The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
The Ghost Walkers – Dragon Empire Session 1 – Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 08 Nov 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 show, I go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game. This is session one of our Dragon Empire campaign, taking place in the world of Midgard using the tales of the Valiant 5e rules.
This show, like all of the work of Sly Flourish, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tools, tricks, adventures, sourcebooks... virtual tabletop backgrounds, all kinds of stuff that you get for being a patron of Sly Flourish. You get access to an awesome Lazy DM community over on Discord, and most of all, you help me put on shows like this.
To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your support. So last week, I had a bunch of my friends over for my Sunday game, and we did character prep. So it actually took most of the session. I had a very little bit of story that took place, but of the three-hour session... Probably more than two hours of it was building characters, talking to each other and doing that kind of stuff.
And I don't think that it was a long time, but I don't think anyone was particularly frustrated by how long that took. For this campaign, I did offer that we have so, you know, because so, you know, we live in a non D&D beyond world for this kind of thing. So what I did is we had multiple copies of the Tales of the Valiant core books around. I think three of my players had their books.
One even had two copies. So we had multiple physical players handbooks around. I also did my Tales of the Valiant sharing it through Google Drive so that they could view the document online if they needed to. And what else did I use? Oh, we have it available on Shard. So I shared the campaign in our Shard tabletop version.
and that way if anybody wanted to build a character in shard they could and i think one player used shard just to kind of work the math out but their plan was i'm going to build it in shard and then i'm going to copy the material over to a tales of the valiant character sheet and so i think everybody is using physical character sheets for it i think the only real complaint that i had heard was like a lot of backtracking for things like skill so everybody liked that ability scores were done all together they thought that that was a big improvement
And I think there was still a bit of like, well, which background do I want to select? Because there's an overlap of potential skills. And also I want to, even though Tales of the Valiant has what I think is a much improved over D&D 2024 approach for talents. So talents are Tales of the Valiant's equivalent of feats.
is when you select a background you have a choice of three different talents for that background so you're a lot less likely to have to like fish around to find the background that has the feet that you want and also has the ability score adjustment modifiers that you want in in 2024 dnd which i think is a you know that's like immediately after it came out that was like a huge complaint that a lot of people had and that i had and like my wife had and lots of people had that i talked to that played or like oh my god
you know like trying to figure out which background they need to select in order to get the proper ability score bumps and also the proper feet that i want is a real pain in the ass and everyone's like oh i guess i'm a farmer right like everybody's picking farmer because farmers got got that one so and there's the custom background feature in dnd 2024 which i have a feeling is going to become the default which is like you get to pick your background and you get to pick your skills and you get to pick your feet and
And you get to pick your ability score modifiers independently of one another, which really is like a better approach. And that could have also been the way to do it with Tales of the Valiant. But Tales of the Valiant, you don't have to worry about your ability scores, but you do have to worry about what skills you're going to get with a given background.
And you have to worry about picking one of three talents. But at least with one of three, you're a lot more likely to find a talent that you like than you are otherwise. So we built out our characters and I have some information. So I'm going to switch over. This is the first campaign that I am using in our Sunday game prep where I'm using Obsidian to do my game prep.
I have switched over to Obsidian from Notion. I have a new article. that you can find. You will find it linked in the show notes. And it says, why am I using Obsidian for stuff? And what advantages does it have and stuff like that? And how do I do it? So that's all available in that Obsidian article, which you can find down in the show notes.
So let's take a look at the characters for our Dragon Empire campaign here. We have. So we have five characters. One player was not there. We have Gaudenzia. Gaudenzia is a small folk gnome ranger, nomadic outcast. One of the interesting things about Tales of the Valiant is because you have your lineage and your heritage.
and backgrounds and class you end up and you know you end you end up with like these really you know big piles of you know adjectives for characters on on who they are right the small folk gnome ranger nomadic out has lots of different things and i do wonder like did you really need a background if you also have heritage i bet you that a system could streamline things a bit if you want to have it streamlined where your background and your heritage are really the same thing
So Gaudenzia runs the food truck at the 440 Fingers. There is a food truck, Blue Glacier, the White Dragonborn operates the food truck out there and Gaudenzia and Blue Glacier operate it together. They have a particular type of bottled water that they serve, but I can't remember what the name of the bottled water is. We have Kalindra, known as Kal, who is an elf druid cottage homesteader.
Her mother is Ordanthea Darkbloom, and she lost everything. So she was, I should add some details here, lost their vineyard to the Dragon Empire. Whoops. And got divorced from her wife as a result. And now kind of moved in, moved home to her mother, or, or Aranthia Darkbloom, who is a knight, a shadow elf. That is the local apothecary. That is Cal.
Amavin is an elf, rogue, cosmopolitan criminal, uh, who was raised as an orphan to be a spy for the Dragon Empire, but fled after some kind of event and now works under the wing of Master Kiprak. Master Kiprak is a local NPC, a kobold NPC, who is kind of the village, a smart village elder. People kind of respect him quite a bit. He's also a secret. This is a secret.
He's a secret member of the lower left hand of Nakresh, a cult whose whole cult purpose is to rip people off. And I think that the characters may be invited to join this cult. How about this? The characters are going to become part of a cult. We have Rowan Kirken.
Rowan is a dwarf fighter salvager rustic, a nephew to Cleon Forgekin at the local forge, and was sent here to avoid being sent to war and slaughter. So the family trained as a fighter, kind of built, and then the family said they're just going to be thrown up against the Combine. We're going to actually have you, we're going to send you to the four or 40 fingers instead.
And so they were, they managed to escape being sent off to the front lines and slaughtered because again, the dragon empire has many wars that are always continually going on that kind of keep the populace under control. And now they operate out of the four or 40 fingers. And we have Otto Grouchless, a mechanist, Sidrian, anointed partisan soldier who works alongside Master Kiprek.
So Master Kiprek has a couple of characters who already are kind of like on his side and operate. So those are our characters. One thing that I did, because we're now using Obsidian, is I created a template. So I'm using the Templater plugin. I use very, very few plugins for my Obsidian notebooks. I like to have my notebooks really clean. I actually don't do a lot of internal linking, too.
A lot of people think that this is the opposite of how Obsidian is supposed to work. You do lots of internal linking. But because internal linking is not part of Markdown syntax, I kind of avoid it. And I also don't really need it because I can just go through my list here. And I also print them and put them in my notebook. And when you're doing a bunch of internal linking, that doesn't work.
That is very different than how many other people use Obsidian to do their GM prep. You can hear me talk more about that in my article about Obsidian. So anyway, with the Templater template, with the Templater plugin, I created a template that automatically adds the date to the beginning of a new file. I already added the five characters that I know about.
We have one new character who's joining today.
and then this little trick here is if you can actually put in a little syntax that will name the file with a date in the name so that way it's very fast for me to create a new session note that has the current date and the characters and gives a proper title to the whole thing which you can watch work right now so if i go to session notes i can right click on session notes i can say create new note from template and i pick my dragon empire template and bang it's already dated right 11 30
2024 and you can see the file name is 11 3 2024 and it already has the characters and it's already got my eight steps all outlined so really handy not anything you couldn't do in notion back when i was using notion but kind of nice to be able to have a little template that does it i use that same i have templates for all my campaigns set up that way you can see them you can see them here i have a shadow shadowed keep one my wednesday session notes i had an empire the ghouls one which i don't really need anymore we're going to delete that because i don't need it because i'm not running that anymore
And then I have like an RPG tips on a data note. So I really like the templater because it's really fast to like build templates. That's the, I think that's really the only plugin I'm really using. Oh, I have like an HTML export plugin so that I can put it up. One thing to note is all my campaign notebooks and stuff like this are available to patrons of Sly Flourish.
And you, if you're joining up as a patron, you can get a link that both gives you like a web view where you can view it all. And I'm going to periodically dump a zip file that has a zip file of everything. So you can download your own copy of all the markdown files and all the files that are underneath. So that way you can get that. So what else? So we have our new template.
So the work we need to do today, this is session one of the campaign. We've already had a session zero. We've already walked through. We now have characters and relationships kind of built in the characters at the beginning of the session. They made their way. So they learned that there was a curse. At the four or 40 fingers, the four or 40 fingers is an outpost and well station.
That's about 150 miles away from any other civilized area where any animals or people can get access to water, which means that they, many people travel through here, many caravans travel through here. And yet it's far enough away from everything that the dragon empire doesn't have a really good hand on it.
So it's kind of a really, in my mind, we'll see, it feels like a perfect place for the kind of campaign that I want to run. Because I designed it, right? I made it up. I made the 440 fingers. And I made it up to be like, it is both in the center of everything and far enough away that it is also outside. And that was a really dirty trick of mine. And it gets really important.
I even put it, and you can see in the map below. So the 440 fingers is right here. And you can see that it's even on a ley line. There is a ley line going right through it. So not only do we have...
you know it being center it's right in the center of three different dragon regions of the dragon empire and it's on a ley line and it's a trade route that everything goes through and it's also far enough away that it's on its own and i think like all of those characteristic make it a really ideal ideal place geographically it's also kind of an interesting spot because it's against a mountain range so there's like snowy areas up above there's also like to the east to the southeast it gets to like arid desert
So, you know, there's lots of geographical interesting areas, too, that make it kind of interesting. It's not super lush, but they could probably get to a place that's super lush. So I think that that's really I'm happy to have put the 440 fingers. And I feel like that serves me well as a GM.
This is like that idea of like when you're designing a world or you're designing a region or even designing like a town. Building it for the game is really important. Like putting the features in that you don't say like, oh, well, I'm so worried about the ecology and the geography and everything that I forgot that characters are going to be going on adventures here.
You want to make sure there's room for characters to go on adventures there. So we introduced the characters, everybody kind of, we built them together, which was really great. And we built some relationships with some of the NPCs. And then they found out that there was a curse and people were, there was a curse that had started to infect people. And at first they thought like, is it a disease?
But basically it was like a weird red patch and then a white spot in the center growing, which is actually the symbol of the white mother.
And it's starting to grow on people and it's because a group of the what are they what are they called the gray folk the white folk not the white folk the ghost folk that the ghost folk are operating out of a lower subterranean caverns beneath the 440 fingers and have corrupted the water with their dark rituals and now it's actually cursing the people up above.
Luckily the curse is not so strong that it can't be reversed. But they are like, hey, we want to send people down. They said, hey, by the way, other adventurers went down there, but never came back up again. That's actually going to be a hook, too.
And the reason why is that the theme of this adventure is about like thwarting and fleecing the dragon empire and going down and dealing with ghost folk down below who are cursing. It doesn't really fit that. But I want to start putting a hook in there.
for it and the hook could be that the adventurers have a map to a vault of previous treasure that is unknown to the dragon empire and therefore the characters have an opportunity to go get this vault before the dragon empire finds out about it and recover them some some treasure one of the things that i'm i think is going to be a fun theme of the campaign is
is that treasure is going to really matter. And it's because treasure really matters to the Dragon Empire. So the dragons, it's the richest nation in Midgard. Like the Dragon Empire is the richest nation in Midgard. It is ruled over by nine dragons who want nothing more than to expand their power and their riches. And these are dragons that have been around now for hundreds of years.
And they've gathered tremendous amounts of treasure, so much that it's not like in their lair. They have many lairs and many vaults where these treasures occur. And they move them around because they know they can't just keep them in one place forever. They will eventually get stolen and raided. So they move these monies around.
They also have these wars going on and treasures coming back from those wars are traveling across. And it's sitting on top of old ruins from previous before the Dragon Empire when there were just dragons in the areas and things like that.
And when you have the Sultans, the previous like 10 Sultans who operated as the figureheads of the dragons, they had their vaults that were kind of hidden around as well.
But one thing I think is going to be fun about it is not only can this campaign be built around going out and hunting treasure and finding treasure, except if you find treasure from a dragon, it is illegal for you to own it personally. This is something I'm kind of adding in. Any treasure in the Dragon Empire belongs to the dragons, whether it has been discovered or not.
And they may hire explorers to go find the treasure for them and then might give them a nice like 5% finders fee. But 95% of what they find goes back into the Draconic Hordes and is owned by the Dragon Empire and probably split among the Dragon Lords among themselves or given to the Dragon Lord who rules over the territory where it is most likely.
And that is a really fun thing to subvert, which is not only can we can we can we can pour money onto the characters, but they can't show that they have it. Because if they do, the Dragon Empire is going to come after them saying like, hey, where did you find all this gold that you're you're spending? So money laundering is going to be a big factor as well.
Not only is the discovery of the treasure a big important thing, but what you do with the treasure and how you move that treasure around is another one. One thing I'm probably going to keep in mind is I think that I don't really want to have things like...
A bag of holding or a portable hole be a thing because it's too easy to hide their treasure that way it's far more fun if the drag if you have to like deal with hundreds of pounds of gold and figure out where the hell you're going to stash it so that the dragons. don't find out that you have it. The other one is the dragons have minted their own coins.
So they know where those coins are and nobody knows where the coins are better than dragons do. Right. You think about smog and the fact that he knew when one, one object was taken from his hoard, he knew it immediately. He had a hoard as huge as a kingdom and he still could immediately tell when something had been stolen.
And I think not only do the dragon lords, the top tier, I forget what they're called, the top tier, the dragon lords know about their hordes, but they have tons of draconic accountants who work for them, who likewise are in a position to constantly keep track of where all of the gold is.
So I think that that's going to be like a theme of like moving treasure around and getting access to treasure, maybe even destroying it. Like, what if you're like, we want to take this entire cart full of all this money that's going to go help hire mercenaries for this part of the war. And you get it. And it's like, you know, 100,000 gold. And you're like, well, we can't do anything with this.
You can't spend it. i can't really keep it because it'll get discovered but we can destroy it and they just poured into like a molten lava pit where it just melts right and they're like that was the goal was destroy the gold so that we have now reduced the riches of the dragon empire maybe we keep five percent so we can buy buy some stuff But I think that's going to be a theme.
I'm thinking kind of further out. I'm tired of thinking too far. But I think that actually that will make a good secret and clue, right? Which is the... What are they called? I get the ranking mixed up. The top rank of the... The top rank are known as the Morza. So the Morza know about all of the... The Morza own all treasure in the Dragon Empire.
Even though even hordes not yet discovered from ages past. If you find a horde, you can meet your local. And what's the what's the next rank? Not Jambuka, not Kobaldi. They're sort of the governor's. The Ermanli are right below the Morza. So that's probably meet your local Tamarli or Ermanli. Tamarli. So they're the scaled nomi or Ermanli governors, local governors.
For a finder's fee, usually 5% of the treasure found. That's really cool. The Dragon Empire, the Morza, have minted their own coins and trade bars, which they use to fund their massive war machines. rumors speak of huge caravans filled with gold and platinum bars used to feed conscripted armies or pay for mercenary companies in the dragon empire's everlasting wars that's a good one
So yeah, a couple of fun secrets there. This is totally irrelevant to their current situation. I'm already like too far out. Oh, my mind has gone too far out in the campaign. And really they're about to get attacked by a couple of spiders. So it comes down to her, back to her solid, good old solid D&D, which is the characters travel down into the well, whereupon they are attacked by a
Should we have three wolf spiders? Three wolf spiders. It occurs to me I should have our Tales of the Valiant books up here. We're gonna take a look at the wolf spider. So one thing about Tales of the Valiant is the power of the creatures are very high. Let me... So it behooves us, particularly at first level, it behooves us to actually look at the monsters
and see how things are going and i can tell you that i already i cheated a bit i did a bunch of work by the way and you'll see it when we're going through my notes i actually have gone beyond just like the time i spend here on the show to think more about this campaign to look into things and is it under animals i think it's under animals we're gonna look at spiders So why not have some spiders?
And wolf spiders are your giant rat aversion of a... I could do cursed rats. I think we're going to stick with the wolf spiders. So I was like, what if they got attacked by a giant spider? Right. I thought like maybe that'd be good. And it's a CR one.
And I already know that like a CR one, even in the, so the Mike Shea rules, the sly flourish of this little lazy GM rules for building encounters at first level is you really don't want to have any single monster higher than CR one half. And you almost certainly would have fewer monsters than the characters. That's that's it. Level one is its own tier, in my opinion.
characters are so much more vulnerable at level one than they are at any other level including level two that you really want to pay more attention to what kind of creatures you're going to throw at them to make sure that they can't get knocked out with a single strike for example we have the giant spider and i was like what if they went down there fought a giant spider nice straightforward thing only one monster ac 15 pretty high hit points 40 that's pretty high for level one for fighting level one characters
A bite is plus five to hit, which is high. Seven poison damage, that's a lot. And the target must make a DC 13 con save, taking 10 poison damage on a failed save or half as much. So that would be 12 minimum and 17 high. That is enough to potentially kill a character outright. And if they had taken any damage, it may definitely kill them, but it will certainly drop them.
Then they can web as a bonus action. So they have a lot of stuff going on here. but that's too much. So I'm like, okay, we're not going to do a giant spider, but already, and this is not out of hand because a CR one giant spider, it's already doing a lot of damage. Like seven, what did we say? 17 potential damage, 17 damage at CR one is a lot, right?
When, when you do seven damage per CR, sort of the benchmark, it's still a lot, but we already know that a CR one is probably too high for a level one character that love, even though like, you know, you think that that's probably appropriate. It's really not. So then we're like, well, what about wolf spider? Giant wolf spiders aren't so bad, right? And then they're only CR one quarter.
So we look at those in the AC 13. Very reasonable. Hit point 14. Very reasonable. They can spider climb. They have a standing leap and they have a bite attack. Plus four to hit. Very reasonable. Five poison damage or five piercing damage. And the target must succeed DC 12 or take five poison damage. And if it reduces into zero, they're stable, but poison for one hour. So that's not bad.
It won't actually kill people with the poison damage. And it's 10. If somebody has a really bad go with those, they would take 10 damage. Usually the characters have about 10 hits. So we're looking just at that amount. And then they have a hunter's leap where they can jump 20 feet horizontally or up 10 feet vertically toward a hostile creature.
It can see the movement does not provoke opportunity attacks. So you have little giant spiders that are zipping all over the place. That seems really fun. We have five characters. So I think three giant wolf spiders is probably reasonable. I don't think we're going to see a situation where like three giant spiders. If we wanted to be a little bit easier, we might only do two.
So I'm going to think about that. But I think this is on page 357. put your page numbers in your notes for future to say help your future self so that is down in the well and then scenes we have giant spiders or wolf spiders attack finding dead bodies exploring the the k the underground river facing the ghost walker, the ghost folk. I like ghost walkers better than ghost folk.
I'm gonna change the name because I think ghost walkers sounds cooler. Facing the ghost walkers and the cultist of the white goddess. Destroying the defaced altar. What is it? The cursed effigy of the white goddess. And then finding hints at future treasure and then the next pass. So the next I want to I don't want to think too far ahead. Right. We want to focus on the session that we're building.
But this is one where there's like an adventure that they're going to be on and then they're going to have options about the next adventure that they want to go on. And I want to offer three. I want to kind of have three quests that they could that they could go on. There's, they're going to be second level at this point. So I want to make them kind of appropriate for second level.
I have some ideas of some kind of big ideas about, I have some kind of big ideas about future things that I want to do, but I don't know if they're really appropriate at that low level. For example, I really like the idea that the characters have the option to go smuggle in a smuggler from Nuria Natal into the four or 40 fingers.
This is somebody like, like one of the things I think will be a fun sort of thing to build is, and it gets into this idea of like, what do you do with all this money is that there that we can set up a smuggling route out of the dragon empire to the West that reaches Nuria Natal.
And, and it's got all these intermediaries along the way and it's got this path and they have like secret ways to try to travel things, you know, move things past. And that way they have a way to smuggle goods in and they can smuggle treasure out and they could smuggle people in.
into the dragon empire so it sort of breaches the boundaries of the dragon empire but they need someone from near and at all in the 440 fingers to be able to do this and i think having somebody do that will be good i think that's probably a good quest that would actually be a really good sort of fourth to fifth level quest so i think that that will be something that we drop in after our next set
so then we want to think about like what are three and i think we'll do it now even though i've got more work to do on the session now is i really want to have like what are the three possible quests that they have one thing that i did is in my i have my my campaign notes we're going to rename that's fine campaign notes is fine dragon empire campaign notes
So I have this list of adventure ideas and the list of adventure ideas, like I want to have like 20 good types of adventures that make sense for this kind of campaign. And the ones I have so far, like steal a treasure cache headed to one of the dragon treasuries, but make it look like someone else did it. That's a fun one.
find ancient artifacts valuable to the dragon empire before the dragon empire finds them themselves a part of this is i think it'll be kind of fun to have a rival adventuring group a rival set of treasure hunters or even like draconic detectives whose job is to go find these old treasure hordes and when they find out that there are more treasure treasure hordes and treasure vaults lost here they might send a an agent to go do it and now the characters have to like play nice with the agent
because they need to be look like normal citizens but really they're thwarting them at the same time there's a lot of like fun subterfuge that can go on there and that's what i mean about like it's a treasure hunting campaign but with a lot of complications which i think is fun so destabilize the armies headed to war with nirin atal smuggle spies spies and agents into the empire from other regions rescue rebels from draconic imprisonment sounds fun hunt down i'm turning all these into active verbs
Hunt down artifacts capable of destroying or destabilizing the draconic rule. Discover old caches of treasure from previous... What do they call it? Sultans. From previous sultans and sultanas. That's one. What is it called? You want to dethrone and delegitimize local lords. Local... What are they called? The ranks. There's two ranks that are important. The Timolari and Ermonli.
I can't spell these things. Tim are Tamar Lee and Irma Lee. So they want to like, you know, you want to make them look like idiots and making them look like idiots, I think can be, can be really fun. Yeah. The whole like inglorious bastards quest series, I think can work really well of like,
Are the characters, I mean, you would probably want the characters to be the Inglorious Bastards in that situation. But I think actually it works that like when the Inglorious Bastards are smuggling in a spy from the British to act as a German agent to go to the big theater and it all goes totally haywire.
I think that that can work well, that like they're already operating inside enemy lines kind of. But then in this case, they are actual members of the group that are trying to destabilize it. But I think that that could be a fun one. And that's that idea of like smuggling in spies from other groups. What else could they do? Capture and destroy resources intended to fuel the war machine.
set up a smuggling route into and out of the dragon empire. I think in particular, we're going to focus on like this Nuria Natal idea. I think that that will really work. What else? So I need to get, like, what are the smaller quests, right? Oh, so I think of, here's a real straightforward one, right?
A creature, a dangerous creature is said to protect a treasure hoard sought by the local who put a bounty on the creature. And I can't spell creature. and a 5% finder's fee. So this would be cool. So they're going to be second level, which means they can start facing like first CR1 monsters. So we could have another kind of CR1 creature. Why don't we go back to our monster list here?
And we're going to go down to the CR listings and look at what kind of monsters would make sense. So brown bears, death dogs, a death dog would be fun because then you get death dogs and wolves. death dogs, closets, devil. Let's see what other creatures we've got. Ghouls, of course, harpies, hippocampus. I think the death dog is a really good one.
So we could have, and we can stick this right in our, we can put this as one of the options is, and who's the guy's name. So I made an NPC list now too. And we have Morris, Morris Gemborn, who is a Termanli, put out a bounty to defeat Termanli.
A hideous creature guarding an old ruin of a previous sultan and the treasures buried beneath the vault, beneath the ruins, offering a bounty of X GP and 5% of the treasure received and the standard 5%. They're like the worst kind of Apple, you know, 30% fee. It's like, oh, you want to work with our app store, the Dragon Empire app store? It's going to cost you 95%.
There's my little un-shitification talk for today. So that is a future, let's see, future quests. That's a good one. Another one could be that they found a, uh, the characters found a map on one of the explorers to a forgotten crypt of a fallen, of a, what would it be? Disgraced. I can't spell disgraced. So this is Oh my God. There we go. Yay. I can spell of a disgraced.
I guess that's not, that's not spelled right either. Yeah. It's with a G D disgraced. Got it. Characters found a map on one of the explorers to a forgotten of crypt of a disgraced or Monley said to have hoarded. I think that could be cool. And they could, maybe they don't know like what the treasure is, but they're like, Oh, well we've got a map to this old crypt that this adventurers found and
And they have coins that show... These coins are like hundreds of years old that have the mint of that sultan on it. I have a list of sultans too. So I have a new... One other thing that I have, this is some homework that I did ahead of time, but it's homework I highly recommend, is a faction list. And... I created a far too big faction list of the different Sultans.
So let's do a roll here on my faction list for Sultans. I have 10 Sultans. Boop. Four. From the time of Sultan Trebizid, the Shadow of the Dragon. long ago. So we can put that in our notes from the time. That's really during the time of during the rain. So that's cool. So that's two treasure hunting ones.
Another one could be, let's see, a Master Kiprek found out that a trade caravan is actually smuggling dragon, is actually a front for the dragons to bribe officials at the borders of the Dragon Empire and the Southlands. He tells the characters that, that they could... So what's the motivation here? Right?
So Master Kiprak found out that there's a trade caravan that's actually a front for, and probably for, one particular dragon. So I'll go back to my faction list here, because there's three dragons that operate in the area. So Adashah is the fire dragon off in the east. Probably Parsis. And now, I mean, yeah, so we have Parsis the Hidden, and Ibalan the Illustrious. Probably Ibalan.
I think Ibalan's going to be kind of a main villain. A front for Ibalan the Illustrious to bribe officials at the borders of the Dragon Empire in the Southlands. If you wanted a quick score, this is a way to do it. It's small enough that any ravaging bands might have taken it as it makes its way west.
So I think that so that way they have two quests for like going to a place and dealing with one's like a monster hunt. One is a exploring an old dungeon and one is actually like hitting a trade caravan. If I had to guess, I bet the characters are going to go for the trade caravan one because it sounds kind of more non-normal than the other one. So we'll see. So I think, you know, we'll find out.
And I don't even know if they're going to be at the point to do this in the next one. So what are some secrets and clues? So we already have that the Morzone, all the treasure in the Dragon Empire, explorers, some crafty explorers, still manage to find treasures outside of the eyes of the Dragon Empire. But if the DE finds out, they could be nailed to a stake or burned alive.
The Morza have countless accountants who manage all of the money and treasure of the empire. Much of this treasure moves throughout the empire as tribute from one dragon to another or to fund war activities. They're countless wars. I think I've said countless wars before, but whatever. It's my own notes. Who cares?
what else so that you know oh the ghost foe this i think is kind of fun the ghost walkers are a greater threat to the dragon empire than they let on Even speaking of the Ghost Folk, of the Ghost Walkers, as a single faction is illegal among the Dragon Empire. They want the Morza, not even the Morza, but the, you know, the, what's the top rank?
Yeah, the Armanli and the Sultan don't want people to know about the threat. The ghost walkers have countless labyrinths, have vast labyrinths beneath the empire and are largely safe from the dragons because of the narrow quarters that connect their empire, their chambers. Two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. I have six. I need four more secrets.
What are some other secrets? Finding, I mean, it's kind of a secret. Let's see. Let me think. So I'm thinking about what they're doing. So they're going to go down there. Oh, the ghosts worship a twisted deity known as the White Goddess, I think. Let's go to our book here. Dark gods. The White Goddess. Yeah, twisted deity known as the White Goddess. Okay. who they refer to as the pale matriarch.
Anything interesting about this? A sun-like splatter of blood on a white field. That's a good one. I do not... I don't know if we need any more stuff for that. Any other... So what other secrets could they discover down there? Anything more about the ghost walkers? I don't think so. We can have a little bit more of it.
So the Ghostwalkers are mutant humanoids, not tied to any known species, but containing characteristics of many. They range in size from gnomish to ogre, or even giant size. The Ghostwalkers deal in blood magic, a forbidden and terrible form of magic. So those are good. Any other got one more secret. I have to do one more. This could be about anything. So what else could they learn?
Anything else that adventures would be carrying on them might be kind of interesting, including like the hook. Like one one thing is like maybe the adventures that they discover down there are the ones that actually hold. You know, they hold like two things.
One is like, hey, you know, there is a trade route of, you know, there's a trade caravan supposedly bringing textiles, civilians traveling textiles to the West. They're actually bringing a fair bit of coin to bribe local officials on behalf of the Dragon Empire. It'd be a good score. That might be kind of fun. What else do we want to know about the dragon empire?
I mean, we have like the three secrets. So I think we could do a secret about like who currently, I think that the dragon that currently rules over the area, the one that, you know, that, that I think this is what a good, good, good point about the four or 40 fingers is that Ibalan the illustrious, uh, currently rules over the four or 40 fingers and is Morza to the local governors.
Do we want to say anything about, I keep forgetting to switch my page back and forth. Sorry about that. So let's go back to our dragon empire section and let's just get a little tip about the illustrious. I think Ibalan is oldest among the, of the dragon lords and was around during the formation of the pact. So vastly greedy. Empire's Ibalans, let's see. Eldest dragon lord.
I don't know that the fact that Ibalan is dead and was present and architected pact of the Maradi. Vast, you know, greed beyond counting. That's a good secret. Okay. So I've got my secrets. I've got my scenes. My locations are going to be the well or the underground river. And I have a map for this underground river, which we will show here to do.
So the characters are going to come in right at the top of this map. And I think we want to have, I'm going to write down a few locations here. So on that, we will, we will, we'll basically are going to go clockwise and from the top. So well entrance is right at the very top. The first right one are like steep embankments with dead bodies. That lower right one
i think that there's there's going to be a collapsed wall so i don't think that they'll be able to reach so because i have a dwarven forge setup that i want to throw in that lower area so i think that that is going to be the lower right area is going to be the effigy of the pale mother and that because i have a little bridge i have a little river area so it's going to take over that whole thing but i think that they're not going to be able to get to it from that one chamber so i think that i'm going to block off that chamber
Then there's, we could have a ruined temple or ruined shrine to what? Ruined shrine to, and then let's use our faction list. Yeah, we'll do the gods of the empire. My faction list is far too big. To give you an idea, so the faction list is now a multi-role faction list. I have gods of the dragon empire, southern gods. There are 20 of those. The main dragons are the three local ones.
The other dragons, there are six of them. The 10 sultans and sultanas of previous time. The four pre-empire dragons, which I made up myself, and then four factions. So I actually can roll a die to determine which table I'm going to roll on. But in this case, I know it's going to be a god of the dragon empire. I think we're going to go with that because it makes sense.
That's one of the advantages of having a multi-role table like this is I can say, I just want the gods of the dragon empire. Seven, Veles the World Serpent. So I think we're going to have a temple to Veles the World Serpent in that area. That's going to be that lower right temple if they want to continue to explore. And I think, you know, why not continue to explore?
Then directly south, we have another kind of open one. Pillars of former, these are like draconic lords of previous ages. I think there's like an old temple that's like below here. We could have, so an interesting thing would be, what if that shrine down there is a shrine to, an ancient shrine to Nakrash? That would actually make more sense.
So instead of the shrine to Veles, it's a shrine to Nakrash. And pillars of former rulers of Nakrash, previous ages. Because I want to kind of introduce the cult of Nakrash, which I think can be kind of fun. So those are those pillars. And then south, there is a chamber that could be like a monster lair. I don't know what kind of monster. Maybe we'll find out.
Then going around to the lower left, we have the water area. So we could have like a continuation of the underground river, but it's probably completely submerged. There might be a water monster there. Then it looks like we have some sort of like humanoid... Oh, we could have a water... There could be like a shrine to a water god. And let's see. I don't know if I have one.
Let's see if there's any good water god. We could have like a shrine to Anuakma. That's a god of the underworld. It's funny. There is like a crocodile god in the Southlands. There's a god called Apossus. That's really cool. Sobek. So I think obsidian here. So a shrine to the water god Sobek in that lower one. That might be fun. Then we have these like, we can call them the howling pillars.
And then as we travel north, we have kind of an open area and then sort of a little separate spot. So what would those be? So if they headed directly west, what would they find? Could there be, you know, we could do something like a hag lives down here. They've dealt with hags before. Like, I've already had a hag underneath a thing. Like, I did that in my last campaign.
So I think we want to use something else. Well, you know, let's, for a moment, jump over to our monster. Actually, I think the Game Master's Guide has it. So let's open up the Game Master's Guide. Get some help here. TOV game, Monster Players Game Master's Guide. Get rid of all this cruft at the end. There we go. And we're going to go to our random tables. Random encounter tables.
And we are going to do... We'll do underground. And this is tier one. So we'll roll a 12. Good old 12-sider. Two. Passage slopes downward sharply and loosely. Slippery stones cover much. PCs navigate the bits of rubble, triggering and piercing choruses. It strikes a patch of shriekers. So we could have some shriekers. That's not bad. We can do shriekers. And then nine.
Ogres engaged in a brutal brawling fight. Eh, I don't think we want to do ogres. I already rolled two again. Four. Silver dragon wormling stuck in a primitive trap. Eh, that doesn't really fit. We could have a bat. So I see a small cavern, smell sour, and there's a basilisk. What level is a basilisk? There's CR3. So we could have like a super dangerous one. Why not?
They could always come back here. The howling pillars, the frozen statues, and we have the basilisks there. And I will make it clear to them that basilisks are absolutely deadly to them until they're like second or third level, but maybe they'll come down. So we have, you know, we're going to let the, and that'll be this upper, these upper left areas. I think that that will, that will work well.
Notable NPCs. I'm going to actually just steal this right from my current NPC list, just so I have it in my notes handy and monsters. I'm not going to worry about that. So treasure, the last thing we're going to talk about is treasure. I have looked at and spent a fair bit of time looking at the treasure system in Tales of the Valiant in the Game Master's Guide, and I am not crazy about it.
So the treasure system in Tales of the Valiant is the last thing we're going to talk about today because we got things to do. So where is it here? We'll go to index because I can't find it. Treasure 171. So the treasure system is magic items. Here we go. So it's kind of buried. But the treasure system, their approach, and every approach to treasure systems is kind of interesting.
They basically say you build a bundle of treasure for a level range. So in this case, you have a level one to three bundle. And this is all of the rewards that you would give your group across all three levels, first, second, and third level. I spent some time like digging into this to figure out like how it works. And I've, I've come to a few conclusions.
One is one prop one, you know, it's got numerous problems. One problem is having a single giant bundle that you have to split out across adventures. Isn't to me nearly as useful as having a bundle that I can do every session. And just know that it's roughly close and it's fine. And I'll just do a session per bundle. I either reward it or I don't. And they get plenty of treasure.
So to me, I would rather have bundles that are built around the idea of the discovery of one session's worth of material, which is actually what D&D 2024's Dungeon Master's Guide does. We're going to talk about that a little later in the Lazy RPG Talk Show. But one other thing is it says like, okay, three common magic items. That's no problem.
There's a common magic item list and you can roll for common magic items right here and you get it. Then you get this one, two common magic armors. Well, there's no list for common magic armors and there are some common magic armors listed here, but there's only a couple. And if I'm offering two, I'm going to offer the same ones over and over again.
If I, if I end up doing common armor elsewhere, there's only like one or two, but there's no list. So now I've got to go hunt through the list in order to find the magic armor. They do the same thing with common magic weapons. There's really not many common magic weapons. And I look through here and I can only find like one or two, you know, so that that's kind of weird.
Then they have this like one to four first circle spell scrolls or one to four uncommon magic consumables. Well, the uncommon magic consumables isn't hard because you can go right here, you roll on this list and that tells you what you get.
However, spell scrolls of first and second tier are on that list, which means you have either you're giving away one to four first circle spell scrolls or you're giving away one to four common magic items, which may also include spell scrolls. You just made me go through this extra work When you could have just said 1d4 uncommon magic items because that will include spell scrolls.
Like in this case, there's a 50-50 shot you're going to get 1d4 first circle spell scrolls. But I think it's like, what is it here? You know, you're 15% likely to get spell scrolls anyway. So it's really, that is bizarre. Then you have like 1d6 common or uncommon magic ammunition. Again, there's no sub list for magic ammunition. There also isn't a random list for what kind of ammunition it is.
So you have to create that. Or one circuit...
or one second circle spell scroll that's a real pain and then you get potions of healing so that's all fine so i created like a little generator to build this for me but i realized like i just like my own generator better and of course it's like if you like your own thing you can use your own thing which is what i'm going to do so i have my my one to four treasure generator which is now tuned for all four versions of 5e that i typically work with a level up advanced 5e
dnd 2014 dnd 2024 and uh this is usually more gold than tales of the valiant offers by a by a significant amount but i think it's actually okay and in this case i i got you know two i have a nice treasure parcel here of copper silver and gold and some other stuff but i but i probably i this isn't bad This isn't bad, but I think I like the magic items here.
So I think we're going to drop those into my treasure. But I want to give a mixture of other stuff. And I think like, let's see, a masterpiece painting doesn't make a lot of sense. It could be kind of fun. The idea that like one of the adventurers had discovered a masterpiece painting of a former Timolari from a long time ago.
And now it could be moved, but this technically belongs to the Dragon Empire. Are they going to sell it or not? So I think that that could be kind of fun. So I'm going to drop the gold in there. They find copper. Nobody cares about copper. They find silver. Generally, people don't care about silver. They find 263 gold pieces.
And the problem is that those gold pieces are from a hoard that they had discovered. And then they got 210 rubies and a... I'm actually going to... What I'm going to do is remove 150 from the gold. So 260 minus 150 is what? 100, 110, 113 rubies. And then I'm going to increase the, the, the masterpiece painting of, and we're going to make this a masterpiece painting of one of the Morza.
Now let's go back to my obsidian here. or not of one of the Moors, but one of the former Sultans. And you can see how my faction list really works well here, because I can now roll a d10, six, and Sultana Patek of the former Sultana. So now the neat one is how do you move that, right? They're going to get a nice 200 gold piece, but how do you move it?
If they sell it to the Sultan, he's going to take, they will get 10 gold pieces for it because they get 5% finder's fee. I think that that's going to be kind of fun. So I think with that, so I don't know, monsters, I'll just look them up in the book. It'll be okay. The monsters are the one section I didn't get to because I took too long. but I have the rest of us.
And that is the end of our prep today. So friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while I prepped my game. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you enjoyed the show and you want to see more stuff like this, the best way to see the work that I do is to subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter. There is a link in the show notes. It is absolutely free to sign up.
You get a free adventure generator for signing up and you get a weekly article that I send directly to your inbox with a tip for how to run role-playing games, plus a whole bunch of links to all of the other work that I do. You can also join us on Patreon. Patrons of Sly Flourish get access to all kinds of tips, tools, and tricks to run 5e games.
They get access to the awesome Lazy DM community, and they help me put on shows like this. And you can pick up any of my books, including Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, Lazy DM's Workbook, and Companion, and Forge of Foes, and others on the Sly Flourish bookstore. Links to all of that are in the show notes. Thank you so much. Have a great day, and get out there and play an RPG.