Last time, on The Angry GM…

I was writing this adventure. There was this kid who was secretly a wild magic sorcerer who’d escaped his abusive master and was looking for a bunch of heroic player-characters to escort him from Baldur’s Gate to Elturel, where his presumably kindly uncle lived. But the kid was being chased by a squad of Zhentarim mercenaries and their little dogs. The party had to escape from their patrols in the streets of Baldur’s Gate and then head across the open country to Elturel.

I mentioned that I’d divided the adventure into two broad scenes. And this was playing off of my sudden decision to change the meaning of the word “scene” from “a thing that is basically the same as an encounter” to “a sequence of mostly continuous encounters and the transitions between them that flow into each other and are unified by general-purpose, by game mechanics, and by geographical and temporal consistency.” And actually, the reason for that shift was writing this adventure. Because I realized I needed mechanics that persisted from encounter to encounter during an entire part of the adventure. Mechanics like overland travel and the morale of an NPC.

The first scene is now all planned and done and ready to run. And it was also played a long time ago. But that’s neither here nor there. In that scene, the party met the kid, Stedd, learned of his plight, fought some Zhentarim, and then evaded the Zehentarim patrols in the streets of Baldur’s Gate’s outer city. At the end of that scene, the party made camp outside the city and planned their trek across the wilderness.

Are we all caught up now? Good. Let’s talk about how I planned the second scene because.

Moving Parts Adventures

Let’s be clear about something: planning an adventure is not just a matter of connecting a bunch of encounters together with a bunch of lines. I mean, it can be, but those are pretty much the suckiest adventures. Which is funny because that’s the way everyone is told to make adventures. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dungeon adventure or a mystery adventure or an event-based timeline adventure. Every adventure is basically just a network of lines and boxes. Hell, I even told you that’s all an adventure was. Way back when I tried to claim that every adventure was a dungeon adventure.

Well, I wasn’t wrong. Because, at the time, I hadn’t analyzed my own adventure building deeply enough to see what I was doing beyond that. And because I also hadn’t developed the language to talk about what I was doing. The realization that I build lots of my adventures with a weird middle structure between the “encounter” and the “adventure” level that ties parts of the adventure together really did change my outlook. And apply a term to that – “scene” – allowed me to discuss what I was doing. To teach about it. And it also allowed me to teach about a completely different type of adventure. The adventure I call the Moving Parts adventure.

A moving parts adventure basically involves very few planned encounters. Instead of planning out a string of encounters and their connections, what a GM does is basically set up several trains running on several tracks that all crisscross over each other and then start all the trains going and wait to see where the fiery explosion happens, how big the explosion is, and how many people walk away alive. The reason I call it a moving parts adventure is because as a GM, you basically have a bunch of game elements that you’re moving around as the players are moving around, and when they collide, you resolve the collision.

For example, one simple moving parts adventure I ran involved a group of heroes trapped in a sewer maze playing cat and mouse with a ghoul that the town had mistaken for a serial killer. As the players moved around the map, I was moving the ghoul around the map. The ghoul would attempt to ambush the players, make quick attacks, and then flee into the sewers before the party could counter. Meanwhile, the players and the ghoul were encountering different bits and pieces of the sewer dungeon. They were mostly mere distractions, but at least once, the ghoul took advantage of the players getting drawn into a fight with an ooze or a sewer rat to paralyze one of the PCs and try to drag them away. Eventually, the players realized they’d have to actually do something proactive to trap the ghoul. They weren’t winning at cat and mouse.

And THAT is the essence of a moving part adventure. It isn’t just about bouncing from encounter to encounter, running a gauntlet. And it isn’t just about solving a maze wherein the intersections occasionally try to kill you. It’s about having to actively deal with a problem that keeps cropping up between the encounters and getting worse.

The trouble with a moving parts adventure is that it can be difficult to build and plan one. And to show others how to build and plan one. Because it takes more than just saying “okay, here’s a pile of parts so, just, you know, keep moving them until interesting adventure happens.” The ghoul had to be built specifically for cat-and-mouse and hit-and-run gameplay, which basically amounted to a good stealth score and the ability to dash, disengage, and hide freely. The map had to be a dense knotwork of passages that offered few dead ends and lots of escape routes. The individual encounters placed through the sewer had to relatively weak, nuisance encounters because they weren’t the focus of the encounter. And some thought had to go into what happened when the ghoul encountered the monsters in the sewer.

Planning such an adventure involves thinking about how the moving parts interact and setting up those interactions to make the best gameplay experience possible.

And THAT is why I needed to set up all that stuff about the layer of the game between adventure and encounter. Because moving parts exist in the space between the encounters and above the encounters. That’s the only way they work. Moreover, because most good adventures bounce between several different types of things going on, breaking an adventure down into scenes works very well. That ghoul adventure? Well, it actually started as a serial killer mystery. The first real scene of the adventure involved the party doing serial killer investigation stuff. They checked out crime scenes, talked to witnesses, that kind of thing. Eventually, their investigation led them to discover that someone was using the sewers to move around freely and to launch their attacks. And then, they went down into the sewers for the second scene. And that was when the ghoul played cat-and-mouse with the heroes.

The point is, it’s easy for internet GMs to sit on their blogs and say, “make your adventures about a bunch of different elements and then move and countermove them,” but it’s a lot harder to provide any sort of systematic approach to doing just that. Which is why I’m the only internet GM worth listening to dammit.

Special Mechanics and Course Prerequisites

The single most important thing that makes a moving parts adventure work is that it works logically or systematically. That is to say that the players can understand how the parts actually move and interact so that they can plan and act accordingly. After repeated encounters, the party could learn the ghoul’s moves. The party could learn the layout of the dungeon. The party could learn what drew the ghoul’s attention. They could even find the ghoul’s lair. And they assumed if the ghoul was badly injured, it would retreat to its lair. And they could use the hazards in the dungeon to hurt the ghoul. And the layout of the dungeon to trap the ghoul.

And that is why you can’t simply throw your moving parts around the board and then just move and countermove. You need to take a more systemic approach. You need to know how things work together. How they interact. And you need to know how to convey that to the players. Because the players need to see the interactions too.

So, a lot of writing a moving parts adventure is about developing systems to resolve how the parts and how they interact. Of course, the word “system” is a word that a lot of GMs get totally f$&%ing wrong. They assume that it isn’t a system if it doesn’t have a massive random table, six different die rolls, and three pages of tightly defined mechanics. Well, no. Sorry. That AIN’T what a system is.

A system is just any tool that helps you resolve something logically and consistently and therefore sets up a pattern that the players can see. And remember, the players don’t have to see the systems. They can. Sure. But they don’t have to. They do have to be able to see the patterns.

In the ghoul adventure, for example, the map was a system. It’s a system for determining who can move where and what they will encounter as they move. Obviously, the ghoul itself is also a system. But for the ghoul system to interact with the map system, you have to figure out when and how the ghoul can move around the map. For that matter, you have to figure out how the players move around the map. Ultimately, I decided to break the movement into turns. When the players moved from one intersection or room to the next, that was a turn. When the players resolved an encounter, that was a turn. And each time the players took a turn, the ghoul took a turn. It would move from one intersection or room to the next. And if the ghoul ran into an encounter, it would immediately go back the way it came. The ghoul wasn’t interested in fighting sewer rats and oozes. Ghouls are the animated corpses of viciously evil beings and they hate sentient life. They have to feed on people. They don’t want to eat rats. And ghouls don’t want to risk getting into fights with anything unless they are going to eat it.

The other thing I had to figure out was when the ghoul was “aware” of where the party was. If the party wasn’t doing anything to conceal itself, I assumed the ghoul knew where they were if they were within two moves of it. Two rooms or intersections away. And if the party got into an encounter, the ghoul would know where that encounter had happened from anywhere in the dungeon. And it would move to find the party.

There was a little more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it. The “system” for how the ghoul moved was based on a set of maybe five sentences tops. Five bullet points that told me how to move it. So that the players could – if they paid attention – start to see patterns. Their understanding wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.

This adventure – Flight to Elturel – also needed systems. Specifically, it needed my wilderness travel/tension pool system. In point of fact, it is this adventure that made me sit down and figure out how to use the tension pool to resolve wilderness travel. And I won’t be going into that whole thing again. I mean, I will. But only a little. And it also relies heavily on my morale system. Which I also won’t be going into in too much detail.

Now, if I were a modest guy, I wouldn’t point out that this sort of adventure is precisely f$&%ing what rules systems for different game situations and different modes of play enable. If D&D had a systematic approach for stealth and infiltration, I wouldn’t have to had to write one just to have my players evade some soldiers while they were getting out of the city. And if the wilderness travel system wasn’t such utter horses$&% in D&D and if morale wasn’t totally nonexistence, I could have written this adventure in minutes instead of hours.

Fortunately, I’m not a modest guy. Humility is for people who aren’t good at things. Besides, there’s a lot of people who need to hear “I f$&%ing told you so.” Every time I put out a new system, I always get these e-mails from people who are like “I just don’t see what any of these rules bring to the table; who would ever use them?” And my answer is “I do, b$&%, because I want to write really great adventures that aren’t just about ping-ponging from fight to fight and do it in a way that encourages actual good f$&%ing gameplay AND teach others how to do it too.”

Anyway, point is, you probably want to know how those systems work before you read any further. So, go back and check them out.

The Broad Strokes: How the Hell will this Play Out

When I start writing an adventure or scene that I think will be even remotely complex, I like to start by describing how it’ll ideally play out and then trying to figure out why the hell any of that is interesting gameplay, what sorts of decisions the players will have to make, and how things might go wrong. So, let’s start by just summarizing the scene.

In this scene, the players have to travel from Baldur’s Gate to Elturel with Stedd. But they are being pursued by Zhentarim mercenaries. If the Zhents catch up to the party, the Zhents will confront the party and try to capture Stedd. If they capture Stedd, the adventure has failed. If the Zhents don’t catch up to the party, the party will reach Elturel safely, Stedd will go into his uncle’s care, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Now, does that sound like good, fun gameplay to you? Because, to me, it sounds like it sucks. Why? Well, look at how that will play out at the table. You, the GM, as the players “what do you want to do?” The players say, “we’ll travel to Elturel.” You say, “okay, do you want to travel fast or normal or slow. Remember, you’re being hunted by mercenaries.” The players say, “we travel as fast as possible.” The GM says, “okay.” And then…

Once the party decides to just move as fast as they can, the GM determines whether the Zhents catch up to them or not. And then either the confrontation plays out or it doesn’t.

Now, of course, you can add random encounters to wilderness travel. And that does add some gameplay. The players get to decide how to handle encounters. But the party will still be taking long rests every day, so as long as they live through the encounters, their survival really isn’t in question. And actual encounters don’t take too much time. A combat slows the party by ten minutes. And if the Zhents are so close that a ten-minute delay is the difference between being caught and not being caught, well, come on, this is an overland chase. The party is caught if the Zhents are ever ten minutes away.

And no matter how much of the fancy wilderness travel crap you add from the DMG, you won’t fix the big problem in this scene that it’s really just a matter of the party deciding to make the trip – a decision the adventure made for them – and then rolling a bunch of dice to see if the party wins or has to have a boss fight before they win.

See? The adventure sucks.

Let’s start by looking right at the first moment of the scene. The party chooses to head to Elturel. Except they don’t. The adventure told them what to do. That’s not a choice. But is there a choice? Well, I looked at the map of the Sword Coast and I noticed something…

Do you see it? Do you see the choice? The party can choose to travel in one of two ways. The party can follow the River Chionthar and that will take them directly from Baldur’s Gate to Elturel. It’s a nice, quick route and the party can’t possibly get lost or delayed. And because the river is trafficked, the route is probably less dangerous. And that’s the obvious way to go, right?

But why wouldn’t the party take that route? Well, if you were being chased by mercenaries and you took the easiest, fastest, most obvious route, you’d give up any chance of losing your pursuers. You’d just be relying on the fact that you can move faster than the pursuers. And if you lose any ground at all, you’re going to be caught.

The alternative is to strike out into the wilderness. Elturel lies on the north side of the river and there’s nowhere to cross the river between the two cities, so the party’s only other option is to head north into that Field of the Dead, cut across country, and approach Elturel from a different direction. That’s a longer, slower route. And the route is unmarked. It’s trackless. So, you have to be able to navigate or else you run the risk of getting lost and spending extra days in the wilderness. Oh, and it cuts through a place on the map marked as THE FIELDS OF THE F$&%ING DEAD. So, not a great choice. But it does mean the mercenaries can’t chase you at their best speed. They have to track you. And you might be able to lose them.

So, right off the bat, the party gets to make a decision about what their strategy is for the adventure. Do they want to take the fast, easy route along the river and rely on speed to keep them ahead of their enemy or do they want to wander into the wilderness and try to lose their pursuers and rely on their own survival skills to keep them alive during a longer trip?

But how will the players know what their options are? Do we just hand them the map and hope they see the two choices and their consequences? No! Because the interesting thing about this choice is what skills they want to bet on, not whether they solve the puzzle of knowing the risks. When the party says, “we want to head to Elturel,” you – the GM – pull out the map and say “okay, well, there’s two obvious ways to do this. You can follow the river, which is fast and direct, but the Zhentarim will almost certainly be able to follow you and you’ll have to outpace them. Or you can strike out into the wilderness, which is indirect and trackless. You might get lost and it’s probably a more dangerous route, but the Zhentarim won’t be able to follow you easily. They will have to follow your trail. And you may be able to lose them. Of course, you can also take a different route if you’d like. Here’s the map. Think about it.”

The nice thing about setting up the choice that way is that it also tells the players what they will need to do to win on either route. If they go into the wilderness, they will want to figure out ways to cover their trail and they will need also need to make sure their survival needs are taken care of for the long haul. Speed isn’t as important as evasion and survival. If they follow the river, they need to push as hard as they can. Speed is the only thing that will save them.

And it also tells you – as the adventure designer – what sorts of challenges they should face along each path. In the Fields of the Dead, everything is about survival and evasion. Encounters should offer them the chance to burn resources or acquire resources or take obvious, easily followed trails or cover their tracks and evade their pursuers? Do you go through the boggy swampy region you see ahead or go around? If you go through, you’re more likely to lose your pursuers. But it’ll be more dangerous because terrible things live in regions like that. Encounters along the river should be about just slowing the party down.

Of course, at any time, the party can change routes. They aren’t locked into one choice. If they start to slow down along the river too much, they can strike out into the wilderness. If they get lost or start to struggle in the wilderness, they can just head south and make for the river. They can always change their minds.

And so, with that simple choice, we have a framework for the basic challenges of the adventure.

Travel and Tension

Now, the party has to be able to make decisions about how they travel. And those decisions have to have an impact on the game. The basic D&D rules allow them to decide to travel at a fast, medium, or slow pace each day and whether to do tasks along the way like forage, navigate, cover their tracks, and so on. And that’s nice, but it really isn’t granular enough.

And that’s why I started the Tension Pool to handle travel. If the party just travels normally – that is, they travel for twelve daylight hours and then rest for twelve nighttime hours through normal terrain, I just roll a full Tension Pool at the start of each day to determine if a complication arises.

But one thing the party can do is push into the twilight while traveling. Traveling during twilight is dangerous, but it gets them an extra four hours of travel time each day. And if the party is concerned about speed, they might take that risk. So, the party can choose, on a four-hour-by-four-hour basis what pace they want to set and whether to travel despite dangerous conditions. And those choices affect what the odds of complications occurring on the road are.

The problem is that the party likely will make the same decision every day unless something changes. If they are willing to travel at a breakneck pace one day and they are willing to travel into the evening at the risk of further complications, they are probably willing to do that every day. And this is a trap that GMs always fall face-first into. If you ask the party to keep making the same choice over and over and the conditions of the choice don’t change, it’s not really a choice at all.

So, I needed some factors that would screw with the party’s choices as they traveled. And those factors couldn’t come from the pursuing Zhents. See, the party would have no way of knowing how far the Zhents were until they were caught. And that’s a problem too. Because the state of being “almost” caught is a good state. It’s a state that would change the party’s decisions if they knew they were in it. So, one thing I decide at this point was that the Zhents split their forces. A small advance force was moving at least eight hours ahead of the main party. That way, if the party was “almost caught,” they’d have two decision points worth of “they are right behind you and you need a plan to deal with that.” If they were at the river, they could break off into the wilderness and try to evade the Zhents. If they were in the wilderness, they could try to cover their tracks, go to ground at a good hiding place, or set an ambush.

But that is not enough of a moving part by itself. Because that will only come up once. And I was planning on spending two sessions on this adventure.

Now, obviously, one of the factors that might change the behavior of the party was the complications that might arise on the road. I would need a good list of complications to do more than just fling fights at the party. I would need to chew up their resources or cause delays. If the party had to slow down to forage, for example, that would screw up their plans of keeping up a fast pace along the river. And I sort of inadvertently set the stage for that because the party didn’t have a chance to shop for the trip before they escaped from Baldur’s Gate and they didn’t loot the tavern for food as they ran through the kitchen and out the back. They had whatever they’d bought during character generation. Which is normally ten days of food. And the trip was a roughly ten-day trip along the river. Longer in the wilderness. The problem was they had an extra mouth to feed. Stedd didn’t have any food. So, they had to share food with him. Which meant, eventually, food was going to be a problem.

As a side note, one member of the party hadn’t bought any food at all.

Meanwhile, I could create complications that chewed up supplies. Along the river, there were opportunities to get robbed, for food to get spoiled or infested with maggots, and to give food to hungry and desperate pilgrims who’d lost everything. And there were delays like small tributaries that had to be crossed which took hours. And, of course, there were monsters and bandits and other dangers too. In the Fields of the Dead, water was scarce – there were drought conditions – and what water existed was standing, boggy water that might make someone sick. And, of course, there were monsters and other dangers too.

The Pursuing Zhents

So, the party would now be trying to survive in the wilderness and either keep up a fast pace or evade the Zhents and various complications would be working to slow them down or chew up their resources, which would require the party to manage their speed and resources accordingly. Meanwhile, I’d have to keep track of the Zhents. I had to know how the Zhents would move. And then, I could just keep track of how far behind the party the Zhents were to determine whether the party got caught.

And this is one of those places where other GMs would make s$&% way too complicated. Me? I made it simple. I figured out how fast the party would move in 4 hours at a Slow, Average, and Fast pace and then figured that the Zhents moved the same speed. Traveling along the river, they always moved at a fast pace and they always traveled into the evening. They would just tear up ground every day. I gave the PCs a head start of one day. I figured the Zhents would have to regroup, report in, confirm their quarry had really left the city, question the witnesses in the tavern, and determine they were headed toward Elturel.

In the wilderness, away from the river, the Zhents had to travel at an Average pace because they had to track the party. But they would still travel into the evening. However, if the party did anything to confound the Zhents – and I would adjudicate whatever attempt they made like any other action – if it succeeded, it would force the Zhents into a Slow pace for eight hours on the assumption the Zhents lost the trail and had to regain it.

However, much ground the party covered in that first day, that was their head start. After that, I just tracked how much ground both parties covered every day and figured out whether the Zhents caught up or not. When the Zhents caught up, the party had to deal with an advanced party of a few Zhents and some bloodhounds. At that point, I assumed the difficult boss encounter was eight hours behind at a fast pace and that the Zhents would travel even into the night to catch up.

You’ll notice that advance force of the Zhents absolutely and definitely WOULD catch up with the party along with the river if the party didn’t maintain almost a breakneck pace the entire time. Whereas in the wilderness, the Zhents could be delayed indefinitely, especially if the party maintained a slow and steady pace. But in the wilderness, if the party traveled too slow, they’d likely have a lot of encounters and one or two bad days of foraging could cause serious problems. That’s all by design. Basically, I always try to set things up so that the party will just BARELY succeed if they do everything exactly right. And success is determined by the strategy. Traveling along the river, the party would be trying to outpace the Zhents. If they did everything right, they would stay just one step ahead of the Zhents and arrive at the city just in time to see the Zhents cresting a hill behind them and shaking their fists at the party. Traveling in the wilderness, the party was banking on their survival skills. If the party managed to keep their supplies up perfectly and managed to confound the pursuing Zhents at every turn, they would lead them on a merry chase and never see them. They’d be like ghosts.

And so, between using the Tension Pool and Complications to force the party to keep revisiting the decisions they made about travel and using the Zhent’s pursuit to force the party to stick perfectly to their strategies or lose, I had the basic skeleton of the adventure down. In fact, I probably could have stopped there, and it would have been fun enough for a single session. But I wanted to get two sessions out of it. And that meant I would have to address two missing pieces of the adventure puzzle.

Now, here is where I normally look at my word count and realize that after editing and polishing, this is still going to hit 5,000 words and then say, “but I’ll talk about those things next time” and turn them into a whole other article. But, frankly, I’m kind of tired of talking about this adventure. So, I’m going to go into overtime and hopefully wrap this up in another 1,000 words and get it posted and be done with it.

Humanity and Conflict

Let’s look again at the adventure I’ve written. The party has to take this kid, Stedd, to a neighboring city and evade a party of mercenaries that wants to bring him back. The party has to choose a route and thereby choose a strategy. The mercenaries will dog their trail. The party will have to manage their resources and deal with various complications on the road. If they fail to do so, that will screw with their primary strategy and force them to change their actions. They might even have to change their choice of strategy. If they succeed and do everything right, they will stay one step ahead of the mercenaries and win. If they fail, they will face an advance force of mercenaries and then have a chance to recover from their mistakes. If they fail again, they will face the main force of mercenaries and the boss fight. If they lose the boss fight, they have failed in the adventure. And maybe died.

Now, there’s actually two big problems with that scene. The first is that, even with the choices and the resources and everything else, it’s still just a matter of doing one thing over and over. It’s all about just managing wilderness travel while a ticking time bomb threatens to blow you up. It’s lacking any other type of gameplay. More importantly, though, it’s lacking a human element. Remember, what makes stories interesting is character interaction. All stories are – at their heart – about human interaction. Even the ones about elves and robots. And this adventure promises a human element that it just doesn’t do anything with. There’s this abused kid who has magical powers he can’t control and he’s being forced through an extremely stressful situation by a group of mercenary heroes for whom this is all just totally normal. The adventure should do something with that.

And that’s why Stedd has a morale meter. A mood meter. And why he gets stressed whenever a fight breaks out and whenever he’s endangered or hurt. Or when he’s forced to go without food. Or when he’s forced to keep marching each day into the dark of late evening across trackless terrain. And the party had to manage that mood. I used one of my favorite tricks here: the ten-point scale. I used it to track Stedd’s mood. Whenever one of the stresses I mentioned happened, I took a point from his mood. Whenever the party reached out and tried to make inroads with him, I added a point. If they succeeded. If they failed, I took a point away instead. And whenever his mood bottomed out, he’d panic. He’d decide he was better off on his own. That he was a danger to everyone around him. That he was better off dead maybe. If that happened in battle, he’d cast thunderwave to blast as many threats as he could – accidentally, he just couldn’t control his magic – and then he’d panic and run. The party would have to chase him down. And, there was a chance they might lose him in the wilderness. Failing the adventure.

Now, some of you might look at that and say I made a major mistake. You’d realize that if the party makes any attempt to build a relationship with Stedd, there’s a chance they’d make everything worse. Failure hurts his mood. So, the best thing to do is not take any action at all. This is the standard argument GMs make about why die rolls in skill challenges should never be “on success, you move toward victory and on failure, you move toward defeat.” And there are two things those GMs always forget. First, it’s that failure is assured if you don’t do anything, so you have to take the chance. In this case, Stedd’s mood couldn’t handle the entire trip unless the party bolstered it. Just moving at a fast pace into the night for ten days would assure Stedd’s morale would break by the end. And that’s without considering complications that arise. The party couldn’t ignore his mood.

The other thing a lot of GMs forget is that when you’re sitting at the table and there’s a fight with an owlbear going on and a teenaged sorcerer is flinging spells with reckless abandon at your back and screaming about how everyone would be better off if he was dead, people tend to stop looking at the game as an optimization game. Actually, they tend to panic and make some pretty bad choices. Which is why it’s important to inject humanity into the game. I made Stedd hard to ignore. When his mood was low, he was depressed and scared and he also kept reaching out for help. And he’d resist the party’s instructions. If the party wanted to travel into the night and his mood was at a 2, we’d have to waste some table on a useless conversation with no die rolls wherein Stedd was sullen and morose and exhausted and the party just ended up feeling guilty as hell when they finally had to just tell him to shut up because they had to keep moving. A GM can’t be a stranger to emotional blackmail.

Long story short, mechanics ain’t everything.

The other thing missing was a climax. See, if the adventure played out perfectly – which it absolutely wouldn’t – the party would never have to deal with the Zhents. They’d never have to see them even. So, the first thing I decided was that, even if the Zhents never caught up to the party, when the party made it safely into the land around Elturel and encountered a patrol of Elturel’s Hellguard who agreed to escort them to the city, the Zhents would show up right then and there to make evil faces at the party and swear revenge and stuff. Just so the party could have closure.

But I also needed to make sure there was a good final conflict in case there was never a fight with the Zhent boss. And to that end, I invented a second bounty hunter. I decided she would show up at about the halfway point of the scene, preferably at the break between sessions, and she’d provide a strong conflict for the rest of the scene even if the party managed to evade the Zhents completely. But to make her last for an entire session, I couldn’t have her just attack the party. I wanted her to try to cause the party to fail in another way. Not by brute force.

When I looked at the adventure and saw that the primary conflict with the Zhents was all about managing time, travel, and resources, I realized that the secondary conflict should be all about managing Stedd. I don’t know if that makes sense. It’s kind of hard to explain. But basically, there’s these two things the party has to juggle during the game. There’s the travel s$&% and there’s Stedd’s mood. They have to make decisions to deal with one of those two problems. And when it came to the travel s$&%, the Zhents provided the opposition. The push back. So, it stood to reason that Stedd’s mood needed opposition to push back.

I thought a while about this. What I really wanted was someone to join the party who would f$&% with Stedd’s mood. Someone who could say the wrong things at the wrong time to throw Stedd’s mood into a tailspin. And, at first, I just thought it could be some completely innocent someone the party met on the road who had been robbed or waylaid and who the party couldn’t leave alone. And that person just happened to be socially inept. But then I thought it would be more interesting if they were doing it on purpose.

So, I started to imagine someone who was sneaky and deceptive. Someone who could trick the party into trusting them and someone who knew enough about the entire situation to say the wrong things at the wrong times to set Stedd off, but who could make it all just look like an accident. Why would someone do that? Because they were also trying to get the bounty on Stedd, but unlike the Zhents, they didn’t have the manpower to confront the party directly. So, they had to get Stedd to run off on his own. To abandon the party. And then they could grab him. But they also had to be powerful enough that if it did come down to a fight, they weren’t going to die in one hit. Maybe someone who had a specific weakness the party could exploit.

But where would this person get their information? Well, they’d have to be able to spy on the party. Watch the interactions between party and Stedd and use the information they learned to sabotage Stedd’s mood. But who could possibly follow the party without really ever being noticed, learn everything they needed to formulate a plan to play on the party’s sympathies, and then sabotage the party’s relationship with Stedd to get him to flee at the worst possible time? And who might be just powerful enough to shrug off about half of what the party could do, but would still fear certain members of the party and thus have to operate in secret?

The first night that the party made camp, right after they escaped Baldur’s Gate, they took shelter in a ruined building. They chased a few rats out into the night. Just flavor text. Nothing came of it. Days later, in the wilderness, the party saw a rat picking through the discarded bits of their food. Just flavor text again. It sounded just like any tiny detail I include in my descriptions all the time to make my world seem alive.

And to my players’ credit, after a while, they did realize that the strange woman who they’d found naked in the wilderness after she’d been robbed and left for dead by bandits actually did seem to be trying to f$&% with Stedd’s head on purpose. And to their even more immense credit, they did figure out she was a wererat before she transformed, bit one of them, and fled into the wilderness.

Man, was that ever a perfect scene. And a great climax that the adventure sorely needed. Because after the party dealt with the advance force, they did manage to reach Elturel right before the main force of Zhents caught up with them.

And THAT is how you write an adventure.