River Scroll of DOOM

[gfish]

For last week's D&D session, I put together something kind of fancy. At the end of the previous week's session I had dropped them and some bad guys off of a bridge, Indiana Jones style. I wanted to have an extended combat while being washed down a white-water river, bouncing off rocks and going over waterfalls. To really capture the feeling, I wanted them to feel completely out of control, and unsure what was coming next. So I made a scroll, 12" x 120". With current vectors on every square, showing in which direction and how far a player would be washed during the movement update phase if they were in that location. And then I rolled it up inside a cardboard tube, fed out through a slot cut in the side, so they couldn't see what was coming.

It worked pretty well. Maybe not quite well enough to justify the many hours of R&D I put into developing the movement rules and drawing the thing, but oh well. Most of the problem was that the enemies they were fighting were woefully underpowered and all but one were wiped out in the first couple of rounds. (I'm coming to dislike some of the PHB2 classes, they seem way unbalanced.) The remaining one swam away downstream, which meant they at least had someone to chase (and a reason to see the rest of the scroll), but they could see what was coming up well in advance. They didn't get the 'ooooooh shiiiiiiiit!' moment I was looking for when the giant waterfall at the end was finally revealed. All in all, I think the bandit hideout siege later in the section was a lot more fun, and took me about 5 minutes to prepare. Oh well.

The scroll also jammed early on and started to tear. If you want to do something similar, cut the slot all the way along the tube, not just in the center. You'll never get the roll of paper inside concentric enough, and it will drift to one side and jam. Luckily, the cutting hook on my Leatherman proved very useful. I was able to cut off the section already deployed without upsetting the minis, then lengthen the slot in the tube and tape it all back together. Took about 30 seconds, felt very slick.

Oh, and the graph paper is from a Staples easel pad. $12 for 50 giant sheets of 1" grid, perfect for gaming maps. I've been using them for all the maps so far, and I definitely like drawing them up ahead of time. It's nice having them ready to go, and it lets me put a bit more effort into the graphic design and tactical layout.

Comments

[hollyking.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea for the river.

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

hee, neat!

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Aw. I'm kinda bummed to hear about the baddies all dying quick, because it sounded SO COOL when you described it to me. Nice touch having islets and such mid-river, too.

I guess now you know to throw bigger, badder baddies at them? :)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we'll see how they handle this week. So far I've barely been able to bloody any of them (that is, reduce to 50% HP), much less get them making death saves.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

You're a DM extraordinaire. Where did you find the time?

[mrpsyklops.livejournal.com]

You're mad, mad I tell you. That's really neat. I wish I had thought of it.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Love the technology. I don't know if this would have worked in context in the campaign you're running, but if you wanted to have ongoing combat as well as the river-running aspect, and if the enemies also are subject to the challenges of running the river, and if you want that not to be a major factor — i.e., you want the major threat to the enemies to be the players, not the river — then it seems you'd want to throw in some aquatic monsters.

You could either have the aquatic monsters be allied with or summoned by the (presumably terrestrial humanoid) actual plot antagonist NPCs involved, or you could have the aquatic monsters eat the NPCs first to show how dangerous it is...

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Also, for the future... write a program to randomly generate the river and print it to a dot matrix printer on old-fashioned continuous paper in real time.

[noumignon.livejournal.com]

Ha ha -- that seems like a really gfish thing to do.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly.

[filkferengi]

Cannily planned, sir!

[quadrivium.livejournal.com]

I love this! I'm so glad I got the link from twitter. I'm going to tell Wesley about it.