Campaign Module: Dynasty In Ashes pt 3
The party makes their first major choice
In our last installment, we said there would be a fork in the road for the players to choose. This is where we take on that fork. Before we dive in to moving forward, some additional background will be required.
SESSION 2
ICYMI: Session 1
Expected play time: 4 hours
# of players: 3-6
Session goal: Make your way to one of the nearby groups to get help for your city of refugees.
GM prep: Remembering that this path is designed to get new players up to speed quickly, there is going to be a bit of a tonal gear shift here. First you’ll want to allow them time to talk to the survivors, lend help where possible. Then, you’ll want the surviving elders to essentially requisition the party to go get help.
There will be two options - go visit the elves, or go visit the gnomes. When prepping this, we thought the elves would be the slam dunk first choice, however every single one of our parties has chosen the gnomes. Therefore, we will lay out the pathway to the gnomes, and meeting with them, in this post and the next one. We will tackle the elven fork afterward.
Of course, when we run this session, we are prepared for players to just wander off and forge their own adventure, but it hasn’t happened yet. If you are presenting things in a fashion that makes the paths sound exciting, we don’t expect you’ll be dealing with that either.
We will post some more battle maps with this session, but the encounters are easy to run without them. If you prefer running theater of the mind, now is when you can make an easy transition. Future sessions that include maps are put together with the idea of switch-hitting in mind.
The players should level up before the session if they didn’t already, and get a minor equipment upgrade or 2 before setting out - remember that they are essentially in a refugee camp now, so more than some extra arrows or a shield for someone who could use it is a bit much to expect.
If healing was a problem in the last session, or they needed a lot of help from the mechanical interventions we described, then possibly assign them an NPC. Our go to for these first few sessions is Saburo-san, a low level sai shi from the city. We make him a level 1 human war or life cleric, wielding a Tetsubo (2 handed greatclub) as the favored weapon of the ancestors. Give this NPC standard array stats and sit them in the background unless absolutely necessary. This helper should not stick around after the party completes this sub-mission.
This is going to be a wilderness wandering session, with random encounters. The encounter table is designed to offer combat and non-combat encounters. It is not designed to be deadly. Rather, the purpose is to let the players start to get used to their PCs with less pressure than the first session.
Leveling was automatic after session 1, it was a “milestone level.” From this point forward, we presume an experience point leveling system. This allows for some fun homebrew stuff we will incorporate later. Give out non-combat experience often. Experience should be awarded for completing given tasks, for negotiating successfully, for great ideas on the way, for excellent RP, for innovative solutions to problems, etc. If you only incentivize killing with XP and not role play, you will develop a party of murderhobos fast. If that’s what you want at your table, fine, but it is not the goal of this campaign module.
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