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Flail_master
2013-03-07, 06:05 PM
Hey again guys,

I am running another instalment of my D&D the Sunday after next, and I intend to have them do fair bit of fighting to offset a fair bit of roleplay. Now, I sort of want to set it out in a similar fashion to a dungeon but not have them go into one necessarily. At least not underground.

The context to the whole thing will be (hopefully) that they are hunting down a guy who has information on someone they are looking for, and he also happens to be leading a group of slavers who have been causing trouble to a local city, and thus have been commissioned to stop them.

Should I have these guys set up in a camp? would that be too open for the players, as in too free so that they could jump ship too easily? or perhaps be unable to justify them not being surrounded.

I guess what I want is a 'room by room' feel without it being a straight up dungeon dealing with skill challenges and groups of enemies, without worrying about aggroing the whole bunch... maybe a castle with a more open feel to it? :smalleek:

gimme your ideas! And I would also appreciate interesting scenery ideas and interactable (it's a word shut up!)terrain and stuff!

Thanks,
Flail_Master :smallbiggrin:

Lorsa
2013-03-07, 06:14 PM
You already mentioned the ideas that comes to my mind. Maybe you could have a robin-hood type camp (in a forest) with small buildings scattered about to reduce both visibility and noise. Or a small worn-down castle ruin where some parts are still functional while others gets used by the low-ranking grunts. Maybe they are holed up in a large mansion with multiple floors and sound doesn't carry all that well more than a room or two? Maybe instead of trying to surround the players those alerted set up ambushes in the next rooms instead?

Rorrik
2013-03-07, 06:18 PM
In the past I've used canyons that form a sort of labyrinth. If the players want they can climb to a higher level of the labyrinth, but the NPCs know the lay of the land and it makes for fun ambushes and elevation issues.

I also once used a mischievous forest spirit to create a kind of hedge maze of trees, that could form a kind of dungeon, with players able to cut through with some effort if they need to get somewhere else. This one was fun because neither they nor the enemy knew the terrain.


Or a small worn-down castle ruin where some parts are still functional while others gets used by the low-ranking grunts.

Ruins can also be fun, I was thinking more overgrown and abandoned and used as a temporary refuge or a defense when the slavers realize they are being followed.

Slipperychicken
2013-03-07, 10:51 PM
They set up camp in some abandoned ruins of what one assumes to have been a town. Or an old Roman-style legion-camp (those things were kind of like towns) made of stone.

GungHo
2013-03-08, 09:03 AM
Depending on the style of your elves or other arboreal races, you could even have an abandoned series of tree-top structures, which are made all the more perilous because of rot.

Surfnerd
2013-03-08, 09:14 AM
You could do a body of water; lake, river, bay, or open ocean. Perhaps on a stretch no longer used for trade or overrun by wilderness. Have an old abandon keep, perhaps it was in construction when it was abandon. Keep tower on shore, small island with semi constructed keep proper on it.

Now you have a gatehouse removed from the main part of the castle. The other keep is used to load slaves onto a slaveship docked in the deep water beyond the island.

Players overcome gatehouse, acquire small row boats, assail the partially built main keep and then overtake the slave ship itself.

Now you have Gatehouse, water area, keep, and slave ship as all areas to expand and add rooms.

This also allows players to get creative, perhaps take the boats around the keep and assail the slave ship first. Which brings them into fast deep water, just throw in some skill rolls and depending on visibility some enemies.

Maybe they just steal the boats by night and row directly to the slave ship. That is fine, just have the guy they are after be in the camp during the night and just some sentries on the boat plus any crew that remained on board to sleep.

EDIT: On awareness level for the enemy. You could have a scale of awareness depending on the parties approach to overcoming the enemy. I'd break it up into the gatehouse area and the main keep/slaveship area. If the gatehouse reaches a certain level perhaps there are signal fires to notify the keep and vice versa if the players decide to skip the gatehouse and go to the keep first via the stolen boats idea.

Flail_master
2013-03-08, 02:58 PM
You could do a body of water; lake, river, bay, or open ocean. Perhaps on a stretch no longer used for trade or overrun by wilderness. Have an old abandon keep, perhaps it was in construction when it was abandon. Keep tower on shore, small island with semi constructed keep proper on it.

Now you have a gatehouse removed from the main part of the castle. The other keep is used to load slaves onto a slaveship docked in the deep water beyond the island.

Players overcome gatehouse, acquire small row boats, assail the partially built main keep and then overtake the slave ship itself.

Now you have Gatehouse, water area, keep, and slave ship as all areas to expand and add rooms.

This also allows players to get creative, perhaps take the boats around the keep and assail the slave ship first. Which brings them into fast deep water, just throw in some skill rolls and depending on visibility some enemies.

Maybe they just steal the boats by night and row directly to the slave ship. That is fine, just have the guy they are after be in the camp during the night and just some sentries on the boat plus any crew that remained on board to sleep.

EDIT: On awareness level for the enemy. You could have a scale of awareness depending on the parties approach to overcoming the enemy. I'd break it up into the gatehouse area and the main keep/slaveship area. If the gatehouse reaches a certain level perhaps there are signal fires to notify the keep and vice versa if the players decide to skip the gatehouse and go to the keep first via the stolen boats idea.

This... Yes.
And to everyone else, awesome :smallbiggrin: very glad for the help, gives me some ideas. I like it! Thanks guys gives me some options on how to approach the overall plan of the area, I think I'll deffo go for the keep/castle route, and maybe put some forestation around it for an initial challenge. I think I'll end up takin tidbits of all of this.

Since the Meta is taken care of (thanks again) what're your fave/best/ideas of hazards and such which aren't necessarily traps? like the standard pit trap, or poison darts so on and so on. I wore all of those thin already :smalltongue: