Loke BattleMats: The Long And Winding Road

DM Ben needs to spin up a random, traveling encounter so there’s no time like the present to take Loke BattleMats‘ “The Long Road: An RPG Toolbox” for a test drive as it were.

The party will be traveling from Waterdeep to Phandalin and as you can see, that’s going to be a bit of a trek! That means the DM is going to need to sprinkle in several engaging outdoor encounters along the way. The Acquisitions Incorporated module gives a couple of nice options but Ben wants to utilize this new under-the-sun opportunity to bring in some fresh encounters, scatter terrain, and miniatures. They are just getting out of a long Cavern crawl so this change of scenery is sorely welcomed.

The beautifully assembled book gives you a slew of encounter tables to roll on. Ben’s first dice-generated, Long Road encounter came out like so:

• Motivation: Escort Duty (1 on d10)
• Who Is Asking?: Plans within Plans (3 on d20)
• Organization of Note: An Influential Merchant House (4 on d10)
• Rewards: Uncommon Magic Items (6 on d6)
• Complications: Not Who They Seem (3 on d6)

DM Ben interprets all these random dice rolls like so: a fresh Help Wanted sign on the town square job board asks for an experienced group of adventurers who aren’t afraid to “get their swords a little bloody” to escort a prominent businessman on the next caravan to Phandalin. However, things are not as they appear as this shifty senior official merely wants to eliminate a rival merchant traveling on the very same caravan. With the party’s help, he’ll cover it up like it was the work of roving bandits and then reap all the territorial awards that come with her untimely death.

But just like that, Loke BattleMats gave us some handy random tables to put some story tent poles in the ground and easily flush out the encounter in no time. See how easy that was?

Once, the dust settles, DM Ben will drop down one of these treasure pile scatter terrain pieces from Dungeons, Dragons & Dadskies to highlight the new-found hoard (of course, that’s if they survive the ambush).

The recoverable magic items will be an Identify scroll, Potion of Climbing, a Good Luck Stone, a Robe of Useful items, a +1 Ring of Protection, six Blunt sling bullets (subdual damage), five +1 sling bullets, and one Flight sling bullet (extra 60 ft range). These could be items picked off the dead caravan goers once the dust settles on the intentional ambush depending on how high the Investigation rolls are.

This Loke BattleMats box even comes with a bunch of killer pre-rolled cards for colorful NPCs (with full stats), unique monsters, and colorful animals. Ben loved these tantalizing cards and just wants to acquire more and more of ’em.

The Long Road comes with alllllll sorts of handy, ready-to-roll battle mats. These will be quite useful as Ben builds and fills the gameboard with the appropriate scatter and minis.

We’ll detail how that all comes together in an engaging setup in the coming weeks!