I’d love to see more activity in this game’s forum! I’ve been running a lot of this game, and figure I’ll try and get more chatter going. So let’s talk about some adventures - namely the “Shadows in the Daylight” adventure module this time.
I’ve run this one a couple of times as one-shots. The main note that I have for now is that if you are trying to keep your campaigns as close to the official Regis-Kasteel map as possible, placing and timing this adventure in the region is tricky.
So it largely takes place in and around the settlement of Printempo - location #24 on the region map. This places it just about six hexes of road travel from New Mossgrove, location #1 on the map. If you’re making use of the Hex Crawl document from the GM’s Toolkit, per that doc’s guidelines one hex is 5 km of terrain, and given a good road, a party can travel 6 hexes (30 km) a day. Which then means that an untroubled party could be reasonably expected to leave NM in the morning and arrive at Printempo before bedtime that same day.
However, the actual adventure opens with: “The player characters have been traveling for several days” followed shortly by “The roadway is a well-worn caravan route.” Several days on the road, implies more than one day, which makes no sense if they’re coming from New Mossgrove in the west. So if we’re taking it literally, the only other option would be for the party to be heading from the east, or more likely the north-east. This would have had them passing the Pylons (loc 19) and the City of Sanktejo (loc 20) along the way - far from the simple easy-going road travel the intro implies.
Plus, the timeline of events within the adventure, and the urgency of being out here on their own, just don’t sync up. With NM only a day’s easy travel away - and less in a rush! - sending for help would be quick, as would the return of said potential (albeit not guaranteed) help, if offered.
For my own campaigns, I found that the easiest ways to reconcile as much of that assumed setup would be one or more of the following changes:
- Change the distances of the hexes to 10, 15, or even 20 KM each. At 15km, Printempo would be 3 days away from New Mossgrove, easily.
- Throw in nature-based delays to make the trip no longer quite as pleasant as the adventure implies; storms, flooding, sinkholes, washouts, landslides and more are all options that wouldn’t need the addition of more encounters.
- Add “Get help from New Mossgrove” as a viable additional option. Play it through, make it a sub-adventure of its own.
- Move up the timeline and put on more pressure. Instead of the attacks happening over several weeks, have them only have happened over several days and emphasize the immediacy of dealing with this right now.
- Set this immediately after the other adventures’ destructive events in and around NM, and emphasize that NM has too many problems of its own right now to deal with, and can’t spare anyone to help.
And if none of the above works, move it to another settlement entirely. Possibilities just based on the existing map locations:
- Soleco Camp (loc 25): Hex-wise, Soleco is the same distance from NM, but this southerly road winds through high hills and possibly even mountainous terrain. That could certainly add time to the traveling.
- Deepwoods Archive (loc 7): A threat to the archive could make for a much more compelling need to defend against raiders. Would have to change up the nature of the residents a bit, and their exports.
- Somewhere new! Consider adding a new settlement along the roads somewhere. Just a hex or so south of Poseidon’s Bridge (loc 18) are some lumpy bits off the road that could be a settlement. Maybe some folks have turned the Ruined Apartments (loc 12) into a new settlement that now has a Thrall problem. Perhaps a community of Grabbers has sprung up in the vicinity of the Manufacturing Plant (loc 13), 8 or 9 hexes up the road from NM.