[Classic Fantasy] Dirty Deeds in Noam (Latest Quest: The Crashed Dreadnaught)

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Introduction

Hello, this is a solo DND 4th edition campaign that I started in order to tell a story based on RPG Solo's answers and the roll of the dice. I started by clicking "Get Setting", which gave me "Setting is occupied shop involving high quality shield and [SPOILERS]". I interpreted that to be a populous city named Noam, which saw trading from merchants all over the world, and was practically ruled by a company that crafted and sold high quality armor. Due to a random biome selection, the city ended up being in the frozen wasteland of Arcziga. After deciding the setting, I clicked "Get Quest" to discover what mission would bring my characters together, and from that I got "Kidnap the musician at the observation dome.". With the setting and quest decided on, I created four characters, chose one to write from their perspective, and started the game. For the sake of improving the story's flow and to keep from spoiling anything, I had to cut out all the questions I asked and all the answers I got. With that, here is how the first quest went after I played several sessions.

Quests

Quest 1: The Envious Singer

Quest 2: Double Agent

Quest 3: The Crimson Jelly

Quest 4: The Rift to the Lost Plane

Quest 5: Underground Abominations

Quest 6: Cold and Stranded

Quest 7: The Visitors from Zebulon

Quest 8: Everything Goes Downhill

Quest 9: Reveal of the Underdark

Quest 10: The Crashed Dreadnaught

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I've now completed the second quest in this solo campaign. In this continuation of the story, our protagonists find that despite their risky efforts to cover their tracks, they've gotten in hot water with the city guard for the crimes they committed last night. With their reputations and freedom at risk, they have no choice but to accept a deal from the king's advisor in order to be absolved of their crimes. The quest generated for this story was, "Find the spy at the legendary armory."

Quest 2: Double Agent

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This 3rd quest was quite the surprise for me. With the quest I generated being "Barter with merchants at the unrecognizable workshop.", I expected it to be something more mundane; a simple investigation into a shady shop with a tenuous connection to the corrupt upper-class. However, as our team of protagonists approached the shop, the quest ended up turning into something far more chaotic.

Quest 3: The Crimson Jelly

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Quest number 4 is a bit different. The quest I generated was "Survive for one night at the ramshackle department store.", and so after taking some liberties with it, I found my protagonists not dealing with Noam's corruption like in the previous quests. Instead, they must now go with two arcanists on a mission into an abandoned indoor market. They must keep the arcanists safe from the dangerous creatures lurking within the building so that they can close a rift connected to an unknown dimension. If they fail, then Noam will lay defenseless against a tide of horrors that have no business existing in their plane of existence.

Quest 4: The Rift to the Lost Plane

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Well, this part of the campaign took a while. The quest I received from RPGSolo was "Teach the half-elf fisherman at the wealthy mountain.". Now, while the initial idea this gave me was for the team to roll a chalkboard up some mountain and become the teachers for some fisherman who happens to live there, that did not sound like a fun story, so I got creative in my interpretation of the quest. I decided that they would be "teaching" the half-elf in the sense that they would be teaching him a lesson. Thus, our heroes now find themselves caught between the royalty and the corrupt upper class: the royal advisor wants them to travel into the depths of the abandoned Arczigite mines to rescue a group of fishermen who ran there after running afoul of the Beezle Company, while the Beezle Company has sent the team an order to assassinate the fishermen for pissing them off. Whichever side they choose, the task will not be an easy one, as they must brave the horrors that lay lurking in the depths of Arcziga.

Quest 5: Underground Abominations

If you're curious about what goes on behind the scenes, I've decided to talk about a couple of the mistakes I made while running this quest since they're the cause of several inconsistencies you might have noticed in the story. Spoilers for the quest lay ahead.

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First, a mistake that's easy to explain, but which I had unfortunately been making since I started this solo campaign. One of the spells Pae has is Cloud of Daggers. I thought it attacks a 3x3 space, but after rereading the spell description carefully, I realized it only attacks a single square. This was a pretty unfortunate discovery to make, since I had already described the CoD as being big enough to attack multiple enemies in the story. To make up for it, I'm having it so that before this quest, Pae did not have good control over the daggers she summoned. But after getting enough practice with it, she figured out how to have them concentrate over a smaller area, allowing her to do more damage to someone while reducing the risk that the spell harms her allies.

I made a pretty significant error during the first fight with an Abominable Snowman. It was caused by my misunderstanding of how many immediate actions a player can take in a single round (an immediate action is an action that you can make outside your turn, but only if something specific triggers it. You usually see this with opportunity attacks, where if you move out of an enemy's space, they get to attack you). The Abominable Snowman is a custom monster that is based on a Yeti Rampager, which has an ability called trample. It lets the creature shift (move one square without taking an opportunity attack) 7 times, and during this movement it can move into a player's space and make an attack against them. Now fighters like Gruzz have an ability that lets them make a melee attack as an immediate interrupt when an adjacent enemy shifts. The question is, what happens if my Abominable Snowman tramples toward Gruzz? To move through Gruzz while trampling, the snowman must make at least two shifts while adjacent to him: the first adjacent shift is when he charges onto Gruzz's space, and the second adjacent shift comes after shifting off of Gruzz. In the encounter, when the snowman used trample, to make a long story short it ended up making 4-6 adjacent shifts next to Gruzz, and I had Gruzz attack him for every single one of those shifts. Thus it lost half its health in one round. However, I shouldn't have had Gruzz strike it multiple times, because players can only make one immediate action in a single round. This is why the first fight was much shorter than the second fight.

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Here we have a continuation of the mission started in the previous quest. The half-elf fisherman, Falfyr Jones, and half of his crew were narrowly saved from Abominable Snowmen and Neslin Beezle's assassins thanks to the party, but as they reached the exit to the cave, they found that getting back to Noam would be a quest in it of itself. They were smack dab in the middle of a blizzard. Unsure of their next course of action, they find themselves in a long bout against the arctic's harsh nature, which turns out to be a little more than it seems...

Quest 6: Cold and Stranded

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It's almost Christmas time, and what's a better gift than another overly violent quest? (I can think of many) After having the characters rework their terms of agreement with their boss, Fulcewind, I asked RPGSolo for another quest and got "Spy on the zebulon sergeant at the strong private chamber.". This required having to look up the definition of zebulon, and after getting several wildly different answers, I decided to follow the source that said Zebulon was one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Thus, after inventing a blatant expy of the Twelve Tribes that worshiped Bahamut instead of God, I had the team find themselves on a mission to spy on a meeting between Beezle and a Zebulunite paladin. But it won't be an easy mission, since not only does only one of them have a good stealth bonus, their recent betrayal of Beezle has left them all at a greater risk of assassination. Trickery and death awaits the party in this quest.

Quest 7: The Visitors from Zebulon

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Yesterday was Valentines Day, but this current quest has nothing to do with love. In fact, quite the opposite. It has to do with hate. Due to the assassination of Royal Advisor Fulcewind, Noam is plunged into a civil war between the royalty and the Beezle Company. Bones will break, blood will spill, and our heroes end up facing their toughest challenge yet. While I did generate a quest for this, I'm not going to bother putting it here since it ended up being a small part of the story.

Quest 8: Everything Goes Downhill

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Well, it's been a while since my last update, but I'm not dead yet! I've been very busy these past few months, but I should be ready to post the next quest in a bit. Out of curiosity, has anyone actually been reading these stories?

[mark]

Not all of them. You have a good style and I appreciate the good grammar.