Doppelgangers are growing a clay giant in the swamps of the prioro marsh. The Friends have found them, and taken some out from the trees before they could be found. Now the giant knows they’re hear and the fight is on.
It was a pretty neat fight. I used some new river terrain made of felt strips that clip together. There was a neat bridge and some terrain at play like a muddy slope and hiding in trees. When I take some time to actually think about encounters (which I don’t often do, the time spent for value gained is not worth it usually I feel) they can be kinda fun.
After the giant falls, The Friends investigate the egg. It was fun describing the inner workings of this object which I knew a little bit about and got to flesh out naturalistically at the table. This kind of logical follow through type improvisation is the most fun DM activity. The roots inside the egg are magical, and want to eat blood. It almost ensnares Icoriol but Friend rips him away. They burn out the roots and find some Meld Clay in the center. It’s a magic clay that comes alive when you build things out of it.
The Friends have decided to head north around the wode and over to Fort Duvno. The only trouble is this takes them through The Beastlands, where the beastmen armies wait. There was some great discussion here about which way to go. My second favourite DM activity is sitting back and watching my players use their knowledge of the world to make smart decisions.
They head north through the swamp, coming across the waterwheel merchant, and taking some time to calibrate their map after getting lost. Eventually the leave the swamp and enter some hills in the north. They encounter some giant ants and decide to head north instead of northeast like they planned because they were under the impression that there was a giant anthill nearby. I may or may not have leaned into this idea. Either way they went around it, so they’ll never know if it was true or not. Didn’t stop them patting themselves on the back for so cleverly avoiding my devious trap.My third favourite DM activity is leaning into my role as the one who knows everything to imply but not confirm that what the players are assuming is true.
The beastlands are dry, the grass yellowing. It does not take much wandering through the forest to come across something. A grizzly battle site, dead beastmen lying everywhere. Some where robes of human skin, others wear scraps of metal armor. Others still are marked only by the braiding of portions of their hair. One beastman lives.
The beastman is named Keoth, and he is part of the only human-neutral beastman enclave. The characters don’t know this, nor do they know there are any beastmen who are neutral to humans. They know nothing about how beastmen organize themselves, or that they might infight. It was a blast using body language, gesture, and broken common to communicate. I love language barriers in my RPGs.
The Friends are nice people, worldly unsuperstitious people. They trust the beastman and let him rest with them. Balthazar uses a language spell to communicate with him in his own language, and Keoth reveals all he knows.
The Beast King uses giants to strongarm several vicious enclaves into cooperation for the purposes of taking on Orthos. Enclave Caskoon is the warmongering enclave, the worst and strongest of the beastlands. Allied with it are the cannibal Enclave Yokotel that eat their victims and each other, and the Enclave Roccia, which salvages armor and weapons from human combatants. Keoth is in The Beastlands trying to contact other enclaves to get help. He is one of several unsuccessful missions. In exchange for his life, he offers to see the party across the beastlands.
Including Keoth is an unintential masterstroke. I shouldn’t even say that because he wasn’t a guaranteed encounter, he was placed on the hexmap while I was keying the beastlands. He was a lot of fun to play, and provided exposition enough that the players realised the beastlands is a whole place with it’s own workings, not just a random stretch of wilderness. This is what the other wilderness crawls on the way to Cortier were missing.
Keying the beastlands was also a learning experience. For some reason, it hadn’t yet clicked for me prior to keying the beastlands that the key and the random encounters are a product of the setting. For the beastlands, I started with assumptions - the beast king watches the border, he is amassing an army - and my keying process followed a natural logical path. How does he keep watch -> Wooden towers and teams of beast men -> Put them on the map. Where does he camp -> In a big fortified location with giants, elephants, and infighting beast tribes -> put it on the map. It made preparing this section of the map feel effortless. Setting up an internal logic to the world and following it led to a more inspired, more gameable, and way easier to prep hexmap.