The Sisterhood of the Traveling Herbs

Time to start pulling key miniatures and scatter terrain for another room inside the Acquisitions Incorporated D&D Beyond 5e module.

This weekend, DM Ben had a hard time settling on the next dungeon room to prep, as he kept flip-flopping on which room to pull pieces from for his next set prep session.  Have you ever gotten that hobbyist feeling where you’re just not energized and can’t make a decision to save your life? Welp, that was DM Ben recently.

Thankfully, he finally settled on Room Five: The Cell as he finally scanned his collection enough to make some informed picks.

The key element of this encounter storyline is the rescue of two Half-elf sisters: Ebella and Ocheri Splintfig. The adventurers will descend upon their creepy jail cells and quickly realize their lives are hanging by a thread due to malnourishment.

It’s a great plot line, too: the Splintfig sisters sell rare herbs and spell components, and were visiting the manor to see if the franchisees wanted any of their wares

We don’t have many sister miniatures in our 3D-print collection, so we went to our archives and found these marvelous, pre-painted miniatures by WizKids. We snagged them from their WarLock Tiles series: Town Watch & Merchants sets.

Sure, the market basket doesn’t exactly spell prison here, but the family resemblance was a key story element, so these two prepainteds will work swimmingly. DM Ben will probably create a face card and have that at the ready because there’s a really cool survival story arc if one or both of the sisters are rescued.

The other key component of this encounter is what appears to be a doomed Dragonborn curled up in the corner of another jail cell. Our office campaign has a Dragonborn character in the party, so DM Ben is licking his chops on this one.

He’ll employ his infamous “Mini Switch” as the encounter unfolds. First, he’ll lay down this Dragonborn Myrmidon from Against the Giants with its back to the characters. 3DRPG has a couple of lovely 3D-printed Dragonborn miniatures, but since this mini’s life is short-lived, we’ll save those for another time.

Once the players walk into the cell area, DM Ben will grab our innocent Dragonborn miniature and replace it with this Ravenous Ghoul from Desert of Desolation.

Our office campaign is level five, so several classes now have two-weapon fighting: our Monk (so overpowered), Paladin, and Ranger can all attack multiple times in a single round, so DM Ben has to make our encounter CR much, much tougher going forward. Consequently, he’ll have two more Ferocious Ghasts come pouring through a sewer grate in the floor or be chained against the opposite walls.

We’ve already featured some prison terrain by Hirst Arts and Dwarven Forge, so we’re solid from a terrain perspective. The miniatures, sisters’ Face Card, and then some treasure cards are all that remain to prep this one.

The DnD posting plan here is to feature key miniatures and scatter terrain throughout Tresendar Manor Dungeon and then circle back with a map reveal post or two.

Until next time!