DM Notes: Bad Moon Rising

If you haven't already done so, download and review the Bad Moon Rising adventure, and the accompanying Scribe Notes post to see how it went for the players.

Overall, for the first real adventure in my own personal version of Forgotten Realms, I thought Bad Moon Rising ran very well. It ended up being broken up into three play sessions, which was nice, as it gave me a little time in between games to further flesh out details based on the PCs actions in game, and there were several of these.

Ava's membership in the Order of the Gauntlet provides an easy excuse to hand missions to the party without the need for convoluted circumstances to lure them into an adventure. Once the hook for the adventure was in, I impressed upon them that they only had so many hours to figure out who the werewolf was before sunset. This encouraged them (somewhat inadvertently, on my part) to split the party up so they could cover more ground. I'm not a huge fan of splitting the party (most experienced players will be screaming "NEVER split the party!" right about now), but not for role-playing reasons - I don't like how it forces me to ignore half the group at any given time. I prefer to keep everyone engaged for the entire game session. Still, the logic behind their actions was sound, and I had no one to blame but myself, so I didn't attempt to stop them. The result was actually very cool, and allowed for some interactions between characters that don't normally happen. Thaelin and Ava bonded in friendship over a drink. Trym got to ply her thieves skills doing some recon and rubbing elbows with the locals. I had a lot of fun playing the NPC Hordak Waveharp - the gruff but boisterous and friendly dwarven owner of Waveharp Brewery - in a one on one conversation between him and Trym.

Another great role-playing moment happened when the party went to see if they could get Jahana Silverkin to speak about her parents' murders. The players persuasion checks happened to fall in such a way as to impose just the right amount of challenge in getting her to speak. She was another fun NPC to play. I'm a 35 year old man with a broad chest and a long red beard, so despite the fact that I've got plenty of experience as an actor, playing an 8 year old girl isn't something I get to do very often. But the scene unfolded very naturally and had the characters speaking to Jahana in first person, with genuine concern. Trym's player told me afterwards that I almost made her cry with the exchange. Moments like that really make the preparation and work of DM-ing worth it.

One of the biggest challenges about this adventure was a mechanical one. Triboar is so large that, despite having a 2x2 page printed hex map on the table, it was difficult for the players to remember what (and who) was where. The hexes were too small to put miniatures on, so between our first and second session I ended up making little marker flags out of some crafting beads and wire. This worked OK, but they still had a tendency to tip over. For future city-level adventures, I've purchased a series of "T" shaped map pins, which I should be able to attach labels to, and press into a map that has been stuck to a cardboard backing.

The other big challenge in this adventure was NPCs. There are a lot of them, and I didn't know until the players started which ones they'd need a greater level of detail on. So I tried to create some basic backstory and personality notes for each (which you will find in the DM Notes for the adventure), but once we played through one session and I got a feel for who they were most interested in, I used the break between games to flesh out those characters. This is the reason Traavar and Vance have character sheets. I had originally intended them to each be just another suspect on the list, but after the first session, it became clear that these two would need to be able to stick around for a while.

When Traavar announced to Ava in the tavern that he thought he'd worn out his welcome and was looking to head out of town, she up and invited him to travel with them. That caught me off guard. But it worked out great, because I got to make a character for him, and a bard is something I've never actually had in any of my campaigns before. I ended up liking him quite a lot for the storytelling dynamic that he could add to combat encounters, but intended to send him on his way after the party arrived in Waterdeep. However, after this adventure, a friend of ours heard we were playing D&D and asked if he could join, and the timing worked out perfectly. The friend is a musician and a bit of a cad in real life, so the role of Traavar Catsglove was an easy fit for him, and he was able to join the party in the most organic way possible. Plus I got to turn an NPC into a PC!

Vance Moonshadow was another NPC that served an unexpected need for me. As a class feature, Trym was supposed to have access to a criminal contact that could get her information on goings on. But the Starter Set didn't really address this, and in fact had her having been betrayed by the only criminal organization she'd ever been a part of, so there was no story justification for her to have that feature. Vance provided that opportunity when Trym trailed him through a crowded marketplace into an alley, and saw him leaving a dead drop behind a loose brick.

She pilfered the coins he left, and followed him back to his lair. As a fence, he has a well guarded cache of illicitly acquired magical items hiding in an underground vault in the hillside near Gwaeron's Slumber, which Trym was able to find and eventually break into. I was grateful that I had put some thought into what that vault looked like, as I wasn't expecting her to get into it. I realized that all the magic items in that vault could throw the game way out of balance if they landed in the hands of the players, so I put them in prison cells under lock and key, with doors humming with magical energy. My thought was that the doors were enchanted with an Alarm spell, so I could force a confrontation between the rogues, but she was wise enough not to touch anything once she noticed that magics she couldn't understand were in play.

When Trym and Val returned to Vance's house to question him about the murders, their previous interactions provided the foundation for a great banter of hints, subtle allegations, and things left unsaid. Vance used their desire to get information from him in order to get the PCs to agree to a quid-pro-quo sharing of information about them. It also gave me a chance to do my best Hannibal Lecter impression - "Quid pro quo, Ms. Greenbottle...". At the end of their conversation, Vance asked that Trym come back to see him before they left town, as there was more that they should discuss. He used the intervening time to check in with his faction - The Order of the Velvet Glove - and get the OK to initiate Trym on her return, giving her the criminal contracts promised by her class feature, and a cool secret tattoo to boot.

A quick word on the Order of the Velvet Glove: they're a faction completely of my own design. The factions in Forgotten Realms are handy for advancing story, but the only one that fits well for a rogue (the Zhentarim), doesn't really work well for a PC in a heroic campaign, in my opinion. I needed a criminal network that was more of a resource for it's members than an ambitious cabal of power-hungry spies. So I invented the Velvet Glove to fill that gap, and made them a banner, organizational structure, and rules, which I put together in a handout for Trym's player. She was so excited to have gone through the initiation and belong to a secret society. The cloak and dagger story exploration really seems to call to her, providing me with lots of opportunities to provide information to the PCs in a way that encourages role-playing, and which the players can feel like they've earned. This paid off right away, in that I was able to have Vance give Trym enough information on the Cloaks of the Hidden Knoll to set them on their path to the next adventure without it feeling forced.

I've made the documents that I've put together on the Order of the Velvet Glove available for download here, in case anyone else wants to incorporate the organization into their campaign.

Another thing I learned from this adventure was to keep a pre-generated list of male and female names handy, with corresponding space by each name to write in notes. After the PCs killed the werewolf and went back to Everwyvern House to interrogate Lord Milstone on his knowledge of the monster, the group got the idea to have the Lord Protector summon the village physician to conduct a test to see if Lord Milstone or any of his other guards were secretly afflicted with lycanthropy. This possibility had never occurred to me, but it was a good idea, so I let it play out. Then a player asked me what the doctor's name was, and I was caught totally flat footed. I am terrible at coming up with names on the spot, and gave the doctor the unfortunately obvious name of "Dr. Wellsmith". This couldn't have been more on the nose if I'd called him "Healer McDoctorman", and the players all had a good laugh at my obvious fumble. I've since started keeping a name list handy, and it's completely changed my position on dealing with unexpected NPCs. Whereas I used to dread interactions with characters that I hadn't expected, I now delight in being able to tell a curious player the name of an apple merchant on the street, or the drunk passed out in the alley; and thanks to my notes column, I can retrieve the name of any character the players have ever interacted with in any town they've ever visited, no matter how small. It adds a whole extra dimension of depth to my world that was lacking before. If you're interested in putting together a similar list, I recommend FantasyNameGenerators.com, and Kismet's Fantasy Name Compendium.

As to other things I would have done differently with this adventure in hindsight, my biggest regret is that the werewolf was far too easy to kill. By the time the group got to him, they hadn't so much as made an attack roll in two game sessions, and they were chomping at the bit for a fight. I was worried Val was going to start setting random pedestrians on fire if I didn't give him something to kill soon. But when they finally kicked the door in (or tried to, at least - it's become an interesting character quirk of Ava's that for some reason she's terrible at kicking down doors) and found the beast, they killed it in the first two rounds of combat, before it could even damage anyone. If I were running this again, I'd either make several of the guards werewolves and have them hunt in a pack, or make the werewolf strong enough to endure a few more rounds of combat and make the players feel like they were in a dangerous boss fight.

I'd also suggest making the den of wolves that Illan Wyrmsbane found closer to Triboar. By the time the PCs got around to talking to him and learned about his encounter, they wanted to go investigate, but there wasn't enough time prior to sunset for them to do so. Giving them a way to get to the wolf den without having to sacrifice the rest of the names on the suspect list would have taken the edge off for the players that crave hack and slash, and would have given them the sense that a broader mystery is afoot.

Other than those couple of points, though, I thought the whole adventure played rather well. I actually wanted the players to accept Jahana's offer of service as a squire, as it would have given me a built in victim for them to have to protect, provided an opportunity for Ava to explore her character as a mentor, and solve the glaring problem of why nothing ever happens to the characters' horses when they leave them tied up and unattended outside a dungeon for hours on end. But I thought Ava's idea of seeing if the Order of the Gauntlet could train her was so novel that I ended up giving them the experience award for taking her on anyway.

The scene after the werewolf battle, where the PCs and Lord Protector Trannyth questioned Lord Milstone and his guards worked out great. It was obvious to the party that he was hiding something, but they couldn't say what, and therefore couldn't accuse him of anything. He left the next morning before the characters got up, and they will certainly encounter him again in the future... and next time he'll have an axe to grind.

I do wish that I'd known about the Princes of the Apocalypse adventures before building this adventure, as much of the content in this story directly contradicts Forgotten Realms canon (if there is such a thing), but that's mostly a personal annoyance. As cool as the D&D Adventurer's Guild books are, I really wish Wizards of the Coast would release a full Forgotten Realms campaign setting for 5th edition, as all of my information is gleaned from old source books and the (wonderfully detailed) Forgotten Realms Wiki. Since my campaign is set in 1491 DR, any information about NPCs I obtained from those sources is all historical, and thus I must make up the characters in each town on my own. If I ever want to merge in additional content from PotA later, that's going to make de-tangling things a little sticky.

Overall, though, this was a great little adventure, and gave the players something different to chew on in a way that still advanced my story, and opened some new doors for me to build on in the future. With the couple of minor tweaks I'd noted above, I think Bad Moon Rising plays very well. Try it out in your own campaign and let me know what you think!