Armele’s Other Environments

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The smell and sounds of the market place were overwhelming at first as the clash between goods raged on. Carts selling produce, stalls selling cooked food and the smell of hot iron mixed together to a confusing mix that left the party feeling heady. However, the market sprawled before them and after just a few moments they spotted a stall that interested one of them.

It didn’t take long for them to find another stall that sold something else of interest and soon they were getting the information they were after. There was a merchant at the market that was selling dwarven goods and despite the mercenary of the elf they asked attempting to intervene between the party and the baker who offered the information for a handful of gold.

The above Environment Stat blocks were created by me. Rules were adapted and inspired by adversaries and environments from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0 and any likeness is the copyright of DRP, Darrington Press, who are the creators of the material (Environment Stat Blocks). This content was modified/created is licensed under the DRP Community Gaming License which can be found here: Darrington Press CGL.

The Streets of Felkirk’s Environments

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The streets of Felkirk’s Environments can be varied depending on the time of the day. For my adventure that takes place over three larger scenes I wanted the setting to be a dark, tense and anxiety charged atmosphere to help fuel the feeling of an invasion going on. But before I get too far into that let’s take a step back.

In Daggerheart its not just Adversaries; the critters, creatures, monsters and hostile humanoids, that the Game Master, GM, can use to create tense atmospheric moments for the PCs its also the Environments that can change, evolve or manipulate the flow of the adventure. For the sake of this quick post tonight let’s treat an Environment as an Adversary as they have a tier, a type, something akin to Motives & Tactics in the form of Impulses as well as a Difficulty and Features.

Like Adversaries some Environments will have passives which alter the area in which the party are in. Examples might be Oppressive Heat where parties who travel through their Traversal environment mark an additional stress on all failed rolls due to the oppressive heat. Or like in my examples it gives a set of actions that he party may be able to take, or impede certain actions that the party may want to take.

The other type of feature that the Environment shares with Adversaries is actions (many do actually) which is an action. Whether this is a spout of burning hot lava erupting from the ground at the Fire-marsh where the Oppressive heat sometimes erupts form the ground causing PCs to make an Agility reaction roll or suffer burns from the boiling water and steam. Or where the GM can activate the Environments natural residence to make an appearance – summoning fire toads to leap from the boiling water to attack with blistering tongues – triggering an encounter. This may or may not cost a Fear, the GMs resource that they get from around 40% of dice rolls, but if it does then it may be a more powerful creature, or set of creatures, that are being summoned.

So treating Environments like Adversaries also comes down to how they look. Environments also have stat blocks and that is precisely what I wanted to show off tonight! So have a look below at some of the Environments for the scene of Felkirk’s Foot Traffic.

The above Environment Stat blocks were created by me. Rules were adapted and inspired by adversaries and environments from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0 and any likeness is the copyright of DRP, Darrington Press, who are the creators of the material (Environment Stat Blocks). This content was modified/created is licensed under the DRP Community Gaming License which can be found here: Darrington Press CGL.

Now while these Environments aren’t going to be game changing they add a bit of depth and structure onto what the adventure will do. If you read The Night of Silent Feet the scene plays out pretty closely. The Party are at the Lost Anchor Inn and they can perform some actions there while a timer ticks down – 1 action per player with the Countdown being the number of players. Once the countdown reaches 0 then the door opens and a guard falls in. The party leave the Inn to immediately get ambushed – the Ambush Encounter event. This is a small easy encounter to ease people in and once its over then they run through the streets.

This may trigger another encounter but it will get the party used to the mechanics of rolling dice to try and get a few successes before failure – and it shows consequence. Afterwards we move onto other smaller scenes (Social encounter at the Makeshift Barracks for scene two. Followed by another Felkirk Streets that moves to Market Street and then Forward Base.) By treating the travel like an adversary then it becomes less prone to becoming dull and the least favourite part of the journey. Many DMs / GMs have covered this type of travel before so I won’t go into it – but I do recommend that you look into it!