In my last post, I described the initial concept of an adventure. The next stage of this adventure is to get into a little more detail as to what the PCs will face.

Let’s start with the tomb encounter. This is where the players meet the “recovery specialists” who are trying to loot the tomb before the PCs. I’m building this encounter for 5 PCs of 8^th level, and I’m likely to use four monsters to face them. At least one monster with the ability to cast counterspell and shield, a rogue, and two fighters.

The default spellcaster is the mage at CR 6. Due to the close quarters in which the characters will be fighting, it’s likely to be less challenging than you’d expect; it’s low total of only 40 hit points goes very quickly. I’m quite happy to use two veterans (CR 3) as guards, and then add a master thief (CR 5) from Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Plugging in all these monsters into the suggested charts means it’s likely a Deadly encounter. Is that too much?

It might be. I’ve just found that players can completely surprise me with their ability to destroy encounters – and at five PCs to four monsters, the odds are in the PCs favour. The advantage with designing an adventure for publication is that you can playtest first and get a feeling for how difficult the encounter is. The easiest way to tone down the encounter is to replace the Mage with something weaker.

The final encounter, where the adventurers are confronted with the rest of the “recovery specialists” as they leave the tomb has the potential to be very similar. As I think about it, I like the idea of repeating an encounter less. So, what can I do about this? The solution was to have another faction come into play. Perhaps the Kraken Society or Arcane Brotherhood? But that’s too similar. How about the Dead Rats, which have a lot of wererats? That seems more interesting! So, one conjurer and five wererats, which puts the encounter at Hard. The terrain here can be designed to allow the wererats to use more skirmish tactics if they like.

Do I need another combat encounter? I think one on the way into the tomb is interesting, especially if there are features that change it up. Yondalla is an agricultural goddess, so what happens if she had a store of magical grain that got consumed by something which is now very big – but can be distracted by feeding it more food? So, it becomes a combination of puzzle and combat. Why is there a way to get past it? Because the “recovery specialists” managed it! So, there’ll be clues in the room the players can use to deduce the trick for bypassing the encounter, but otherwise it’s a fight.

My first thought was to use giant rats, but doesn’t that make it too similar to the final encounter? Then it occurred to me that it provides another reason the Dead Rats might like to get the relic, especially if it created the magical grain in the first place. So, giant rats it is. But just rats is a bit easy, so let’s include a queen rat – one that has magical powers and can order the rats around. I don’t think such a monster exists in standard D&D at present (and I can’t use monsters from books like Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts because this adventure will go on the DMs Guild), so I’ll have to design one. It’ll be a simple design; the difficulty of the monster can be found in playtesting. If I look at a CR 5 queen rat and 12 giant rats, that should give the difficulty I need: not a really dangerous encounter, but one to engage the players’ interest.

So, three combat encounters. The next step for me is to work out an environment for each encounter and see if there are any tricks that can be used. I think that the encounter in the tomb proper should have a bunch of magical effects causing interesting things occurring to both sides fighting; the other encounters can just make use of terrain to provide further interest.