Mike Shea

Characters are in the game. If the character is there, that means that they can be a vehicle for secrets and clues, which means when you're doing your prep, you can actually add a secret to each of the characters that are going to be there because you're pretty confident that you're going to be able to reveal that secret because the character is there. So tie secrets and clues to characters.

Probably like one secret per character is a really good way to go. And recall that characters are the only source for secrets and clues that you can actually count on. Two is when you're running Tales of the Valiant with the monster vault, pay careful attention to challenge rating one and two monsters.

Challenge rating one and two monsters in Tales of the Valiant seem to be hitting about one challenge rating ahead of what they look like. So if you run them and they're fine, that is totally fine. But you might want to be a little careful because they seem to hit as though they're one challenge rating ahead. That seems to be specific for challenge rating ones and twos.

Threes and above seem to hit pretty reasonably. And by that time, your characters can weather that sort of attack. And below that, that appeared to work well is below CR one appeared to be pretty on par as well. But CR ones and twos are a little bit dangerous. So you want to keep an eye out for that. Now on with the show.

Last week, the characters were right at the entrance to the camp known as the Campo, the ruins of blood and sand, which was an old ruined shrine.

on the outskirts of the village of kukatarma this is sort of like out in the wild out in the badlands southwest of the dragon empire the character's home base is in the 440 fingers which is actually at the joint of three major regions of the dragon empire mazar batek and gizmiri and i think it's kind of fun and it sits on ley lines which is really fun too so we got lots of

Lots of like things that can happen in the region that they're in and also in the outskirts. But they made their way down to the Gidigada Hills in order to set up a smuggler route, which they did set up. But now they moved over to Kukatarma, which is an old ruined city. They went there basically to follow a very small quest, which was, hey, a goblin stole a puzzle box.

And ran off to Kukatarma, and we, some gnolls that the characters had hired, we were going to go after the guy, but now we work for you, so we don't need to do it. And the characters were like, I guess we'll go there, right? It sounded interesting and fun. So they were like, we're going to go head out to Kukatarma.

So they headed out to Kukatarma, and what they found is like a big ruined city with lots of things going on. Here is the city of Kukatarma. I just grabbed a, as I do, my favorite trick, right? I think probably my, one of my most used, if not my most used resource for running RPGs these days is Dyson maps. And Dyson had a great map of a kind of city.

And I grabbed it and said, that's going to be Kukatarma, my ruined city. And I'm going to draw on little interesting places. There's actually a couple of other places that I should have drawn on here that haven't, including on the outskirts. If you see that hill on the lower right, that hill on the lower right is where I put the camp of blood and sand.

And the characters, let's see, have the runes of blood and sand. So here's the runes of blood and sand. They were sneaking up from the upper left, kind of from the west. And we began the session by having a couple of thralls that had escaped from their enslavement being chased by gnolls, one of whom was killed with a poisoned arrow.

And the other one they saved and they took care of the two gnolls. But it was a very tricky business because they were starting to alert more gnolls. There was a gnoll up on a watchtower that they had to then take care of. But luckily they managed to take care. I think it was about three gnolls in the end that they had to kill before they alerted all the other gnolls.

The gnolls are all part of a tribe known as the Black Venom tribe, who use sort of a supernatural poison to put themselves into a, you know, into terrifying violence. And they are, the gnolls are actually in service of... of a member of the dragon empire a an official of the dragon empire which was um eris dawn gaze a akinji commander of the um which of the dragons

Yeah, Adesha of the Burning Sands, who's the dragon ruler of the Gizmiri area. So there's like three draconic rulers. And Adesha probably has dozens, if not hundreds, probably dozens of these exploration groups that are out there in the desert, digging through old ruins, trying to find more treasure to amass to his massive horde. And he's got these commanders...

These kind of military commanders that are out there commanding mercenary groups and enslaved groups and all these other ones to dig into these super dangerous ruins and find the things that they've got. And Eris Dawngaze, this half-dragon Akinji commander, is going to be one of them. The characters dealt with – they snuck around. They did a lot of recon-y stuff.

They then – like one of the characters turned into a giant constrictor snake and caused problems, attacked many of the gnolls. And then they killed the gnolls that were guarding the prisoners in the slave pits. And then they went to the main temple area and found the leader who was Gavish Blacksting. And they faced... And that was really hard.

They had a good, hard fight against Gavish Blacksting and some other gnolls and gnoll cultists. And they were engaged in some... They had this big effigy of Abriac in the center of it. And so they defeated him. And then they're making their way out. And as they were making their way out, Eris Dawngaze, who was...

staying over in that tower in the upper left, came on out to see, like, what is all this commotion going on? I'm hearing all this noise. Uh-oh, right? And it pops out. So the strong start in today's game is going to be facing Erez Dongay's half-dragon commander of Adashav, the Burning Sands. So we are going to go to our session notes, and we are going to make a new note from template.

I'm using Obsidian to do my campaign planning these days. If you want to learn more about Obsidian, there will be a link in the show notes section that tells you all about using Obsidian for your game. But we are starting off, the nice thing is we're starting off with just a straightforward big fight and the characters are pretty worn down.

So one thing is like the characters are third level and third level is not a lot Third level is pretty low to face a lot of powerful encounters, one right after the other. And we're down two players today, so we're only going to have four characters. The ones who are not there, Cal there, Gaudenzia is there. I think Mateo is not there. So I think we've got Amavin, Gaudenzia, Rowan, and Tolstoy.