A Prologue Session for Ravnica

Once again, our regular DM for my Sunday games was feeling under the weather, and so, given that all those players are going to be in my Ravnica-based campaign (which starts a week from today as of 44 minutes ago,) we decided to help the last couple people roll their characters and ran a "mini" adventure (though in fact it felt like a pretty substantial one) with those characters.

What we had were:

A Human Grave Cleric from the Orzhov Syndicate
A Minotaur Fighter from the Boros Legion
An Eladrin Elf Druid from the Golgari Swarm (yes, I'm letting people play non-canon races/subraces if they really want to)
A Goblin Bard from the Cult of Rakdos
and a Vedalken Storm Sorcerer from the Izzet League

The premise was that, at about 10pm on a weeknight in Precinct Six, near Foundry Street, these random strangers got on the Izzet-run subway to head to Precinct One, only for a group of Gruul anarchists to attack the train and divert it off its normal course. The party fought car-to-car through Anarchs, Rubblebelt Stalkers, and survived an attack from a Skittering Horror when the train entered the Undercity (they just had to fight off two grasping tendrils, not the horror itself) before confronting the apparent instigator of this whole thing... a Dimir Thought Spy.

Given that a single CR 1 creature, even to a party of level 1 characters, can be shredded in a single round of combat, I made some adjustments:

First, I gave the guy studded leather armor to pump up his AC by 1 (it turns out this didn't make a difference.) I also gave him max health (this helped.)

Next, I gave him Legendary Actions. The two I gave him were a single dagger attack and "Stutter Step," where he'd be able to move up to half his speed without drawing opportunity attacks.

Turns out this made the fight feel very climactic and exciting. It didn't hurt that he was doing crazy well on saving throws against the various cantrips people were tossing at him (Vicious Mockery and Toll the Dead, primarily.)

Now, Dimir NPCs tend to have Psionic spells, meaning they cast their spells using no components. This, as it turns out, made for some really fun RP opportunities, as I had the guy never once speak, even as he was casting Charm Person on the Bard (who nearly killed the Sorcerer.)

Anyway, it was a pretty cool and intense first Ravnica adventure.