when pressed, made the circle rumble and rotate and the relevant symbol light up.

I even drew a representative picture!

Am I so bad at describing things? Have they just never seen Stargate?

Well then, at least they’ll be surprised when they manage to switch it on.

They concluded their investigation of the site by taking pictures of everything and deciding to go fetch a better-equipped archaeological team. They got home without incident, and were then caught up in the founding of the Third Imperium.

The next arc will begin with their old enemy betraying them. Who could have seen that coming?

Roleplaying games

• The Motivated Sandbox Search or ‘Haystack’ Campaign