I did it. I finished writing an adventure, start to fin-wait fuck I just realized it’s not quite doneeeeeee eh whatever I’m gonna say it’s done.

So, I was so goddamn frustrated by not being to make any progress on the Temple of Doom adventure, that when I read someone talking about their simply little combat dungeon I got all wistful and was like, “man, I just want to make something like that…” And so I drew this, kind of as a joke:

And even though this is too simple to really play, it got my brain thinking and I was like, “Well what if it was just a little more complex?” I’ve been wanting to do things with dark passages that players can hide in as enemies run by, and stuff with loud noises being heard in adjacent rooms. So then I drew this (and a lot of the notes were added later):

Now there’s nine rooms. They’re all interconnected, but three of the passages are secret (Shit, I need to figure out how they’re secret). If there’s an L in the box, that means the room is lit. Otherwise, it’s dark. This is good because the party is outnumbered and is going to be sneaking around. If there’s an H on one of the passages, it means sounds from either of those rooms can be heard in the other one. I added some simple little tag lines to each room. The rooms themselves aren’t really that significant, because I originally planned for the players to have to find a written message and then escape with it. And as we all know, it takes a turn to search a room. And I was going to rule that, every turn, one of the groups of people would move to a different room. So the players would be searching the rooms one by one, avoiding the enemies, and accidentally encountering them eventually (hopefully) or maybe capturing some to interrogate them. I added a pond, a copse of bamboo, a stable, and a shrine to the temple’s spirit. The dotted lines indicate which rooms the external point of interest is visible from. I rolled to determine which rooms the five groups of enemies started in, and then came up with fun little reasons for why they’re in that room. At this point, I was thinking that this was a minor military outpost behind the border of the province.

Next, since I had already given these little groups some personality by splitting them into what looked like friend groups, I thought it’d be fun and inspirational to add details to each of the fifteen enemies. So I gave them names, an age, a race, a class, and one Ability Score just for a little extra flavor:

A few interesting things happened here. There are only Bushi and Shukenja (the Ninja were added later), so immediately I figured this is some kind of Temple where Shugenja go to study, learn, practice, etc., and they have some Bushi for protection. We also have two Bamboo Spirit Folk and a River Spirit Folk, and I thought that was perfect because we have a pond and a bamboo grove that can be the life forces of those guys! Very cute. Last, we have two Hengeyokai, a cat and a drake. I noted that the drake is Good aligned and the cat is Chaotic, so I decided the cat would probably be evil. The drake becomes key later on, but it just seemed like a fun piece of flair at this point.

Next, I sorted them into their groups based on the earlier map:

Now we can see who is friends with who. This will help us decide how they react to the players, which one will do the talking, etc. Just some more verisimilitude. Ignore the strike-throughs.

Now, this is where I sort of fell into my usual confusion trap. I started falling in love with these characters. The group of three is two very old men and one young kid, who is a Shukenja. To me, that looked like a really cute group of two old men who are best friends and get a kick out of hanging out with this passionate youngster and so let him lead them around. I loved the idea of the River Spirit Folk guy relaxing by his pond. The problem with all this is that these are supposed to be bad guys! The players are gonna be fighting them before we get to bask in all this charactery goodness. What’s worse is that if the players get a sense of how interesting these characters are, it might defuse the tension and cause the players to lose their sense of direction and start to ask “what are we doing here?” Those are the things I started to worry about now. “Are they good? Are they bad?” By this point I’d even forgotten what the PC’s objective was, I was just going around in my head worrying about things.

As I was lying in bed one night, I was STRUCK by the realization that a drake hengeyokai has DRAGON’S BLOOD. Why is Dragon’s Blood important? Because it is the key component to the Shukenja’s most-powerful, coolest first-level spell: Weapon Bless. Weapon Bless allows you to name a target and then prepare a weapon to slay it. On the first attack against the named target, the weapon counts as a +5 weapon! That is amazing! The problem with this spell is that it requires Dragon’s Blood, and where the hell is a first-level PC going to get that? But what do you know, here in my little dungeon, purely through random rolling, we’ve got a bunch of Shukenja in a small compound with a source of Dragon’s Blood! So I knew Weapon Bless was going to play a part here. That’s when the backstory started getting even more complicated and my mind got even more bewildered as I tried to figure out why a bunch of nice Shukenja were messing around with Weapon Bless, and whether it was immoral for them to keep a source of it around like this, and, wait, was this drake hengeyokai actually a prisoner?! I started to wonder about all these things. Meanwhile, I haven’t decided why the players were sent to this place, so I’m tryin to figure that out, too.

Anyways, I couldn’t piece it all together, so I decided to fall back on some good ol’ random rolls. I made my own little table of plot points and rolled on it four times to force me to decide what the hell was really going on here:

I got: “the dragon is a hostage”, “reinforcements are on the way”, “there is a pile of burnt bodies”, and “the temple has changed.”

So now it’s coming together. The drake hengeyokai is there against his will. There’s a pile of burnt bodies, SO the original inhabitants of this shrine are mostly dead (and piled up) and the shrine is now taken over by some bad guys who are making use of the hengeyokai and stockpiling his blood to win the war against our daimyo. We also know that in a few days, additional soldiers will be arriving, so if we can convey that to the players, that’ll add some nice little tension. Finally, the temple has changed. I ignored that one. I kept thinking about it and got everything figured out. This sheet of paper is a list of all the possible bits of information the PCs can learn about what’s going on:

Now, most of those entries are backstory. This might be a case of me being way too worried about backstory. But I want things to make sense to the players. Or maybe I’m just afraid of things not making sense to me. To summarize, the adventure begins with the players being summoned by their lord, Bando Tsugumuchi. The clan is in peril. Bando’s father was assassinated about a month ago. There are enemies at the gates. As Bando speaks, you can smell the smoke from a nearby battle. The clan is literally on the precipice. And he is sending you out on a mission into the wilderness, but all he can tell you about it right now is that you will be following the clan Shukenja, Yoshiya Shigeaki, as he travels back to his alma mater to investigate the implications of some intercepted enemy messages that indicated something important was happening at that shrine. Yoshiya grew up there and loves master Miyazoto like a father, so he’s worried. It’s a three or four day journey through the mountains and forest (which I have a bunch of cool encounters planned for). When the PCs arrive at the shrine, Yoshiya will immediately realize what has happened, as all his old mentors are gone and a bunch of young bushi and strange Shukenja are there, and his master is nowhere to be seen. Our enemy clan hired a ninja clan (the same ninja clan one of my player’s is estranged from) to assassinate our clan leader and destroy our clan. Through subterfuge, they learned of the drake hengeyokai here and decided to make this shrine their base of operations. How did they get past the 10th-level Shukenja who was master here? Well, our friend Yoshiya will recognize one of these invaders as Asakari Naito, who also trained here at the shrine. Asakari came to the shrine posing as an old friend returning for a visit, and then tricked Miyazoto into astral projecting, then hid Miyazoto’s body so that his spirit was stuck outside it and his physical form became trapped in a coma (as per the Dream State spell). You see, Asakari is also a ninja from our ninja player’s clan, (hopefully our ninja player will recognize him and there will be this double “wtf” moment), and so he’s super tricky and dishonorable like that (come to think of it, I don’t think ninja’s can double-class with Shukenja, but it’s too late now). Then the rest of the bad guys showed up and killed all the other Shukenja who could have helped lead Miyazoto’s spirit back to his body. Well, they tried to kill them all, but a few escaped into the forest (this is another piece of information that our players’ can potentially pick up). So there’s two ninjas here from the clan and a bunch of their retainers. They are making this a little base of operations, and they plan on assassinating Bando next to end the war. Every day they drain the hengeyokai of some blood and store it in a hidden cache that the will use to win the war. Our players don’t have an explicit goal as their mission was simply to visit the shrine and gather information, but hopefully they will want to do some or all of the following:

Free the hengeyokai so he can’t be used by the enemy Capture the hengeyokai so they can use him Kill all these bad guys (or maybe just the ninjas) Find and capture the stockpile of dragon’s blood that has been collected thus far Find Miyazoto’s body and help his spirit return to it

And some weird stuff is going to be wandering out of the forest on day three as a repercussion of all the horrible acts of murder and betrayal that happened here recently.

I’ll update you after the session!