With Season 2 of Dungeon Masters in full swing, we can now claim the first Play-Along Pack from the upcoming Arcana Unleashed book. But after reading it, it was surprising how underwhelming it was. The Play-Along Packs from the Ravenloft series had great monsters and encounters built into it that I hardly had to make any changes to it and was able to run it as written. But that wasn’t the case for the “Living Spells Play-Along Pack”. So let’s break it down and talk about how I ran it at my table to make it more interesting and challenging to your players.

I’ll Be At GenCon!

Before we dive in, I wanted to let you know that next week I will be at GenCon! The biggest gaming convention in North America, GenCon is one of my favorite conventions to go to. I’ve been lucky enough to attend as Press for the last few years, which I take that opportunity to cover the convention with interviews as well as posting news on my social media accounts. Right now I have a lot of interviews scheduled, such as Jenn Ellis from Twogether Studios, Tomas Härenstam from Free League, Jason Carl of Dungeon Master University, and I still have a few others that I am in the process of confirming. I also do interviews with dice companies to talk about their latest products and what they’re selling at GenCon, and we compile that into a video called “The Dice Of GenCon”. (In fact, I just recently did an interview with FanRoll Dice talking about what they will have at GenCon this year). So keep an eye out on my social media accounts as well as my YouTube account to watch the interviews as they will drop same day or the next day.

Overview

The Play Along Pack sets up the encounter by having your players be a part of the Ninth Quill Faction, a new faction that will be available in the Arcana Unleashed book. This group is kind of a self-appointed magical Indiana Jones-type group, where they believe that magic items are safest with them and not with other arcane-focused factions. But they are also a bit morally gray as they don’t mind rewarding themselves with rewards as well. The faction tells the characters that they need to retrieve a magic item, the Idol of Good Fortunes (also a new magic item in the upcoming Arcana Unleashed book). They are tasked with exploring an Evoker Archmage’s workshop to retrieve the magic item and while there, they encounter 3 Living Spells, an arcane entity that was created from the components of the spell it’s named after (Living Burning Hands, Living Shatter, Living Acid Arrow, etc.). Sounds interesting.

But here’s the problem. As written, the party does not encounter the Evoker Archmage (another new monster from the upcoming Arcana Unleashed book) in this scenario, and the Living Spells are are Challenge Rating of 1. The adventure is designed for a party of Level 6 characters, but the XP for 3 Living Spells is well below the Low difficulty for this party (3 CR 1 monsters is 600 XP. A party of 4 Level 6 characters has a Low Difficulty of 2400 XP). So this already tells me that this encounter will not be challenging and probably not interesting, either.

So here are the adjustments I made that hopefully you can implement if you run this encounter for your table.

How To Hook Your Players

The Play Along Pack starts off by saying the players are part of the Ninth Quill Faction, which I think is a great way to introduce this faction and to get the encounter started by already stating how the group is formed and why they’re being tasked with this quest. But why stop there? We know that players love to talk about the characters they’ve made, their personalities, what they’re good at, etc. So this is an opportunity to start the encounter off by letting your players share that with the table, especially if they are new to each other.

I told my table that they just joined the faction as Agents (the lowest level membership of the faction) and that they were meeting with their Lieutenant, a Dragonborn sorcerer named Lennok (this is a character I’ve created in another campaign I played). This was their first quest to prove that they belong in the Ninth Quill so as long as they succeed in this mission, they are officially in the group. But if they failed, then they are kicked out.

For the Ninth Quill, people do not apply to join – they’re invited. So I asked my players to share an event or moment about their character that impressed a member of the Ninth Quill so much that it granted them an invitation. The players came up with a great story for each of their characters that highlighted something interesting and unique about them. Doing this already creates a buy in and interest with the players, making it more meaningful for them that they are a part of the faction.

Modifying The Quest Goals

As written, the Play Along Pack states that the quest for the characters is to retrieve the Idol of Good Fortunes. But I wanted to add a level of interest to the quest to make this a bit more interesting for my players, so I simply added another goal for them. Their Lieutenant shared with them that in addition to retrieving the magic item that’s in an abandoned warehouse, they have received rumors that the warehouse is used as a place to store magic items and spell components as part of a larger magic item trafficking operation. But what’s odd is that the warehouse is old and abandoned and there’s no activity being observed in the building. So the party’s secondary objective is to investigate the warehouse in general, which sets up the exploration phase of this encounter.

Making The Warehouse Interesting

When the party arrives at the warehouse, I describe to them what they see: in the middle of the Anauroch desert, they see an old abandoned warehouse, made of rotting wood and boarded up windows and doors. But what they discover as soon as they start investigating is that the warehouse is actually a major illusion. Once someone gets within 5 feet of the building, they find themselves walking through the mirage and see the truth: there is a building, but it’s not made of old rotten wood. Rather, the frames of the building are made of human skulls and bones, with the walls made out of red and black material, almost skin-like. A Study Action (Arcana, History, or Investigation) will reveal to them that this is the work of a Thayan Red Wizard (the Evoker Archmage). I added the Thayan details here since we will get a new campaign book, “Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall” that is centered around the Red Wizards of Thay. So I thought it would be fun to add that little detail here, but you are free to adjust it however you like.

It was really neat to see how my table discovered the building’s true form. The Bard of the party cast Detect Magic to try to find the magic item and immediately they pinged that the whole building was reverberating as magic from the School of Illusion. But once the party realized this was a building of a Thayan, the tension was set as they knew they may be in for a challenge.

Improving Combat

As I mentioned earlier, the Play Along Pack only includes 3 Living Spells of a CR 1 rating for combat, which is well below any kind of challenging combat based on the Encounter Builder. The Living Spells are contained in crates but automatically start to quake in it when a creature steps into the warehouse. So to make this more interesting and challenging, I added in all 6 Living Spells in the encounter so that my players could see all six of them in action. But even with having all 6, the XP total is 1200, still about half the budget of a Low Difficult encounter for this party. So I added in the Evoker Archmage in the Encounter as well.

The Evoker Archmage is a Red Wizard of Thay. Someone in the party can encounter them by going into the Archmage’s office (or sneaking up and looking into the window of the office), and can observe them manipulating spell components with magic, which is how a Living Spell gets created, according to its lore. This is a moment where you can essentially describe a Living Spell of your own: Maybe it’s a series of projectiles that glow red (Living Magic Missile), or a giant snowflake bouncing around in a snowglobe (Living Ray Of Frost). This is a clue that you can give to your players so they learn more about these Living Spells and what they may expect to encounter in this area.

Once the Evoker Archmage is confronted, they mumble something about how their operation is now ruined and combat begins, causing the Living Spells to burst out of their crates and start attacking on their Initiative count. Now, we need to be mindful about this because the Evoker Archmage is a CR 13, which is 15,000 XP and almost twice as much of the budget for a High Difficulty encounter for a party of this size and level. So give the Archmage two rounds to show off its cool abilities (casting Fireball AND Lightning Bolt in the same turn? Yes please!), but showing that the Archmage is on their way leaving the warehouse. This ensures that the party does not get completely annihilated from them and since the Living Spells will be engaged with the characters, they have other things to worry about. (My party still tried to take down the Archmage, but once they realized that after they hit him with their big spell and attacks and still only got to a quarter of the Archmage’s hit points, they realized they weren’t going to win against them so they let him go).

If you want to add another element of complication to this encounter, you can having the Living Burning Hands or Living Flaming Sphere accidentally set some crates on fire, which starts to cause the warehouse to catch on fire. Now, the characters need to figure out a way to locate the Idol of Good Fortunes and retrieve it before it gets destroyed in the warehouse fire. Having a Countdown of 4 turns should be enough time for them to locate it or come up with a creative way to stop the warehouse from catching on fire even more (such as the Create Water spell).

Wrap Up

The Play Along Packs from Ravenloft were fantastic, so it was a bit of a disappointment to see this Play Along Pack to not have that same level of interest or challenge as the previous Season. But I had a lot of fun creating my own additions to the encounter that engaged my table in a more meaningful and interesting way. So adding these elements to your game when you run this Play Along Pack should hopefully create a fun experience for your table as well.

Did you run this Play Along Pack as well? If so, let me know how it went!