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12 December 2025
Egads, fellow gamers! Our Home Edition DnD campaign fell victim to the dreaded dire scheduling challenge that is the holiday season. Let’s get things back on track with some much-needed dice rolling for December!
Playing for just the second time in just five months has been a huge bummer, but DM Ben has a secret weapon to get all our young adult kiddos back to the game table on a more regular basis in 2026. 😉
Sadly, we had to make the dreadful decision to put our beloved dog, Sandy Paws, down right before Thanksgiving. She was a beloved member of our family and the office mascot for nearly 13 years. We were so blessed to have her in our lives. We had already been planning to add another pup in December.
Meet our newest team member – Miss Winnie Lou Who. The pic above is Winnie, just a few weeks old. She comes home this weekend! Nothing brings folks to a game table like new puppies, right?!
If there’s one thing DM Ben never has to worry about with our home DnD campaign, it’s a slow pace. Do you think it’s true that younger players go at a faster game pace than older players? Well, it sure does seem to be the case for us.
In our last session, the home team knocked out the following encounters!
DM Ben has to be laser-focused in his prep and usually survives each session with just one encounter left in the tank!
So, what’s next? Welp, it’s time for our fearless adventurers to solve the mystery of Waterdeep’s missing persons. This larger homebrewed scenario is directly linked to the missing boy of local blacksmith Krufer Promentory, but the group has learned he’s not the only one! Their only lead is a spooky old woman held up deep in The High Forest, and she’s hard to pin down. A large search party was sent in to find her, and none returned.
Thankfully, we have a marvelous Wyrmwood game table at the house, so DM Ben was able to utilize his Dwarven Forge Wilderness terrain to build an elaborate forest map that will house numerous encounters, summarized below.
First things, first. The players will be exiting Waterdeep and will once again be required to pay Terry the Troll’s toll to cross. They’ve crossed this single city entry and exit point a couple of times now, so there won’t be a need to drop down an elaborate gameboard this time. Still, they have to pay the “fee,” or there’ll be heavy consequences.
Even getting to The High Forest will require as much as three days’ travel, depending on their mode of travel. You might recall a recent post where we explained how obsessed we are with 3D-printing wonderful wagons of all kinds. So the group can do any of the following:
The mode of travel is so important. It costs money, affects travel speed, potential routes, ability to stealth, etc.
The agreed-upon mode of travel will dictate how many wandering monster rolls there will be. DM Ben will assume at least three rolls, and the percentile chance again depends on how they get there. We’ll naturally utilize our own free d20 Wilderness Trek Table. DM Ben rolls ahead of time so he doesn’t have to dig for the appropriate minis in the event they do encounter something.
And here’s what he rolled off the table:
The default chance of a travel or long rest interruption is either 20% on percentile dice. That benchmark can go up or down depending on their speed, stealth checks, climate (on our weather dice), on-road vs. off-road, and so on.
There will also be planned homebrewed scenarios as the players get closer to the Night Hag’s HQ.
There’s a rhyme and reason to every one of these upcoming encounters. The scrying stone tips off the players that the old woman is watching. The attacking plants show off her powerful magic. The discovered stone statues indicate the first rescue party was stopped dead in its tracks. A second trap trigger conveys that the group is very close. The crazy old man is a final dire warning. And the Scarecrow introduces our next fun NPC.
Once the party gets through all these encounters, they’ll have their first chance at capturing their own Bastion and assigning their Kinda Sorta Portal to their new home base!
Until next time!
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