Burnt-down village - aftercare

[HoboKnight]

So, my campaign is nearing an end of a chapter. The final great battle will be PCs participating in a defense of Rural town (Taken from Mines of Phandelver). It will be mercenary group laying short night siege and a night raid to this settlement. About 150 mercenaries, longbows, fire arrows, most importantly - three small catapults, launching jars of burning oil into the settlement to have people running around + light up the targets.

PCs may or may not be successful, but if they are, there will be an aftermath - many houses in village will be burnt down, many people hurt, it is early fall, some supplies will be destroyed.

If our heroes (who will also get a level), survive, I want to flood them with needs of this village. Make them help villagers out, rebuild the community. (Btw, my players like this sort of quests).

I'd ask for help regarding these tasks - maybe less about tasks, but more about what is messed up in a village after such an event beyond lack of shelter, lack of supplies, wounded people and maybe disease spreading weeks after?

thanks :)

[col_impact]

So, my campaign is nearing an end of a chapter. The final great battle will be PCs participating in a defense of Rural town (Taken from Mines of Phandelver). It will be mercenary group laying short night siege and a night raid to this settlement. About 150 mercenaries, longbows, fire arrows, most importantly - three small catapults, launching jars of burning oil into the settlement to have people running around + light up the targets.

PCs may or may not be successful, but if they are, there will be an aftermath - many houses in village will be burnt down, many people hurt, it is early fall, some supplies will be destroyed.

If our heroes (who will also get a level), survive, I want to flood them with needs of this village. Make them help villagers out, rebuild the community. (Btw, my players like this sort of quests).

I'd ask for help regarding these tasks - maybe less about tasks, but more about what is messed up in a village after such an event beyond lack of shelter, lack of supplies, wounded people and maybe disease spreading weeks after?

thanks :)

Trauma. The villagers will be experiencing trauma.

[Sparky McDibben]

A lot of the scarcity you can create will be driven by how you play the mercs. I'd try to put the PCs on the horns of dilemmas, so no matter which choice they make, they're going to lose something.

For example, if the PCs catch some of the mercs in town, looting the granary, have one of the mercs chuck a torch into the granary while the rest are making off with food. Now the PCs have a problem: if they pursue the mercs, they could catch them, reduce enemy forces, and maybe loot them for items. But if they do that, the town's food supply is now burning.

You can apply this to the siege, too. The PCs can try to take out those catapults, but if they're not inside the wall when the attacks begin, it'll be darn near impossible for the townsfolk to hold off. Now you've got time pressure, too! And of course, if they don't take out the catapults, the town will be getting wrecked.

Moving on to your actual question, those quests will depend on what you did during the battle. If the granary was fired and nobody put it out, the town is now nearly out of food. The DMG says that D&D characters need at least one pound of food and one gallon of water per day. Let's assume 50 people survive. If we assume early autumn, and that the mercs burned the fields and stole the livestock, these people need enough food to get them through winter and into spring, when they can maybe forage for themselves. Assuming spring is about 150 days away, that's (50 people x 1 pound of food x 150 days) = 7,500 pounds of food they need. You might want to inflate that by 10% so the people here have some seeds to plant next spring, so you actually need 8,250 pounds of food.

Where do you get that much food? Well, some of it might be able to be found by hunting, but game gets real scarce in the winter, so they won't be able to survive on just that. You could send a message to other towns, pleading for support. If the other towns sell to your PCs at a fair price (which your PCs might be able to negotiate down, either with services rendered or just good rolls), that's about 1 cp per pound of wheat. So, 82 gp and 50 sp could solve your whole problem. My advice is to set it up so the other towns can alleviate but not solve the food crisis (maybe they could get half their food requirements from the other towns). Moreover, somebody's going to have to escort all that food through miles of merc-infested wilderness. Sounds like an adventure to me.

Beside that, the townsfolk need shelter and heat, which means lumber. You might have a similar set up to what I previously described, which someone going to visit the lumber merchant downriver, but I'd recommend having them try to cut down the trees themselves. That way you can set up some real interesting conflicts with the local druids, dryads, and other local fey.

You might also have the PCs help out with trauma counseling, as HoboKnight pointed out. This would be a great opportunity for the cleric player to get hit with some hard questions: "If the gods are good, why is my mommy dead?" I'd play that one right to the bone, as it were, and make it as painful as possible for the character to deal with those situations as possible.

Another opportunity involves dealing with the fallen. Fun exercise - flip through the Monster Manual and see how many things eat dead bodies, or arise from violent deaths. If those dead bodies go untended for more than a week, start having some ghosts, shadows, wraiths, spectres, etc., show up.

But the big daddy of possible adventure hooks? Going after the mercs to steal it all back. Your players might want revenge, they might want their stuff back, or they might want to free any captives taken by the mercs during their attack. Go nuts.

Most importantly, I'd set it up so they can't deal with all these situations before something explodes. It's like hot potato - there's only so many PCs and only so much they can do, so they've got to pick a problem and solve it, then take care of the fall out from the ones they didn't.

[Lupine]

Mcdibben’s got the right of it. The big needs for the townfolk will be food, water, shelter, and warmth (possibly clothes too)
As time goes on, tensions rise, and people may start killing each other to increase their rations. The PCs can hunt for their own food, and while doing so, will probably get plenty of water. The townsfolk won’t like the PCs having more supplies than them. The PCs won’t like feeling like they’ve got insufficient supplies. Tension rises.

Each need of the town deserves its own “quest” that involves some social interaction, and possibly some combat.

[J-H]

-Sanitation
-Shelter for people
-Shelter for livestock, including training animals to their new homes
-Messed up bee hives
-Roads, mud, and walking paths
-Finding/making new nails
-Stored food and medicine for people
-Repairing damage to well(s)
-Stored food for livestock
-Damaged or destroyed farming tools
-Inability to pay taxes (in kind) due in a few months - including diplomacy with the fuedal lord who no-showed and needs to give them assistance or a tax break
-Medical care including long-term care for the disabled
-Priority over who gets new houses or shelters first/last, and quality thereof
-Making new clothing (takes wool/cotton/linen and time)

[Spriteless]

Well, you've probably already put some thought into it. But I have my own too.

How bad are the village's food suplies damaged? Does anyone in the party have the survival skill, background abilities like the outlander's ability to find food for 10, or divine magic/mark of hospitality that can create food? Come up with rules for that. I'd say, if rules state you can feed 10 people, you can stretch it to 20 with rationing, given that none of the 20 are doing hard labor, myself. Otherwise, exhaustion penalties (https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Conditions#toc_16)may be in order.

So, there's a lack of walls, hmm? Any players have guild artisan background, otherwise have proficiency with construction tools or magic that can be handy such as move earth, fabricate, or unseen servant (cast as a ritual repeatedly all day for 6 laborers at the cost of 1)? Do y'all have tents? Do you think you could make some tents or blankets from the hides of animals hunted by the food gatherers? Phandalain is a growing town, so some townsfolk ought to be professional builders too. Looking at the map, I count 44 buildings, most of which are too big for a single casting of fabricate. Also, that requires materials.

If someone wants to make walls with move earth, well, OSHA says anything more than 2 feet of height to 3 feet of width is too unstable a slope for a trench. (Here is my source, search for slope (https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1926/1926.652).) Mind you, this is to prevent workers from being buried by earth not tested for how hard packed it is. If one is building upwards, one might be able to manage 3 feet of height for each 2 feet of width for stable town walls, might be worth it if being attacked again is a risk. Might be able to do even better if the ground is particularly stony, even 2 feet of height for 1 foot of width. Medieval earthenworks are not very impressive to players who have seen skyscrapers, or characters who have seen wizards' towers.

Hmm, is your Phandelver near the mines in the adventure? Shown the lil' Spectater a document of rightful ownership that makes it into a helpful guardian? Otherwise cleared out the monsters? That would be a better place for refugees than an open field, at least.

I would set a date for disease in my notes, maybe 20 days away. I would extend the date if the rebuilding party thinks to build latrines as well as roofs and walls, maybe 30 days instead. (Or, have an NPC suggest latrines as one of several buildings, and the party can choose to allocate or not allocate labor to digging them.) I would roll for weather, and each time it rains, and the townspeople don't at least have dry shelter, roll for the flu to start going around. If they hit the date and everyone is still huddled under a few shelters, it starts going around anyways. Tight quarters are a breeding ground for pestilence, after all. (But so much faster to build than the spacious buildings) The flu requires full rest an food to heal, and can also be cured with magic, but that's limited by spell slots and people will re-catch it if you don't set up a quarantine and SO MUCH WORK. You said your party likes the work though. Or the satisfaction of simulated work.

And everyone should know in the autumn, that winter is coming. That's deadline for getting people roofs and blankets, that makes food harder to get, and people more susceptible to disease. If the situation isn't good by then, is the party willing to stay by the village, and cast 'create food and water' every day so rations don't run out?

Trauma is a luxury most people can postpone when in survival mode. As long as rebuilding, one can focus on the now. But given time to stew and think about loss, from sickness or being cooped up, might give those without a support system a chance to fall to despair. Those single, able-bodied workers who came to the village to find their fortune are most likely to be doing the physical rebuilding and food gathering, but will there be hope at the end of these tasks?