4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

Tax Man by Black Plauge

When most parties rst start out, they’re sphere of influence is limited to their local village and the land around it. As they grow in power, however, the opportunity to influence events on a larger scale arises. Whereas once they dealt with mayors and local craft guilds, they may now deal with barons, earls, dukes, and if they are successful enough, even kings. The question for the DM, though, is how to introduce one’s party to that larger stage. 

For many campaigns, this transition is accomplished by a process of hiring up the food chain: where once the party was hired by the mayor, they are now hired by the local baron. Either because the mayor recommended them to the baron, or something they did for the mayor had consequences visible to the baron. Now, while this is a valid strategy, and one that is employed to great eect over and over again, this “book” is designed to provide the DM with an alternate approach. One in which a seemingly random encounter (from the party’s point of view) has consequences that reach beyond the party’s current sphere of influence and will drag the party, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the larger arena.

I think this one may just get my vote. I really, really loved it. Its a bit broad for an encounter but the way this could impact a campaign is well done. The writing style is great. Would love to see you branch out into a full adventure.

Thanks.  I’ll admit that the consequences of this one encounter can be really far reaching, but sometimes big events hinge of the little things.

Man. I love finding out who the author is after the fact. Well done BP. It was either this or one of Andorax’s. I particularly liked Stag Party and the mining one.

If your finding out after the fact, then you weren’t reading Jim’s post very closely as it says my name right there at the top.

Wow! This one was long! I think it was nearly 13 pages on a pdf on my computer! I almost didn’t read it because it was so long.

This is a good entry. It has a lot of detail to it, and the writing is good. But it is too long, I think to make it an encounter. Seems like it could have been cut down to about 3 pages if a lot of the details about the NPCs were dropped out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an encounter with an index and an appendix.

I didn’t like that it didn’t have any maps, either. I don’t have the Red Hand of Doom, so I really didn’t know what the map should look like. I think I would have drawn something like some of the other people did. I’d have used a map instead of the appendix or index. That would have been more useful.

This is a good story, but I think you just left too much in instead of making it into a single encounter. Good job, though, and good luck.

It is a long one, but it’s also organized to the point that if you don’t want to deal with the consequences of the encounter, you can skip straight to Chapter 3 (where the encounter itself is described) and only read that.  The only other thing you’d need is the Appendix, and only them, really, once the stat blocks are added.  If you consider just Chapter 3 and those theoretical stat blocks, then there’s only 4 pages that you have to worry about.  Every thing else is fluff that the DM can use to figure out how the participants came to be in the encounter, or where events are going to go after it.

Coincidently enough, I don’t have The Red Hand of Doom either.  The way I knew about the map is because WotC puts pictures of all the maps in all its products up on their website.  I suppose I kind of assumed everyone knew this, so in mentioning an WotC map, I believed that I was pointing everyone to something they could easily get.  I suppose I should have been a bit more clear about that.

Truth be told, however, that was really a last minute addition to the document.  When I first thought of the encounter I planned to map out the encounter site and the town myself and include those maps in the document.  However, I ran out of time and so switched to what I did as a reasonable substitute.