Bungeonsandbagons - I Keep All The Stuff Here That I Like

Adventure: An Icy Expedition

“I’m not sure what the foreman means when she says “ Shift’s over, head out and warm yourself up” do you? The whole thing’s buried under a glacier and half the canyon’s still coated in ice. I haven’t been warm since we started this damn excursion! “ 

Setup: The ancient goliath enclave of Emendurana once surveilled an Edenic valley of delights, but was covered over with glacial ice and buried millennia ago. Little now remains beside stone and the chill of ages, but some vaults may yet hold the secrets of ages past, hidden away from the march of time and empire in the outside world. 

Too large and of too historically significant for any one adventuring party to delve, Emendurana has been taken over by the Nhilari Expeditionary Coalition as one of their premiere dig sites. Too often characterized as a “ roving army of mercenary Archeologists”, the coalition has taken careful pains to negotiate with both the dwarven clanhold who hold territorial claim over the ruin as well as those goliath herds who descended from Emendurana long ago. 

With Hard weeks of travel through snowy foothills behind them, the N.E.C. Has set up a village-sized basecamp at the opening to the glacial caverns, and is ready to begin the first real forays into the ruins proper. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Plenty of adventuring groups get their start apprenticing with the coalition, who work hard to assemble synergistic teams of scouts, scholars, technicians, and “strongbacks”. Drawn from their disparate lives by the promise of adventure or steady payment by the N.E.C. recruitment officers, the party will bein their journey by helping their employer to break new ground in Emendurana’s frozen halls.  

When a nobleman with a fondness for ancient curios is petrified in his own home by an ancient goliath artifact he recently obtained, the reliquarian who is now at blame for the incident hires the party to help clear their name. The investigation leads to a shifty fence, and a smuggling ring that may be working within the ranks of the N.E.C. to siphon off relics and other treasures beneath the organization’s nose. Ousting these outlaws will require the party to travel far north to the digsite itself, as well as dealing with their agents in the city. 

Seeking council from a mystic oracle on their current adventure, the party receives a prophecy that the answers they seek are “beyond the deepest gates of Emendurana”. Research gives the party the location and the history they’ll need, but convincing the coalition that they’re more than simple teasure hunters looking to loot the dig site will take some negotiation. 

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Image source This was the first subclass I ever made and I'm stilllll tinkering with the thing - it's, fittingly, stuck in a time loop of rewrites.

Have a great week!

The swirling blade glows with flame, imbued with powers of metallic magic powered by the genasi’s ancient ancestors. As she chops the treants to bits with her scorching magical strikes, the smell of bonfire reminds her of home.

I have always loved forge-based subclasses, and really I think only forge domain cleric currently does the theme much justice among official classes. I figured that sorcerer becoming a whirling gish of metal and magic seemed like a good way to start! The updated homebrewery link is here, while the permanent PDF of the above image is here. Hope you all enjoy, and please leave your comments and feedback!

CUTE Pathfinder 2e Character Sheets just dropped!! 🎉🎉🎉

Find them here!

THINKING ABOUT the merging of sailors and ship that takes place in the act of sailing & how the ship becomes more and more human and the sailors become more and more mechanism until at some point it perfectly evens out & their bodies are enmeshed to the point there’s one great seamless living Body with many parts. thinking about how if it’s a warship the wood of the ship is absorbing the blood and sweat and tears of the sailors and the sailors are likewise absorbing elements of the ship. thinking about how they’ve both got ribs

Monster hunt: Goudslok the Gorger 

“ Fellers, yer not going to ‘alieve this, but I was siftin through all this pickrel and I think I found me ol’ keys, how’d ya think they ended up ‘ere?”

Setup: The gnomish village on the shore of a great lake is seasonally plagued by the appearance of a tremendous golden carp. Nicknamed “the gorger” by the locals, this golden monstrosity emerges from the depths to devour all the fish at the height of the catching season before returning to the muddy deep for another year. 

Furious after years of plundered nets, a fishergnome by the name of Lennart Trawley has found the biggest boat he could, gathered a crew full of cousins, and stockpiled an arsenal of harpoons and cable. He’s still looking for a few strong backs to aid in his Ahabic vengeance quest and the party look like viable candidates for a pressganging.  

Adventure Hooks

While the Gorger is an easy enough quarry to find, catching it is another matter. The massive fish is capable of splintering hulls with a slap of its tail and causing weaker vessels to tip over with its trashing. What’s more, no mundane line or net is capable of holding the creature, as it seems preternaturally able to break any bond forced upon it. If the party manages to pick themselves up out of their first sodden defeat, they may wish to seek out artisans capable of crafting unbreakable or otherwise enchanted fishing gear, perhaps a blacksmith that works in adamantine or a fey tinker who can spin a promise into a rope? 

Not one to waste a good catch, Trawley and his crew will pull Goudslok’s body to shore for the butchering, revealing a belly full of still-wriggling fish as well as a trove of strange objects The gorger has seemingly scavenged off the lakebed. loose coins and gemstones, bewitched items, even a still-locked treasure chest, a portion of wish the party will be allotted a share based on their participation, along with as much fish as they can carry. Some of these items include: the ring of a rivergod who’d very much like it back, oddly familiar keys that open doors to places they shouldn’t go, and a weighty, invulnerable breastplate that compels its wearer to go swimming against their better judgement.  

Goudslok is not a normal fish, as anyone can tell, but few could guess that its true origin lays somewhere in the feywild. To be swallowed by this great, glimmering beast is to be spat up on those shores of primal wonder, as the party may discover should their hunt go very, very badly. Likewise, slaying the beast in the mortal realm is not enough, as it will continue to return each year unless slain in its home domain. Doing so is easier said than done, and may require bargaining with whatever fey lord keeps the now miniaturized gorger as a pet. 

Tableskills: The Proactive DM Voice

One of the most fundamental lesions I learned over the course of becoming a great DM was that it was my job to push the story forward, not my players.  When I was younger I was terrified of taking any agency upon myself for fear of railroading my group, thinking that my job was merely to read out prepared text and design a playground for my players to explore as they saw fit. Needless to say, no matter how much planning i did or how big I made my campaign world it never made my party any more energized, instead bleeding out their attention until they became listless and the group/campaign dissolved. 

Once I made the change to DM driven play, things changed almost instantly. My once distracted players became excited collaborators, looking to steer the runaway engine that was my narrative. Where as before they were directionless, having infinite shallow options, they were now focused on the road ahead of them, trying to dodge upcoming hurdles while reacting to the unexpected ones.  

This change took some getting used to, but became most evident in how I narrated my games, cutting down on extraneous calls for rolls,  chaining together scenes until a big finale at the end of the session, using my infinite power as narrator to push receptive players into interesting situations that progressed both the story and their character arc. Over time I began to think of these changes and a bunch of others as “proactive DM voice”, a skill that I think players and dungeonmaters alike could benefit from learning. 

Lets look at an example, lifted from one of the very first modules I ever ran: The party stands at the edge of a tremendously large fissure, and has to lower themselves a hundred or more feet down to a ledge where they’ll be ambushed by direrats.  You could run this in a rules literal sense: reading out the prepared text then waiting for the party to come up with a solution, likely dallying as they ask questions. Have them make athletics checks to descend the ropes, risk the possibility of one of them dying before the adventure ever begins. Then you do it two or three more times as they leapfrog down the side of the canyon, wasting what was perhaps half an hour of session time before you even got to any of the fun stuff. 

Or you could get proactive about it: 

Securing your ropes as best you can, you belay over the side of the fissure, descending down in a measured, careful pace aiming for the most stable looking outcrop of rock, still a hundred or so feet above the canyon’s base. A few minutes and about two thirds of the way through your decent [least athletic PC] looks like they’re struggling, their hands are coated in sweat and they can feel unfamiliar muscles burning in complaint.  I need [PC] to make me an athletics check

Rather than waiting for the players and the dice to make a story for me, I took the extra step in my prep time to think of something interesting that might happen while they’re venturing through this section of the map. I specifically designed things so that happenstance wouldn’t kill off one of my heroes, but they might end up damaged and in a perilous situation should the fates not favour them that particular moment. 

Likewise, this planning has let me prepare a number of different angles that I could use to prepare the next scene: with an injured player ambushed by multiple rats while their allies dangle a few rounds away or with the party saving their friend and descending together, too much of a threat for the rats to tackle all at once, leading them to stalk the party through future encounters.

This is already getting a bit long, but for those interested in more ways you can adopt a proactive DM voice, I’ll give more examples under the cut

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standing on the deck of a ship while all the dead men's eyes look down on you from the rigging. just sailing things