Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nifft" data-source="post: 677010" data-attributes="member: 6562">So, no exposition from me last night. I crashed hard and slept until pretty much now.Anyway, here's my EXPO:It seemed to me that the mistaken flag of truce and the viscious circle went well together. A quote from a Stephen R. Donaldson book sprung to mind: "Mistrust justifies itself" (spoken by Lord Mohram). So I needed a couple of forces whose misunderstanding would lead to an escalating conflict.I didn't have to worry about one of the forces: it was going to be tied to the dwarven stonework, so in came a troop of dwarves. Who canonically misunderstands dwarves? Elves! There was the seed for my political setup. To add another layer to the conflict, the dwarves became religious industrialists, while the elves became druids -- which helped me incorporate another element, the blind dire ape(s), as druidic animal companions.The conflict had to be fairly young if the PCs were going to be able to do anything about it -- including exploit it. This let me exploit another aspect of the dwarven stonework, that it lasts a long time. The dwarves would be returning to a place which had long forgotten them.Now I had everything worked in except the rod and the sorcerer. Every conflict needs its seed, and these two ingredients would provide that seed. The rod of the python is nifty because it can be used to restrain (grapple) as well as kill, so it's a good item for the priest of a god of healing -- and the fact that the snake has been a symbol of healing since the Greeks is icing.The very lucky sorcerer I decided would be the instigator. He would be the one who stole the rod yet escaped both blame and detection -- by luck alone.I considered briefly having the sorcerer be a member of an evil cabal of mages called the Viscious Circle, but decided against it.That's it for the ingredients. Next time I think I'll make a separate section for mechanics (DCs for Gather Info, Spot, etc. and NPC reaction tables, not to mention force structure analysis and NPC Feats, Skills and spell lists) so as to cut down on space used for the formal entry. That way, anyone wishing to acutally use the entry to play with will have a "mini-module", but the judge won't have to slog through all those details. -- Nifft</blockquote>

Verification