#DnD encounters

[awindinthelantern]

RPG Encounters: Trains

Need a one-session encounter as a bridge between larger story arcs in your Call of Cthulhu game, or Steampunk- or Roaring 20s-themed DnD/RPG game, and are looking for something unconventional? Or are you just a fan of trains (aren't we all?) and are looking for a way to incorporate them into your game in a way that isn't boring for your players? Here are a few session ideas, courtesy of various works of fiction:

Baccano! The luxury express train on which your players are riding is suddenly commandeered by a group of terrorists (who boarded while masquerading as a wedding party), who take the train's passengers hostage. A prominent politician's spouse and children are aboard the train, and the terrorists hope to use them as leverage against the politician to force them to have the terrorists' leader released from jail. The terrorists have already sent their demands to the politician and are waiting for their response via radio/telegraph; if their leader is not released from jail, they will blow up the train, or blow up a bridge the train will soon pass over (GM's choice). Players must defeat the terrorists to secure the passengers' safety. Feel free to make the situation more complicated by making the terrorists freedom fighters, and the politician an asshole who's willing to sacrifice his family rather than acquiesce to the group.

The Lady Vanishes (Depending on your player group's size, this may work best if you split your players up between several compartments, or have them riding together in an open coach) In a foreign country, one or more of your players are sharing a train compartment with 3-5 strangers (six people per compartment), one of whom is a very friendly old woman from their country who makes friends with your players. This old woman accompanies your players to the dining car for lunch, and writes her name in the condensation on the window when the train's whistle drowns out their voice, but when the train passes through a tunnel and is momentarily plunged into darkness, she vanishes from the carriage. Your players will assume she went back to their compartment, but when they return to it she is not there, and the other strangers swear that there was no such woman in the compartment with them. When your players go back to the dining car to question the staff, the employees also swear there was no such woman. No one aboard recognizes the woman your players were with. When they return to their compartment, an entirely different old woman has taken the first woman's place, and the other strangers insist that she was the woman your players were with the entire time. Unknown to your players, the first old woman was a spy carrying information dangerous to the foreign country's government, and the other strangers are domestic agents sent to get rid of her before she reaches her home country. It is up to your players to find out what happened to the woman they met, and rescue her, before the train reaches its destination, and the woman is disappeared forever.

Murder on the Orient Express (This may work best if your players have already achieved some renown) Your players are riding a long-distance sleeper train which will spend one or more nights en route to its destination. On the first day aboard they are approached by a wealthy stranger with a dangerous aura, who tells them that they have been receiving threatening messages and fear for their life, and they want to hire them as bodyguards. Hint to your players that the stranger is up to no good to encourage them to decline. Either that night or the following night, the train is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift or a rockslide, something that blocks the tracks. The following morning the wealthy passenger is discovered murdered in their cabin by their valet and the carriage porter, who break the lock on the door when they don't answer. Have your players investigate the crime scene, and leave clues that indicate that the murderer was someone aboard the train, and that someone is still aboard the train (if in winter, the window is open but there is no snow on the windowsill, and there are no footprints leading out from the window. If in a warm season, the rockfall blocked the train into a notch or on a cliffside, with no room for the assailant to escape through the window). The sleeping carriages are sealed up at night, which means the murderer is one of the passengers aboard this very coach. Have your players interrogate the passengers to determine who the culprit is.

Demon Slayer Your players board a train and settle in for a night of relaxation or boredom. Unbeknownst to everyone aboard, demonic forces are at work to commandeer the train and suck the life essence out from all of the passengers aboard to grow their own strength. Have your players discover and battle the monstrous forces lurking before they consume and kill everyone aboard. To spice things up, have your characters congregate in the lounge car after dinner, where, amid the dim lamps, several passengers make your players' acquaintances. As an icebreaker, one of the more gregarious strangers elects to tell the group of a ghostly encounter of theirs, and after them the other strangers start telling their own tales of woe or haunting. Soon after, one by one, the strangers start getting killed or injured in ways that resemble the stories they told, hinting that the monstrous evil aboard the train manifests as its victims' worst fears or trauma.

[enchantedfrogprince]

I'm currently in the process of writing some short DnD sidequests for my Feywilds campaign where the party gets to engage with some pretty wild fairytales I have picked out.

For something a bit more particularly scary and unsettling I am writing up some more dark folk horror type encounters for tales like:

-- Long Tom

-- The Hobyahs

-- Kate Crackernuts

I would also like to have the party come across an abandoned church based off of St. Trinian and let them defend it from a buggane attack during the middle of the night...

Are there any other obscure fairytales or folk horror you can think of that would make a fantastic DnD encounter?

[sicc-nasti]

Rapunzel type tower situation but the tower is a giant mimic and hunts in the way a pitcher plant does. Yes, fair knight. Climb up this conveniently long hair, follow the sweet smell, pull yourself up and over the window sill and fall in to the far below.

[ancrky]

the moment brennan pulled out the real exam questions every dnd player started praying to every god in the universe that their dm wouldn’t find out and do this, and every dm took down a little note

[tabletopresources]

Reward by Andrey Vasilchenko

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[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 212

“Did we just pull an Isekai?” 

“I mean, does it count if it’s practically just Ghostwriter’s usual shit, just more chaotic?” 

“Sam, this is like a game, look, we even have inventory overlays!” 

“Yeah but Tuck, I died so therefor I pulled an isekai, right?” 

“Shit, why does that make sense?” 

“Boys, perhaps actually look into your overlay there? Perhaps look at the map as well?” 

“... oh my Ancients, guys, we’re not the players, we’re going to be the bosses of this game.”

. . . 

“This is going to be so much fun guys.” 

The JL Jr team would really like it to be known that they are in fact done with Klarions shenanigans. This is literally the first day school is out for the summer for them! Who even showed him DnD and anime anyway?!

[2minutetabletop]

World Map Hex Tiles

Have you mapped your world yet? If not, these hex tiles are for you! Oh, and let us know what to add to Part 2. ;)

→ Download them here!

[oldschoolfrp]

Balancing an encounter (AD&D Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, TSR, 1990)

[rexecutioner]

Mystreet au but it’s just the comfort no hurt mcd spin off where everyone isn’t a descendent or reincarnation of their mcd selves and are just happy and content with their lives, and Minecraft Diaries is a dnd campaign that Garroth runs for his friends (main party consisting of Aphmau, Vylad, Laurance and Nicole, and eventually Dante, Travis, kinda Zane, and Katelyn join them)

“Ok Vylad, roll to shoot Zenix.”

“…nat 1.”

“Vylad shoots Brendan in the chest. Roll damage.”

”Aphmau, roll to hit with disadvantage.”

“WHY DISADVANTAGE!?”

“You are trying to kill a demon warlock. THE Demon Warlock. The guy keeping you trapped on this island. Alone. By yourself.”

“Okay, I guess that makes sense. *rolls* NAT 20!!”

“…..you got him. Roll damage :( ”

[sketchlm]

Honestly seeing discourse about the Bad Kids killing the Rat Grinders is very funny because... They've killed so many people. Like sure there's a discussion about in-character motives and everything, but also the BK's just kill a ton of people. Most people don't play DND and consider 'non-lethal' options. Brennan kept reiterating it at the start of the season. Murder is literally above redemption on almost everyone's list of priorities in Spyre. Aguefort literally establishes the concept of 'adventurers' as just violent wanderers that go around and kill things that they feel like need killing, this is literally what they go to school for.

The season started with them killing a bunch of fervent cultists, and the Bad Kids only started considering mercy when they started getting tired. I wouldn't have minded the Rat Grinders getting a redemption arc, and maybe they'll get revived somehow, but also the Bad Kids barely consider mercy to people they don't know, so people they HATE getting that sort of treatment already seemed off the table. Not to mention, this is instantly after the Rat Grinders tried to kill the Bad Kids and the entire student body, and are in the midst of casting a wild, out of control spell to raise a new god of wrath.

They literally killed Ragh and only decided to spare him because they went a little too far with their torture power play after they revivified him after brutally killing him. Aelwyn was too slippery to keep down consistently. Literally every character roughly their age that they're antagonistic towards that's still alive is part of the exception, not the norm.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Adventure: The Big Ambitions of Baron Bittly

Monsters from the primal expanse of the Drovidiin Wilds have been appearing without warning in the kingdom's heartland, somehow teleported hundreds of miles to rampage through towns and cities. After more than one skirmish with the beats, your party has ventured to the bordertown of Thimblewell on the edge of the wilds, seeking answers.

Adventure Hooks:

Though the party have heard whisperings of the beast attacks before, their firsthand exposure to the phenomenon comes when they hear screams and cries coming from the town's fancy playhouse. An acid spitting drake has somehow found its way inside the building during the middle of the performance and its rampage threatens to bring the house down.

Tasked with tracking down a crew of bandits that've been plundering local caravans, the party's raid of the outlaw's encampment is thrown into chaos when one of their targets breaks open an innocuous crate, pulls out a glowing glass canister and smashes it in the middle of the melee: unleashing a beast in a burst of blue light into an already chaotic final battle.

The party find a strange tension when they arrive in the town of Thimblewell. Though the settlement has a long history of being beset by monsters from the primeval wilderness it borders, there've been no attacks for the past several years and no one seems to want to talk about why. Eventually a disgruntled former guardsman points them in the direction of the local landholder, an amateur mage with a reputation for conducting strange experiments. He fails to mention that said mage has a defence system built into his manse, and that he's been expecting the party's arrival for some time.

Background: Irnett Bittley was never a mage of large talent, both because he was unable to summon up the showy displays of elemental mastery that would have earned him a living as a court wizard, and because his self important streak made him too proud to ever suffer suffer through an apprenticeship. He was a great mage, destined for great things, and the fact that others couldn't see that was their failing.

Tired of being challenged or denied by people who genuinely knew better, Bittley picked up stakes and went to the boonies seeking to find a pond small enough to consider him a big fish. He found it in Thimblewell, a little town sorely in need of a handymage, and he could have been happy and well liked there if the need to be great wasn't etched on his soul. Thimblewell had a monster problem, and while Bittley was no battlecaster he did have a knack for bindings and containment spells. If he managed to catch a monster by supprise while it was distracted by the local millitia he could shrink it down and hold it in stasis, effectively defeating the monster by kicking the can indefinitely down the road.

The townsfolk heaped praised upon him for his heroics, only to have their goodwill spat right back in their faces as Bittley started asking for increasingly steep "donations" to keep his enchantments in place, all but threatening to release the beasts again if his impromptu tax wasn't paid. Fast forward a couple of decades and Baron Bittley has become rich enough to buy himself a title and become Thimblewell's defacto ruler.

Still not content to be a backwoods landbarron, Bittley's latest scheme is to sell his stockpile of captured beasts one by one to unscrupulous individuals who are in need of a good monster: thieves in need of a distraction, poachers and collectors trafficking in rare specimens, nobles who'd prefer an untraceable and indiscriminate means of assassination. This enterprise is making Bittley even more rich, but with success comes paranoia, and we all know how dangerous a paranoid mage can be.

Challenges & Complications:

1: The drake was intended as a means of assassination, targeted at a countess and her heir attending the playhouse's performance in one of the box seats. As the party runs in to save the screaming commoners, they'll potentially be diverted by the countess's guards, intending to save their employer's life before anyone else's. Saving the noble might earn them a rich reward at the cost of many lives, but choosing to look after the common people will earn them the ire of the acid-scarred heir, who watched them save the rabble while his flesh burned and his mother was crushed to death under rubble.

2: After the party have defeated the bandits, they'll find three more of those arcane canisters left in the box, each containing its own miniaturized monster waiting to be unleashed. The caravan the bandits robbed was smuggling these beasts to a buyer with dangerous aims, meaning the caravan's owners now have good reason to want the party silenced. Do the party report their findings? Extort those who hired them at the cost of a knife in the back? Or do they just take their offbrand pokeballs and run, dreaming of the chaos they can cause.

3: Baron Bittley knows the party is coming for him thanks to his spies in town, he also knows he could never hope to take them in a fair fight. Thankfully he’s got access to magic, so he doesn’t need to fight fair, allowing them into his home only to catch them in a trap that will shrink them down to a few inches tall, whereafter it’s a simple matter of mage-handing them over into the basement bound dowry chest/prison he’s made for all those in town who’ve dissented to his rule over the years.

Thankfully the tiny townsfolk have been working on a jailbreak for some time now, having painstakingly sawed their way out of the box while their inattentive overlord’s been distracted domineering the world outside. The greatest hurdle to their escape has been the wild landscape of the junk fulled manor basement, filled with various pests that’ve become arcanely mutated from the leakage from the mage’s lab on the floor above. The party will need to engage in some borrowers esque traversal across the basement, up through the walls, and into the lab if they have any hope of reversing their predicament.

Artsource 1

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[awindinthelantern]

D&D encounter idea (for low levels):

A really ornery swan or goose with two heads. One head spits fire, the other spits poison. The bird has landed in a local pond and is harassing all the locals and preventing them from fishing.

[aaronsrpgs]

In Praise of Random Encounters

I'm in my "responding to frequently asked Reddit r/rpg questions" phase, so please allow me to defend the random encounter. This post is in response to everyone who goes, "Why do people use random encounters? They interrupt the flow of the story, and it doesn't make any sense to have something randomly show up and fight."

Did you know there was a Pokemon named after me?

In this post, I will argue against these strawmen, make a case for random encounters in certain games, and describe my favorite random encounter situations from my own games.

This disputation against random encounters can be broken up into three parts:

they interrupt what is already going on ("the story")

they are illogical

they're automatically a fight

I'm going to address these last to first.

Random encounters shouldn't jump right into fights. If used as intended, they come with an encounter distance, meaning sometimes you just see signs of the encounter, or you spot them from far away. And they should also come with what used to be called a reaction roll, which dictates how the encounter feels about the PCs. These were rolled on 2d6, which meant there was a bell curve that favored results in the 6-8 range, which were usually something like "wary" or "neutral."

Second, the logic of random encounters. If you're using them right, random encounters should make sense. They should only have a chance of happening in places where the encounters could be, and encounter tables ought to be chosen based on location. So you won't get a dire trout in a desert or whatever.

This last bit is the hardest one. If it feels like a random encounter would disrupt "your story," you're probably running a game whose underlying philosophies are opposed to random encounters, yes. It's probably also opposed to many other frameworks that were present in traditional/old-school rule sets. If your game has a pre-planned story or plot, if that plot requires a certain pace or order, and if the injection of outside elements would disrupt that plot, you probably shouldn't use random encounters.

(You also shouldn't use D&D or its cousins. You might also not want to have other players, since they can disrupt those plots. But that's just me being petty.)

A page of random encounter rules from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This is a shitty example. I promise it's easier than this.

So when SHOULD you use random encounters? Use them if the game you're running is attempting to simulate a world that has its own logic and background that is not dependent on the player characters. Random encounters help show that the world is in motion at all times and that people and creatures move about of their own volition. They don't show up when it's meaningful to the plot or the other characters; they wander. They're random.

Another key component of this style of gaming is that they usually consider story as something that emerges from or comes after play. "Remember how we tried to cross the raging river full of electric eels, and you dropped your sword, and I almost died, but we made it across? That was awesome." These things didn't happen because they were important plot points predicted by the DM; they are the results of rolls at the table, rolls that are honored in their immediacy and only made sense of after the fact. Does this mean that you risk having a disjointed mess from which no pleasing story can emerge? Yes! But you also risk having a story emerge that no one could have planned, that is equally surprising and pleasing to everyone at the table.

This emergent storytelling is probably the greatest joy of the random encounter. Don't approach the encounter with, "It doesn't make sense that a goblin would be here." Instead, adopt the attitude of, "Let's figure out why this gobllin would be here." (And while you're at it, use that same attitude toward books you read and movies you see.)

A related aside: in some play cultures, the DM is considered to be someone who plans everything out and slowly reveals bits of story as rewards to the other players. As a DM, this can feel really stagnant, and it can be a lot to keep track of, and there is far less joy of surprise. Using dice at the table to introduce new elements can bring some of that fun back to the DM.

Everything I've said so far is a synthesis of dozens of rulebooks and blog posts I've read across a decade of running games, so please allow me to introduce a final element: my own experience with the joy of random tables.

In 2014, when 5E was coming out to great demand on the backs of Stranger Things, Critical Roll, and The Adventure Zone, I started running a campaign for friends and coworkers. There was no developed play culture around 5E at the time, no cottage industry of third-party developers. So in running it, I was drawing on what I had been reading for years: old-school roleplaying and story games.

So I prepped my starting town (doing way more work that I would today), including random encounter tables for the area. And when the players were out searching for some ruins and getting lost west of town, I rolled a random encounter. It was some gnomes. All the gnomes here had escaped from a gnome hell for greed, so they weren't exactly kind. And their reaction roll was just south of neutral, so they were a little surly.

A bad screenshot of my "west of the town of Wall" encounter tables.

They led the players to the ruins and waited, trying to trap them inside after they'd been run down by the undead inside. But the players overcame the trap and told the gnomes off. (They didn't want to get in another fight after going through the ruins; more emergent storytelling.) So the gnomes ran off, but they would remember this.

Flash forward to a different session. In the main mega-dungeon under the town, the players were exploring a new area. Another random encounter: the devil of gnome hell! It was a giant mole with masses of earthworms for limbs, and it was searching for its escaped prisoners. It threatened to kill the PCs unless they gave it a magical item. So Pepper the elf gave up his winged sword, which he'd found in the aforementioned ruins. He loved that sword.

And here's where it all comes together. The gnomes were trying to settle the land west of town, but the humans had a fort there. The players were going to that fort to get some information about the faerie realms. How could I show this situation in a way that would, as succinctly as possible, illustrate the tension while giving the players a choice on who to join? Well, the gnomes would be attacking the fort. This normally wouldn't be much of a battle…but the vengeful gnome from the ruins had made a deal with the gnome devil for power. And now he was wielding Pepper's sword, using it to fly over the fort walls and attack.

Pepper was pissed! He wanted his sword back! The other players were more interested in figuring out a way to stop the ongoing conflict between gnomes and humans. And the gnomes were split between wanting to peacefully settle their new land and get revenge on the players for driving them off from the ruins. Who would prevail?

I hadn't planned a story, but I had created a situation a story was likely to emerge based on the players' actions and the results of the dice.

Conclusion

This isn't me saying this is the only way to play. It's not the only way I play. In a short one-shot or a tightly paced, emotional game, I would never use random encounters. But they can be fun! And they (and their associated suite of rules) can address some of the issues that lead to DM burnout and genre predictability.

If you find me in the wilderness, I will fight you.

[jkcorellia]

"scattered audio snippets providing players clues as to what happened at this facility" video game trope but it's repurposed Magic Mouth spells throughout an abandoned wizard tower that your DnD (or similar TTRPG) party is visiting (and expecting to be occupied). The original messages are partially overwritten by frantic, whispered updates on whatever Went Wrong Here

e.g. "Guardians of the tower, arise! Defend your master and his sanct--oh god it got through. It? Them? It's large, but I think there might be one or more handlers. It seems to have defenses against fire in particular. I think…oh shit. Shit!--who cross [so-and-so] will be utterly destroyed!"

near this particular Magic Mouth are several pulverized constructs. ahead is an ornate door, formerly Arcane Locked, now smashed through...

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

SHADAR KAI

VS DROW

First, Shadar Kai! They're former elves of the shadowfell, though now some half-living offshoot. Normal human height. They can see in the dark and teleport, turning all ghostly when they do so. This is the player kind, so don't have to deal with the depression aura of the monster manual version! And...that's all we learn of the PC version, so for once I'm actually glad for the MPMM's hatred for detail.

The average drow is a 5 foot (1.5 m) cursed elf that's cartoonishly evil to the point of parody. That's not actually innate, their goddess just personally has the good ones killed and tries to manipulate/torment them to be even more evil. So there are actually nice ones, I mean they used Drizzt as thier only example photo, but most drow that survive to adulthood are going to be sadistic and dominant. Primed and ready if you're into manipulation and being used! Or someone with a hell of a lot of trauma.

I'm figuring out how to make these look...decent, because some of these have too many artworks with background for me to comfortably do my usual basic photo editing.

[tabletopresources]

Environments by Maxime Desmettre

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