#bandit encounter

[geckcellentmaps]

A quick battlemap of a mountain bandit camp I used recently in my campaign. Boulders, cliffs, and red igneous rock protrusions make great cover, but there's no avoiding this pack of bandits waiting in the road.

commissions are open

[dailyadventureprompts]

Encounter: Tossup on the Tollroad

Artsource

Setup: The party are travelling either by themselves or as guards for some caravan, making their way along an old road widely known to have fallen into disrepair thanks to the local lord's mismanagement.

What a surprise then when the party approach an old fortified toll house and discover it garrisoned with troops in the lord's livery, who are now expecting them to pay exorbitant fees for the privilege of crossing into the lord's domain.

The toll collectors are beligerant and one or two even appear drunk. Not paying their toll ads days, maybe weeks to the party's journey, and crossing overland will not only be slow going, but dangerous, as monsters have been known to be creeping back into the region from the wilderness (again, due to the lord's mismanagement).

Challenges & Complications:

Plenty of folks call tollgates "highway robbery" but in this instance it's far more literal. The garrison are infact a group of bandits who have laid their hands on some of his soldier's uniforms, or fashioned crude imitations. The ones interacting with the party have mostly legitimate looking outfits, but those standing back have increasingly flimsy disguises which a perceptive character might notice.

The bandits demand to inspect packs and cargo for "contraband" as a means of seeing whether the party is worth robbing beyond paying their hiked up crossing fee. If one of them finds something good, they make a quick signal to the ones on the battlements which tells them to drop the portcullis after the travellers are through, cutting off their escape before launching their attack.

More than a couple merchants have fallen victim to the ruse already, and the party may notice the their wagons and pack animals tucked away, some of the former showing signs of struggle. The contents of these wagons are sitting inside the fortress waiting to be fenced, meaning a party that defeats the bandits may have stumbled into a small fortune of trade goods, as well as mementos, messages in need of delivery. My advice is to cram this treasure-drop full of quest hooks.

Selling the goods may get the party accused of banditry themselves, turning a potential payday into a brush with the law.

[2minutetabletop]

The Acid Pit

Patchwork Paul, a man consumed by unrelenting pain, seeks a twisted retribution against the world that abandoned him to his fate. ☣️

→ Read the article and download the included battle map here!

[moviestvpolls]

1977 Movies

[greyias]

My honor mode run has (surprisingly) not ended! Somehow my sparkly pretty bard girl is still alive! She survived the fight outside the grove, the skellie bellie fight to grab Withers (and successfully respec the party to my insane 3 rangers 1 bard setup), and they even got through the harpy fight and saved our little aspiring adventurer at the beach! I dipped my girl into one level of Wild Magic sorcerer, because quite frankly, things aren't blowing up enough on her to match her ttrpg counterpart.

Which is good because the Tides of Chaos is the only thing that saved Arabella (because no save scumming while Honor Mode is active! It's harrowing)

They've also broken all of their thieves toolkits on various crates around the grove to try and get enough money to fund all of the arrows for the rangers' quivers, so... that's about accurate.

We're about to now go back to Wither's house to help him deal with his bandit problem. Pray for us.

[landgraabbed]

her name is farama. redguard priest of mara. pacifist, though she did kill one kwama forager. she too started at thrisk hall but having started out with water walking she managed to head to fort frostmoth and out of the island. she's still alive hehe

[wolfman-al]

Three bandits my DnD group has faced in their first encounter.

[leftmysoulbythesideoftheroad]

i asked my sister and nephew today how much combat they would like to be in our game because i’m more story-focused and i was a little worried they would want more interesting fights. their responses

my sister: idk but not a lot. i’m a gnome bard named lamppost jr. i would like to not fight

my nephew: *shrug* can i seduce the monsters?

so i think we’re on the same wavelength here.

[bucketofchum]

"Is this yours?! Atumu, are you bleeding?"

"I did not want to cause us to lose time, Master..."

"Time, I can afford to lose, Atumu."

Dialogue only version above. Below, more descriptive...

At a certain point, King no longer heard Atumu's footsteps behind him. He turned around, only to find a pile of robes collapsed on the dune. King rushed over to his travel companion, calling out his name in alarm.

Atumu's breathing was light but haggard. He clutched shakily at his linen robes, which were soaked a deep crimson red and staining the sand.

It quickly became apparent to King that they had not left their encounter with the bandits unharmed.

"I did not want to cause us to lose time, Master" Atumu breathily mustered.

"Time, I can afford to lose, Atumu." You, I cannot, were the words left unspoken.

[dndsettingsinfo]

The Bandit's Pass [44×29] by Darkest Maps

[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

Artsource 2

[mobbothetrue]

Rules: Make a new post and post your latest line from your WIP and tag as many people as there are words.

Hough! Okay!!! Technically I’ve been tagged in this twice, by @sagethegremlin and by @neurotypical-sonic ! Uhm. Except. I’ve not been— okay so I have been writing but

I got thinking about a project that I did a little bit of two (2) years ago, right? And I was just reading what I had written down two years ago, and I realized I used the word ‘neck’ twice, and that bugged me, so I changed one of the words, so technically the last “”sentence”” I wrote is just. The word.

“[…]skin.”

Which isn’t fantastic for a last line, tag, I think, so I thought ‘oh okay I’ll just go to the thing I was writing before that’, except that’s my extremely self indulgent splatoon TMNT crossover that I may not even like. Publish. so I’m a little uncertain about sharing a snippet of it because it’s a very very new direction for me (putting, what is, essentially, an oc into an established -verse) and I’d like to nurture it a bit more before I share anything

So then I thought ‘okay okay I’ll go to the thing before that!’ but that’s just. stopgap. which is already published. So I’ve just been sitting on these tags and sweating

and I did think ‘oh i’ll just write something new and slap that on here :)’ but then I. Didn’t do that. And I am so so aware of the passage of time so!

Here is my line.

“Edelgard knows only that she is alive by the breath, wet, against her skin.”

for which, the only new word, the rest having been written two years ago, is skin, so. I will be tagging @lessrthanthree . Godspeed chief

[clockworklozenges]

Dungeons and Dragons is fun, because a character called Gasperre, Vice-Archivist of the Innumerate, a psychic wizard lord with 20 Intelligence can get ganked in less than three rounds of combat by the players, but two joke bandits named Gilbert and Sullivan with their three mates who have aluminium baseball bats and no discernable positive qualities can down half the party and take a real-world two and a half hours to finish off as they almost kill every party member.

[shinysheil]

Hmmm

Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

[daisyachain]

That reminds me, would love for Jonnit to get a recurring side piece. He has a new partner each arc to play with and there’s just a little something missing compared to a recurring character. Balanced out by him getting paired up with Gable or Orimar frequently enough that he doesn’t ever feel lonely.

[aparticularbandit]

The thing about writing a what if Tohru died and then Akito leaves and etc. fic is like.

Akito is gone, yeah? Separated from the Sohmas.

Means I need to bring in characters for Akito to interact with that aren't any of the canon characters in Furuba and aren't connected to any of the canon characters in Furuba.

Which means either I make a host of OCs or I pull from something else entirely.

And my mind is immediately reaching for Danganronpa and like Akito can not be in the vicinity of Junko ever. I have talked about how BAD that would be.

I'm debating having Akito get adopted by Chisa (for VA doubling funsies), but really Akito + Yui is probably where I'm heading.

Which means Tohru Dies gets combined with Yui Lives which like.

I'M GONNA WRITE A FIC THAT IS SO SELF-INDULGENT.