Help Me Spruce Up This Encounter Area!

[MortalPlague]

Hey folks,

I'm putting together an encounter for my thieves' guild game tomorrow. I've got a kind of back-alley park between a set of buildings, where my players are likely to do battle with another band of thieves. The kicker; these thieves are dark elves, and they've brought friends. Ropers, in particular.

As you can see in my badly-scanned map, I have a rough layout. The two ropers are marked on there (each with range 10, so they cover a good distance). There's a stable-type area, empty of animals, but full of hay... very flammable hay. Other than that, the rooftops will be accessible. But I'd like to put more in the north and south courtyard areas.

For the record, the little open spaces in the walls are windows, which players will be able to clamber through or shoot through. Notably, the ropers can also snag people through them.

Any ideas? Ideally, I'm looking for something that'll be interesting in game, but would be found in a regular back alley in a normal human city. I'm drawing a blank... any help would be very much appreciated.

 

[Neubert]

I was thinking that a couple of homeless people (or stableboys?) could be sleeping in the hay and wake at the sound of battle. I don't know how your players and the NPC band of thieves are alignment-wise, but reactions to the fleeing innocents could range from ignoring them, to avoiding hitting them with AoE powers, to grabbing them and using them as human shields.
You could also place them in either the north or south end (where you wanted more detail), but I can't think why they wouldn't lie around in the hay instead.

 

[the Jester]

Piles of garbage would be good difficult terrain.

Also, a particularly nasty heap that, if moved into, creates a zone of buzzing flies for a round. Anyone in the zone treats all creatures as if they had concealment and may catch filth fever.

Perhaps a pile of scraps of construction material; anyone force-moved into it, or knocked prone in it, takes bonus damage.

I like the "sleeping homeless people wake to a horrible battle" bit too- if your pcs are heroic, this can lead to a sudden re-evaluation of their tactics.

 

[MortalPlague]

As far as homeless people go, my PCs are rather ambivalent. They're a thieves' guild who's more or less unaligned; they won't go out of their way to sow terror, but they have no qualms about collateral damage. So I doubt the innocents would cause any problems for them.

Still, I may have the drow folks take them as human minion shields. Absorbs an attack. If they see how effective it is, they might do the same... I can see that being an interesting mechanic.

I really like the flies idea. I may even lure players into the garbage by giving people cover if they're in those squares...

 

[bennyhobo]

With that kind of commotion, maybe locals will alert the town guard? 3 or 4 rounds in you could have some troops join the fray and start fighting against both the players and the drow? Then the players would have to choose between fleeing and killing everyone, including the guard. That might get them put on (or placed higher on) the wanted list.

 

[Kannon]

I like the minions-as-meatshields idea. It's nifty, I'm gonna have to steal that. I've got a vaguely similar encounter coming up, I have a two-tiered setup, for street-level and rooftops, you can climb most walls with an average climb check to count it as difficult terrain, and a couple places with scaffolding to climb up as difficult terrain. There's also some assorted construction debris on the roof for cover, or a strength-type check to push it down on a target below. On the roof a square (5') back from the edge, you've got cover from the street, and street-level cover is ignored from the roofs. (There's no roof-to-roof cover besides the 2 piles of construction debris). Definitely stealing the meatshield minions, though.

 

[aco175]

some other iedea may include:

rock/brick pile making areas difficult terrain, similar to the trash heap
local water well, great place for where they came,
a few trees may allow pc's to hide from the reach 10
A statue, similar to trees,