Radiating Gnome

All right, it's been ages since I wrote the first one of these, and I haven't been as regular with blogging as I wanted to be, so I'm going to babble a little about some of the stuff I'm working on right now.

I'm actually working on material for two campaigns -- one heroic (4th level PCs) and one that has just reached paragon (11th level PCs).

I'm offering this walkthrough of my process as a demonstration of the sort of very relaxed, zen process I'm using to create custom opponents for my campaign. It's very, very light on the math -- I mostly just make stuff up and then check it against what's already there to see how it measures up. Let me know what you think . . . .

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For the Heroic campaign, I'm bringing a plotline involving goblin invasion by sea and the gnome effigies that I've mentioned before to a head. The gnome effigies are a new creation for me -- I need to come up with a variety of opponents for the party that are based on these animated gnome dolls. (I play a lot of rogues in WOW, and when you pick pockets there one of the ubiquitous things you loot is a "gnome effigy" -- that has been the inspiration for this collection of opponents)

Gnome Effigy
The gnome effigy is the weakest, most basic instance of the effigy creatures. I want these guys to be annoying, but no more than that. About the weakest single creature I can base them on is the kobold minion, so that's what I'm going to work with. However, I want to give them a slightly different flavor. In a previous post I mentioned these guys and said that I was going to give them the clay scout's limited invisibility, but I've since decided that I don't really like that for them -- it's a frankly a deeply stupid choice on my part if I don't pair them with creatures that can daze opponents, or give them the ability to daze opponents themselves. So, I want to come up with something else. In the end, I think I'm going to go with the gnome's reactive stealth and make sure they're trained in stealth (on top of the Kobold's existing stealth bonus, that would give these little buggers a +9 to stealth).

Gnome Tickleyou
My original plan for these guys was to just use the clay scout, and make them bigger, non-minion versions of the effigies, but I've since decided to throw this idea out entirely.

Effigy Swarm.
This is my replacement idea for the tickleyou. It's a mob of effigies, working together in a tightly packed unit of lilliputian anger and menace. Swarm models for these guys could be the rat swarm, the needlefang drake swarm, and a few other similar swarms in the compendium. Swarms seem to be pretty consistently marked by their resistance to melee and ranged attacks, their vulnerability to area and close attacks, and their auras. Most swarm auras just let them make their basic attack again, so that's all pretty easy to do.

I'm going to go ahead and use the rat swarm as my basis for the effigy swarm. That gets the stats pretty much right, but I'll want to make a couple of changes to create my flavor. I see this as a teeming swarm of stuffed gnomes. They've grabbed small blades, bits of broken glass, etc, for weapons, and the rat swarm's basic attack works just fine for my purposes, but I'm going to remove the ongoing damage. In it's place, I'm going to include a collection of alternate attacks that build on each other.

The Attack will still be 1d6+3 and will grab a target. If the target is grabbed, it will knock the target prone (flavored to pull the target down). If the target is grabbed and prone, it will do 2d6+3 damage.

This is very simliar to the Needlefang Drake swarm, but it's not quite as deadly in pure damage, but it will be harder to escape, which I expect will be scary for the PCs.

Effigy Golem
The fey baddies who have created the gnome effigies that are helping the golins attack the city have created one more monstrosity -- a sort of golem created out of packed-together effigies, bound into a single being through fey sorceries blah blah blah.

I spent a while looking for a construct that made sense as a model for this opponent. I didn't find much in the level range that I'm working in. So, I broadended my hunt, deciding that what I really wanted was a basic brute of some sort, and decided to use the Orc Beserker as my primary model. But, I flipped over to the Golem pages to look at the golems there for something that was a standard golem flavor. Golems have a power called Golem Rampage, which should work well at just about any level, so I'm going to slap that onto the orc beserker in place of the warrior's surge. I will also adjust the attack -- rather than the 1d12+5 (with the high crit) that the orc beserker has, I'm going to go with 2d6+5 and leave off the high crit. This is somewhere between the high damage values for levels 1-3 and 4-6 in the DM (p 185). It'll average out at 12 points of damage, one point lower than the 2d8+4 that is the high damage at 4-6 on that table, so it's just about right.

So, that's my collection of Effigy beasties -- the minion, the swarm, and the golem. In all three cases the design was very quick and dirty, and the whole set was inspired by what I wanted to achieve in story terms. I spent most of my time flipping through books and the compendium looking for models and ideas -- the rest was just copy-paste and a little tweaking. And, really, since I'm going to use these monsters for a session or two, and then they'll never be used again, I don't want to spend hours and hours putting them together.

Reading the most recent article in Mike Mearls' skill challenge series, I got excited. Once again, the ideas and mechanics in his dramatically different variation on skill challenges shook up everything I was thinking and I went back to the drawing board for this week's game session.

If you have not read the article (and you should), his article details a skill challenge that does not have a "number of successes before a number of failures" mechanic to it at all. Instead, he has used pieces of the core skill challenge mechanic, added some new ideas, and come up with a rich gaming experience that looks very different from the skill challenges we have been playing with.

The two important variations I'm seeing are these:

1. Party skill checks. Rather than track specific successes and failures, everyone in the party makes a skill check. If the party gets more successes than failures, they get a success in the skill challenge.

2. In this challenge, successes mean no change in status, but failures in those skill checks add a failure to an ongoing condition track that measures the ongoing effects of the party's bumbling. In this specific case, since the PCs are trying to move discretely through a hostile city, each failure makes the city's defenses more and more alert to their presence and makes it harder and harder for them to operate.

Those are pretty significant changes, but what's even more exciting is the idea that even the bedrock mechanics of skill challenges can be adapted to fit your specific needs. I mean, a skill challenge that doesn't track successes? If you can do that, and it's still a skill challenge, what CAN'T you do?

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So, given that, I sent out to rewrite the skill challenge I had planned for my group this weekend. Here's their situation. They are in a major city where the are minor heroes. They have been asked by the Duke to go out among the people during a week-long festival and to be visible, heroic, and to counter the public opinion that is being generated by the pretender prince who is in the city with his army of knights, who are trying to convince the people that the city needs their help to protect them from a looming goblin threat. The Duke fears that if he takes this prince's help he will be tied in fealty to a man he is not sure he wants to serve. All of this takes place during a street festival that is inspired by Mardi Gras.

So, I created five different quarters of the city, described the, the people who live and work there, and how they party during the festival. The idea was that the PCs would move through the city over the course of the day in four phases -- at the end of the day, if the PCs had a majority of successes in a majority of the phases (sort of electoral college style), they would earn a victory in the skill challenge. Each quarter of the city had a risk of some sort associated with it -- something that might happen while the PCs were there (for example, in the big marketplace, the risk was a pickpocket, who made an attack on the PCs' reflex defense and if it succeeded the PC lost 5gp). I also details some specific RP events that would take place in each quarter -- things that would move elements of the game's plot forward one way or the other without being a direct part of the skill challenge. This included things like spotting a Fagan-type trainer of cutpurses and finding a quiet courtyard where a couple dozen of the Prince's knights were practicing (which gave the PCs present the opportunity to earn a reroll they could use in the future in a fight with one of those knights -- to represent having studied their tactics and being able to anticipate them).

Then I took my list of skills that the PCs could reasonably use to try to win the hearts and minds of the people in the city away from the prince and his army of knights, and set DCs for them based on the quarter (following Mearls' example on this)

I decided that the day would play out in four phases of about 2 hours each. In each phase, if the PCs were not in a quarter of the city, the Prince's men in that area would earn a success for their side in the contest to win the hears and minds of the city. Each of the PCs could make a check in the quarter they were in to try to earn a success there.

How did it play out?

Pretty well -- not perfect, but pretty well. Over the course of the day, they figured out that they needed to be in many places at once to stop the knights from winning successes. They decided to save the Dockside quarter -- a part of the city they already had a following and had won successes in the meta-challenge earlier in the week -- for the last phase of the day. But by the time they got to the last phase, they realized they were in a situation where they had made tenuous gains in other parts of the city, and the only way to win the overall challenge was to stay in those parts of the city and not allow the Prince's knights to have the last word. So they had to stay away from the end of the day party with friends in the dockside quarter and to spread themselves pretty thin across the city (and splitting up the party is scary enough for a group of veteran players).

What we came away with was a skill challenge that, including all the ancillary RP stuff that I mixed in, gave the PCs some tough decisions to make, taught them a lot about the city they're in, gave them relationships with some new contacts, and that has set the scene for a lot of fun to come. We played it out in a 3.5 hour session, in which they avoided any combat they might have gotten in to, but still had some good RP fun, had to make some tough, dramatic choices, and even better, the challenge has helped me develop setting and world details that would have had to be boring exposition otherwise.

I had hopes for trying to keep the skill challenge out of the player's line of sight, but there wasn't a good way to do that, IMO. To create the drama of the mounting successes for the other guys in other parts of the city, I needed to show the party some sort of indication of those successes. I could have held that back completely, but in our particular case the players would have lost the challenge and not had the tough choice to make to give up on partying with their friends back at the docks, because they would not have been able to see the strategic situation. And I could have couched the relative success that the knights and the party were having in the different sections of the city in description, rather than using a game mechanic like successes, but that would have added the wrong sort of description and detail to the game, I felt. I needed the visible scaffolding of the challenge to help the players see what was at stake and to help them see it in a strategic way.

In the end, I was pretty happy with the results, although I don't think I want to try to run challenges like this one too often. For one thing, it takes a LOT of work -- far more work than preparing a couple of combat encounters would have taken. I spent several evenings this week scribbling like mad in my game journal trying to come up with enough ideas and events for the PCs to interact with over the course of the day. The work paid off, and we had a good session, but it did take longer. Look at the example challenge in Mearls' article -- that's pages and pages, where one of the more traditional skill challenges in one of the print adventures takes perhaps half a page. I think the work is worth it.

If you've been suffering along with the blog posts I have been making lately, you know that I've been experimenting and playing around with skill challenges, and the way they work, especially responding to the way the designers are driving the evolution of skill challenges since the initial release of the game. Ideas about skill challenges have changed a lot since the game was first released, and it seems like they still have some room to grow.

In last week's D&D podcast and in the dragon article about skill challenges, the ideas and evolution took a little more form. I like the direction things are going in -- even when I think they're going in directions that I've argued against in the past, I can see the case they're making and I think they're right, in the long run. But there are still questions that I have, and clarifications that I would like to see.

1. Tell or Don't Tell?

This was addressed in a question in the podcast -- should you tell your PCs that they're in a skill challenge or not. The answer they gave was sort of the one I prefer -- that it depends upon the skill challenge -- but I think they could have put better emphasis in their answer on the idea of making a choice, and discussion the advantages of each option. Instead they talked about skill challenges that are just rolling dice and making checks as the lesser of the two options.

And, well, I can see plenty of opportunity for challenges that are primarily tactical -- making skill checks and using a very visible scaffolding to structure the challenge -- and see them as engaging moments in the game session. That's very, very different from the narrative style, story-driven skill challenge. But I don't think that it's necessarily any less interesting.

They also mentioned, in passing, the idea of grand-scale skill challenges -- challenges that have other encounters embedded within them. I think that's terrific, and I've been playing with similar ideas.

In past posts -- in the blog and in other forum discussions -- I've frequently asked or wondered what advantage there is to gain from having a skill challenge without showing the structure to the players. My point at the time was that the structure allows the players to react to the challenge as a game -- to use tactics and teamwork to beat the challenge, and without the structure being visible they don't have that available to them.

But my opinion is changing on that note; there are some pretty important advantages to the DM using the challenge structure even if he is not going to show the structure overtly to the players. The challenge structure gives a DM a template for building this sort of narrative element into his game -- and it gives the DM a structured way to reward the players for those sorts of encounters. So, I do want to back off on that criticism of the idea of not showing the structure to the players. I still think there are moments are reasons why you might want to show the structure to the players -- probably in much smaller scale challenges, challenges that are more about a tactical situation than a narrative one (you need to cross a chasm or pick a lock, not woo the princess or convince the crew to mutiny).

2. In narrative challenges, how do you handle including everyone? How do you adjust for rampant assists?

One of the things that I liked about the initial incarnation of skill challenges was that in most cases the DCs were high enough that it took the entire party to succeed -- in most cases you needed to have half or slightly more than half of the party providing assists checks just to get enough. And the challenges were handled in a sort of round format, with the DM making sure everyone was contributing something to the challenge. There were problems, however -- some PCs were just not suited for some challenges and if the were not given a way to try not to hurt the party's chances of success by staying in the background the challenge would be doomed to failure.

The update that revised the DCs and failures changed that landscape a great deal -- now there is no reason for assisting, since the DCs are by and large 8 or 10 lower than the original ones were. Skill challenges have gone from moments that require teamwork and planning to complete successfully -- and that are achievements during the game -- to moments in the game that are just about as much a guaranteed success as combat is.

Now, the only way to challenge the party is to create a sitation where the party members cannot assist each other. That seems to run counter to the ideas that are so built into the rest of the game -- the party that works together and supports each other will be able to defeat combat encounters that are far too tough if they don't.

In my own opinion, assists should -- at least some of the time -- be a part of the structure of the challenge. My recommendation would be to make all checks that are made to assist "medium" or "hard" checks (using the medium or high DC) rather than a simple 10. After a certain point, if the assist check DC does not go up, it becomes an automatic +2.

I would probably also add +1 to the DC for every PC that can potentially assist. So, to push down the door, you can have one PC make the check and two others assist, the DC should be set at +2.

In the more narrative challenges -- in which the PCs are inventing their own solutions to challenges, writing their own story as they go, and things are much more unstrucutred and open, it seems like it's much more difficult to give every party member something to do in the challenge. In a more "tactical" challenge, it's easy to work around the table and figure out what everyone is doing, but when you start buliding challenges in which each check represents a stage in the challenge, it starts to move completely away from giving everyone something to do. The only potential way to try to achieve the same indended inclusiveness of the challenge is to try to write it so that there are stages in the challenge that other PCs can be good at.

So, if the challenge is about trying to navigate through a haunted forest, and each success creates a new situation for the PCs to respond to, the challenge will be to build stages at which the PCs discover something or open up an option that involves a new skill that will include another player. So, the initial nature check to find the path might lead the party to a ruin that would open up a history check that might open up a dungeoneering check that might open up a stealth check . . . and so on. I'm not sure I am totally comfortable with that idea -- I'm going to be very interested to see if these values that seemed so important to the initial skill challenge design just end up discard on the side of the road.

3. Why are we still calling these skill challenges?

Even though the primary tool players use to handle these moments in the game will be skills, those will not be the only thing they use, and calling them Skill Challenges is conceptually limiting.

I think we can create a much more interesting tool if we talk about "Challenges" -- a sort of umbrella term that brings with it the basic structure (DCs, successes vs failuers, etc). Then we can start talking about challenge types:

Skill Challenge -- the more tactical, smaller scale challenges
Narrative Challenge -- the more grand-scale, story-driven challenges

and perhaps some others, like . . .

Combat Challenge -- unlike combat encounters, a combat challenge is a challenge that can be completed using combat skills (think of an archery tournament or a jousting match).
Meta Challenge -- a challenge that does not actually include any individual checks of it's own -- successes and failures are earned by completing other encounters and challenges.

And so on.

I've been using my blog to post my planning notes for the campaign I'm running -- we play every other saturday, and we just had the first session of play involving the notes that I've been posting for the adventure I've planned that is very heavy on skill challenges (I had intended for it to be ALL skill challenges, and then backed off that a little).

We had a great session, 4 hours of play with only a single short 45-minute combat encounter as we played through the first two days of the festival. The players were engaged and creative in ways that surprised and impressed me, and I'm very pleased with the result -- but it also helps me support and flesh out some of my half-formed ideas about skills challenges in 4E.

The skill challenge structure works exceptionally well, IMO, as an aid to DMs who are trying to ad lib with their players. With just a few notes scratched down for yourself, you have all you need to set DCs and determine how successful your players have been -- without needing to think too hard ahead of time about options they might come up with. It certainly doesn't hurt to come up with those ideas, but if you feel like you need to plan out all of the available options for your players, you're going to make yourself crazy.

What Happened

So, by way of illustration, note the challenge I created to start off the festival -- the PCs had a goal to somehow counter the effect of a ritual honoring long-dead high kings and undermining the support for the current duke. I sketched out some ideas for what they might try (being included as a part of the ceremony themselves, disrupting the ceremony in a negative way, doing nothing). But the most important information I had in my notes, when we sat down to play, was the complexity (6/3), the base DCs (7/21/17), and the basic situation.

The PCs came up with an idea for an alternative ceremony, tied to and based on things that had happened earlier in the campaign, and provided such a perfect answer to the Prince's ceremony to honor the high kings that I am almost ashamed to say I did not see it coming. Almost, because it's a whole lot of fun being surprised like this.

To begin with, they reached back to two things in previous game sessions. They have been adventuring at sea for a while. In one adventure they captured a goblin catamaran and had been sailing around on it; in another, while sailing around, they came upon a sinking wrecked fishing boat, with one survivor, a terrified boy clinging to the mast while sharks circled in the water around them.

In that encounter with the boy on the fishing boat, they had to try to deal with the sharks while getting the terrified boy onto their ship -- but when they tried to sail right up to his sinking boat, they bumped into underwater parts of the wreck and pushed it down faster -- so they were struggling to with trying to find a way to help the kid -- who was so scared he wasn't going to let go of the mast. They did pretty badly, eventually getting a rope around the kid and pulling him forcibly off the mast -- into the water -- and then failing to get him back out of the water before the circling sharks could get to him. This failure has haunted them -- with no additional prompting from me -- and it's still a pretty sharp point with them.

That failure led to an encounter -- actually a series of encounters I had not planned for the night before the festival. The PCs talked the Duke into sending them with some money for the boy's family. They found the boy's mother and sister -- all that was left of his family -- hungry and poor and having had no word yet about their missing father and the two boys who had been on the boat. The party blamed the deaths on the Goblins, gave the family the money, and did their best to try to feel better about things.

At that point, I decided to mess with them as DM. They also decided to stay in the poor dockside residential quarter where the fishing families live, asking around about others that were missing or lost in the closing goblin blockade. There were a lot of people to talk to -- lots of missing fishermen -- and in a little while a crowd had gathered around the PCs. What made the scene a bit contentious was that the crowd had also heard that the PCs had delivered a gift from the Duke to the one family -- other families with missing fathers and sons and husbands wanted to know if they were going to get some sort of a handout -- what made the one family special.

Of course, the players were not about to admit that the one family was special because they felt guilty about getting the boy killed. So they had to think fast and backpedal . . . and that left them with a lingering feeling of having not quite gotten the visit to the fishing families right. They spent a lot of time talking about giving the families the goblin catamaran so they could use it to fish in . . then realized that most wouldn't want to fish in something that was painted with blood that could certainly have been the blood of their missing family members. So, they moved on, without having come up with a satisfying answer yet.

Then they got around to trying to find a way to deal with the planned ceremony to honor the dead high kings. They need to do something to steal the thunder from the event without making the Duke look disloyal, and without squandering their own fledgling fame. My plans for the encounter figured they might become part of the ceremony and pay their own respects to the long dead high kings, but their idea was better, and a total surprise to me.

They planned to deliver the catamaran to the square outside the temple during the ceremony, so that as people emerged afterwards they would find the catamaran there in the square. The families of missing and dead fishermen -- and anyone else with dead or missing family associated with the goblins -- were all invited to come and place a token of their lost family members in the catamaran -- an offering of flowers, a keepsake, something -- and then the catamaran was taken down to the harbor at the head of a large procession where it would be launched, burned, and a big wake would be held for the common people to remember their lost loved ones. The PCs made the arrangements, funded the party, and delivered speeches standing on the catamaran in front of the stunned people coming out of the ceremony while the poor came forward to honor their own dead.

I handled it as a skill challenge. A couple of checks to make plans the night before and get the word out to the poor. Another couple of checks while giving speeches, and then finishing up with some checks for the Wake -- having the notes (6/3, 7/12/17 DC) in front of me made it easy to handle the challenge on the fly, as we talked out what happened as they executed their plan.

The players whose characters were tasked with making speeches outlined their speeches for the group -- sort of half-speaking in character and half not -- which was pretty good for our group, mostly made up of novices.

They did have one failure -- the dwarf barbarian tasked with getting the drink for the wake rolled a failure on her check . . . we played that one out by saying that she had made the mistake of having only strong dwarven spirits to drink -- not the lighter fare like wine and beer that the crowd of human mourners, much more than half women, would be comfortable drinking. But a little quick roleplaying and another character making a good diplomacy check to convince nearby tavern owners to swap the dwarven spirits for more appropriate drinks.

And they had their Wake, celebrating the immediate losses suffered by the common people in the city, rather than the distant, long-dead high king. It went off well, and made an important step in their overall goal of winning the support of the common people back for the Duke and away from the pretender prince.

There were ways I could have screwed with the plan -- maybe the cloak knights would have gotten word of their plans ahead of time, but overall I was very pleased with their creativity and connection to the story of the campaign -- they made their choices based on story elements, not on the skills they had the best chance to succeed at, and their engagement with the ongoing story of the campaign is getting stronger.

So What?

This isn't going to be the way things always go. We had a handful of other skill challenges over the course of the session, and most were not as imaginatively handled as this example was. But it only takes this one shining creative success for my players to have a very positive feeling about the session.

What did I do? I gave them a fairly detailed but open-ended challenge, one where I didn't give them any specific hints about how to solve the problem. I'm fairly certain that the primary option I detailed in my writeup didn't even occur to them, and if it did it went by so quickly I never saw them consider it seriously.

They did, however, reach back to what had come before in the campaign. They used props and plot elements that they had already played through -- things that I did not expect them to use. If that were the first session of the campaign, they would have had a much harder time coming up with a way to handle the situation. So, don't expect that your players will come up with brilliant ideas right away -- the campaign needs some time to develop some narrative momentum.

Also, remember this: YOU don't get to decide which details you present to the players are the important ones. They decide. In this case, the encounter with the boy who was eaten by sharks was never meant to be more than a little side encounter to show off the sharks I'd developed (basically adapted crocodiles) and fill an encounter slot in the adventure I was writing. But because they failed to rescue the kid and that failure stings, that throwaway encounter has turned into an important narrative thread in the campaign. It would be a HUGE mistake on my part to do anything other than work with that plot element. You need to be ready to accept those opportuinties when they appear.

What does this mean for Print adventures?

If you're a DM who uses print adventures rather than home-grown stuff -- Dungeon adventures, etc -- its a lot harder to find opportunities for this sort of skill challenge -- and you'll see that in the way challenges are written in these sources. You'll also see that it's continuing to change as time goes on -- the challenges in adventures publish today compared to the ones from 6 months ago are VERY different. I'll write a future blog post about incorporating Story-level skill challenges in a campaign that's using print adventures.

Day 2 - Day of the Crown

(note: as I prepared for our next session, which was yesterday, I became concerned that I would move through these skill challenges too quickly, and so this day includes a couple of combat encounters to fill time. I was running out of time before the session, and combat takes a lot longer to play through than skill challenges . . . . that's why there are a couple of combat encounters here. MY next post will be a report on the action from yesterday's session.)

The Day of the crown, symbolized by the Crown of the High King, is a celebration of commerce, craftsmanship, and all things financial in the Isles.

This is the day, each year, when masters take on new apprentices, pass apprentices to journeyman status, promote journeyman to masters, and the new masters are given a chance to show off their work in the guild halls and marketplaces of the city. Craftspeople from all over Ikaria save their best work all year to bring to Ikarport for the Day of the Crown. In the evenings, the guilds hold whatever elections and annual meetings with their entire membership.

This is a special day for moneylenders, who traditionally calculate their annual interest and debt amounts on this day.

On this day the Duke or his representative visits the city's debtor's prison to select one prisoner whose debts he will pay off. This selection is made in a different way each year -- in some cases based on merit, in other years through drawing lots, games of chance or skill, etc.

Before dawn, craftspeople flood into the city and set up stalls in marketplaces and plazas. The streets will be packed from sunup to sundown with shopping -- any vacant corner is usually quickly filled with an impromptu game of chance.

After sunset, the guild halls hold great feasts for their members and any important nobles they can convince to attend. It is a mark of great status to have a member of the royal family attend a guild's feast, so frequently the family is split up and sent individually to different feasts to spread out that status among as many guildmembers as possible.

Chad, an officer of the Cloak Knights with a bad case of poison ivy and a serious case of the hates for the party has decided to use this day as his big chance to try to get some payback. He has arranged for some minor embarrassments for the party over the course of the day. Also, the PCs are new heroes in a city badly in need of heroes. A handful of the assorted guilds in town will ask the PCs to attend their banquets that evening.

Challenge 1: Shopping & People Watching

The PCs can't help but spend some time prowling the streets looking at all of the fine goods being offered. The entire City is a street festival, crowded with goods and food carts and music and buskers and so on.

Scene 1: Gnome Effigies

The players catch a child running away from a vendor from whom he has stolen a clay drinking mug shaped like a dragon's head. The child is no practiced thief, is easily caught, and surrenders quickly. Any questioning at all reveals that the child was put up to it by "Bennit" -- who turns out to be her brand new gnome doll, tucked into her tunic. When he's pulled out, Bennit announces "I'm a Monster. Rawr." Bennit will also say "I think you're pretty" and "You smell like bacon". When examined by a PC, Bennit says "Soap and Water won't kill you, you know. Lemme go!" or something like that. Bennit mostly says his usual three messages, and shows no other sign of sentience, except for at key moments when he seems to either get in a good barb or encourage the child to do something naughty (like steal).

Asking around a little, The PCs come upon a toy vendor selling a massive pile of stuffed gnome dolls to eager children -- empty sacks and crates make it clear that he has already sold dozens, if not hundreds of the little dolls, and the children and clamoring for more.

The Vendor, who calls himself "Stonemeal" is respectful and insists that he's a simple toymaker who has been working all year to bring his talking gnomes to the city. It's a harmless enchantment that brings joy to lonely children -- just look at them, how happy it makes them to each have their own talking friend.


The PCs are out and shopping among the people. They come upon a scene that has been organized by Chad, who is not at all subtle in his methods. But he, himself, is being used by Fey agents in the city who cannot show their hands.

During the day the PCs are attacked by some urchins throwing dung. Once the PCs have been pelted, the kids run for it. A quick chase (Skill challenge, 4/3, DC 5/10/15) allows the PCs to catch one of them and question him – which reveals that the kid was hired by Chad, who was watching from a nearby window.

Chad, of course, didn’t come up with this on his own – he was put up to it by a fey agent (the doppelganger at the kiln), in the guise of another Cloak Knight. The Dung is actually special dung, carrying an odd scent. And, shortly after the PCs are pelted with it, a pack of 3 Fey Hounds (shadow hounds) appears and attacks them.

A few minutes later, before they can clean up, the PCs are attacked in the street by 3 Fey Hounds.

(Fey Hounds are modified Hell Hounds).

The Crowds – There are three crowds of people -- one that is 1x1, one that is 2x2, and one that is 3x3 (using the streets of shadows dragontiles for this encounter). The crowds panic once the fight begins and move 1-6 spaces in a random direction at the end of each turn until they finally leave the board. They will not enter the space of a hound. Any PC who moves into the crowd, who the crowd moves on top of, or who starts his turn in the same space as the crowd, must make a save or be knocked prone. If the crowd moves on top of a hound, a person in the crowd is killed. Crowds provide cover

The hounds were intended to be untraceable, but a investigation of the bodies of the hounds reveals some interesting red clay packed into their foot pads – there’s brick kiln on the outskirts of town that uses this sort of clay, and this might be some sort of clue.


Scene 2: People Watching and Observation
A repeat of the investigative challenge from day 1. More clues and details provided . . .

Scene 3: Beanie Baby Ambush (Combat Encounter)

(this encounter happens whenever the PCs decide to investigate the brickworks)

Tracking the clay back to the kiln leads the PCs to the brick warehouse that houses the fey portal that the doppelganger has been using. She has been sent to try to kill the PCs by Lady El. She has also been given a small army of the stuffed gnome effigies o protect her hideout.

• Doppelganger Sneak (150)
• 2x Tickleyou (250)
• 24 x Effigy Minions (25@)

Monsters:

Gnome Effigy Level 1 Minion
(Kobold minion, with the clay scount limited invisibility rather than shifty)

Gnome Effigy TickleYou Level 2 Lurker
(Clay Scout, with guard creature rather than guard object)

Scene 4: Guild Feast.

The PCs are invited to several feasts -- as city heroes they are celebrities and having them attend a guild's feast will be considered a great honor.

The PCs have to choose which feast to attend:

1. The Merchant's Guild
2. The Metalcrafter's Guild
3. Shipwrights and Chandler's Guild
4. Hoslter's Guild
5.

What ever guild they pick, the encounter is basically the same. The PCs have a chance to win the support of the guild for the Duke's efforts ot maintain independence if they can behave well and make a good case for it during the dinner.

Complexity: 6/3
Difficulty: 6/11/16
Primary Skills: Diplomacy, Insight, Bluff, History, Streetwise (may vary a little with the choice of guild).