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19 September 2025
Ahh, it’s that wonderful time of the month when we let our Dungeons & Dragons dice fall where they may. The 3DRPG team takes the hill this Friday, and our family home game starts twelve hours later. While DM Ben looks for the smelling salts, let’s see what he has prepped!
Let’s start with what we know. The 3DRPG Studios adventurers have successfully explored the caverns below the Night Hag’s cabin in the woods and fully claimed it as their new Bastion. At the end of the last session, they successfully defeated the Rock Mimics guarding her Alchemy Room. Their next move is to travel back to Waterdeep to continue their journey to fortune and fame, but it won’t be a walk in the park to get back to the capital city!
Last time they left off, the players had just successfully cleared the Alchemy Room. It will yield several treasures, including a piece of the mysterious Corederite mineral. They’ll probably start off by attempting to harvest the now deceased Rock Mimics using the fab Nord Games’ Foraging, Harvesting & Natural Discovery 5e supplement book. DM Ben will also allow the party’s Wizard to snatch up the Alchemy Room materials (via an Alchemy Kit card) so he can set up a lab of his own in a more secure location. But, where do we go from here?!
First off, we have a freshly prepped encounter from just the other day that requires the party to carefully retrace their cavernous steps and avoid rustling the water inhabitants throughout the natural passages back to the surface. DM Ben has a hunch they’re about to waterwalk into a heap of trouble.
The party will have to traverse back through the shallow-watered cavern tunnels from which they came. This will be a group skill challenge focusing on two key aspects of their previous exploration. Part one involves remembering exactly how to get back, as they’re deep below ground, and all the different underground passages get confusing in a hurry. The group made no callouts on their way in, so it’s time to potentially suffer the consequences.
This navigational challenge will be a DC 15 skill check with any of the following skills: Investigation, Perception, or Survival. All it takes is just one failure to attract some unwelcomed scaly company. Anyone wearing armor takes the roll at disadvantage. This time, the water will be a bit deeper, which will reduce everyone’s speed by half, and all the players’ attack rolls will be at disadvantage. We’ll be using the Zombie Fish 5e DnD monster stats here, but with some small stat tweaks: AC 13, HP 40, +6 to hit (one bite, one tail attack).
After successfully getting back to the surface, now what? Welp, we start by clearing off the office conference room table, yet being smart about packing those rooms up, so we can re-run those Cabin Cavern Crawl scenarios in our home game. Since our adventurers have a lot of traveling to do, our base “layer” on the table will be forest-themed in nature (pun intended).
Some Dungeon Masters thrive when they see a clean slate, but DM Ben gets a little apprehensive, and sadly, he freezes up a tad. One way he counters this unproductive vibe is to start slow-writing out our next Game Day DnD blog post and just start dropping ideas “down on paper.” Selfishly, DM Ben really leans on our lil’ ol’ DnD blog to keep him focused and producing a great game month in and month out.
Once they cross that shallow water choke point, our exhausted explorers are in the clear and finally can take a long rest. The next morning will bring several incomplete tasks, including:
First things first, they have to get to actually travel back through The High Forest to the capital city of Waterdeep.
Consequently, DM Ben has crafted several DnD one-shot encounters to ensure their three-day travel is filled with excitement and new curiosities.
That’s a solid list of encounters for three days’ worth of travel, but that list depends mightily on how the players roll for wandering monsters.
A player suggested DM Ben revise his Wilderness Trek Wandering Monster d20 Table roll rules. Initially, we had everyone at the table roll a d6, and if any player got a six, that meant a Wandering Monster encounter. Instead, we’re going to try a single percentile roll with a range of 10-30% based on the situational parameters at the time of their rest. For example, on the first day of travel, the party will be 10 to 20% as they haven’t had a chance to make their presence known, but by day three, they’ll probably be “pretty loud,” and a 30-50% chance makes more sense.
DM Ben likes to pre-roll the results on the table in case the party triggers a wandering monster on their rolls during actual gameplay. This way, he doesn’t have to pack up every single possibility and lug all that extra stuff to the office. So, the three he rolled were: #8 Mercenaries, #17 Side Guide, and #18 Leapin’ Lizzards.
So, if the group somehow avoids all their Wandering Monster rolls, they will still do our very first Forgotten Rails official encounter and re-cross the Troll Bridge (by giving Terry a helping hand against a nasty monster). All of these encounters are in a woodland setting, so we grabbed a couple of Dwarven Forge’s Forest Patchy Ground Battleboards. Also, by including a few of their forest edging pieces, this lush wilderness playspace area gets a little more depth.
Lastly, to keep each encounter on this natural playspace unique, DM Ben will swap out a variety of outdoor scatter terrain. This helps with fresh combat tactics and decreases the amount of time for gameboard scene changes. Plus, how can we not give some of our favorite 3D prints some extra lovin’?
And there you have it! We’re all prepped for nearly all these encounters. It will be rather interesting to see how far the players get tonight. 🙂
Until next time!
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