The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Ruins of Blood and Sand – Dragon Empire Prep Session 5
Fri, 13 Dec 2024
Mike prepares the next session of his Tales of the Valiant Dragon Empire campaign. Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Podcast Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Midgard Worldbook Tales of the Valiant Obsidian for TTRPGs
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish here with another episode of Sly Flourish's Lazy GM Prep. In this weekly show, I go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game. In this case, I am running a Midgard campaign using Tales of the Valiant set in the realm of the Dragon Empire called Scourge of the Dragon Empire.
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so last week we had i i kind of opened up they were going to the to this the ruined city of kukatarma the characters had followed a caravan down to the south hijacked the caravan and established a new trade route a black market trade route for themselves to ride on top of the trade route of the dragon empire And that they kind of got that squared away and they let that go.
They really don't like the NPC. It's funny. They just decided they hate him. But there's a particular NPC and I'm trying to make it more likable and they just don't like him. So I guess they accept the fact that they don't like this NPC. But I don't think I'm ever going to have him betray them. He probably will end up dead.
And he seems to be in a state where he's going to be in the most dangerous position. And he kind of told him that he's like, you know, I'm the one that's actually going into the dragon empire with illicit goods one way or the other. And I'm going to be the one that will be the first one killed.
And, you know, you don't have to worry about being on the edge of all this stuff, but I'm going to be there. So they're kind of stuck with that. But then they said they picked up a quest to go to the ruined city of Kukatarma. And so they decided to go to Kukatarma. So they traveled to Kukatarma.
They found an abandoned druid village where a cursed druid who had been poisoned by the strange poison of a particular...
tribe of gnolls known as the black venom the black venom gnolls had corrupted the whole place and he tried to save it but in doing so ended up corrupting it even more and had these corrupted trends which they bought corrupted awakened trees and holy cow those awakened trees hit like freight trains this is probably i don't know if it's my number one criticism of tales of the valiant so far but one of my big criticisms of tales of the valiant so far is that monsters of a certain challenge rating
And I think it's basically like CR one to three hit really, really hard for their CR. And we're going to look at, I think they're down under, I think under animals, which is weird. Yeah. Awakened tree is under animals. That doesn't make a lot of sense. But the awakened tree is a CR two creature with 60 hit points. So that 30 hit points per CR and has one big hit.
That's plus six to hit for 22 damage, which means it's doing 11 damage per challenge rating at CR two, which is a lot. That's a lot of damage on top of being able to entangle and restrain with as a bonus action. There's a pretty easy fix for this, which is for CR 1-3 monsters in the Monster Vault, be prepared to bump them up one challenge rating.
So if you're going to run an Awakened Tree, you can simply think of it like it's a CR 3, and now it makes a lot more sense. Now, because a CR 3 is 20 hit points per CR, that's not so bad, and a 22 damage attack at CR 3 is pretty reasonable. So if you treat them as though they're one challenge rating higher than the listed one, you probably don't want to do it across the board.
I don't know that this is true for every single monster in here. But I do notice that some of these monsters, particularly, like I think that when you hit CR4 level monsters, we should, let's go look at a CR4 monster while we're around here. So we have creatures by challenge rating. And we will look at a CR4 monster. Well, look at like a straightforward, like a, a chewel, right?
A chewel is a really pretty straightforward, like punches you punch you in the face kind of monster. Where is the chewel? That's funny. The chewel, it doesn't look like it's bookmarked, right? I don't know. Weird. So we have a Chewle. Chewle is CR4. 80 hit points, so that's 20 hit points per CR. That makes sense, right? Again, we get like how many hit points per CR?
20 hit points per CR is pretty normal. Makes two pincer attacks, plus six to hit, 17 damage each. That's 34 damage. Do I have that right? It's about 34 damage and a paralyzing tentacle bonus action, which doesn't do any damage. So the maximum damage that this guy can do is 34 damage at CR4. That's reasonable, right? Below that, what is 34 divided by 4? It's 8.5. So it's high.
Like 7 is kind of my benchmark, right? If a monster is doing 7 damage per CR, I feel like it's doing a pretty decent job at that damage. And it looks like, I mean, I picked one. It's a sample size of one. So I haven't looked at all of the challenge ratings of all CR4s. But I think that CR1 to 3s, let's look at a 3.
Because I think like I looked at veterans and some veterans and some other monsters at higher ones. So we could do a bearded devil. We'll look at a bearded devil, the knight, and the veteran. Like knights and veterans. We'll look at the knights and veterans. So we have NPCs and we go to knight. And we'll look at the veteran as well.
So the knight is CR3, 68 hit points, so a little higher than our 20 hit point per CR amount. Multitech makes three greatsword attacks or four javelin attacks. The greatsword does 10 damage, so it's doing 30 damage at CR3. That's a little on the high side. That's not crazy. Like over 10 is really high. This is right at 10. This is still pretty dangerous.
You could probably treat this as a CR4 and you'd be okay. I think the veteran also, if I recall, because a veteran is one of my like most used stat blocks. I use veterans all the time. CR3 is actually a really good challenge rating for a monster because you can use them as bosses at low levels, elites at low-medium levels, regular monsters at mid-levels, and then minions at high levels.
And they can cover a huge range of challenges. You can throw them up against characters of a lot of levels and still have veterans be a viable sort. So 68 is a little high again. I mean, these look pretty straight. I think that their monsters are consistent when I look at them. I think they have consistent math across them. Two long sword attacks and two short sword attacks.
Long sword is seven because they're not doing two-handed because if they do two-handed, they can't make short sword attacks. Three longsword attacks, so they could do 8, 16, 24 damage at CR3, but we're going to do the most damage, which is 14 and 12, which is 26. And they can knock somebody prone, and they can parry, but they don't do extra damage. So that is, what did we say? I already forgot.
So 14 damage on the longsword attacks and 12 damage. So that's 26 damage at CR3. So CR3 is pretty reasonable, right? Like CR3, you might not have to bump the two. I think this guy would probably be a little weak as a CR4. So I think it's maybe just CRs, 1s, and 2s. Boy, am I already breaking away from what we were talking about. The Cult Fanatic is a CR2, and this is where you look at it.
CR2, 60 hit points, 30 hit points per CR. makes two sacrificial dagger or unholy bolt attacks. The unholy bolt is 10 damage, so it does 20 damage per CR with unholy bolt. Sacrificial dagger is 11 damage, four slashing plus seven fire. And if they're stunned or unconscious or prone, they take extra damage. So they could even do more than this, but we'll assume they don't.
That's still 22 points of damage at CR2. These cult fanatics, you could probably treat as CR3 and you'd be better off. And then they look, their Unholy Brand gives them advantage, I think. See a target Unholy Brand and start. While the creature is branded, fiends and cultists have advantage. That would include the cultist. Has advantage on attack rolls against it.
So that means it's going to hit even more. So I would... So my worry is that CR ones and twos, and now I've run a few of these and I've seen it, that CR ones and twos definitely hit a little, in my opinion, too hard for their challenge rating, even when you're all the rest of it is all Tales of the Valiant.
There's recognition if you read the design of Tales of the Valiant that, yes, our monsters hit harder because our characters are more robust, but they don't really have more hit points and they can still drop. And we were having characters that were getting dropped with a single shot fighting those awakened trees. So that was an experience that I have now experienced myself and seen in play.
And my recommendation is be careful with the CR1s and 2s and don't be afraid to consider them one CR higher than they are if you're doing any kind of CR math. You might think of a saber, here's a saber-toothed tiger as a CR2, 63 hit points. Again, that hit point would be fine for a CR3. It pounds, it can knock prone, multi-attack a bite and a claw. The bite is nine, the claw is nine.
So that's 18 damage at CR two. That's not outrageous. So again, that's why I'm saying you probably don't want to always treat them one CR higher, but you want to take a look at them. You want to be careful with your CR ones and twos of the monster rolls. That's probably, that's one thing I've noticed since the first time that I've had to worry about monsters in the other direction.
That's actually not quite true. I've had to worry about them in CR one halves in vanilla 5e were pretty dangerous too. If you look and we laugh about seahorses, the giant seahorses will kick the crap out of you. They did crazy amounts of damage per their challenge rating. So something to consider. But let's take a look. We're going to switch over to Obsidian now. And we're going to take a look.
This was last week's notes. This is the notes we had. So we had Bradek, who is their connection. I had him talking about being freedom and what life is like under the Morza. It didn't really turn the characters. They were like, I don't know if I trust you. They still think like this guy's going to betray us. I don't think I'm going to have to betray them.
So they had their thoughts with Bradick and Varrican and Silverblade, who are all the people that are running their caravan. They... I can't spell. Silverblade... Let's do reader mode. I'll turn off source mode. There we go. So it's still editable, but it's now, it looks like Markdown or the Markdown is rendered. So they talked to the Brady, Verican and Silverblade. Then they headed to Kukatar.
And on their way to Kukatar, they faced the, the Druid village. They killed the Druid. The Druid was like getting converted by stuff, realized that he was doing terrible things and asked to die. They tried to heal him, but couldn't. So they killed him instead. Then they met the priests of Hume and the priests of Hume gave them,
quest and told them about the area of kooka tarma so i have my map of kooka tarma and they met i actually have a couple of other areas that i should probably draw on this map when i when i mess around with my hand drawn one i'd love to throw one more dungeon in here I showed where the blood mages are that there, we have, we have multiple factions here. We have blood mages.
We have the Selkets, Selkets sting. They are, uh, what are they called? The blood mages of something. Great thirsters are going to be a fun monster. Oh, the Sanguine, because I got them from my Demon Cults and Secret Societies book, which I love. And it's unfortunately out of print. Sanguine Path. So they're blood mages of the Sanguine Path are one of the factions.
Selkett Sting, another cult, is another faction in here. We have the Black Venom Gnolls, which are gnoll slavers that are operating out of the area. Those are three main villainous factions. And then we have the Priests of Hume who are there. And so I have kind of four factions operating around Kukatar, which works well. In fact, that would be a good secret for our next one.
So I'm going to create a new session notes. I am using Obsidian to do my session notes stuff. If you want to learn more about how I use Obsidian for my session prep, you can find out more by following the link in the show notes. So I have my Dragon Empire template. I have, let's see, a few of the characters are not there today. Cal is not there today. And I think, I always get Amavin and Rowan.
I think Amavin is there, but Rowan is not. I think Rowan is our dwarven friend, but I want to be sure. We're going to go to characters here. And we have Rowan. Where's Rowan? Rowan is the dwarf fighter. So Rowan is not there, but Amavin is there. Two of my friends are at PAX this weekend. So we got four characters today. So we're going to have something happen.
So first we'll go through, let's go through in order. Let's do the steps the way we meant to do the steps, which is first the characters. The characters are Amavin. Amavin is a rogue spy who used to work for the dragon empire and no longer works for the, for the dragon empire. I got the wrong one. So Cal is here. Gaudenzia is not. Cal is a druid. Is she a druid? Do I have that right?
I can't remember. Take a look at my characters. Yeah, Elf Druid Cottage Homesteader, whose mother is Orthania the Darkbloom. So Cal, and this is where you can immediately start to like tie secrets in. Cal, understand, and we're just going to drop like a couple of like, you know, tiny little things here that can tie the character to the session. Understands the fiendish nature of Black Venom.
I'll just say of the Black Venom. So Kal is a druid, understands the nature of the place, can also probably tell another secret is that like Kukatarma was ravaged by the blood magic of the Kandrians. What was their name? The people, yeah, the Kandaharians who used it to defend themselves against the dragon empire. So that's a couple of things that Cal could probably connect to.
Amavin is our rogue. And Amavin is a cosmopolitan criminal spy, raises an orphan for the dragon empire. So we could have Amavin remembers the fall of the Kandaharians and their use of unholy magic. We'll go with that. Ateo is our Mechanist. Mechanist being one of the new classes available in Tales of the Valiant.
And Sidrian, appointed partisan from the Seven Cities area, works alongside Master Kiprek, got the ability to turn non-magical armor into mystic metal. I think a good hook for Mateo is can feel the presence of the red portal. So that's a secret. So this is when we're tying direct secrets to characters, right? We're saying this character can probably learn this thing in this game. It's a good way.
Normally we don't choose a source for the secret, right? We're pretty careful about not choosing the source. But there is one, and that's because we don't want the characters to not discover something. But here's a dirty trick that just sort of occurred to me. You're discovering things while I'm discovering things.
And the discovery is there is one source for secrets you can guarantee, and that's the characters. If I know that these players are going to be here and I know these characters are going to be at the table, I know that those sources of those secrets would be available. These are things the characters might just know.
Then tying it to a character is not so bad because the character is a lot more likely to be there. than for some other event to be there. One of the reasons why we abstract secrets from how they are discovered is because you don't necessarily know how the characters are going to go through an adventure. You don't know what they're going to discover and you don't want to bury your leads.
Justin Alexander talks about the three clue rule where he says, anytime you have a vital piece of information,
put it in three separate places so that they're likely to run into them my version of that is instead of worrying about coming up with three clues you have only one clue but you don't tie it to anything and that way whether the players pick up a sword and learn something from a sword they talk to an npc they read a a tumbleweed with a note is stuck and they read the note and they learn something you know they can learn from all the spirits they have dreams whatever however they discover it they can always learn the clues that are vital for them to move forward
So, so that one, but, but an interesting one about tying clues to their sources, if you tie them to the characters, you're pretty good because the characters are the characters. They are the ones that are there. So that's probably the one time when you can tie a secret to a character and it works really well. Tolstoy is of the stringent anti, anti dragon empire person wizard.
I think it's probably more likely that Tolstoy can feel the presence of the, of the red portal. So I think Mateo can understand the magical mechanics of the puzzle box. I'll cut words from that. Understands the puzzle box. So yeah, so now I've got some good secrets. So along the way, they are right now, they snuck down to the, they snuck down to the gnoll camp, I think.
Let's see, I've got a map for that here. Let's take a look. Here we are. So this is the camp. They're kind of outside the camp right now, and something's going to happen. So let's see. What could go on? So the situation in the camp is that we could have two escaped slaves run by. And one of them is killed by a black venom. Now this, yeah. So I think I like this one.
So two, two slaves escape, by the way, just a trigger warning here. I am talking about slavery. I'm talking about very villainous creatures, uh, enslaving humanoids. I have, I warned my players about it last week during week. I, you know, I mean, even if you, this is, I think here's another tip. You want another tip? I'm giving, I'm packing out the tips today.
I got my tip about monster vault monsters being a little too hard. I got my tip about tying secrets to characters. And here's another tip about doing like session based session zeros. So during my session zero, we have a safety tools discussion that we bring up and my players and I have played now for years. So they're aware of things like pause for a minute and everything else.
I still remind them at the beginning of every campaign. I think it's good habit for me.
and i explain what kind of content is going to be in the campaign and what kind of content isn't and that's their opportunity i really don't want to have x in there if they don't want to have x in there they have brought things up that they don't want to have and that's fine but there's no reason you can't do in the middle of a campaign too and even though i had talked about the fact that there is like definite like classism and some racism on the villain side here i i think i had mentioned slavery as a as a as a villainous activity as well
But I wanted to reiterate because like now we're actually going to be doing it. And so I mentioned to the players, hey, this is going to be here, you know, and it's only on the villain side. There are no good guy slavers in this area. And so, you know, and they were like, yep, all good. And that's, you know, super fast conversation. Everybody's on the same page. We all know where we go.
We know what the boundaries are of that topic and everything works out fine. So two slaves escape one shot with a black venom knoll with a black venom arrow and dies. The other escapes. Two knolls come after the escaped slave. This is my, here's a dirty, you're getting all the good tricks today. Another dirty trick is the, what I call the two bandits in the woods.
One thing that I really love to do because it has, it has lots of different possible ways to deal with it. It gives a lot of agency for the players to decide what they're going to do. And that is this idea of two bandits in the woods and two bandits in the woods, or it doesn't matter what character levels you've got or what power they are.
Uh, bandits in general are pretty low challenge rating, not very hard creatures and yet can be dangerous because they can run an alert everybody else. And so when you have kind of two bandits in the woods, those bandits can be doing lots of different things. They could be talking about secrets and clues, like they could be talking about what's going on in the camp.
They could be talking about like, oh, I really hate this guy. And this guy also really hates this guy. And then you can like learn about what's going on in the camp. So the characters could learn a lot of stuff. They can sneak up on them. They can try to convince them of things. They can kill them. They can bypass them. There's lots of different ways to interact with the two bandits in the woods.
It's not a challenging encounter from a combat perspective, except it's got that built in. We've got to stop them before they run and alert everybody else factor. So it's got a really good like, you know, tension point that isn't just, oh, they're hard and could hit us with stuff. So I really like that encounter type. And this one works fine where two slaves escape.
One is shot with a poison arrow and dies. The players see that happen. They see the other slave goes running off and they see two gnolls, you know, chasing two black venom gnolls that are chasing the last one. And they have an opportunity to interact. And that gives them a chance to meet the escaped slave. It gives them a chance to see what's going on with the gnolls.
They can let it be a distraction. They can do anything that they want. So it's just a situation that I've thrown up that works well. So we have a two escape slaves, then the infiltration of the ruins of sand and blood. And their goal here is probably to disrupt, you know, I can probably just add this right here, goal, disrupt the gnolls and free the slaves. I think that's really their goal.
They're not really going to learn much about the puzzle box here. But that's still going to be piled into Secrets and Clues because that's kind of the thing that we want to get to next. But this part alone might take up the whole session. So what we do want to have, though, is next we're going to have choices. Like when they're done with this, where do they want to go?
And if we go back to our Kukatarma map, they could travel to Ziggurat of Thoth Hermes, confront the Blood Mages, travel to the Pit of Unending Thirst. I want to think about, one of the things I want to think about is why they want to go to all three of these places. Like each one of these needs to have a good reason why they want to head there. For each of these locations, I want to have a goal.
And I'm going to start with them and we might fix them. So what's in the Ziggurat of Thoth Hermes is discover the Red Portal. And going to confront the Blood Mages at the Sanguine Path...
the i mean what's the goal there stop the blood mages i don't know why they would need to necessarily go there and the pit of unend pith the pit of unending thirst we're just going to remove the things here we just have the locations Make our notes a little tidier. Pit of unending thirst is recover the puzzle cube.
So a question that I've got is, do they need to do all of, do we want them to have to do all of these things or at least two of these things? And I don't think they necessarily need to confront the blood mages. And I think it's okay if that's sort of optional. The blood mages might have more information about how everything works. But they don't necessarily need to do that.
So I don't know if we're going to make that any kind of requirement. But I think one thing is that the Puzzle Cube is in the Pit of Unending Thirst and the Red Portal is in the Ziggurat. So they could clear their way to the Red Portal. and realize that they cannot activate it because they don't have the puzzle box. And it won't be filled with monsters when they come back.
So the work that they do to clear out everything to the red portal will work fine. I think that that's a good way to go for those potential options. But secrets and clues wise. So I think that that feels like I've got at least a loose idea of the areas that they can go to next without necessarily having to build those all out because I don't know that they'll be going.
I mean, I guess at least two of those are probably going to go to. And I can always change my mind. They could always get to the ziggurat of Thoth Hermes and get down there and the puzzle cube is already there and they get the puzzle cube and use it as a key to open up the red portal.
But if I want to make it longer, I can have the puzzle cube actually in two pieces and they have to require both pieces. That could be another way too. So if I decide that I want them to go through more stuff, we can, otherwise we don't have to. So we'll see. We'll play that by ear. That's what I call the movable MacGuffin. Here's another tip for you. And some people hate this tip.
Some people really don't like how this works. And it's sort of like the man behind the curtain kind of issue. You get to decide the pacing of your session and of your adventure and of your campaign, and you can decide if you want to shorten it or elongate it, depending on how it feels. Does this feel like it's fun? Are we getting in the fun direction? Are players enjoying it or not?
Do you want to do more there? Do they feel like they're getting bored and they really want to go back and do other stuff? And the move of a MacGuffin is a way to do that, which is if you have a MacGuffin in this case, I have like this puzzle. So the whole thing is there's a red portal beneath the ziggurat of thought Hermes. If they get access to it, they could use it as part of their trade route.
They could actually move goods through the ruins here of, of Kuka Tarma and it will speed things up significantly for moving and moving stuff to and from the area and gives them more, more time and everything like that. It could, it could work out really well for them. I don't think they figured that out yet. In order to activate the red portal, though, they need a puzzle cube.
And there is a goblin mechanist who has acquired the puzzle cube. He's got part of it, and he wanted to go try to use it and activate it. They don't know this goblin yet. All they know is that Selkett Sting, the assassin group, is going after him because they were the ones that used to hold this cube, and he stole it from them and moved here. So that's part of the plot.
But the main thing is, like, from the adventure standpoint, is the characters get a hold of the puzzle cube, they use the puzzle cube to open the portal, and they've got the portal. The deal is, though, I can actually make the acquiring the puzzle cube as easy or as hard as I want.
So if they need the puzzle cube in order to activate the portal, it could be as easy as once you get to the portal, the goblin's already there with the puzzle cube and he's fighting off some guys. And if you save them, you get the puzzle cube and you can activate the portal. That means they only have to go to one place. They go through it and then they're done.
Or I could say, well, the puzzle cube isn't there. The puzzle cube is actually in the pit of unending thirst and you have to go down and crawl this dungeon and get it. And then once you've got it, go back out and go back to the other one and crawl through that dungeon, then use it.
Or I can split it in half so that the goblin has half of a puzzle cube, but is seeking out the other half, which I think is kind of more interesting that he's already got part of it because that's the part he stole from Selkett's thing. And there's another part of it that's in the pit of unending thirst. He went down there to go get it.
And the characters have to go down there, make sure he doesn't die and get and get the puzzle cube as well. And they also want to know, like, what is this thing about? So I can move the MacGuffin around in order to make the pacing of the story of the game. And I can even do so from the standpoint of what's happening in the world, which is where is the goblin right now? What's he doing?
How far has he gotten? Did he manage to get the other puzzle cube? What did he do? I can change that up depending on, you know, how I feel about it or even roll some dice, right? I could make it completely stochastic and roll a die and figure it out. So that's like my ability to kind of change this up and either make it faster or slower depending on how I feel.
I don't think there's a problem with that, but some people hate that because they feel like that means you're manipulating the entire game and that there's really no agency on the part of the characters to do anything. I don't think that's really true. And frankly, having run it that way for my players and my players are all very smart folks. They know what I'm doing and they think it works fine.
Right. They're very happy with it. So I think it's good. But there's a lot of strong opinions on it. So beneath secrets and clues, I'm going to drop them in because I've got them on my head. So beneath the ziggurat, beneath the ziggurat of Thoth Hermes is a portal, is a red portal missing a key. The puzzle box is a key. The puzzle box. Why did that not open up a new? There we go.
The puzzle box, I just did a pie. The puzzle box is in two parts. One part held by the goblin. I don't remember his name. I'll have to get his name in a sec. The other part lies beneath, lies in the depths of the pit of unending. We don't have to say in the depths. It lies in the pit of unending.
thirst the puzzle box also contains or imprisons a demon bound by the kandahari and kandrians can kandirians to fight dragons in the dragons of the empire because they have a demon on their side i don't know I love having bad guy or like sinister creatures that are actually on the side of the characters. I have it in all my games.
That to me is like a fun moral quandary of do we ally with a demon who's hideously dangerous in order to use it against the dragons. So those are some things about the Blood Mages. The Sanguine Path seeks the puzzle box to unbind this demon so it can serve them. They also seek forbidden texts held in the Pit of Unending. Who is Thoth Hermes? Let's take a quick look at the game.
67.
We're gonna go backwards to get to the gods section. Thoth Hermes, god of knowledge and learning, the wise. So we grab this and we're going to paste that into my notes. A patron of scholars and thieves. That's interesting. And symbol is a feather. Green and white feather with green ink. A white quill, feather quill. All right.
So we've got something about Thoth Hermes, but I think I also want to throw in, so we have some sinister gods. And I think the sinister God that we're going to go to is our good friend Varduzain. And in particular, the Varduzain is, we're going to have Lord of Unending Thirst. And what do we want to know about the Lord? Let's see. Is there any
So, like, I think I've only had one player who really delved deep with Varduzain. And so, like, I just ran Empire of the Ghouls. I finished a two-year campaign of Empire of the Ghouls. So I want to focus on this thirst. Was worshipped by Kandaharians, Kandirians. Sought. And I think we're going to switch genders. The Lord of Unending Thirst. Who sought the Lord's connection to blood.
and hunger as a source of magical power. A symbol, we can use the symbol of a purple worm with tentacle tongues of skulls. So a little modification of the symbol of Varduzain. So that's good. Do we have any other gods and things that we want to dive into here? Oh, the Venom Lord, I think is one of the gods. I actually, I think it might be in the Southlands book. Let me pull up Southlands.
and i think there is a gods let's go to the gods of the southlands and there was like a there was a god of vermin like a god of i think there was a a god of poison i think i pulled it up last time too that one's cool digi the serpent god This book's got a ton. Southland's book is really, really good. There's our friend Thoth Hermes. So there's a posset. Arbriak. So our gnolls. Let's see.
The black worship Arbriak. The prince of swarms. I like that. I like those domains there. Supreme general of the meat raids. That's fun. Symbol for Aubreyac is an eye with wings, with insect wings, surrounded by insect wings. So that's fun. For funsies, we're going to, I think that's page 250. That looks like 250.
And I'll tell you, the page numbers on Southlands are really hard to read, but it helps to put page numbers down. I wish I'd done this for the other ones. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I've got eight secrets so far and 10 minutes left for my game prep here. Let's return back to our obsidian notes.
So any, what are some other things that they could learn while they're at the gnoll, the black venom slavers? So we already know, and I already have some secrets because I tied them to here. The black venom is actually fiendish in nature. It's not, it is not purely venomous. It is actually fiendish in nature and transforms, can transform its victims.
And the black venom gnolls actually ingest this stuff and that makes them kind of kooky. We could have the sanguine path gave the black venom gnolls rituals to strengthen their concoctions and control their slaves in return for forbidden text they acquire. That's fun. What else? I think this is a pretty straightforward. The black venom gnolls are conscripted. And which one of the dragons is it?
We're going to go back to our Midgard world book. We've got to go to our dragon empire section. One thing I both enjoy about this campaign, but is also take some work is the richness of the lore, right? With the nine dragons that are ruling over the area, there's a lot of lore.
And the idea that like the characters are having and the players are having trouble getting their hands around all of it is okay, I think. Cause it gives them the opportunity to learn things and pick them up.
Like they're not, you know, I, I, I can sense there's like an edge of frustration and like recognizing the three different dragon rules and they get their hands around and then they feel good about it. And it's okay to have it like be complicated as long as they don't feel frustrated by like, Oh, I don't really have any idea what's going on. They give up.
They want to be continually learning, you know, the interactions of these things. So we have Ibalan the illustrious is one of the three dragons. And I think as Parsis the hidden is the other one, but then there's another one. I don't think it's Glauvisus. I think I skipped it. It's not Maharat. It's not Sadara. I think it's one of the first ones. Adashah. So Adashah of the burning sands.
These ones conscripted by agents of Adashah of the burning sands of, and the, the, the area of Gizmiri. And if we look at our map of the area, let's go back to dragon empire. There we go. This is our area. The characters are operating out of 440 fingers here, and Gizmiri is directly south of them. Ashadar is directly north of them in B'tech. And then Mazar is off to the west.
They're in Kukatarma, which is clearly in Gizmiri territory. And so it is agents of the Gizmiri, agents of Adisha, who is operating out of this that is trying to find treasure on behalf of the Dragon Empire. And they are of Tamarli. So let's see, conscripted by Tamarli of Adasha. So nobility of Adasha, I guess, or the Ormanli, the scaled lords of Adasha. So they know who's operating here.
That's good for secrets. Fantastic locations. I've got, I mean, there's like three. The Ruins of Sand and Blood. I'll list them here. There is the Pit of Unending Thirst and the Ziggurat of Thoth Hermes and the Unholy Shrine of the Sanguine Path. So there's a handful of locations here. So notable NPCs. So we can start off by having the prisoner, the one slave that is escaping.
We will just quickly roll up a random name for this guy. Tantalos Siege Kiss. Let's see. An elf. So Tantalos. And let's get a better name. North River. The Elf Escapee. We have the Goblin, who I think we had last time. And that one, we're going to look at our notes from last time, because I can probably grab some. Look at all these notable NPCs I had.
Grab a handful of these guys and bring them over and see what we've got. So I don't need Silverblade or Braydeck or Halfspear. Robin Stormwise is the Priest of Hewn. I like this. So these are all good. Those NPCs. I just stole them right from my last week's notes. But Robin Stormwise, Priest of Hewn. Kara Duststalker, a Selkett Sting Assassin. Reddius Doomcaster, the Sanguine Path Mage.
Gravash Blacksting, Abriak Null Slave Lord. Eriz Dawngaze is the Half-Dragon Akanji Commander. And Silvergaze, a Goblin Sage of Hewn. Those are good. Monsters, we have gnolls. We can always do the good old hyenas. We have black venom hyenas. So we can bring some of that old gnoll lore that gnolls are actually from like tainted hyena blood or tainted hyena meat. We can put that in here.
I want to also have, let's see, we have skeletons, of course, that wander about. We have specters that wander about. We have Selkett Sting assassins, scouts, spies. We have Sanguine Path cultists and fanatics. We have Black Venom gnolls. I already have the Black Venom gnolls are already on this list. This is like sort of like a random, almost a random encounter table.
In fact, I could make it instead of a bullet list. We'll make it a rolly, an ordered list. And that way I can roll on it if I want to. And we can roll other monsters too. Like, you know, I think that's good for now. And I'm pulled the monsters right out of the monster vault. So we're set there. Treasure wise, I'm going to grab a one to four treasure parcel. This looks pretty cool.
So we've got some copper, some silver, some gold, some sapphires. Dark elven set of gold buttons. That's interesting. Undead silver and topaz crown. We'll just make that elven set of gold buttons. Undead silver and topaz crown. Potions of healing. We'll give more than... Give a couple of those. Dust of choking and sneezing. And a plus one infernal studded leather armor. What could this armor do?
So it's studded leather armor. Plus one. What could it do? Is there... I'd like to throw like a spell on it. Why don't we? So I'm going to move over to our list of... Go to the player's guide and go to spellcasting and spell lists.
and at this level we probably don't want something too strong but i like the idea of like an infernal thing and it could even be i would like to have something to do with insects and plagues and things like that that would kind of be neat go to the druid list because it could be like a druid so that those are arcane divine we'll go to the primal primal sets here We could have it do poison spray.
So they like an easy one would be like the armor can do the poison spray cantrip. So whoever's wearing it can do poison spray right on their own. I think poison spray is a DC. So it'd be like a DC 13. It's not the most powerful poison spray. I could use their, let's see, could it use the primary ability of the character? Because if they're like dex based, that wouldn't really work.
So it's better to give it a fixed DC. So we could have, I think like plus five to hit or 13 DC would keep that armor at like basically that low tier approach. But we could also give it the casting of a daily spell. And I'd like one that has kind of like an insect, sort of an insect-y kind of thing. We could do an entangle and also one that's not going to like ruin my day.
We could do fog cloud, but it's actually like swarms of insects that flow over an area, like non-biting. You know, that's only a first level spell. I kind of like that one. That's a fun one. Can cast fog cloud once a day, filling the area with swarming insects. So you sure know it's not just fog at that point. It's actual insects. I'm gonna just do a search for insect and see if I see anything.
There's giant insect, but that's fourth level. That's too high. Insect plague is too much. That's fifth level. Yeah, so I think that that one's good. So another thing we could do, like this is always an easy one. You could also do like the equivalent of like a burning hand spell or burning hands, only it's filled with stinging insects and does piercing, magical piercing instead of.
So that's not so bad. Infernoid studded leather armor. And I think that could be worn by the Noel guy. So that seems fun. So I feel like if we go back to our notes here. I've got everything I need. I've got my characters, my strong start scene, secrets and clues, fantastic locations, notable NPCs, monsters, and treasure. So I'm going to print this out.
I'm going to go in here and hit file, print, or export to PDF. And it makes me a nicely formatted single page, two columns spread. Oh, look at that. So nice. I'm going to hit print and print that out. If you want to see it, what my notes look like. And again, in my notes about using Obsidian is how that works. And this is what my notes look like when I'm getting ready to print them out.
So they're printed out and then I throw them in my notebook and I got my maps and I have everything I need for my game today. Friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while we prepared for my Sunday role-playing game. If you enjoyed this show and you want to see more stuff like this, the best way to get it is to subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter.
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