Patreon Preview: Let's Build an Adventure, Keep of the Black Gate Part 2
Here's the second of two preview videos in which I use the Adventure Generators and Uncovered Secrets to build an adventure I was running this weekend called Keep of the Black Gate.
And here's the first video if you missed it and the final notes for Keep of the Black Gate.
Thanks!
Let's Build a D&D Adventure: Keep of the Black Gate Part 2 (YouTube)
Comments (9)
This is really helpful to watch, thanks! But I have a question: you've populated all these chambers with interesting random items, like smoking spires and radiant thrones, but what do they mean? Do you have another step where you figure out what they do and how they logically fit into the story, so when the party investigates there's a payoff? Do you improvise those details and interactions?
This is where secrets and clues help. I can tie the objects in the rooms to the story through secrets and clues.
This was a great couple of videos. However, I am a little lost in how to use the annotated map and our roster of monsters to create our dungeon crawl. Like with what we have how do we establish the situation?
There are a couple of ways. You can jot down which monsters might be in which rooms if you want or you can improvise this from the list of monsters. That's what I ended up doing. When it felt right to drop in a monster, I dropped one in. Otherwise I skip them. The one thing I wish is that I had spent more time on the boss fight but it still worked out in the end. Being comfortable improvising combat encounters is a useful trait to practice.
This is so helpful! I think I might use this to generate inhabitants of a dungeon / fun situations. One thing I always struggle with though is explaining why the entire dungeon doesn't turn on my players once they have one (very loud) combat in the very beginning?
Sometimes we have to pass on realism for the fun of the game. It's ok to hand wave the noise of battle if it would send every monster in a dungeon into the room. It's a good time to "fail forward" and put nearby monsters on alert but not necessarily send the entire dungeon on top of them.
I find these homebrew adventure design sessions extremely helpful, and I hope you do more down the line!
As I run them, I'll do more videos!
Is the haughty Tiefling also a hottie Tiefling?