Ending a few weeks ago, in my campaign we had an adventure that wound up taking over a year. Now granted, part of that was due to the fact that I had to be out of town for a couple months while dealing with family issues (that you can read about elsewhere in this blog.)
Having done a lot of relatively on-rails adventures up to about halfway through level 5, I had a lot of time away from the game (for the same family issues) and so, to keep myself occupied with a creative endeavor, I came up with a new type of adventure: the party was captured by a group of Dire Elves (Drow who had sworn themselves to a powerful individual in the Shadowlands - which is my setting's Shadowfell-by-way-of-the-Dark-World-in-Link-to-the-Past-plus-some-Dark-Tower-elements.) The party found themselves lost in a region of the Shadowlands called Red Scar Plains (the name was actually an in-joke from years ago in which my roommate, who is one of the players, had a dream in which I woke him up to tell him I had run a World of Warcraft dungeon called Red Scar Plains.)
Anyway, what was meant to be a sizable excursion wound up going for quite a long time. We had some cool revelations, like the fact that there was a shadowy version of our Paladins Gold Dragon God in the Shadowlands, and that our Rogue was actually an amnesiac who had been a member of an Illuminati-like global conspiracy before he lost his memory. We also introduced a new player in the middle of it.
While I really like what I came up with for the setting, it's something of a relief to have finished it. That same roommate has taken up DM duties for a little side-campaign, and I've been able to play the Warlock character that has been kicking around in my head for years (though we're a few sessions in and still level 1 - I really want a second spell slot and my Eldritch Invocations, lovely as Hex-Eldritch Blast gameplay may be.)
Anyway, while we were doing Red Scar Plains, I started working on the next big adventure, and among other things, it has our first really significantly large true dungeon in it that serves as the kind of second act break of the adventure.
But after spending so much time on Red Scar Plains, I've planned out now three shorter adventures - stuff we can probably finish in one or two sessions a piece. For one thing, it'll give them a chance to get a little more gear and perhaps a level (likely not a full level though) before getting into what I imagine will be a somewhat intense adventure difficulty-wise (though primarily the final boss, and I'm relatively confident that they will get to level 9 at least before that point, maybe level 10 - though I haven't totaled all the XP they'll earn - hell, they could be 11.) In fact, I actually expect (and hope) that they'll feel a little overpowered early on in the adventure, giving them some momentum.
But one thing that's actually quite fun about these smaller adventures is the ability to use monsters and themes that I won't be able to use in rather thematically consistent adventures. For instance, one will be sending them into some ancient ruins of the massively important super-advanced civilization and thus give me an excuse to have a lot of robots (I'm using the gnomish clockworks from Mordenkainen's.) Another is built entirely around Deathlocks and Demons, giving us a bit of a break from the Undead and Great Old One-related menaces that are more prevalent in my setting and allowing me to introduce a faction that will allow for heroic chaotic evil characters (it's a cult dedicated to a prophesied destroyer god, and part of their religion is that they must preserve the world so that it can be destroyed by the right entity.)
Also, given that I did a lot of work for the big adventure (called "The Bloody Baron" - see if you can guess what the big bad of it is) about a year ago, it's also nice to have a reason to plan adventures again.
I suspect this might be my model going forward - I really like the idea of having these major story commitments, but it's good to get some standalone breaks now and again.
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