The duplication potential in this Vestitas hex encounter honestly has us a little worried about balance, so we’re considering having both killing and imprisoning the doppleganger cause their copied equipment to be dragged back into the reflection with them in the final version for the .pdf.
Month: March 2017
Wrenwrick Crik Chaos Landing
One of the towns in the Vestitas hexcrawl is called Brandt’s Landing, and due to the Warp shenanigans of a herald of Slaanesh called the Thin Man, there exists in the Warp a mirror image of Brandt’s Landing overrun with spooky daemons and heavily corrupted Chaos cultists. The fundamental goal of the Thin Man is to make the real Brandt’s Landing look like Chaos Landing, but with a much more dense population of grotesquely mutilated damned souls staggering about the streets. This here is the key for one neighborhood in particular of Chaos Landing, called Wrenwrick Crik. Brandt’s Landing is Slaanesh-themed, and while it doesn’t really come up in this particular segment, be advised that the existence of the sex trade is briefly acknowledged.
Hexcrawling
If you’re going to put together a hexcrawl you need mechanics for crawling hexes. This is the current draft of those mechanics for the Thar hexcrawl. These might see some revision between now and the .pdf (the spotter role is relatively new, which is why none of the Thar encounters posted so far have detection DCs, we’ll have to add those in for the finished .pdf), but we’re reasonably sure this is about what we want the end result to look like.
The Wyverns’ Nest
Maybe it was naive of us to think that war camps were the kind of encounter we could pump out daily. Scratch the maybe, that was definitely naive. This Thar encounter involves a pair of wyverns nesting in the ruins of an ancient Thar watchtower, because progress on the Bloody Hands war camp is going pretty slow.
How To Run A War Camp
While writing the Manslayers and now the Bloody Hands war camps, we quickly realized that managing 100-200 NPCs is really hard and that GMs were going to need explicit advice on how to keep up with it all if we were going to expect most of them to be able to run encounters like the Manslayers Camp as something entertaining rather than as a hot mess.
The Manslayers NPCs
The Manslayers came with two new NPCs who didn’t rely on any of the generic stats from either the Monster Manual or our own new statblocks. These NPCs are Chief Mazhug and Rakgu, Chosen of Gruumsh, and they’re some of the toughest orcs in Thar, especially Mazhug. The sheer number of orcs in the camp, even after having several of their hunting parties picked off by a clever party who fully understands they need to fight an asymmetric war, makes fighting the Manslayers alone an intimidating proposition. The presence of powerful NPCs like these makes even fighting them with allies difficult, as even with allies to keep the riff-raff out, these heavy hitters and their bodyguards will fall to the players to deal with in combat.
The Manslayers
Plot details are liable to change radically as we hammer out more of Thar, which is a far more interconnected hexcrawl than others. We’ve also put a lot of time into just figuring out how we’re going to do these enemy camp sort of scenarios, which means we haven’t had as much time to add in things like how different NPCs react to attempts at negotiation. What with the Manslayers specifically hating 80% of player races and all, it’s safe to say that when we find the time to add that in for the .pdf version it’s going to mostly be “make a DC a billion Persuasion check or else they stab you to death.”
The Grave Statues
We’re hoping to run a whole lot of Thar in the near future since we’ve been leaning pretty heavily on Dark Heresy 2 so far. One last hurrah for DH2 before we switch focus to Thar is this encounter, concerning some Age of Strife Chaos cultists who sealed their souls into statues, awaiting someone to crack them open to release them.
The Nurgle Cultist’s Family
You can guess from the title that we’re in Vestitas again. This time, in a remote hex on the eastern fringe of Imperial territory there is a lone and lonely Nurgle cultist who seeks to trade the PCs to papa plagues in exchange for having his dead family reanimated as zombies. Surviving the encounter isn’t difficult, but getting rid of the hideous plagues that might be inflicted upon you along the way can prove more challenging. Special bad luck to those who contract Creeping Buboes, which might claim your life long after the fight with the Nurgle cultist is gone. On the other hand, this encounter’s confrontation is one of the easiest to circumvent entirely, provided you’re nosy and/or paranoid.
Ogres of Thar
In addition to orcs, Thar also contains rather a lot of ogres. The number of new statblocks needed isn’t quite as steep because the ogres commonly have orcs or goblinoids as minions, which lends itself some variety on its own, so here are three new statblocks, one of them unique to the Crystal Sphere Tribe of ogres. After this we’ll have all the new stat blocks we’ll need for the hexcrawl, so we’ll be getting back into encounters.
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