Dungeon 176Cross-City Race
By James "Grim" Desborough
HT 1st-3rd Level
Today in Dungeon:
This adventure is meant to be a 'side quest', a break from more typical adventures and dungeon delving. It begins with the characters arriving in a city that's about to host an annual foot-race which whips up the town’s interest like little else. The race is held every year on the same day. The goal is to take a letter from the southern gate to the northern watchtower as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary. "Cross-City Race" is an adventure designed for characters of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level.
The crowds cheer as the contestants line up just inside the southern gate, sizing each other up. With a great deal of gravitas, the captain of the watch passes before each contestant, bows, and presents them with a small scroll bound up with red ribbon–the message to be delivered at the end of the race. With this accomplished, he paces to the side of the starting line and raises a bright red handkerchief and waves it furiously like a flag to signal the guards. In a moment there is a loud ‘CLANG!’ right behind the runners as the portcullis drops. The race has begun!
Talk about this adventure here.
The dogs are hilarious as well. I can only imagine a PCs reaction to "Hey let's jump over this - OH CRAP".
Oh wow, this is such a solid adventure for starting a campaign as it doesn't require the PCs to know about one another for it to work. This is such a great concept, I can't wait to run this in my game and I know exactly how I will use it.
The dogs are hilarious as well. I can only imagine a PCs reaction to "Hey let's jump over this - OH CRAP".
Great idea! Wish I thought of it. May I steal it if I ever run another campaign?
Does anyone have any thoughts on what amount of information should be provided regarding the status and location of competitors that are not close to the player characters?
I'm thinking of putting together a "map" showing progress, based on the flow chart from the last page. Maybe it would be best to post the current position of every competitor on the map for the information of players, and remind them not to metagame with information that their characters don't have access to?
It would be nice, however, to have more examples in Dungeon of how to create compelling scenarios where combat is secondary. Also, interesting design and implementation of skill challenges.
Bravo, Mr. Desborough and WotC. Please make more adventures like this.
Please make more of this kind of thing
). The use of powers for creative effect was fantastic. I'll list several examples of that below. i drew the flowchart onto the mat that i use and marked the five routes. I did not mark anything that might indicate the challenge or encounter they would find there. we used that as though it were a board game almost. It was a good indicator of success and failure as well as an indicator of progress. though the players could see the NPCs and other players, I don't feel any of them treated that open information in an abusive way.
i told them that the entire course was considered a single encounter, thus once an encounter power was used, it was used for the entire event. no one balked about that and it was a fair restriction to use for the eladrin in the party.
instead of drawing up a map for the encounter with thugs, i simply placed thugs near the character and told him that each was within the distance of his normal speed. i figured that with four skill checks or four successful attacks he was moving past each thug. Two PCs chose that route and one NPC. The two PCs each addressed the challenge differently. One used attacks to incapacitate a few thugs. The other used athletics to run past them and remain out of reach.
The rich street with the smoke barrels was by far the most fun to watch. The wizard had chosen the rich section of town and was able to counter the smoke with arcana right away. Then he used a bluff to declare that it was poisoned gas and that everyone would die. This was pretty effective against the two NPCs that had chosen that route also. He also used a power to burst one of the smoking barrels to disperse a larger cloud of smoke. It was a great success against the half-orc.
Seeing the town guard member getting ahead on the roof tops of the wealthy neighborhood, he used ghost sound to sound the alarm. It was enough distraction that the guard left the race to figure out what was going on. his duties outweigh a simple race.
the monk of the party used cranes wings to hit a random crowd person and then use the power to leap a great distance.
The sorcerer tossed a handful of copper coins in the market to create an obstruction for anyone behind himself.
The players all had a great time, they liked a change of pace from combative enounters. They also liked having a combat with thugs that didn't play out slowly like a normal combat. It was simply subdue and move on, no need to ensure that the enemy is dead.
the four rolls were somewhat tough to maintain. One such example was the bridge. The eladrin wanted to rush forward to the carts blocking the way, fey step beyond and be done with the bridge. Requiring the additional successes was a little bit hard to explain other than, 'there is still quite a lot of crowding.'
because the distance of the river and the distance travelled during each section of challenge was not spelled out, there was some question of, 'just how long am i stuck making a skill check in each area?' which of course makes the 4 successes before 3 failures a perfect choice. It would be hard to call that any lower and it would become too much of a roll slog to require more.
This is a fun adventure, it can easily serve a low-level party, it was helpful in teaching innovative roleplay with both skills and powers, and it has a very simple and believable premise.
I also wanted to agree with many in this thread and throw in that I would love more of these easily adaptable, short session adventures in Dungeon.
Here's my question: how could someone expand this idea to a mini-campaign arc? Instead of a foot race across a city, how about a Paris to Dakar-sized race? How would one make this work?
Here's my question: how could someone expand this idea to a mini-campaign arc? Instead of a foot race across a city, how about a Paris to Dakar-sized race? How would one make this work?
if it were just a race, and you didn't plan to insert other combat encounters, then you could likely have the three challenges per area represent any distance you choose. alternatively, you could require the party to move through each challenge in order to represent the greater distance covered, and each route becomes a different village or city along the way from Paris to Dakar.
I guess that it depends on how much time in terms of sessions that you want to extend the total race. you could extend it a large amount, adjusting some things to be little more than small blips on the trip. (ie. the hot roof challenge could become a massive forest fire through which the road travels; the dogs could be wild dogs in the wild that attack while the party camps at night along the way; there could be several rivers to cross--each represented by a different challenge from the adventure; they might try a shortcut through an old maze of tunnels that is represented by the halfing quarter; an oasis serves as a stopping point for a caravan of merchants which cause significant dificulty in getting to the water for drinking and then getting back out on the road again)
If you'd like the trip to cover the distance but not take long, you could still make several skill challenges and encounters, but treat those each as just stunning vistas along the travel from Paris to Dakar while the rest of the trip is mostly boredom and mundane travel. This would mean that they are likely resting each night and would face each challenge with encounter and daily powers. You may want to adjust for that.
If you'd like the trip to cover the distance and take many more sessions, you could increase the number of challenges faced during the journey. each might still be a small moment of time during travel, but more of them could give the impression that the travel is more exciting eventful. You might still have to adjust to the PCs regaining encounter and daily powers through the trip.
consider how you might describe travel of such a long distance. I'm certain you wouldn't keep a travelogue of every minute detail. You might write about some of the most stunning elements or surprising people or best meal...use that sort of idea in telling of the travel over a long distance for the PCs. they wouldn't need to hear about every mile of travel, but would want to be aware of the smaller, but outlandish, events that occur along the way.
Take a look at a map of the area between your desired begining and end point. You're looking for the larger settlements where there are plenty of resources and relative safety where the party can rest. These are your pitstops. Unlike the Amazing Race, I wouldn't designate a single path of pitstops but instead find every possible pitstop in between. Pitstops should be used to replace the normal encounter/daily boundries and are the places where the party can take the equivalent of a short or extended rest.
Once you know where the pitstops are, start connecting them. Roads, rivers, and traderoutes are the obvious connections, but also look for the connections that might be too dangerous for regular travellers but which adventurers wouldn't thing twice about using. In some cases two waypoints may only be connected by a single path, but in others they might be connected by multiple paths.
Once you know the paths, create connections between some of them. It might be possible, for instance to switch from River to Overland travel between two pitstops. In other places the party might be piggybacking with trade caravan and can switch between trade caravans that might have different priorities. Not all paths need to be connected to another path. If the party decides to take an oversea voyage to cut straight across a large body of water rather than go around, then they're stuck with that unless they return to port and start this whole segment over again.
With the paths and connections defined, figure out the challenges that the party might encounter on each. These could be either skill challenges, or combat, or even whole side quests (depending on how involved you want this to be). For variety's sake some should be easier, some harder, some longer, some shorter. A well travelled route, for instance, might be long but easy (say a complexity 3 to 5 skill challege at one or two levels below the party) while a more daring shortcut might be short but hard (complexity one but two levels above the party). Try to keep the XP budget balanced along the possibilities, but don't micro manage it. The goal is for the whole race to be worth roughly the same amount of XP regardless of what path you took, not for each individual path to be worth a specific amount.
I ran something similar calling it "race across the city" for a lv. 15 3.5 group of mine. I had a party of 5 and i brought in other people to play important NPC's in a city of about 1,000,000 popluace. It's interesting to see how I thought it should have been run in 4e into how it was written. Pretty cool job, keep it up.
They had reason to think 3 shady characters at the docks had sicced the city guards in them in what looked like a case of mistaken identity. When the shady characters took off running (I used the half-orc, elf, and human race NPC's exactly) the PC's chased! I made checks for the NPC's that were on screen (their 'home field advantage' was having a good idea what skills to use for how many successes) and described the difference between PC and NPC progress cinematically (until they got close enough to use more tactical powers).
Initially all 3 PC's followed the half orc onto the poor roofs, but one fell into the poor ally (right into the thugs encounter plus the elf) and the trailing PC dropped down to help him. The lead PC knocked the half orc off the wall into the river, jumped in after, had a brief but dramatic fight on the barges before Two Teeth leveled his brutal encounter punch(2d8+something, rolled 2 6's, plus knocked him prone) and the PC let Two Teeth slip away. The PC's have a captive Dorion to ask about the strangeness at the docks...
Very fun!!
They made a small mistake in the Index, it says it is an adventure for all levels instead of 1-3. But since it is mostly a skill challenge it is at least really easy to adapt for all levels (i will use it for my lvl 11 players).
There is one thing that confuses me a bit, all the skill challenges default to a DC 15 (some are 10 and some 20), which is 5 higher than what it should be according to the revised Skill-Challenge DCs. Did they made a new change, is it simply wrong or did I overlook something?
This thread's title says "Dragon 176," but it should be saying "Dungeon 176."
I'd fix the mistake, but I don't have the authority to do so once people have posted in the thread. I think I was -really- tired at the time.