While I’ve mainly been running published adventures lately, every now and then I throw in some encounters that I create myself.
I’m currently running my Friday night online MapTool group through the War of the Burning Sky adventure path. We’re in adventure number five right now, and one part of the adventure called for the party to venture into the Valley of Storms. Despite the name, this valley had no storm-themed creatures in it at all, which felt like a crying shame.
As I was thinking about this encounter, I happened to be joining Mark Meredith as co-host of an episode of Dice Monkey Radio, his new podcast. The episode hasn’t gone live yet, but (spoiler alert!) I used the segment at the end of the podcast where Mark offers campaign advice to get his suggestions for some storm-themed encounters I could throw at my party. His ideas were excellent, and the result is Stormy Weather.
This encounter is for a party of five PCs of 15th level. You could use it in any campaign where the party is likely to meet hostile storm-themed creatures. The basic setup is that the PCs have intruded on the territory of a thunder titan and his genasi friends, and they intend to destroy the interlopers. While you could certainly handle this type of interaction via diplomacy (assuming someone speaks primordial), I wrote it as a fight.
Taking advantage of the ever-awesome Power2ool, I created monster stat blocks. I drew a map in MapTool. And the result is right here for download!
Since I’m proud of the monsters I created, I’ve reproduced their stat blocks below (click the images to enlarge them). I particularly like the thunder titan who spews lightning motes.
I ran this encounter for my group last Friday night, and they absolutely loved it. Now, that may be in part because they went after the genasi with a tornado of carnivorous hell-frogs, but it was a cool battle. Fair warning, though – they ended up using a LOT of map! Getting out of range of those genasi is a tricky business.
Map – scaled to a 50 pixel grid for use in MapTool and similar programs
Valley of Storms map - gridded
Valley of Storms map - no grid