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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Roger" data-source="post: 4546524" data-attributes="member: 17420">An excellent question!  I've been thinking about skill challenges for a while now.You've got a strong initial idea:  players fleeing from an erupting volcano.  Now it's a matter of growing that seed.A useful starting point is that old rule of thumb:  The purpose of a role-playing game is to generate amusing anecdotes.  I like to think about what sorts of anecdotes might come out of our initial idea; often this involves thinking about how similar situations have played out in other stories.Some random ideas:* the one guy slips and falls, and the other guy, at great risk to himself, runs back to haul him back to his feet.* the guy clutching mounds of treasure, dropping a steady trail of coins, must decide whether to drop it all to improve his chance of survival.* falling rocks and/or lava that blocks the obvious route out, diverting everyone to some other path.We might use some of these, we might not; still, I find the exercise useful for visualizing the encounter.It's also useful to consider the end with these sorts of things -- the consequences of success and failure.Success is usually the easier one.  Failure is often a lot harder.A number of the recent Dungeon adventures have unfortunately, in my opinion, really missed the mark here.  A lot of their skill challenges end up being "Success: X happens.  Failure: X happens anyway, but the PCs suffer some minor inconvenience."This is related to a phenomenon I've noticed:  skill challenges tend to occur earlier in an adventure rather than later.  An adventure that ends with a skill challenge can be very tricky, due to the difficulties in having meaningful failure.I'm not sure if your skill challenge is at the end of your adventure, but it seems like it must be close.There's a close relationship between meaningful encounters and quests.  I'm not sure what existing quests the PCs might have in your game, if any, but I'd start looking at them.Not knowing anything else about your game, I might come up with something like this:There's a town or village at the base of the volcano (isn't there always?) who probably told the PCs about the Volcano God in the first place.  Full of mostly-helpful villagers and the occasional cultist.  They're used to hearing the volcano grumble every once in a while.It's now up to the PCs to rush down there and warn them of the huge cloud of poisonous volcanic gas rolling down towards them.  The longer they take, the more people will die.  This opens up a bit of the partial-success/partial-failure angle which I think improves skill challenges, too.Some DMs feel the temptation, for various reasons, to keep this dire fate a secret from the players until it's too late.  My suggestion is to tell them right up front what will happen if they don't reach the village in time.In terms of physically staging the challenge, I'd be tempted to use a battlemap in a somewhat abstracted way.  Basically just as a one-dimensional line.  The PCs are moving forward, and behind them the poison gas is advancing.  I think this would allow for some interesting dynamics between the faster PCs and the slower PCs.Anyway, I hope all that helps a bit.  Sounds like your players will enjoy it in any case....You also asked about a Volcano God.  Hmmm.  I think I would take the 'one big monster that's mechanically comprised of smaller monsters' route.The Volcano God has two legs which are Magma Claws (level 4 brutes) and two arms which are Magma Hurlers (level 4 artillery.)Every part has its own initiative.  Keep the legs, oh, within two or three squares of each other.  The arms shoot balls of magma.  The legs can be reached with melee attacks; the arms only suffer ranged attacks (and possibly melee Reach attacks, if your party has that sort of thing.)When a leg is destroyed, replace it with one of the arms.This encounter is 700 XP, which might be a little light for a boss fight.  Add another Magma Claw as a 'body' if you need more; make the body Elite if you still need more.This might be a little weird to pull off but I think it'd work well.  Lots of anecdote-generating possibilities.Cheers,Roger</blockquote>

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