SESSION 3
Expected play time: 3 hours
# of players: 3-6
Session goal: Establish partnership with the gnomes on behalf of the people of Iwasaki
GM Prep: This is the first session you’ll want to really let your players off the leash to explore and interact with the world a bit. The gnome village should be a place of whimsy and charm, but also a bit unsettling - they are riding giant spiders after all. This is where tangential or completely unrelated plot hooks can start to appear in every exchange between GM and PCs.
The gnomes, at least the military ones and the elders, are modeled after the old “inscrutable Oriental” trope. They will initially be very reserved, keeping their cards close to the chest. The civilian types should be more approachable.
Since the party is expected to extract help for the Iwasakians from the gnomes, they will be expected to get past this secretive exterior and learn how they can make it worth the gnomes’ while to help them. This is hostile territory, and the gnomes won’t be willing to spend their limited resources on strangers without sufficient return for their people.
Visiting the gnome village hits many adventuring checklists. It’s the party’s first town visit, it offers some serious RP opportunities in a nearly “no fail” setting, it allows for meaningful relationship development with NPCs, and it allows the DM to flex their creative/descriptive powers.
Different groups of character will of course want to interact in different ways with the gnome village, so aside from the “major events” this session will be less linear than the others so far, and thus presented somewhat differently.
No maps for this session. You are certainly welcome to use village maps, we do not typically when running this session.
One last note - when we originally designed this campaign, Artificers and Spore Druids didn’t exist. We homebrewed similar classes (Arcane Engineer and Fungus Druid, one of our names is better and one of WOTC’s is better). Some remnants of our original designs are in our verbiage and descriptions. We will publish our OG Fungus Druid as a special, extra, paid post next Sunday. This will not affect future Module scheduling of twice monthly.
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