Peasant Adventure

Hey Veeky Forums, haven't posted anything on here in a long ass time. Been throwing out an idea for a year or so and finally have a party brave enough to face the challenge. So here it is:

>party is a group of 1st-level commoners
>living in a small farming village in the north
>group of raiders come riding in, pillage the village
>capturing women and children, and killing anyone who gets in there way
>leave as quickly as they came
>survivors begin to panic and try to put out fires, tend to the wounded, etc.
>party propose giving chase and rescuing the captives
>yourekidding.jpg
>village gathers up as much supplies as they can
>party takes said supplies and begins to follow the trail
>they have five weeks before winter hits

Essentially everyone is starting off with a fair amount of food, weapons, and equipment that a farming village would be able to muster. The party members are a blacksmith, a hunter, a butcher, a miner, an apothecary, and the village idiot. Any advice or opinions? I know that I've got my work set out for me with encounters, and the party has got a lot of obstacles including the weather, disease, and other rules from Pathfinder in front of them besides those encounters. All in all, we're all looking forward to the outcome and if anyone has an interest in this, I'll come back with an update when the last party member dies, or a few or all of them succeed in their goal.

Sounds good. Combat might be the big trick, better be sure to emphasize cunning plans.

it seems like you want to play warhammer but can't quit d&d

Assuming you're playing 5th edition, they would be CR0 Commoners. I'd replace their stat blocks with player generated ability scores (use point-buy) and modify their health to be maxed at 8+Con Modifier. Given their professions and backgrounds, you can determine what weapons they have, without proficiency in wielding them as weapons.

For example:

- BS has a Light Hammer (1d4) or Mace (1d6)
- Hunter may have a Short Bow (1d6)
- Butcher may have a Dagger (1d4) or Shortsword (1d6)
- Miner has a Hand Axe (1d6)
- Apothecary has a Quarterstaff (1d6)
- Village Idiot can have improvised weapons (1d4)

So according to the stat block of the CR0 Commoner, they have +2 to hit meaning that their Proficiency = +2,

Very simple encounters with no complexity or depth.

For instance, the miner could compromise the integrity of an overhanging bank so that when the goblins chase the hunter, their weight drops the bank out form under them and they slide into the river.

One goblin is worth 50 XP, so if they face 4 of those, that's an adjusted 300 XP for the group or 50 XP per player, adjusted on the assumption that they're level 1. At level 0, that'd probably be more adjusted to 75 XP per player.

Once they dispatch of the 4 goblins, have the players recover the stolen goods, return to town and award them each 25 Story XP to bring them up to 100 XP and Level 1.

We're using Pathfinder as the system, and you'd be surprised how close you are the items the party started off with due to their professions. The BS got his smithy hammer (a light hammer like you said), Hunter got a short bow and dagger, Butcher got a dagger, Miner opted for a pickaxe, the Apothecary took a club and the Village Idiot took proficiency in club as well.

With HP, they wanted to roll a 1d6, and I gave them +2 for the roll, and Toughness as a bonus feat for living in the far north of the campaign setting and being essentially laborers. Lowest party member is the Butcher with 9HP.

Not contributing, just old pasta

>party members are a blacksmith, a hunter, a butcher, a miner, an apothecary, and the village idiot.
Give the village idiot an axe and have him start chopping. Put the apothecary on fishing duty, and make sure he has the fish cleaning labor enabled. The miner should be clearing out a cliffside for underground farming and rooms, while the rest of start hauling and tending to the plump helmets. Rush beds using the idiot as a carpenter, and mine small rooms. Store excess logs and food inside for a rainy day, and get still up as soon as you have a spare working. The first migrant wave should give you all the extra workforce needed to get a sizable dining hall up, then consider your water-options for a well, dependent on the map.

That's good

Your campaign sounds pretty dark and gritty, so even a "Black Dragon" run would probably be out of the question, but you might consider picking up Ryuutama and mining it for ideas anyway. It's literally a game about (essentially) NPC classes Oregon Trailing their way across fantasyland and nearly dying while trying to collect the raspberries they need to sell at the next town to continue their journey. You could probably steal the weather/terrain difficulty section outright.

Would be perfect for running this in a Kingmaker style game, thanks for the idea user.

Never heard of a "Black Dragon" run, but thanks for the recommendation on Ryuutama. I'll have to check that out and see what I can use from it.

"Black Dragon" is one of the four GM "settings".

"Green Dragon" = Tales of adventure, exploration; etc. (Focusing hard on the travel aspect. Considered the newbie/default for Ryuutama.)
"Blue Dragon" = Tales of love, friendship, family; etc. (Typical slice-of-life stuff.)
"Red Dragon" = Tales of war, battle, treasure-hunting; etc. (Typical D&D stuff.)
"Black Dragon" = Tales of madness, betrayal, despair, and mystery. (COC type stuff, grim-dark as seen through the eyes of JRPGs; etc)

Ryuutama is essentially a game about teaching newbie GMs how to GM and secondarily for newbie players to learn how to play, so the dragon stuff is just a way to help a GM focus on types of games they may go on to run for other systems and for the newbie players to understand how to stay on the same page as their GM.

I ran a campaign with this premise a while back, it went strangely

Huh... So what does that make a White Dragon run?

Depends on if you subscribe to the light-based or pigment-based system of colors.

(I'm quipping because I'm not sure if you're making a quip about white dragons from the traditional D&D 5 colors or asking seriously. But in case you're asking seriously, those are the only ones I'm aware of unless white dragons are part of the upcoming supplements for Ryuutama. Nothing keeps you from homebrewing dragons of any color in your game, though. I know people are doing just that. I'm personally adopting "white dragons" as sort of the "dragon nursery" class. Their only jobs are to tend to the seasonal dragon eggs while the other-color dragons are off recording PC adventures to gather the stories necessary to actually feed the seasonal dragons.)

As commoners, you are what can be summed up as a bunch of rogues with poor physique. Think like a rogue, and try to avoid direct combat if at all possible. Do not fight fair - that is the job of the idiot fighter who is currently NOT there, necessitating you to do his job for him. Charisma is probably the only stat that you can get to workable levels without being hopelessly outclassed by encounters, and you'll need it to gather all the third party help you can get. Hirelings are your friends.

Tell us!

In no particular order:
>eating zombie jerky
>wolves vs wooden mech
>lying about being goblin jesus
>becoming goblin moses
>making bombs out of kobolds
>winning a fight by throwing a goat
>using a dingy as a weapon

Any you'd like me to expand on?

This; I mean, Rat Catcher is a core class in WHFRP.

It's shitty-stick dysentery-core to the max.

How about starting with mech?

Starting with mech sounds good but how about he continues with all of them, if he ever comes back.

Playing a commoner right now in a campaign.
Party thinks I'm a wizard, and considered the most dangerous of the party (consists of mostly other wizards).

All I say is, if you are playing Pathfinder, keep an eye on people taking excessive ranks in handle animal or alchemy. Or take pains to limit what those two can do.

Don't you dare blue-ball us you sunova bitch

>The party members are a blacksmith, a hunter, a butcher, a miner, an apothecary, and the village idiot.

Get one more. Make them all dwarves. Send them out on an expedition to create a new colony for the Dwarven empire. Make the village idiot the expedition leader.

STRIKE THE EARTH!

alright the mech it is

there's actually not much to tell with this one, the party were finding work as scouts for a kingdom currently at war with a neighboring group of dwarves, on their way through the forest they had encountered a pack of wolves, one of the players had a lot of ranks in handle animal and had more or less been using animals in combat in order to make up for his character's general weakness. So they are being sent to a recently abandoned dwarven city to find out why it has become recently abandoned. After making their way through the city (the dwarves had left a lot of traps) they eventually find out why it was abandoned, one of their engineers has been working on war machines powered by bound elementals (yes I got the idea from Eberron) and if any escaped it wouldn't have been pretty. They end up fighting the engineer in question who's piloting a large wooden war machine by wrapping ropes around its limbs and giving the ropes to the wolves to keep them pinned down, this allowed one of the Pcs to get in close and start screwing with the machine, eventually disabling it. They captured the engineer and he is currently being coerced in building similar machines for the human army.

Nice fights you got there.

Maybe goblin jaysus/moses now, please?

a campaign that doesn't immediately corner characters into a class and heap equipment on them?

Yeah. It'd be a welcome relief for seasoned players

>>point buy

no you pleb. 3d6, right down the line

What If I want to run a Purple Dragon game?

Gonzo style fantasy. Pulp fantasy and scifi adventure thrown into a pot with a few eyes of newt and maybe a single tentacle rising up out of the stew

>Nice fights you got there.
thank you, stat wise the mech was a bunch of traps on a moving platform

anyway, Goblin jesus story.

The player were helping a local village take care of a group of bandits who'd allied with a bugbear tribe and were causing some problems. The players realize they can't fight their way through this so one of them (who's maxed his bluff in much the same way as the wolf guy had his handle animal) decides to wait until most of the group is gone and pose as a prophet of Maglubiyet (the goblinoid god for anyone unfamiliar with standard D&D deities). This somehow works and word of this new messenger spreads quickly amongst the goblin tribes, the player in question who's a military history buff and strategy game enthusiast sees this as a chance to organize them into an effective army, so he proceeds to spread various training, production and tactical tips among the goblin leaders, which naturally only further confirms his status as a prophet. Eventually he has a vision dream in which Maglubiyet appears to him and basically says "I'm not happy about you posing as my prophet, that said, you've done a better job so far than any of the actual ones". After this point he began stage two of his plan, essentially this would involve getting an evil dragon on side, which would also help get the alliance of the local kobolds, once all this is assembled he can use this might to convince the local rulers that instead of trying to fight off this monstrous army (while already at war with the dwarves remember) they should give them a small kingdom to rule on their own and have peaceful trade and relations with, thus creating a new homeland for the goblins. The player's exact words after explaining this plan were "I'm kind of like Moses, except Moses didn't have a dragon, so I'm better"

Nice work, I like creative problem solving, it makes a better story.
Goat one, if possible, please.

Gotta go sleep soon, so I may not reply.

Agreed.

underground farming?

Explain.

goat one's pretty short, the were in a fight with a dangerous mage, animal guy throws a goat, next turn one of the players who would've been killed by one of the mage's summons isn't because it can't reach him on account of the goat in its way. They kill the wizard next round. That PC would have died there if it weren't for that goat.

>>implying a level 1 should ever have more than a 16 in a stat.

Sure thing, kid.
I bet you even roll 4d6 - the lowest too.

He is talking Dwarf Fortress, in this game you can grow mushrooms in caverns.

>animal guy throws a goat
kek. Reminded me about that gay inquisitor game, where one tribal guy throws goats at castle.

Pick any you fell like writing about.

A classic.

The party and I came to the agreement of straight 10's in every stat and since most are playing Human (the Miner is going Halfling), they get a +2 in any one stat. The reason we came to that agreement was due to the fact that 10 is the base stat for an average human being.

As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning at Oxford University?

>Playing D&D when WHFRP lets you start off with noble professions such as prostitute and rat catcher.