Eric Watson

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We interrupt our regular programming of “Storm King’s Thunder” with this special broadcast! Due to some of our usual players being out of town for the week, we decided to gather together for a one-off side-venture starring new (pre-generated) characters and a pre-built adventure.

Welcome to the “Den of the Rotten Kings!”

I can now add “threw together a 4 hour D&D adventure in a day” to my list of DM accomplishments. The only way I had a chance of doing this was by using a pre-built adventure.

I already had a number of good sources. I thumbed through my Book of Lairs from Kobold Press, a fun collection of over 20 monster lairs and dungeons, many of which can serve as good one-shot dungeon crawls. As a Kickstarter backer I also got a .pdf of all the battle maps, which I could convert into Roll20 pretty quickly.

I settled on the 3rd level dungeon, “Den of the Rotten Kings.” It felt like the easiest to run, with simple foes like bandits, thugs, and wererats, and some classic traps with tripwires. It also had a few fun role-playing and dialogue opportunities with two different potential allies who can be rescued.

It’s impossible to say how long a mini-adventure will last, and we ended up starting very late since we were still scrambling to get our character sheets done by our usual start time. It took us a solid four hours to defeat the leader of the Rotten Kings, but I think it was a fantastic adventure that did a great job telling a complete mini-story. Continue reading “D&D 5E “Den of the Rotten Kings” Recap”

I just posted a sad update a few days ago that we were going to have to cancel our weekly D&D session this week. I’m pleased to announce that we will go forward with our session – but it won’t be “Storm King’s Thunder.”

Since two of our players are gone this week, we opted to take a page from our last campaign, when Chris ran an excellent one-shot adventure when we had a player out. Like that one, we’re bringing on another party member to bring us up to four players, and this time I’ll be DMing again!

I can almost guarantee we’ll be starting late and running later tonight and have all kinds of problems as we scramble to plug in our pre-gen characters into Roll20 and try to wrap it up in a single session. I’ve lightened much of the burden by adopting a pre-made adventure, one of the mini-dungeons found in the Book of Lairs by Kobold Press.

So tune in tonight as your slightly altered group takes on a brief side journey with a new cast of characters!