I thought some people might find this interesting. To me what makes a good session great or a bad session better is the amount of time the DM puts into thinking about what’s come before and what comes afterward. It’s only with thought that things tie together. You might get a happy synchronicity on occasion but these, at least for me tend to be accidents and can’t be relied upon.
So with that said, the party was going to need to seek out the hobgoblins in the region last week, who have banded together. On the way there I’d come up with a minor POI or Point of Interest that could be engaged or bypassed as the party wished. These always start out as ‘filler’ material to lend verisimilitude to the world that things happen in spite of the players, not because of them.
There have been several such incidents during this campaign. What might appear to be a minor encounter just for an encounter’s sake branches the world as the player’s react to it. The rescue of the people kidnapped when the airship touched down in Darkmith, the rescue of the slaves from hobgoblins, the encounter with the Hill Giant (Rest in peace big fella you had so much ahead of you), the bandit encounter, the woman and child who entered the town bleeding to name a few off the top of my head. These were all Important Moments In Time and helped determine future events.
This most recent PoI was of a similar nature. This little encounter started out in my planning as a small little tactical combat opportunity as they searched around the countryside looking for a tribe of hobs to parlay with. Nothing special, the kind of thing that every DM pencils into his flow chart to make sure he has enough ‘stuff’ on hand to fill the session.
But over the course of the week this little minor side point grew and evolved and here is how it happened.
As the week went by the generic “Necromonger” as it was, your basic necromancer encounter, a creature shunned from town for his stereotypical fetish for the dead. My initial envisioning was of a necromancer taking advantage of the bodies of a hobogoblin intra warfare site. The initial single encounter broadened into two encounters and the scenery was filled in. The generic aka without much interest antagonist turned into the Steppes Hag as I found time to consider the upcoming weeks events. I envisioned this creature as a minor legend in the area, one that fed on the dead and made them serve her and the encounter grew into three ‘minicounters’. A kind of minor delve.
Then as I was working on my Rogue’s Gallery of villains on the opposing forces a little note I’d penciled many weeks ago about one of the creatures working for the BBEG back in the day, Utha Plaguebringer now escaped from her prison like so many others of the dark days, caught my eye and the Steppes Hag became Utha and a new plot branching was brought into being.
I’d already set the stage for Utha to make an appearance, her pet, a kind of liche like dragon creature had already been spotted searching the countryside (looking for bodies for his mistress truth be known now after the fact as a kind of foreshadowing but it also had the side benefit of increasing the paranoia of the players).
As I dressed up the encounter a bit more I realized that Utha wasn’t doing her job very well. So the encounter grew more legs and stretched out. Instead of just sending out Bonegnasher to spot battle sites, she set up a ritual, a powerful summoning magic that subtly leads people toward her lair and drives them to their natural tendencies to fight. It was aimed primarily at hobgoblins who enjoy fighting other tribes. This way she doesn’t have to go looking for bodies, they come to her. Naturally though as the players traversed the countryside they would be caught in this ritual. Although they discovered it before walking into the trap as heroes tend to do. But what makes a hero is what he does with such knowledge.
In addition she’s still bitter about her sister, Liloth gaining the favor of the Dark One and is always scheming ways to curry favor and throw down her bitch of a sister as she sees her. So she’s concocted a plan to infect the corpses with plague and give them back the semblance of healthy flesh. These hobgoblins she’ll send back into the tribes where they’ll pass on the infections.
The underlying reason for her actions are many as I inked her into being. She along with all the others of the Darkmith bunch hate the hobgoblins as they were part of the forces that locked them away and to date still guard against any creature that escapes the wardings of the ancient prisons. By decimating the tribes she hopes to win the ‘love’ of the Dark One. In addition committing genocide by disease is just a joy of hers anyway. She’s not a very nice creature.
In the end the encounter grew from a simple time filler into what I think was a fairly interesting encounter (even if there was no loot 
) and the players’ actions or inactions yet again have a direct and major impact on the world. If they’d not followed up on the encounter, if they’d of not killed her or if they’d of taken too long to kill her she would have escaped and continued on with her plans and the players would have had to deal with the consequences of the hobgoblin tribes, a major if unknown factor in the fight against Darkmith sickening and dying.
As it was they performed a service for all hobgoblin kind, the same hobgoblins by the way who have ransacked and destroyed several farming villages of Larkson and taken the people they didn’t kill into slavery. Just because hobgoblins have a common enemy with the group, doesn’t make them nice people either. Not everything is black and white, in fact few things are.
So there you have it, the evolution of an encounter from a generic combat fight into something with interest and ties to the world and the story line and it was simply by spending a little time each day thinking about the planned encounters and past encounters and the forces at work in the world.
Hopefully this will inspire you to turn that next random wandering encounter into something with deeper roots than as a portable bag of experience and gold for your players.
