#RPG 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.

[theworldbrewery]

1d12 ways to complicate an encounter

A magic or mundane artifact generates an effect harmful to the PCs, but it is guarded by the monster's minions.

The encounter's setting starts to collapse during the battle, and all the combatants will need to escape.

A boss monster has a 'second form' that activates mid-way through the battle.

Traps are placed throughout the battlefield, and characters must be wary of them.

The PCs must complete a ritual while fending off attacks from the enemy.

The encounter area is a series of cliffs or platforms, forcing characters to jump around and risk falling, possibly into a pit, water, or lava.

There is a monster that uses the blink spell or tunneling to avoid attacks between its turns.

A minor enemy has the ability to summon or call for reinforcements every round.

There are three sides, not two, battling in this encounter.

A disastrous environmental effect, such as an avalanche, wildfire, or earthquake, occurs in the area, dealing damage and forcing the combatants apart.

An anti-magic pulse affects some areas of the battlefield periodically, suppressing spells and magical items when it is active.

The enemies are shockingly weak and easily defeated, but the PCs' goal isn't here -- the treasure chest is a mimic, or their princess is in another castle.

[tabletopresources]

Reward by Andrey Vasilchenko

Check out Tabletop Gaming Resources for more art, tips, and tools for your game!

[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]

You had fair warning, the sea monster was drawn to scale at the edge of ye olde map (John Garcia from The Third Book of DragonQuest: "Skills, Monsters, Adventure", SPI, 1980)

[master-of-47-dudes]

Oh! For those of you who like Lancer, I've made major progress in the campaign I'm writing: Kindness of strangers!

LRBT-III, otherwise known as Blanche to the locals. This sun-baked dustbowl of a planet has the high honor of being one of the few habitable terrestrial bodies that anyone has discovered in the Long Rim, and probably the only one that's actually any use to anyone. Luckily- or not so luckily, if you ask some people- it was Union that found it first. Well, about 70 years ago when they stumbled across this star system they got it in their heads that the Long Rim's days were numbered. There’s untold millions living out there scattered along the emptiest shipping lane in the known galaxy who'd need a way out once no one needed to pass them by, and by Christ the Buddha Union was gonna be there for them waiting with open arms.

All of that is background, though. You? You’re a bunch of mercenaries who got their hands on a couple of GMSes, decided to make your manna selling violence for pay. Worlds like Blanche don't take to colonies very well, so even two generations in there's still plenty of frontier out there being settled and railroad tracks being laid. The people out there struggle day by day to survive, and people like you are there to protect them from those who got sick of the hard life. Not everyone out there has the guts to stand up for the little guy- that's why you're called Lancers.

A setting and a campaign all in one, Kindness Of Strangers and its (eventual) follow-up Dancing With the Devil are a series of Wild West-themed 2-mission adventures intended to take players from 0-12 as they find themselves embroiled in the midst of a corporate conspiracy to overthrow the Union-backed government of the isolated colony of Blanche and a ploy to seize control over a nearly completed Blinkstation. All the while, a strange religious movement worshipping an eons-dead alien civilization grows ever more influential in the background...

This campaign tackles themes of colonialism, nationalism, corruption, and conflict between indigenous peoples, settlers, and immigrants, all in a world where well-meaning intentions have gone sour and the ghosts of the past have come back to haunt it.

Kindness of Strangers, Missions 1-3

Field Guide to LRBT-PN

Exotic Gear Documentation

Variant Frame Documentation

Kindness of Strangers Worldbuilding Short Stories

Kindness of Strangers LCP, Maps, and Assets

This latest update includes the first(ish) draft of Mission 3: The Field of Blue Children, allowing play of the first half of Act 2 and extending the LL range from 0-3. Mission 3 is heavily intrigue and RP focused, featuring a wide suite of characters, relationships, and locations in the Tourist town of Baugh- a thriving immigrant community situated on a soda lake.

The PCs have been hired to investigate a bomb threat at the newly completed Baugh Pumpworks, and water filtration and chemical processing facility that stands to end the water shortage and threatens corporate control over the colony's water supply- but is everything really as it seems? In the process, the PCs will go toe to toe with teenage gearheads, Pinkerton-expies, and a group of Sparri Espadas who got roped into this whole mess, and uncover the mystery behind the threat!

Also, there's a subaltern that talks like a pirate and catholicism.

Anyway this mission also includes a custom NPC Template (kind of, I don't know how to design the LCP for that but i did include instructions on how it works), several new reserves, and several custom sitreps!

So, check it out- I'm always looking for feedback.

[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.

[thatsbelievable]

[thirddoctor]

every rpg maker ever: what if... get this, it'll blow your mind... we had a brothel in our game. I'm a genius. $5000000 please

[flowersnax]

ASTRAL STIGMATA

[dailyadventureprompts]

Dungeon: Grave Portent

Tormented by nightmares of a darkened sarcophagus in the depths of an infamous cavern tomb, a nobleman sends the party to investigate the source of these visions fearing one of his rivals is using dark magic in an attempt to ruin him, possibly from beyond the grave.

Once known as the graven sepulcher the necropolis was dedicated to Illmater and Located in a cavern thought to be the final resting place of one of his saints. For more than a century it was the go-to place to be interred if you were a pious elder of the temple or someone wealthy who wanted their lifetime of sins forgotten beneath a sacred slab. Then a war and ensuing famine broke out, and the temple of Illmater took it upon themselves to house the swelling ranks of the dead. Once the paupers outnumbered the proud and the pious the cavern tomb lost much of it's prestige, coming to be known in the common day as "the bone pit"

Adventure Hooks:

Given it's remote location few venture to the old necropolis anymore, with the few countryfolk leaving their swaddled dead on the interior stairs for fear of braving its darkened depths. The party may be asked to carry one of these bodies in return for asking for directions, sworn to see it to its destination less they suffer the curse of the bereaved and recently dead. Along their way they'll be pestered by a Yeth hound who wants nothing more than to eat and despoil the body, simply for the wrongness of it all.

With its many hiding places and forboding reputation the necropolis is a great place to lay low, which explains the gang of outlaws currently hiding from the law in its upper reaches after robbing a tax wagon. If the party encounter them they'll pretend to be peaceful pilgrims, but they're intent on not sharing their takings and won't hesitate to add a few more bodies to the bonepit if necessary.

Apart from the usual shades and skeleton warriors, the necropolis is haunted by a Mohrg spawned from the corpse of a wealthy noblewoman who thought it a delicious irony that she could pay to be buried among saints and holyfolk despite her secret history of serial murder. Only awakening after the tomb's consecration decayed and with hazy recollections of who she was, the Mohrg will observe the party from the shadows, following them back to town if it can to become an enduring thorn in their side.

In the depths of the necropolis the party will find the sarcophagus open and waiting, just as the nobleman described it. Beside they will encounter a death priest of Nerull, god of unnamed graves, who will council them about the vision's meaning: The sarcophogus is the nobleman's destined end, and should he not come to rest within it soon a great peril will befall the land. Its up to them to deliver the bad news and convince the nobleman to make a selfless sacrifice, or perhaps contrive an unfortunate accident and make off with his corpse.

Artsource

[another-rpg-sideblog]

Holding Down the Fort - random events for the PC's strongholds.

From Dragon magazine #145 (May, 1989)

[theworldbrewery]

1d8 places to camp in the woods

Under the spreading limbs of a gigantic elm beside the road. Many a traveler has camped here, each adding their name to carvings in the elm’s bark. A small lean-to shed stands stocked with dry firewood, and a large fire-pit has been lined with stones over the years.

In a secluded glade, inhabited by a herd of whitetail deer. The deer are unusually docile and unafraid of people. At the center of the glade there is a single block of granite, carved into the shape of a rounded idol. At night, fireflies congregate around the idol.

Beside a babbling brook, with a mossy wooden footbridge passing over it. The brook is teeming with fish, and a forgotten fishing pole is still wedged between two slats in the bridge. After a heavy rain, the water rises to cover the footbridge.

Within a small, stone roadside sanctuary. The sanctuary’s statues and walls are crumbling with age and overgrown with ivy. A colony of feral cats has made it their home. The oldest, a one-eyed tuxedo cat, greets all who enter her domain.

The still-standing but abandoned barn beside the burned remnants of a woodcutter’s cabin. A crude wooden memorial shrine is built there to honor those who perished in the fire; a bundle of withered weeds is tucked into the shrine as an offering to any restless souls left behind.

On the shore of a placid lake. Mists drift gently across its surface, and in the dark of night, a quiet song rises from amidst the cattails. In the gray hours before daybreak, a common loon calls out mournfully and fixes any approaching creature with the accusing stare of its red eye.

In a clearing ringed with quaking aspens. When freezing-cold breezes blow through in the night, the aspen leaves rattle, reminding travelers of a hushed warning, but high above, the stars shine brighter than ever before. A watchful owl hoots throughout the evening, but gives the camp a wide berth.

At the base of a waterfall, which spills down a rocky cascade before vanishing into a pothole in the stone. The water does not appear to resurface. It seems a message has been carved into the stone above the pothole, but the message has been worn away by the water. The rocky campsite is split in two by a massive toppled spruce; within its hollow trunk is a nesting pine marten and her kits.

[tabletopresources]

Environments by Maxime Desmettre

Check out Tabletop Gaming Resources for more art, tips, and tools for your game!

[2minutetabletop]

The Lost Library by Spectralicy

It's Community Spotlight time! This time bringing long-forgotten lore to your tabletop. Can you navigate the maze, solve its puzzles, and escape this perilous tomb of tomes? 📚

→ Download them here!

[mircalla-tepez]

~Asenath Waite: Cult of Dagon~

Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's work we tried to go for a Cthulhu cultist themed session. Based on the only really remarkable (at least seemingly) female character by Lovecraft, Asenath Waite, I wanted to create a glamorous look with only one single detail that would seem rather offputing. To emphasize with the fish people theme, I dropped Asenath's huge, fishlike eyes and rather went for gills - except for the one picture where I tried to make my eyes pop as much as humanly possible... ^^° _ Model+MuA: Mircalla Tepez Foto+Edit: _soulcatcher_photography_ Neronomicon: Naruvien