Into the Lairs: Self-Flagellation Edition

As promised, I said I'd talk more about the process of building my encounter and what I thought went well, poorly, or somewhere in between.

From an encounter standpoint, I knew I wanted to do something that wasn't always 100% associated with deserts. Gnolls and their ilk were immediately out. While I'm also a diehard supporter of humanity (my friends will vouch for my preference of human over almost every other race), I didn't think a group of human bandits milling about the desert were particularly interesting either.

Kobolds are always a favorite of mine because they're not quite so socially inept they can't talk to you a bit. They might hate you and try to steal your stuff and actually be a little nervous when you start waving your sword around, but they're silly little lizard men and their use of traps and trickery is pretty fun to toy with. I also feel like kobolds are too often trapped (puns, doho~) in their little caves and never get to see the light of day. They're cold-blooded little dragonmen, so why wouldn't they hang out in the sun like lizards in the desert?

It was then I remembered that the desert-themed dragon was the blue scaled fellow. This one never really sat well with me, because if the dragon is anywhere except the clear blue sky he just looks completely out of place. I made my dragon and dragonmen red. The rocks are red, it's hot as hell, it's probably a good place for a guy with some fire resistance to hang out.

When I was building the encounter, I knew I wanted the ambush to be a little challenging... but not overwhelming unless the PCs really asked for it. I tried to set up the map in such a way that there were lots of ways to evade line of sight from the cliffs and plenty of room to duck around and have an almost guerrilla-styled battle across these narrow passages. The addition of a few cheap pit traps that aren't actually pits only helps break up the flow of combat, keeping the PCs moving up and down around the terrain while getting plinked away at by some kobold crossbowmen... and their reinforcements!

The young half-dragon monitor lizard was thrown in there because I wanted some kind of diversity. All kobolds all the time is... meh. But a half-dragon kobold was equally meh. The overlap of templates kind of creates something that might not really match its CR, but I think it has an interesting set of abilities for a relatively low-power encounter. I also sort of wanted it to contrast the kobolds--it's slow and stupid, but more powerful than any of the kobolds individually and arguably more draconic than any of them as well. They sort of have a love-hate relationship with this little pet of their true master.

...Speaking of their true master, I feel like I also suffered from the 'I've got lots of cool stuff but it's not happening here' issue. There's a red dragon in the equation somewhere, and he's only tangentially influencing this particular group. And this group is only a small segment of the whole Red Rock Raiders. There's a whole lot going on beyond this simple encounter, and perhaps that's where I missed the mark. It was called the Lethal Lairs contest, and this doesn't really qualify as a lair by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe I just misinterpreted the directions ("design a Southlands encounter") too literally. Maybe I've been trained by RPGSS to build things in the wrong sort of direction. Whatever it is, I think I have the least lair-like of the entries, and that's definitely a mark against it.

The map itself is definitely one of my better ones. I'm super proud of it, even if its still kind of crap by most people's standards. It took way too long to get it even looking this good. I do not art. I love the little palm trees, though! They're so cute and palmy. The rest of it feels laid out fairly responsibly--the kobolds have built their trap around the spring, the traps feel like they're in the right spots to prevent people from approaching/fleeing, the little houses are far enough back to be hidden but close enough to keep reinforcements nearby, and I feel like everything is in the right spots. It's still not super pretty to look at, which obviously a problem when you're being graded on your map skills, but it's not like it fell down the ugly tree and hit every branch. It's readable and usable and that's a massive step in the right direction.

Structure-wise, though, I think the encounter comes off a little haphazard. When I'm building encounters for my home games, I sort of toss the experience budget out the window and just roll with what feels right. I also tend towards the 'level up when I say so' methodology in many of my games, so just ignoring the XP values lends itself towards that. Here, I knew what I wanted but was quickly chewing up experience without really getting, what I felt, was a challenging encounter. I ended up making the sandpit traps worth nothing because traps apparently don't go low enough in Pathfinder's CR system to represent a cheap CR 1/3 or 1/2 trap. That feels a little like a cop out, and probably not something a real developer would let fly. Conversely, I do feel like the terrain and the beasties and the traps lend themselves to a pretty diverse little encounter.

But is it memorable? Eh. I'm not sure. And I think that's probably what cost me the most here. The winner's encounter is absolutely memorable. Wyvern riders are cool, wyvern riders throwing you off a waterfall are even cooler. (That does call to attention the fact it doesn't really feel desert themed if the main hook is a waterfall, though that's beside the point.)