Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today my buffer of reader bounties is so well-stocked that it would be an act of supreme hubris to write any further ahead, so I figured I’d instead check back in on my early adventures in Dungeons & Dragons, and see if we can sift some lessons out of my early mistakes. It’s been over a year since I last published one of these pieces, meaning looking back is only getting more embarrassing as I get more practice – but of course, improvement comes in much greater leaps and bounds early on, when there’s so much more you don’t know, but could easily learn through experience. It’s true of most things, but especially true for the mix of preparation, performance, and improvisation that is DnD: until you’ve actually hosted a live table session, there’s really no way of knowing precisely what you will and won’t need prepped to support you.
That’s the primary divide we’ll today be reaching, as we charge past the end of The Festival of Saint Agatha, and on into The Dreadful Tale of Castle Blackmire. Saint Agatha was my first adventure ever, save precisely one session of guest DMing our prior campaign, and thus I was basically guessing regarding the level of detail I needed to write into every quest. My first takeaway was a clear “need more prep,” meaning Blackmire would include more fully realized expository copy to more easily set scenes, and also more clear mechanical definition for conflicts I had previously, foolishly assumed I could “just figure out on the fly.” I am not a master of swift improvisation; my DnD work demands preparation to come alive, and balancing that level of preparation is something I’m still working on today.
When last we left off with this endeavor, our party of Dante the tiefling sorcerer, Arachne the half-elf/half-spider ranger, Garu the human rogue, and Dylan the crustacean paladin had successfully derailed some kind of sacrificial ritual, preventing the emergence of a dark harvest god and saving their friend Lugdug in the process. With both my main side quests for the town of Nettlebarn resolved, I figured it was time to pull the trigger on the town’s concluding drama, and get the team marching towards the city of Yhaunn, which would ultimately become their home for the trials ahead.
Fields of Fire
Late sunday evening, after the festivities have died down, the party will be awoken by the sounds of screams. Rushing outside, they’ll discover the grain silos holding the year’s harvest aflame, with townspeople rushing to carry water from the well in the square. Dark riders are visible in the glow, chasing panicked villagers down with their steeds. The Master of Ceremonies stumbles from a nearby home in his full-length pajamas, staring in bewilderment at the chaotic scene. “Please.” He clutches the hem of Dante’s cloak, tears filling his eyes, “Please warriors, please help us now. Please save our home.” He releases Dante and staggers off, joining the throng of water-bearing villagers
It’s time for a goddamn BATTLE, which will first involve the party intercepting the riders. They will then fight a Knight, Berserker, and Bandit Captain
Conclusion
As the festivities die down, the Master of Ceremonies reveals himself to be the town mayor (Mayor Pete) as well, and thanks the party for their assistance in saving the village (offering a Ring of Protection). Having proven their strength and valor, he asks them to take on a far greater task: taking down the evil lord of a nearby castle, who’s claimed an abandoned estate and is abducting travelers along the nearby trade routes
One of DnD’s most fundamental player payoff loops is “players make connections in the world, players are forced to defend those connections from threats, players feel a sense of responsibility and satisfaction in defending their friends.” I planned to exploit this loop early and often, basically using every quest and character to hook the players into my world, and thereby flavoring every subsequent victory with the satisfaction of defending places and people they’d come to genuinely care about.
For Nettlebarn, I might have attempted to capitalize on this a bit too hastily; beyond Lugdug, there wasn’t really anything about this town in particular that the party had come to care about. First lesson there: you can’t harvest a bounty you didn’t properly seed. Second: it doesn’t actually take much to seed these things, you just need to ensure your most dynamic, endearing characters feel genuinely connected to their homes, such that a defense of those homes feels like a defense of those characters.
This sequence itself could have likely benefited from a touch more expository prep; perhaps the briefest possible scene on a balcony of the inn, where a conversation with an NPC leads into the party themselves noticing the fire starting (another way of giving the party a sense of ownership over the proceedings). Still, that’s a critique I could level at basically every page of this early work – I was thinking more in terms of functionality than scene-setting, and that was probably to the good.
Finally, what I will give Past Nick credit for is his determination to link everything dramatically, to ensure the party is basically never unmoored in terms of their objectives, by weaving the call to action of their next quest into the conclusion of their prior one. This is actually a general narrative writing lesson that serves DnD as well as any other kind of narrative fiction: events can’t simply happen in sequence, they must be linked by “thus,” “therefore,” “but,” and any other conjunction that actually implies a causal relationship. This is one of the fundamental differences between a story with momentum and a series of events that happen.
Castle Blackmire once housed the respected Mire clan, a noble family who ruled justly over thousands of acres of fertile land. Those were in the days preceding the modern emergence of city-states, and as the modern powers rose, the Mires fell into destitution. The clan has withered to nothing over the past century, and their castle has since been claimed by one Baron Tragdor, a murderous ne’er-do-well who some say isn’t even actually a baron
Tragdor has been hosting outrageously loud parties that upset all the neighbors, and furthermore his raiders have been attacking traders and caravans all along the Daleroads. The party is tasked with infiltrating Castle Blackmire and bringing Tragdor to justice, after which they will report to the city of Yhaunn, the capital of Nettlebarn’s section of the Dalelands. Pete sees something special in you folks, and thinks you could be of use to the kingdom in this troubled time. He sends you with his blessing
On the Road
To the east, well-tilled fields eventually give way to sprawling, untamed meadows and ragged splashes of trees. The air is temperate, sky vast and empty overhead. There is a lazy scent in the air, a lethargy born of the late-summer warmth, springing pooling mirages from the dusty road. The path winds over hills and past farmlands, through shaded groves and flowering meadows. The Dalelands are simply beautiful; the land is vast and bountiful, the people friendly and contented
The party mingles comfortably with the road’s homesteads and travelers, though the distance between each grows as the group approaches Castle Blackmire. Farms come further apart and often abandoned, overgrown fields and burnt homes speaking with equal clarity. Eventually, even the land seems blighted by Tragdor’s presence. Grass grows sparse and feeble as the road approaches the Blackmire turnoff. Then, in the distance, the party spies a line of carriages motionless on the road, with humanoid figures milling around
Encounter: As the party continues along the Eastern Daleway, they come across a caravan that has broken down on the road. The human travelers state that their caravan was attacked by riders about an hour back, who killed several of their horses and forced them to laboriously rebalance their carriage weights. The travelers (Jeffrey Pennyworth) beseech the party to defend them in case the riders return. Suddenly, the riders return!
The party must keep the travelers alive as riders take passes at the caravan. The more travelers survive, the greater the party’s rewards and renown will be. The riders are more interested in attacking the travelers than the party, and can be driven off if the situation seems like more trouble than it’s worth. There are three caravans bearing travelers scattered throughout the battlefield, and one rider approaching each caravan. Do your best, warriors!
The raiding party is composed of three Spy enemies, each of whom are approaching a different covered wagon. Defend the wagons!
As a reward for saving them, the travelers will part with what remains of their gold (200g) and two potions of healing, as well as something far more precious: a map of Castle Blackmire. They will also tell the party that several of their number were previously taken by raiders, and entreat the party to save them if they can
Whew, that’s a lot of text! Fortunately, I didn’t just sit there and exposit at my players for five minutes straight, though you know I happily would have. As you can see by the more fully realized description of this next stage of the adventure, this is basically when I started seeing my campaign world as an actual place worthy of description, rather than just a stage for mechanical adventures. The first two paragraphs here aren’t even for the players – they are a description of the quest to come, as well as its sort of general tone, to help me as a DM get my head in the right space for the coming adventure. A key innovation here, thinking more in terms of DM-side tools than text for the players, and reflective of how, having already run a few sessions, I could now see more clearly what precisely I needed to get the story rolling.
The “On the Road” sequence is for the players though, the first of many introductory segments I’d be using to set the tone for the quest ahead. As I’d come to appreciate more and more over the sessions to come, a paragraph or two of carefully premeditated exposition goes a heck of a long way towards making a videogame quest into a shared fantasy adventure; personally, without the aesthetic backend, DnD feels mostly like a clumsy videogame to me anyway. It’s the texture that makes it a story, and different DMs can offer texture in different ways – I trend towards descriptive copy and NPC dialogue because those are my strengths, but any visual artist could easily replicate what I’m doing with a few portraits and landscape sketches.
The encounter here is pretty simple, and mostly demonstrates both my increasing understanding of how blunt quest on-ramps need to be (where the Nettlebairn quest needed to be “discovered”, this one basically leaps onto the road in front of the party), as well as my attempts to create more dynamic combat encounters, this time through the presence of multiple targets to guard. Escort missions get a bad rap because players don’t like putting their success or failure in the hands of an uncontrollable NPC, but by making this simple “king of the hill”-style encounter, I felt I could force the party to think about battlefield spacing without feeling like they were working at the whim of suicidal hostages. The concept worked well, and thus immediately entered my combat encounter lexicon (these days we’ve even got a dedicated “damsel in distress” mini).
Sidequest:
Rescue the captured travelers from Blackmire Castle. The travelers will reward you with two Potion of Greater Healing, and will increase your reputation in Tasseldale as they relate word of your exploits to those they meet. Also a small magical trinket – perhaps a first level Amulet of the Devout
Lil’ Susie
The caravan will include an adorable halfling girl, whose parents were taken by the raiders. She will do her tragic child utmost to convince the party to save her parents, and beg them to take her with them for the journey. This is probably a bad idea by any strategical metric, and will presumably force the party into a variety of unfortunate situations where they are forced to save Susie before she trips and falls in a bog or says hello to a castle guardsmen – or should I flip this around, and have the twist be that Susie is actually incredibly competent?
The approach to Blackmire reveals the mire from which it earned its name. Thick fog stretches languorously over tarry stretches of peat and mud, interspersed with dark puddles of dubious composition, bubbles rising from their depths. Lonely cries reverberate in the distance, dissolving into cackling laughter and gurgling noises. The road grows patchy and uneven as the party approaches the castle, eventually ending at a collapsed bridge. As the party assesses the situation, those distant cries ratchet into a chorus of screams, and decrepit bodies begin rising from the pools behind
Encounter: The party must find a way to cross the collapsed bridge, which presumably once spanned a healthy river, and now perches astride a bubbling cauldron of filth. Complicating this task, zombies are rising in numbers beyond reckoning behind the party, adding a clear time limit to their task. This encounter will combine battle with problem solving – the party will have a little time to act as the zombies approach, but will ultimately end up crossing the gap while simultaneously engaging with zombies. The party can exploit Tragdor’s existing pulley system, allowing one player to cross the bridge while another turns the pulley (at either end) for one (or two?) turns. Remaining players must hold off the zombies. Party can also find their own ways across the channel, though falling in the muck will inflict 2 dmg/turn and require a dex check to escape
More evidence here of how fearful I was that the party would just miss the quests I’d planned entirely, as I layered a second rescue mission sidequest on top of the mayor’s initial “liberate the castle” main quest. Of course, these additions served a greater purpose than that: as I said above, I’d well learned that quests only feel as meaningful as the party’s emotional attachment to the characters involved, and thus it seemed prudent to add a more direct human element to this whole Castle Blackmire scenario. I also liked the idea of an infiltration mission with multiple targets, potentially forcing the party to think more strategically about their approach to the castle, and make best possible use of the floor layout I’d put together. I knew from our previous campaign that few things excite a party or make them feel like they have genuine agency in a mission more than having a map to pour over, and I was determined to make use of as many supplementary props like maps or relevant landscape shots as I could.
Lil’ Susie is the first successor to Lugdug, a character with a straightforward personality and easy comedic bit for the party to latch onto, the human face attached to an otherwise impersonal conflict. I know I said all that stuff about the annoyance of escort missions in games, but keep in mind that I’m also designing this campaign for my actual friends, with whom I have shared many conversations about precisely these sorts of mechanical annoyances. Making Lil’ Susie lampshade the general uselessness of escort characters was an intentional joke, though she ultimately didn’t play much of a role in the adventure – as I swiftly learned, it’s hard to make NPCs who are traveling alongside the party feel present without feeling intrusive, as their dialogue tends to take the place of conversations the party would otherwise be fostering among themselves.
This encounter was another attempt to add unique dynamics to DnD’s inherently underwhelming combat system, this time in the form of an approaching horde and a spacial/timing puzzle. It worked well enough, while also revealing two key issues with its design: first, that encounters where “kill all the enemies” isn’t an option must be clearly understood as such (a difficult task in such a murder-happy game as DnD), and second, that mechanical roles like “spend your action turning the pulley” work better on paper than they do in-session, where nobody wants to spend their turn doing an invented task the DM demands rather than actually playing their character.
With the zombie-infested river traversed, the party found themselves standing before the imposing Castle Blackmire, where they would meet an unexpected friend with a destiny even I couldn’t begin to imagine. We’ll tackle that meeting next time, which I promise will be much sooner than a year from now!
