Hidden Kingdom Devblog: Your Ptolemy Is In Another Castle

One of the major things I wanted to say up front about the adventure is that, while it does deal with the Hidden Kingdom directly, it will not feature the titular Brother Ptolemy of the “Brother Ptolemy And The Hidden Kingdom” cycle. This is something I thought was really important to say up front and to explain why it is. I mean, he’s the big bad evil guy right! Shouldn’t the adventure be centered around him? Shouldn’t the PCs get to take him down right there? Well, therein lies the problem for me, which I will go on to explain, along with some other details about creature design and fluff in the module.

The Hidden Kingdom is an organization of intrigue, secrecy and manipulation. They get the people to be on their side and they use tangible political, social and economic influence to swell their ranks. That’s the true power they hold. They are in fact so secretive that I felt Ptolemy just could not be the villain of this module. I could not have the PCs discover and defeat Ptolemy within 10-12 encounters. They barely discover him in the module as it is, and only if they play well and mindfully. The Hidden Kingdom is a such a secretive and powerful organization that I really just wanted to establish a lead to Ptolemy in this module’s finale, and then let individual DMs decide how they want the rest to go down. If Ptolemy is in your setting, he’s supposed to be an important, dangerous and most of all secretive element of it, that has probably already influenced many governments. It should be your decision how you use him!

And for that, we did include his stats, obviously. His stats, along with all the info on him, will be there for you to use. If you want, you can even modify the adventure on your own terms and include him.

I had to make some tough choices when writing the encounters in this module. One particularly odd ability the Red Monks had as previously written is Rise Again, which allows them to get back up with a bit of HP if they weren’t killed by radiant attacks. All monks are supposed to have this ability. I removed this ability from a lot of Red Monks, giving it only to Leader subrole Red Monks in order to simplify encounters, and give the PCs without radiant attacks a measure of thrill at defeating the minor enemies in each encounter. I also did not train them all in Diplomacy. Again, I only did this to Leader subrole monks. I think entire encounters of self-reviving diplomacy monks would bring in a lot of unneeded potential complexity, but I wanted to maintain those elements rather than remove them entirely. The more important Monk in each encounter still has all of those elements, which I feel makes them a bit more intriguing than every single monk being able to self-revive and being trained to smooth-talk.

It also makes the organization a bit more “defeatable.” There has to be a balance with such organizations between them being discoverable and defeatable for the PCs and them seeming to be competent, influential and menacing. If there’s too much of the latter, the PCs just get frustrated by their inability to get leads or victories, as they chase red herrings or lose trails, or find informants too late and get there in time only to see them die.

(The Red Monks also have a few other abilities as written in the original Ptolemy articles, many of which I also ignore in their stat blocks for simplicity. One such ability is the power to infect enemies who perform Bite attacks on them. This is highly unlikely to ever come up, so I don’t mention it at all.)

One final element I had to decide was the origin and type of the Red Monks. I decided to make them Natural origin humanoids with the undead subtype. I felt this came closer to what they are (transformed people, sometimes unwillingly so) than sticking them with the shadow origin most undead have. I also wanted to avoid some of the typical cliche “I shoot the undead with my holy bolts of light for extra damage” stuff. These guys are undead, but the PCs won’t know that until they kill them and strip them of their stuff. They’re not wights or zombies.

The D&D Monster Builder has been decently useful. I haven’t been able to get it to do Companion NPCs yet (if you know how, please tell me!) but one of its abilities I’ve been taking advantage of is changing stats through its built-in settings, giving non-standard defenses and HP to creatures. This module has a LOT of minions, and if all of them had huge AC it would quickly get frustrating. By changing their AC setting to the Monster Builder’s “Low” I can solve this and make them much more squishable. Likewise for things like Brutes. One approach I took with these encounters is one outlined by The Chatty DM before (read the rest of that series by the way, it’s good): high damage, low defenses, especially with things like Brutes. When the players see themselves getting BLAMed for high damage it makes for more exciting give and take encounters. Besides, their main enemies in this module are all basically unarmored humanoids who aren’t meant to be altogether very nimble, so fluff-wise it doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to have huge ACs and NADs.

Hopefully, it’ll make for some tense, thrilling encounters. In fact, the adventure basically starts off with one such thrilling encounter (well, not really starts off, but features it early), where the PCs face a board full of minis, more minis incoming, and one particularly big, fat, bad mini that can tear a chunk right out of ‘em!