My Monday night Greyhawk campaign is currently using a format that we’ve dubbed “Weekend Adventurers”. That is to say: each session is what happens on the weekend. The party then go back to their regular jobs for the rest of the week. That is, they have a week of downtime between each session, which they might spend working or pursuing other activities. The rogue of the group has been a one-person crime wave! It is a fun way of running the game.

There are two types of adventure that dominate this campaign:

• A dungeon delve into the ruins of Castle Greyhawk, or
• A short-one session quest

The delves are easy to run – I have substantial levels for Castle Greyhawk designed, either my work or taken from published sources. They last a single session, with the party returning when time runs out. The quests? They’re more interesting.

For the most part, I generate their parameters randomly. A long time ago, I picked up Cities from Midkemia Press, which along with many other wonderful tables, has a set of tables for creating quests (or missions, as they call them). A die roll indicates if the mission revolves around goods, people, or places, and then two subsequent rolls indicate what or who the task is about and what service the characters must perform.

I then combine these seeds with my knowledge of my version of Greyhawk (World and City) to make them fit the campaign. I typically offer three short quests for the players each session.

The Mercenaries

This last week, the players chose an offer from the City of Greyhawk’s council to find a mercenary captain and persuade him to leave the area. As the party is relatively low-charisma, I was interested in seeing where this went.

The captain and his troops were camped to the south of Greyhawk, which made the Ruling Council somewhat nervous. Especially as Greyhawk’s army mainly was elsewhere (they have territorial ambitions). So, they needed someone else to do the job. Enter the adventurers.

The mercenaries were about a day-and-a-half ride south of Greyhawk, so the party set off, and I rolled to see if there was a random encounter on the journey there. There was! But I didn’t use an encounter table to determine what they fought instead of bringing up a list of appropriate CR monsters.

For one reason or another, I ended up on the homebrew page of DND Beyond. And found an Aberrant Dire Wolf. It sounded cool.

So, the party fought two of these wolves. They defeated them, but because the party is between 2nd and 6th level, it wasn’t entirely one-sided, especially as the “tanks” of the party are at the lower levels!

Enhancing the Scenario

Running this encounter gave me an idea to link it to the greater mission. When the party reached the mercenary camp, they witnessed a pyre where the mercenaries were burning more of these wolves’ corpses.

There are a couple of things going on here. The first is “Where did the aberrant wolves come from?” This question leads to a potential future scenario. And such can be preceded by more reports of attacks by strange, tentacled wolves.

The second is that by the wolves attacking the Warband, its leader was more inclined to move on, which changed the parameters of the quest.

The party’s rogue, Alton Fatrabbit, played by Josh C, ended up doing the negotiations. He suggested that there wasn’t much work in the area, but he knew that the ruler of the See of Medegia had been in the area recently buying weapons.

How did he know this? He learnt it two sessions ago when they did bodyguard work for the Celene representative as he met the See of Medegia’s ruler. The party had first-hand knowledge of the situation. Alton also offered the mercenary captain a sweetener of 200 platinum to move on.

The captain agreed, and the party happily left, having completed their mission.

Wyvern!

On the way back, I rolled another random encounter! (I made two rolls of a six-sided die for each day the party travelled, if the dice came up a one, the party met something.)

Again, I chose the monster rather than using a random table. I do have tables I could use, but I felt a Wyvern would work well. It would be very challenging for the party, and I could add other details.

The fight was challenging, but no one got poisoned to death, so all good!

The detail I added? The wyvern was already wounded. A couple of elven arrows pierced its side.

After the combat, a couple of elven rangers ran up. They had tracked the wyvern from Celene, where it had caused trouble, and were very happy it was now dead. They thanked the party for their bravery and gave them a small reward.

This encounter kept Celene in everyone’s thoughts as well. It helps things link together.

I don’t know if all of this will build to anything – and I was improvising a lot of it based on some prior developments – but it could. Making an interconnected world is quite important to me – and, given how the players used these links during the negotiation, it seems to be bearing fruit. I’ll be fascinated to see where this campaign goes. At present, I have no endgame planned for this campaign!

Improvising in the Realised World

I have been running games in my version of the World of Greyhawk for a very long time. The first campaign I properly ran there was in 1997, but some of the details date back to the late 80s when I first played in the world. Both Meliander the Mage and Brunak the Barbarian, characters created by my brother and me, are still active in the world. I have used material from official books and made a lot as well.

This session drew on that history. How old is Cassie? Here is a blog post from 2004 (over 17 years ago), where I mention Cassie.

This story brings into relief one of the crucial things about improvisation: the more material you have to draw on, the easier it gets. This technique of creating adventures mainly on the fly is only one of the ways to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons. I am not fond of overusing the technique, but it is excellent when you seek to be reactive to the players’ decisions or short on time.

Preparation doesn’t only have to be about designing an adventure before the players sit down; it can also be about becoming so familiar with your world that you can extrapolate scenarios and encounters based on just a little input from your players.