Train Tuesday Part 96: In the Zone

Our players have recently completed a couple of big milestones in our ongoing D&D Beyond Acquisitions Incorporated 5e campaign, and the time is right to start introducing the brave new world of The Forgotten Rails! Let’s see what DM Ben is cooking up for Encounter 1.

DM Ben is all about teasers in his campaign to bridge one set of milestones to the next. Many of our players just wanna “kill stuff” so they don’t exactly give off Sherlock Holmes vibes when it comes to solving a mystery. It’s more like the Scooby Doo gang on gummies. Now that we’ve spent over 95 entries building our new Hovertrain setting, it’s time to insert some actual, legit, and playable encounters into our game.

The reason DM Ben is confident to start dropping in Hovertrain-specific encounters is threefold:

• The party is now traveling from their High Forest Bastion back to Waterdeep.
• Construct clues need to be dropped about all the new mechanical wonders.
• The party then needs to ultimately travel to The Lighthouse on the Sword Coast.

We’ve already 3D-printed our core miniatures and scatter terrain for everything leading up to the Silent Sound lighthouse headquarters (even the lighthouse model itself…but not the interior rooms quite yet).

Now, let’s get into the specific clues. The very first one will be some first-generation discarded wreckage. Oddly enough, our office campaign players have only searched the caverns below their bastion and not the immediate acreage around it. That might come in the next sesh, but they seem eager to collect their gold bounty for rescuing the children from the evil Night Hag so DM Ben will pick his spot on where to drop this first robotic clue.

Next up will be the very first sighting of the Forgotten Rails Reconnaissance Probe Golems. Omin Dran knows he can’t just start sending these mighty Hovertrains out and hope for the best. He needs to establish clear rail lines and ensure they stay clear of his monstrous engines. No one wants a bunch of lawsuits during the inaugural opening. Again, the group will just spot one or two of these in the distance (after some wandering monster traveling wilderness encounters). DM Ben wants to pique their curiosity.

So, that leads us to today’s Hovertrain encounter. The Forgotten Rails doesn’t really believe in the people’s right to vote, so it’s going to start snatching up land and call it a prime example of eminent domain. Hence, they’ve deployed some of these Corederite-mining Pulverizer Constructs to start hammering in notice posts along the surveyed routes of the Probe Golems. The posts are from the Galladoria Games Kickstarter.

The tiny posts will have a short official notice nailed to them: “The land along these official markers is hereby now the property of The Forgotten Rails. No questions asked.” Leave it to the government to provide as little information as possible, right? 😉 A few of these posts will be sighted before the actual encounter unfolds below.

Well, as you can imagine, The High Forest inhabitants aren’t too keen about outsiders thinking they can come in and just take something that doesn’t belong to them (again, sound familiar?). DM Ben just needed some miniatures to play the part, and that’s where STL Miniatures comes into frame. They made this awesome Forest Protecter STL, and we just had to print one out!

Resident Painter Kimmy Utah grabbed a brush and got busy here. Her woodwork is always some of our fav, and we feel she captured his running state perfectly. That full sprint is exactly what DM Ben needs for this encounter. During slicing, we made him take up a full set of 2×2 d20 squares so he’s bulked up a bit more. We’ll probably add flock to the base if time allows.

The DnD jist of this encounter is that Treeants are especially miffed that their brethren are being viciously cut down in the name of mechanicals, and so they’ve sent some of their stealthy foot soldiers to go in and remove the Hovertrain domain markets. They use their brilliant camouflage to lie low at first. Once the Probe Golems and Pulverizers leave the area, these protectors sneak in and either destroy or move the route markers in the hopes of spreading continuous chaos and confusion.

Well, that tree trickery can only go on so long before the founders of The Forgotten Rails create new constructs to stamp out this annoying resistance movement. So, they created these nasty Detection Dawgs to hunt down and put down any wrongdoers.

The encounter will begin with the party seeing a Treant running at full sprint away from these nasty, pursuing Constructing jaws. This one goes by the name Tibarious Trunk. When he gets near the adventurers (who are traveling back to Waterdeep), he will ask for help in a true panic, as he doesn’t want to become firewood. Then it’s up to the party to think of a way to do so…if the group believes his intentions are genuine, of course.

Lots of player options here, right? They could cast a spell to help hide him, let him cloak out in their caravan, and then claim they don’t know where he went, or they could simply use their influence with Omin Dran to provide him with temporary sanctuary. DM Ben could also do a group skill challenge here with the players using things like Survival, Deception, etc, to send the hunting robots on their way.

Until next time!