AAR: Trouble Under Ptolus; March 15th
The party, accompanied by a Dwarven expedition, made their way into the abandon underground city of Dwarvenhearth. Their primary goal for this session was to secure the the Commerce district as HQ for the expedition. After this, they were free to decide how to tackle searching the rest of the massive city.
What Worked-
- The Stone Colossus skill challenge.
- Node-based encounter map
If you didn’t read it yesterday, here is my writeup on the skill challenge. On the whole, it went rather well. The party didn’t use as large a diversity of skills like I had hoped, but the challenge did not feel forced or clunky as they have in the past. They only managed to use the Athletics, Arcana, Perception, and Nature skills, and never managed to discover the powder kegs (which was my favorite part of the challenge!) One of the unique things I did with the challenge was allowed characters to use their attack powers against the colossus, but substitute an Athletics check for each melee attack the power would normally allow.
There are maps of Dwarvenhearth available in the Ptolus book. I didn’t want the adventure to become a massive dungeon crawl and also wanted to supply some of my own locations, so I quickly jettisoned the idea of using the map. Instead, I laid out a node-based map. Basically, every important location is a node, with lines drawn to show the physical connection of the nodes. I split the city into four districts (commerce, government, manufacturing, and university,) and then placed a handful of important buildings as children nodes. Some of those children nodes are simple, with a single encounter and notes on what the party could gain there. Some nodes are a little more complicated, with their own children nodes representing rooms inside buildings. When the party enters a node, I give them relative information they could easily gather. For instance, entering the university district, I then told them some of the important looking buildings: the university, the Hall of the Runelords, and the Great Library. The layout is very useful because it presents the players with immediately valuable choices. One of the things I may wish to do is have a player start mapping the nodes. This first session didn’t see much exploration, but I’m sure as the party moves on things might get a little too complex to keep it all straight in their heads.
