[KOTS] Help me come up with a first encounter that doesn't suck

Hi all,

I'm running KOTS for a new group in two days and would love some help brainstorming. The PC's went through Slaying Stone and this will be their third session. The opening scene from the adventure, while arguably good at introducing the combat rules is a bit flat, particularly for the amount of over-the-top gonzo atmosphere most of my campaigns take on.

Items of note:

One of the PCs is a Paladin of Ioun and is a contemporary of Kalarel, who in my campaign was originally a cleric of Ioun who got corrupted by Orcus. Kalarel's cover story for being in the area is that he was going to start an official temple to Ioun complete with library on or near the site of the Keep. The PCs in the last session were made aware that Kalarel broke contact with the temple in Fallcrest and hasn't been heard from in over a month.

Another PC is an elven ranger who had Ninaren the bad guy elf as a mentor. Ninaren's been in the area helping Irontooth, who I want to play up as more of a cult member when I get to him

I changed the slaying stone iteself to be able to be reused and increase in power, and work outside of the city it was in. It's currently inert but the wizard PC is obsessed with making it work again. I'm going to have Kalarel learn about it and covet it.



All that said, I want a first encounter that really cranks it up to 11. So, thoughts?

Got to hand it to you for at least working the NPCs into PC backgrounds/adventures.

I'm surprised you want to run encounters with MORE Goblins/Kobolds after Slaying Stone. Anyways.

With the opening sequence, what you want to do is establish that the kobolds are a menace to the local area. So:

1) Before the encounter on the road, the PCs spot a farmhouse burning in the distance. Perhaps a single dead livestock along the way, or some bloody chicken feathers, or a lone goat wandering around. This is a sign of kobold raidesr.

2) This encounter is absolute chaos. The PCs come in on the tail end of the kobolds attacking a farmer coming in to market. The farmer and his son are up on the top of the wagon, waging a losing battle of fending the kobolds off from all sides. The two horses that were pulling the wagon are loose and running wild around the site, being either herded by kobolds, or chasing scared kobolds. Perhaps one of the horses has been hit by a sticky pot, immobilizing it, and it is freaking the hell out. The horses are wildcards, which will trample/run through a knot of PCs/kobolds at some point in the fight before running off into the wilderness.

If you want this encounter to be even more crazy, you can play up how disorganized these kobolds are, or at least how little of a real threat they are posing. The kobolds are less concerned with actively killing the farmer/son then they are, say, stealing everything off the cart while the farmer and son are busy defending themselves from one group. Some of the kobolds are sitting under the wagon, eating some of the contents right there, while others are taunting the farmer. The idea here is that the kobolds are terrorizing the locals as opposed to just killing them.

To have this thing teeming with crazy kobolds, you need a bucket of minions and skirmishers, as opposed to the heavy hitting dragonshields and wyrmpriests who would make short work of the actual farmers. Although if you want them present, then the scene could change entirely - the kobolds aren't disorganized, they're just pulling their punches and acting crazy. When the PCs show up, the kobolds could put their game face on.

3) Instead of Encounter 2, one of the kobolds could escape Encounter 1, reporting back to Irontooth. Irontooth responds by sending a hit squad (lead by a slyblade or something) out to hunt down the PCs. The encounter would probably involve a more involved trap. Kobolds luring the PCs into a trapped spot in the woods, where they might have a hostage, or some other clever ploy. If you do as #2 suggests, then this encounter might surprise the PCs in how on the ball the kobolds are.

Alternatively, Irontooth could have sent the hit squad out only an hour before the PCs show up to kick his ass. So the hit squad, returning to base and finding it destroyed, are looking for vengeance and show up later - for instance, they come at the PCs from behind while they are in the Keep. I had originally intended to do this, the hit squad setting up their ambush in the first room of the Keep and hitting PCs as they were leaving the dungeon once Kalarel was taken care of.

Just an FYI. You might have the dragon burial site actually do something. Maybe the thing in the site can be related to amping up the Slaying Stone. In any event, whatever is in the burial site should be relevant to the story.

Sorry I wasn't clear (although some great stuff in the post there.) I want to make up a completely different opening scene than the one in the book for the very reason that they have been fighting nothing but goblinoids for a bit and I want them to fight something new.

What level are the PCs?

Rechan said:

What level are the PCs?

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2nd level.

Phebius said:

One of the PCs is a Paladin of Ioun and is a contemporary of Kalarel, who in my campaign was originally a cleric of Ioun who got corrupted by Orcus. Kalarel's cover story for being in the area is that he was going to start an official temple to Ioun complete with library on or near the site of the Keep. The PCs in the last session were made aware that Kalarel broke contact with the temple in Fallcrest and hasn't been heard from in over a month.

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I actually did a "flashback" to foreshadow Kalarel - who in my game was also a priest who was corrupted by Orcus. I handed out character sheets to the players, the last one of which was Kalarel himself. It was a great "oooo!" moment.

The players then played a quick encounter using their new characters, which ended with Kalarel being possessed. It was naturally railroady (I made sure Kalarel didn't die, for example), but it worked for my group as a one-off showpiece. Guess it might work for yours, if you're looking for something a bit more off-the-wall.

I've done it a few times since (I'm planning a similar thing for this weekend, in fact), and I've found that giving players monster PCs works best, with one or two simple attack powers and a recharge power. It also means you can slaughter them all with no hard feelings. I did it once to foreshadow the lich they were hunting, for example, where everybody played the previous group of adventurers who dared to enter its tomb.

What you could do is have a rigged trap. Some beast(s) disguised cage sits on the side of the road, with a tripwire as the release mechanism. Alternatively there could be jars filled with snakes or a swarm of something, rigged on a tree branch, ready to drop (or in a pit - a jar full of wasps in a 6" deep pit would be a hell of a surprise).

Or you could have the above, but the PCs see someone on the King's Road ahead of them about 100 feet trigger the trap. So you have a round or two of the PCs running to the rescue. Later it's quite clear that it was set up by those little buggers (even having the Ranger find kobold tracks).

If you want to really get the PCs angry, instead of it being a trap, it's kobolds herding something big and nasty onto the path of the road. They are likely watching from a hill, and when they see people coming, they piss off a bear or boar or something, and simply run across the PCs' path/herd it towards the road, and then run away laughing.

Crossposted from rpg.net

Well, last night's game was a success, though it went in a completely different way than I'd planned it, (as happens roughly 100% of the time in my campaigns.) For starters, I was fighting off a massive cold and was doped up on Day Quil and lack of sleep which made for some interesting DMing. I would not reccommend this as a matter of course for aspiring DM's, but if you do, it's good to take notes. I'm currently looking over said notes after a day of sleeping and they're interesting. Here's a recap:

As we were waiting in the study lounge on campus for the room we'd reserved to open up, someone who I've met a few times and is friends with one of the players wandered by, saw our dice and asked if he could play. He'd never played 4E before, but had played a few Pathfinder games so it wasn't too hard to bring him up to speed. He wound up having a great time and loving the system and will be gaming with us regularly. (Wait a minute? A fan of BOTH Pathfinder and 4E? But how????!!! ) Kidding aside, and speaking as a fan of both games and as a DM with time limitations, I really have to give the nod to 4E both for teaching new people and for character creation and encounter building and alteration on the fly. With the character builder, we had a character for him in 15 minutes. Admittedly we hurridly chose some options with the idea of him being able to redo things he didn't like once he got a look at it later, but even that said, he wound up changing I think one power. So the party now contains a Deva Druid. Of the Raven Queen. Which is about the coolest idea I've ever seen a new person come up with. I'll probably need some help again making that as interesting as possible but more on that later.

Anyway, the previous session had ended with the PCs having fled from the setting of The Slaying Stone both they and the city itself more than a bit worse for the wear by their having been in it. I changed it so that the stone was more than a one shot gun, but have yet to solidify what the hell it is. (I do things like that a lot. The player who had it has never gamed at all before and was really interested in the stone and made a throwaway comment about it probably having hidden powers, and so as of right then, it sure did. After seeing the thing blast away about 20 orcs, she's terrified of it, but doesn't trust anyone else with it. Her background involves a lot of trust issues and she is beginning to suspect that her mentor isn't as competent as he comes across. (She's right)

So I had the Deva be aware of their coming and presence and he decided to just walk up to them and demand what the hell they were doing in his forest. This led to about an hour's worth of roleplaying with each other and deciding to join up. (I see your party lacks an immortal worshiper of death.") And then combat.

My initial plan was to go the Firefly episode "Bushwacked" route, and have them come across the scene of a caravan that had been hit with evidence that it may have been done by undead with some partially eaten corpses, but nowhere near enough to account for everyone, and one survivor who'd go feral on them. At the last moment I decided to just run the opening scene from KOTS with the alteration of the kobolds attacking a caravan. The shopkeeper Bairwin from Winterhaven was in the caravan and was the only survivor because he was a cult leader who'd set the whole thing up to take out some enemies and provide Kalarel with sacrifice victims. The new guy wasn't familiar with the system and 2 of the other players need practice on some things, so I thought between that and my foggy brain, I'd just go with that, adding the survivor who'd still go feral on them.


Combat went well, and the players are starting to figure out how to work as a unit much better than they have. But in the course of my brain getting more and more foggy, I completely forgot to have fleeing survivors, which I wanted because it would have added some initial credibility to Bairwin's cover story and also a means to lead them right to him when they turned up missing later. As expected, the PCs were suspicious of the sole survivor with no apparant injuries, but I managed to make that work when one of them flat out asked him how he managed to survive and I had him just explode on her, saying how dare you call me coward, those were my apprentices killed back there, is this the sort of thing we have to expect from adventurers, etc. (Oh yeah, I also forgot to have the feral survivor. I'll work that in later.)

So off to Fellcrest they went, the Wizard meanwhile getting a message through magic talking sparrow, (which I made up on the spot because it seemed really funny to me just then) from her mentor saying, "please confirm or deny that the goblin city of Gorrisbad was annihilated by a cataclysmic event." She responded in a rambling narrative that was trying to say something without saying anything, at which point, one of the other players said, "I think you only get 140 characters per tweet," which means he also thought it was funny, so hurray! I also gave the rest of them their own tweets from varying contacts, the ranger getting one from Ninaren the ranger who is her mentor of sorts. The fun bit is that, in the adventure itself, Ninaren is the most obvious of obvious traitors, but the PCs haven't even considered not trusting him. The halfling rogue got a reminder from someone named Spyder that I made up on the spot that she owed money, and the others got other plot things.

We ended things in fallcrest with the wizard deciding not to answer the sparrow, which led to three more sparrows, all of which she fed to her dragonling who has now taken to eating every sparrow she sees. The party is of course being like all wise parties and splitting up, the halfling going to her wizard friend in the seedy part of town to ask him about the Slaying Stone, as well as to pay off whomever Spyder is. I used my last bit of creativity to have the halfling spot Bairwin rather hurredly moving with a purpose somewhere.

So, in an adventure that I planned on having them end up in the thick of things in Winterhaven, they wind up in Fallcrest with a bunch of complications that they weren't expecting. So now I have to figure out what Fallcrest's criminal underworld is all about and find some interesting things for a Deva Druid of Death to do.

This Sounds Awesome.

find some interesting things for a Deva Druid of Death to do.

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Since Devas reincarnate, maybe he could get a flashback from a past life (maybe when the town was just starting up) about something that's buried here somewhere. Or someone he knew (An elf? To see if they are still alive?)

Or, he could get a message from Momma Raven that a Reaper has gone missing/not doing their job in the area, and there are souls who haven't managed to cross.

Do you plan to run any published adventures after KotS? Specifically Trollhaunt (Yes I know it's Paragon but).