Adventure/Encounter: Blue Mountain Inn

I've thrown together a short adventure / long encounter for use in any heroic level game. So long as you have the core books, you have everything you need to run this module. The adventure takes place in an Inn, so some of the fighting spaces may be a little cramped. Let me know what you think!

This was inspired by Lord Zardoz's excellent demo encounters found here.

Edit: You might find the Inn to be a little too cramped. It may be a good idea to treat the mapped areas as using 10 foot squares rather than 5 foot squares (i.e. 4 squares to every one).

Adventure Background:

The Blue Mountain Inn has been a safe haven for adventurers and travelers both, sitting on a road halfway between two towns. Offering good food, good ale, and a warm, comfortable bed, the Inn has always been a preferred stop for anyone passing by. Recently, however, a band of goblins led by Skave the Sly have taken over the Inn, driving the owners away (and killing those too slow to flee).

Delighted with their captured prize, the goblins have already finished with their looting, and now they plan to hold it, driving away anyone who comes near. Skave knows that to have a stronghold is to be powerful, and more than anything else, Skave wants to be powerful.


Adventure Setup:

This is more a random encounter than a true adventure, but the Inn itself offers several small encounters which can occupy characters for a few hours. The characters could accept a quest from the owners to retake the inn, or they could simply stumble onto it along the road, or maybe a captive goblin tells them about Skave and his band? This little module can be affixed to any campaign with relative ease.

The adventure is written for 1st level characters, but there are scaling rules at the end of the text. If every encounter is completed successfully, the PCs stand to gain 4025 xp (or 805 xp each, assuming a party of 5).

Nice, well laid out and looks like it will be interesting to play. May well throw this at my group while they are enroute somewhere.

This looks like a good test of combat in small confined spaces. I will take my group through it soon. Thanks for your hardwork Mortal Plague.

D&D DAVE said:

This looks like a good test of combat in small confined spaces. I will take my group through it soon. Thanks for your hardwork Mortal Plague.

Click to expand...

Let me know how it goes! I don't think my group will hit this adventure for another couple of weeks, so I'm eager to hear how it actually plays.

I ran a solo playtest of the encounter in Area A and I noticed a few things about the adventure. Firstly, it's smaller than I thought; it wasn't really apparent until it was on the battlemat. I might recommend bumping the scale up to have the map be ten foot squares rather than five foot squares for the sake of gameplay (i.e. 4 squares to every square). I still haven't wrapped my mind around 4E's scaling yet, I suppose.

The second thing is that initiative really controls this fight; in my playtest, the goblins won the initiative and stormed the characters (the KotS pregens) and trapped them in the entrance hall, pummelling them into submission. It didn't help that I was rolling below 5 for most of the pregens, but still, this encounter can go downhill fast. I may have made things a little too difficult.

Your mileage may vary. Let me know if you give it a try.