D&D General Need interesting overland chase ideas after the PCs rescue a kidnapped VIP

[RangerWickett]

Can I tap into your genius?

Tonight my players will be rescuing a priestess (Nita) being held hostage by a rival religion. The setting is broadly bronze age Mesopotamia, with the main action being in a Babylon analog (No-Ostalin) along one river, complete with a big ziggurat where the high priestess (Kalumum) can do powerful magic. They're trying to dominate another city (Eshkital) along a different river that runs sorta parallel.

No-Ostalin's big ziggurat has a bunch of gods subservient to it, and so Kalumum the high priestess can command all sorts of miracles, but Nita the hostage priestess from Eshkital serves a river goddess who has purview over agriculture. Due to the way magic works in the setting, Kalumum can't do any miracles related to rivers or agriculture. She wants to consolidate power by strong-arming the river goddess's faith to join up, and the PCs are part of an opposition movement that wants to prevent Kalumum from having unstoppable tyrannical control over everything.

The PCs intend to sneak Nita out of the 'guest house' and escape No-Ostalin, then flee 50 miles through canal-filled farmland (bare because it's winter) to reach a river they can travel to Eshkital, where Nita's temple is. They've got a boat lined up to meet them at the river, but first they've got two days of travel to get there.

So, like, what sorts of pursuit should there be? What's the challenge? I've got ideas, but I figure you might come up with stuff to motivate more creativity.

One fun twist: one of the PCs (Sayf) is seen by Kalumum as an ally, and he's positioned himself to be the guy in charge of chasing the rest of the party down. So we'll have 4 PCs fleeing with Nita, and Sayf a group of NPCs chasing them. I probably need to bounce back and forth between the two groups, keeping tension up on both ends.

Like, Sayf's group needs some sort of skilled tracker, and he can't too obviously screw up the chase or else they'll turn on him and his cover with Kalumum will be blown. And maybe Nita's group comes across some people in trouble (probably members of a clan that one of the PCs belongs to), and there's a question of whether to do the right thing or keep running.

And when the two groups finally meet up (which I'll try to contrive to happen), there should be some sort of monster that attacks too, which poses a complication for both sides. And what sort of monster should that be? And what terrain should the fight involve? Like, the PCs see the boat waiting for them just upstream, and they've got to hold off the pursuers and the monster for 5 rounds as the boat comes in to pick them up?

The PCs are:

Sayf - ancestral barbarian undercover as an ally of Kalumum
Qusay - mastermind rogue from a tribe of "Githyanki with the serial numbers filed off" who are sort of desert nomads
Chee-tor - Tabaxi fighter copper merchant who is blessed by the god of fire
Shenshen - alchemist from Eshkital who is trying to understand the setting's "stone-tablet"-based magic system
Sag-e-kur - fey ranger who recently used treasure from a previous adventure to buy a farm to try to share the wealth with the common man

I need:

Interesting reason to slow the PCs down.
Quirky NPCs chasing them.
Cool location for a fight.
Novel monster.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Theory of Games]

Is the system 5e? Any major house-rules that may affect magic or movement? Map of the ziggurat area? Map of the region that includes the starting and finishing points?

 

[Dioltach]

Make full use of those irrigation canals. A small pole barge will be faster than trying to find the best place to cross from field to field. But of course there will be dead ends, and blockages. Sections with high reeds might block sight, and there could be all sorts of interesting things that make their homes in the fields and waters during the winter months.

 

[GuyBoy]

There’s a “niche sport” in England called bog-snorkelling. Essentially, swimming through muddy ditches or small canals, breathing through reeds.
A land area blocked by hostile forces could force PCs to bog-snorkel past them, complete with cold muddy water and at least a few giant eels or worse. It would confuse trackers though.

 

[GMMichael]

It looks like I missed the game, but...

Like, Sayf's group needs some sort of skilled tracker. And maybe Nita's group comes across some people in trouble (probably members of a clan that one of the PCs belongs to), and there's a question of whether to do the right thing or keep running.

The tracker might be able to keep the pursuit going in the right direction, but catching a quarry that has no reason to slow down, knows it will likely be tracked, and has little overland resistance (bare farmland), sounds about impossible. Doing-the-right-thing encounters seem needed at this point.

Sayf - ancestral barbarian undercover as an ally of Kalumum
Qusay - mastermind rogue from a tribe of "Githyanki with the serial numbers filed off" who are sort of desert nomads
Chee-tor - Tabaxi fighter copper merchant who is blessed by the god of fire
Shenshen - alchemist from Eshkital who is trying to understand the setting's "stone-tablet"-based magic system
Sag-e-kur - fey ranger who recently used treasure from a previous adventure to buy a farm to try to share the wealth with the common man

How in the world did you get five PCs to all come up with generally setting-consistent names? (The odd man out is pretty obvious to me, but at least there's a dash in it).

 

[RangerWickett]

I have really awesome players who appreciate the effort I put into world building and pacing exposition.

(The game is in 8 hours.)

Chee-tor's player made a whole suite of thundercats-esque Tabaxi NPCs, including the power hungry sorceress Tigrexa, the mistrustful shadow warrior Dark Panthra, the hairless beggar Sphynxo, and the huge but lazy Whiteclaw. And listen, you can't judge other people's cultures. If their names sound strange to our ears, we just need to be better about accepting them.

(They're hilarious. He refers to cat person culture as 'being saved for the DLC,' when he intends to run a follow up game in the same setting after I'm done, wherein the party will have to face the perils of the pharaoh of the Necro-Cats.)

 

[RangerWickett]

Is the system 5e? Any major house-rules that may affect magic or movement? Map of the ziggurat area? Map of the region that includes the starting and finishing points?

5e. The party is 4th level. The magic system for the players is the same, but the setting has a sort of technology of stone tablets that create magical effects within 12 cubits, which the temple uses as gifts or threats to keep other communities allied. The party's first gig was stealing a sort of 'no trespassing' tablet from the temple of the sea goddess which they intend to use in a few months to interdict a big treasure barge.

Not sure the map makes a huge difference, given the minimal level of detail, but this is the region: two major rivers (Chebas flows past Eshkital, Quatil flows through No-Ostalin). There hasn't been much travel outside the main city yet, though.

 

[RangerWickett]

 

[RangerWickett]

I think I have a starter idea for what I want the final encounter to be.

They have a boat that will be waiting for them once they get to the Chebas River, and they know what canal outlet the boat will be waiting by, so they can head for that. And along the way there will probably be some military blockade that was perhaps warned in advance through Magic to try to stop them, so they have sneak through the canals or figure out some other trick.

But at the destination, the boat that they are waiting for is hanging out in the river, anchored, because it doesn't want to go into the canal because there is a monster there.

A kulilu, which is a thing I've established existing in the setting: a 20-ft long hybrid of a carp and a weasel, which generates unnatural heat from its body that causes water around its to steam, and which can spit a geyser of scalding water.

Ideally, I can contrive to have the fleeing player characters get warned somehow that the monster is there, and then as they try to figure out a place to rendezvous, where the boat can make landfall away from the monster, the pursuing NPCs come within sight, and they are forced to have a fight, and the fight attracts the monster. And maybe during that, the boat risks coming in close to try to pick them up, even as the monster is present.

 

[RangerWickett]

We got a little sidetracked when two PCs came up with the idea to have one of them become the apprentice of an evil witch working with the high priestess Kalumum, in order to spy on her and learn how to defeat her. So that was a fun detour I had to make up on the spot.

But when the 'rescue' happened, and Sayf volunteered to help track the party down, he got put in charge of the mission, and then was a bit too good at slow-rolling it. The rescue happened just after sunset, and Sayf told his team to get a good night's rest because they'd be leaving first thing in the morning. The guys thought this was ridiculous (Sayf also rolled a 6 Deception check), so they actually encouraged Kalumum to send another group of trackers who'd leave right away.

So the party is traveling, and a group of hunters are in pursuit, and now Sayf needs to catch those hunters so he can make sure they don't catch the rest of the PCs. We'll see how that pans out next week.