The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Sessions 9 and 10)

I took on a big writing project last week, so my work on the Deep Vaults has slowed to a crawl (although I completed my hazards table and am pretty happy with it...I will likely post that next). I’m getting jazzed about resuming my Wednesday night campaign, which is moving to Thursday nights every other week. Scheduling five adults for an entire evening on a regular basis is near-impossible, so I feel like we’ve really accomplished something. We’re also going to try to have at least one longer weekend game session each month. It warms my heart that the girls can’t wait to get back to slinging some dice.

After the last session’s light-hearted adventure (which I ended up naming “The Right Stuff”), I was ready to hit the players with a major shake-up to their reality. At this point in the campaign, we’d been playing a little over over three months and they got “the game.” Now it was time to show them what playing in a “campaign” was like.

To now, the setting’s background consisted mostly of rough bullet points, some of which I gave to the players at the start of the campaign—just some hooks to create points of recognition later. As I started prepping for this session, I added some details for the players to begin making choices. I knew they wanted to be closer to Emelia and her family, so I expanded on that portion of the setting for the players to explore.

I love to world-build, but whenever I start a new campaign, I immediately start looking for ways to subvert what I’ve presented and shake up the status quo. I’m not sure why I do that, but D&D needs dynamism, and the historical eras it emulates were certainly dynamic ones. Dungeons & Dragons could easily have been named Cash & Conflict, and both of those things come to the fore during these next  sessions.

This game-play report covers sessions 9 and 10, which occurred on 7/15 and 7/22, 2020.

Previously...

The girls lent a hand to the bakery moms, who needed help gathering ingredients for a feast to be held that night—an order commissioned by Lord Ferril, himself. Not only did doddering old Mr. Mulberry forget to place the order in a timely manner, as requested by the lord,but he also forgot to give the girls invitations to the feast, which is being held in their honor!

Despite the screw-ups, the heroes gathered the ingredients, the moms made the food, and everyone, along with Mr. Mulberry in tow, arrives at Brackleborn Keep on time.

The Heroes of Brackleborn -- Game-Play Report (Session 7)

My Wednesday night campaign remains on temporary hiatus. We're hoping to get an extended weekend session sometime this month. I intended to use the hiatus to catch up these reports to the current timeline (Session 43), but that plan never quite materialized. This session occurred on 06/17/20.

Previously…

The party defeated a goblin ambush and found a hidden trail to their lair, a pair of cave openings into a hillside deep in the woods.

Lurid Lairs: Owlbear Den

While the Gloomy Forest is a dense, old-growth woodland, it also lies in the highlands of Brackleborn province. The underlying terrain consists of steep-sided hills, with deep valleys running between them. Climbing the hills involves rigorous activity that eats up valuable daylight, meaning the party has tended to follow the maze of gullies, culverts, and channels that characterize the forest at ground level. They haven't quite realized how many areas and encounters are up on the hillsides that they've simply wandered beneath without ever realizing it.

Some of these encounter areas are lairs, the denizens of which populate the wandering encounter tables. If the players can locate a lair and wipe it out, then that creature type might disappear entirely from the tables. While a lair persists, it also generates an additional encounter check if the party wanders within a certain distance of it. Thus, wiping out a lair of monsters can have long-reaching exploration benefits.

I've sprinkled lots of these encounter lairs across the Gloomy Forest map: peryton nests; an awakened grove full of intelligent animals, plants, and myconids; a bullywug village; an ancient cemetery; an ettercap nest; etc. 

One such lair is the following owlbear den, a bit of content I cribbed from my old Frozen North campaign. With a few minor flavor changes from a Viking-style setting to a European/fey one, the content works just as well here. Reusing adventures is something I'd always avoided in the past...no idea why. It saves so much time and effort, and let's me revisit the adventure with a fresh perspective. With the right changes, I've even reused adventures for the original players and they didn't catch on.

As with most monsters in the 5e Monster Manual (particularly the classic monsters), I've had to de-neuter their archetypal special attacks. I don't know why 5e took away some of the core monster abilities (like the owlbear’s classic hug attack, or the rust monster’s ability to eat magic weapons and armor...it just makes no sense). I digress; my owlbears will hug the crap out of you. Changes to the core monster are described below.

Owlbear Den

This is the lair of a sleuth of owlbears—(8) “sows,” (6) juveniles, and a massive “boar.”

Lurid Lairs: Ettercap Cottage

In my regular Thursday night game, the players are exploring the Gloomy Forest—a hexcrawl sandbox with established encounter areas related to (3) factions: 1) Human bandits seeking to overthrow the local lord (whom they view as a usurper); 2) A green hag named Mamawaldi and her servant, a wight-lord known as "The Blackheart" (the undead form of an ancient warlord who once ruled this area); and 3) Ancient denizens of this forest, some of whom have fallen under Mamawaldi's wicked influence (if not her direct control).

At this point in the campaign, the player-characters have allied themselves with the local lord and largely neutralized the bandit threat. Now, they're searching a section of the forest looking for the last remnants of the surviving bandits and their leader. Although my players are relative novices to RPGs, they've quickly adopted some smart strategies in their exploration, including never entering the forest from the same direction twice in a row. As such, their map is now crisscrossed with paths and marked with notes. They're beginning to get a feel for the lay-of-the-land and discovering lots of the little details I've sprinkled across the forest (which is relatively contained at a mere 8 x 12 miles).

They found themselves following an old trail through an unexplored area after discovering an ancient stone marker that indicated the trail led to an elven shrine. As they went deeper, they began to notice the tops of the trees were draped with webs that became denser the farther down the trail they ventured (making the forest even gloomier). Undeterred, however, they came to a fork in the road where I had placed an encounter area that read, simply:

"A cozy cottage made of webbing hangs up in the trees here. It is the lair of an ettercap-matron named Etta Capp. She likes to spin spidersilk while she looks out the window overlooking the path. Her body can't be seen, but at the window she appears to be an old crone with a tiny wrinkled face and really long, silken silver hair. If she sees an elf, she mentions the shrine and directs the party down the east fork (where her children--(2) giant spiders and (2) spider swarms--will ambush the PCs). She steers them away from the west fork (to the shrine), warning them of a "dangerous forest spirit" down that path."

In case the PCs decided to attack her, I statted Etta out and gave her some minor "Legendary" powers, including the occasional ability to summon a spider swarm, a giant spider, or an ettercap to her defense.

The encounter went down pretty much as written. The girls were wary of Etta but engaged her in conversation and received her directions. They did not guess her true nature (or catch on to the pun in her name, even though Rachel shouted "Attercop, Attercop!" when I first mentioned the webs), and so followed the east path where they encountered the spider ambush. At the end of that session, the group seemed determined to return to the cottage and deal with Etta.

Over the intervening week, I had some thoughts about expanding the encounter a little bit and after some sketching and note-jotting, I felt I had a really good mini-dungeon on my hands. I drew out the map in better detail/quality—an unnecessary step since I redraw everything on the battlemat, but one which helps me refine the layout and figure out the various ways I can challenge the players. I then created a simple key for the interiors and added some notes about how the denizens of the expanded lair would react to the party's intrusion.

The next session, however, the party decided not to seek revenge and avoided her cottage on their return trip toward the shrine. To my chagrin, quite a few hours of hurried work between sessions vanished in the party's rear-view mirror. I'm saving it in the hopes they come back this way, but I was a little disappointed. It's certainly not the first time that's happened to me in my 40 years of DMing and it won't be the last. 

I have dozens of such lairs and micro-dungeons in my folders and I do eventually get to use them (or pieces of them), but I really like this one so I'll share it here. I've always called these micro-dungeons "Lurid Lairs" (after the set of tables in Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy, which I was enthralled by in my youth.) This blog might be a good spot to post all that content for anyone to use. I designed this for 5e, since that's the version we're playing, but I think it's easily adapted to any edition or OSR ruleset.

Etta Capp's Cottage

Three trees stand close together here at the forest’s edge, overlooking a fork in the path. Their leafy boughs are thick with spiderwebs. Suspended from the branches is a delicate, 3-story cottage with shingled roofs, shuttered windows, flowerboxes, cornices, etc.--all made entirely of webbing. The area at the base of the trees is also shrouded in heavy webs, except for a cave-like opening between two of the trunks.