PF2e 5 - Caravan Rescue

This one ended up pretty straightforward, all things considered.

The setup: The party, hanging out at the guild, is roped in to help with an urgent request. A covered caravan was attacked by something unknown, and they needed assistance. The magical message was tinged with a bit of necrotic energy. The party jumped at the request, got some horses, and left for the southern desert.

I made this area into a hex crawl. About 28 hexes to search, and I used the Technoir strategy of [Transmissions (fix this link later)] to decide what would go in which hex. Filled it out, expecting it to last two sessions.

It lasted barely over 2 hours.

I expected them to meander a bit more and poke around, but they were able to zero in on the location of the caravan pretty quickly through some incredible skill checks and one good directional guess. They had to traverse through the bare minimum number of hexes to reach the caravan, and their Cobble Together roll to patch up the wagon to help get it out went incredibly well.

Now, in retrospect, what I should have done was have an encounter where they had to defend the caravan. I didn’t plan one, and didn’t feel like asspulling. Sometimes it’s nice to just have an easy session.

The big thing about this was that several of the hexes had undead fights of varying difficulty. This being the main threat of the game, they were the special automaton undead I had cooked up. Templated them over regular undead.

So, undead and desert, purpose was to tie this overarching threat to one of the player’s backstory: They came from the desert and most of their nomadic tribe are missing. Easy. The undead are capturing people to use for fodder, and are a combined construct of person and anything made of metal. This will feed back into the other rumor that I mentioned that the terrain in some places has turned to metal. A swath of a grassland has been converted to some razor grass.

Absolutely stealing from Magic the Gathering’s plane of Mirrodin.

I need to now tease this out a bit more. I don’t want the players getting a direct answer as to who is controlling this and causing the land to change, so I need to keep it a mystery a bit for other characters in the world. I think I want the end of the game to come from breaking his ritual or whatever up in the icy northern mountains.

Anyways, taking a week off due to Thanksgiving so I have more time to plan the next full on quest. I need to come up with a quest from the guild to issue, so I need to just sit and think for a bit.