Just Me and My Shadows

The Tresendar Manor DM prep continues as we start another room inside our latest DnD 5e mini-dungeon delve. Let’s see what our brave adventurers are going to unexpectedly walk into next!

We’re going to be uncovering some intense necromancy villain-style stuff this week, as erradicating those sorta spooky operations is no simple task. Besides, can you ever really stop a shadow monster from sneaking up on ya?!

As longtime readers know, we’re detailing our dungeon master journey through D&D Beyond’s free 5e module for Acquisitions Incorporated (while injecting a ton of free, home-brewed content, too). We typically divide an encounter prep into sections: the miniatures, the scatter terrain, and the final gameboard reveal. Today’s post is the first entry for Tresendar Manor’s Area 11: The Workshop.

The story goes that a band of mercenaries was hired by a competing Franchise (also known as “The Six”) to clear out the area. When the hired guns finished their dirty work, the Franchise suddenly turned on their own mercenaries-for-hire so that they could have permanent undead centries patrol this underground mini-dungeon. Diabolical stuff indeed!

So, today we’re going to build out the encounter challenge rating and select our bad guy miniatures. We have some excellent pre-painted mini options by WizKids, but we’ll still include a free 3D-print option in case you’d like to create your own set. We have six characters at level five, so DM Ben would like the total XP/difficulty to be between 3,500 and 4,000.

The module assumes a much lower adventuring party and initially calls for three Shadow monsters (AC 12, HP 16, +4 att/2d6+2 damage). To represent these guys, we’ll use these classic miniatures from WizKids’ Night Below set. The translucency makes them especially creepy. These Shadows will be treated more like minions who try to create flank so that their allies can get that nasty extra damage on the party.

We’ll still include a small patrol of these undead monsters, but DM Ben needs a more challenging enemy here, and a Shadow Demon seems like a fitting choice: AC 13, HP 66, +5 att/2d6+3 damage. We’re surprised at how low their AC is, but we’ll run with it. These stealthy miniatuers are from WizKids’ fab 50th Anniversary set.

DM Ben always likes to have a few extra miniatures on hand in case he grossly underestimated the challenge level or needs to reach for a few relevant wandering monsters. So, he’s got these cool Lurking Wraiths at the ready. They’re from their amazing Against the Giants set.

We even have a promo mini that could represent a boss for this fight. However, the module doesn’t call out the need for a leader, and DM Ben wholeheartedly agrees. No need to force it.

Lastly, if you don’t have any of these pre-painted miniatures, you can certainly print your own Shadow band of monster minis. We like this free download by creator AJade. We didn’t get a chance to slice her STL yet, but we dig the sculpt. Dungeon Classics also recently came out with some Shadows of their own, thanks to an undead-themed set.

Until next time!