Lost in the Woods
Sometimes you need to isolate the party from the rest of the world to set up an interesting encounter. Here’s how I’d do that without it feeling like “railroading”.
There are some really interesting encounters you can run if you isolate your party from their usual support networks, resources, and allies. This isn’t your usual dungeon delve, where the party can return to the surface or flee back to town if the going gets rough.
No, I’m talking about really separating them from the world, deep in unknown or hostile territory. This lends a sort of desperation to the game that isn’t always appropriate, but can hit just right if used in the right circumstances.
The combat encounter applications are many and mostly obvious—a powerful beast that hunts them through the woods, a swarm attack they must hold out against for as long as possible, a never-ending ruin that they must flee to survive—but I actually like the social applications better.
That’s because the social aspect of the game really changes if the party feels truly alone. If they’ve only seen unfriendly faces for days, or seen no one at all, then every encounter feels charged and tense in a way that’s hard to deliver in an urban setting.
Here’s a few ways I like to go with this:
- The party has reason to believe that a doppelganger has replaced one of their members
- It’s only now that the betrayal of the party by one member comes to light
- A secret about someone’s past is revealed in a moment of passion
This is like a bottle episode in a TV show. If you get the setup right, even a table of roll-player hack n’ slashers will get really into their characters. It’s awesome.
Isolating the Party Without Going on Rails
But if you know you want to run one of those encounters and you want to isolate your party to ratchet up the tension, you need to tread carefully. It feels profoundly unfair to the players if they don’t have a choice in the matter, and they’ll usually fight tooth and nail to avoid a bad situation if they see it coming… and on the other hand, they’ll also feel cheated it sneaks up on them without warning.
So how can we run these fun and tense encounters? Do we have to wait around for that situation to naturally arise and then slap the cool bottle-episode social encounters together then?
Or can we just tell the party tough luck, this is happening? Isn’t that… railroading them?? And isn’t that against everything that proactive roleplaying—let the players decide what happens in the game and the purpose of this whole website—is about?
Well, only kind of. See, proactive roleplaying is about reacting to what the players want, not what their characters want, even though that looks like the same thing sometimes. And if your players like social encounters, roleplaying at the table, and tense in-character conversations, then they would like this kind of thing, right? So it’s fine. It’s for their own good.
But we’ll be sneaky about it, since not having a say in what happens in the game feels bad to most players. Here’s how I’ve isolated my parties from the world to set up a tense encounter later on a few occasions.
The Secret…
…to getting away with rails
The secret is actually pretty straightforward—you still give them plenty of meaningful choices, just not about the underlying premise of being separated and isolated in a dangerous place. So they can still end up in many places and situations out there, with allies or not, well-equipped or not, with knowledge of their surroundings or not—and these choices are usually enough to make the process of getting lost in the woods fun.
Here’s when I would use each of these examples in my games in response to player goals:
- If the party needs to travel somewhere by water, go with Encounter A—that’s a straightforward shipwreck.
- If the party is trying to prevent any sort of magical disaster or ruin the evil plans of some master wizard—anything magical that could go wrong in a big way—run Encounter B.
- If you want your bottle-episode encounter to happen deep in a cave underground, like a horror movie, run Encounter C.
Encounter A
Blown off course by a storm, the party ends up on strange shores with no way home.
Skill Challenge Basics
The mechanical purpose of the skill challenge is to roll a certain number of successes before reaching a certain number of failures. The creative purpose of the skill challenge is to encourage each player to think about how their character approaches different problems and explore different aspects of their character’s personality.
- Each player must attempt a roll at least once before any player can roll again.
- Each player can attempt a roll based on a certain attribute only once (one INT roll, one CHA roll, one STR roll), no matter what skills they’re using.
When a player makes an attempt, they’ll tell the table which skill they’re using to make the check and justify it to the DM (if necessary). They’ll describe how they’re using that skill to address the problem or help the group work towards a solution, then make their roll.
For this skill challenge, use a DC of 15. Let a particularly audacious plan have a DC of 20 instead, but award two successes on a success (and still only one failure on a fail).
Setting up this Encounter
This encounter works without feeling like “rails” because players understand that a ship at sea in a storm is in a very vulnerable position. Until they hit the epic levels and can solve that problem with powerful magic, this one feels fair.
Foreshadow the storm as it approaches. Talk about the tension on the deck and the apprehension and superstition of the sailors. Talk about the songs they sing and the precautions they take to make the deck safe and the stories they swap about storms they’ve survived to make this one feel less scary.
When you do, proactive players will want to do something to help their chances of survival here. I say let them, and consider not even using a skill check like I did in my game, just ask players who want to prepare what they do and make a note. Later, when you’re calling for skill checks, ask them if any of the preparations they took would help them out, and if they make a decent case, give them a +2. It’s enough to feel significant without breaking the math.
Action!
When the storm hits, use kinetic and frantic language to describe the power and ferocity of the storm. You’re selling the result—the shipwreck—here, so you need to be clear that this storm is a whopper.
We’re going to use a skill challenge here, Quest Brothers style (that is, no repeats of attribute rolls—check the rules in the box if you’re not sure how we do it) to run the ship in the storm. As the waves batter the ship and it starts to fall apart, each player should use their turn to describe how they work to:
- Preserve the ship and its integrity
- Save their own lives or the lives of their friends
- Prepare for the inevitable sinking by gathering supplies or making themselves safer
We’re looking for eight successes before three failures, as usual. But—and this is the crucial part—no matter what, the shipwreck happens and the characters wash up on a beach somewhere, just like you planned.
I usually advocate telegraphing these outcomes very clearly when you’re running the skill challenge, but it kind of gives the game away in this case. Instead, I recommend letting the party choose exactly how they fail when they do roll a failure. Here’s the list I used (they can only pick each one once):
- A piece of timber strikes you, hard, as it flies past (take 4d10 damage)
- A wave washes over you and dislodges something from your person (lose a magic item or wondrous item—if you’re nice, they can recover it later on the beach)
- You’re nearly washed overboard or struck by lightning and are forced to spend a spell slot casting a spell of your choice to save yourself (spell casters only, I like to require 3rd level or higher but I’m a sadist).
Resolving this Encounter
So does the skill challenge not matter? No, it totally matters—because the result determines the position they’ll be starting from after the shipwreck.
On a successful skill challenge, the party might be:
- All together on the beach
- Near some supplies, or have gathered supplies successfully before sinking
- Have an idea of where they are
But if they fail the skill challenge, the party might be:
- Separated, if you feel comfortable running that
- Drained of their supplies or even their equipment
- Not know where they are, or worse—have the wrong idea of where they are
After the skill challenge ends, you can set the scene for whatever comes next. And no matter what it is, the party is now isolated and you can introduce whatever scheme you’re working on.
Encounter B
When a magic ritual goes wrong, the party is cast through space and maybe even time to an unfamiliar place.
Setting up this Encounter
There are so many things that could lead to this encounter that I won’t list all of them here… just some of them. I ran this encounter when my players were trying to stop a fell vampire sorcerer from pulling a conquered castle fully into the Shadowfell, but you could use it when…
- Someone unqualified tries to teleport something dramatically
- A powerful wild or natural magical phenomenon acts unpredictably
- A cult of demon summoners are trying to call something really nasty through the fabric of spacetime
Any of these will work, or really anything where magic is being used to manipulate space and time, when they might reasonably be thrown through a gate and end up where you want them to be—that’s fine.
As they move towards the dangerous magic, talk about the prickly feeling in the air and the occasional bouts of deja vu they experience. You want to convey the feeling of instability and that things might fall apart.
They only way they get out of the next phase of your plan at this point is to turn around and walk away, which some parties are happy to do. They might need a strong reason to pursue this goal, and if they aren’t strong enough, you might have some trouble with this one. Revisit the fundamentals of goal-setting if you need to strengthen that.
Action!
When the magic ritual goes haywire—either because the character are trying to stop it or because the person driving it does something wrong (through no intervention or fault of the players, probably), talk about how the light in the space shifts. Talk about how time seems to slow down and speed up.
Things need to get pretty weird for this setup to work, and we want that lodged in the players’ minds before they start making rolls. When I ran this encounter, I was playing some strange music in the background (I usually play fantasy ambient music, but I switched to Run the Jewels—it was a fantasy heist, for complicated reasons, so this made sense).
We’ll use a skill challenge to run the actual encounter of trying to stop the ritual from going very, very wrong. When the players take their turns, they should be thinking about how their character:
- Stops the magic backlash from getting any worse
- Prevents the ritual from progressing towards its terrible end
- Preserves the safety or sanity of civilians, cultists, monsters, etc.
We’re looking for eight successes before three failures—a skill challenge a la Quest Brothers (see the box for a reminder on how this works).
I like to let players choose their own failures here in situations like this. Here’s the list I used (each can only be chosen once):
- A terrible magical backlash rips a spell from their mind (they forget a spell of their highest available level until their next long rest)
- A magical effect threatens to destroy their sanity, and they must use a spell slot to prevent that fate (this expends a spell slot—make sure you have them explain what spell they used and why)
- A wave of elemental energy rolls over them, causing 4d10 damage of a random type
Resolving this Encounter
No matter what happens in this encounter, even if the players roll all successes, the party is cast through space (and time, if that’s your thing) to the next phase of your plan.
That’s right, you get the setup you wanted even if they win—the skill challenge just determines how well they’re set up to tackle the next challenge.
If they succeeded on the skill challenge, the party might:
- Be all together, with their minds intact, in whatever lays on the other side of the veil
- Know where they are, or even have an idea of how to escape
- Received premonitions or divide knowledge of what lies before them
If they failed the skill challenge, the party might:
- Have their magic behaving in strange and unpredictable ways
- Be in different places or even different times
- Lose some of all of their memories
After the skill challenge ends, the group is now set up for your real plan, whatever that is.
Skill Challenge Basics
The mechanical purpose of the skill challenge is to roll a certain number of successes before reaching a certain number of failures. The creative purpose of the skill challenge is to encourage each player to think about how their character approaches different problems and explore different aspects of their character’s personality.
- Each player must attempt a roll at least once before any player can roll again.
- Each player can attempt a roll based on a certain attribute only once (one INT roll, one CHA roll, one STR roll), no matter what skills they’re using.
When a player makes an attempt, they’ll tell the table which skill they’re using to make the check and justify it to the DM (if necessary). They’ll describe how they’re using that skill to address the problem or help the group work towards a solution, then make their roll.
For this skill challenge, use a DC of 15. Let a particularly audacious plan have a DC of 20 instead, but award two successes on a success (and still only one failure on a fail).
Encounter C
Deep in the belly of the earth, a sudden cave-in traps the party in the swallowing dark.
Skill Challenge Basics
The mechanical purpose of the skill challenge is to roll a certain number of successes before reaching a certain number of failures. The creative purpose of the skill challenge is to encourage each player to think about how their character approaches different problems and explore different aspects of their character’s personality.
- Each player must attempt a roll at least once before any player can roll again.
- Each player can attempt a roll based on a certain attribute only once (one INT roll, one CHA roll, one STR roll), no matter what skills they’re using.
When a player makes an attempt, they’ll tell the table which skill they’re using to make the check and justify it to the DM (if necessary). They’ll describe how they’re using that skill to address the problem or help the group work towards a solution, then make their roll.
For this skill challenge, use a DC of 15. Let a particularly audacious plan have a DC of 20 instead, but award two successes on a success (and still only one failure on a fail).
Setting up this Encounter
I ran this encounter soon after watching one of my favorite movies, the Descent (2005). In the movie, the protagonists are caving in a beautiful natural cavern that they mistakenly believe has been mapped before, but is actually mostly unexplored. They get trapped on the wrong side of a cave-in, and as they come to terms with the few hours they have left down in the dark, they realize they aren’t alone…
It’s a terrifying movie, and it’s definitely not for the claustrophobic. But it’s also a fantastic inspiration for an encounter. Given how often D&D protagonists dig around in caves, it was also fairly easy to implement.
I knew I wanted to run a survival-horror type arc set underground, so I needed a lead-in that felt like the whole of the adventure. That way, the actual danger felt scarier and surprising, like a jump scare. I did that by choosing to run this cave-in skill challenge when they were exploring a natural cave: a monster den with a newly-opened passage in the floor that promised treasure and adventure.
The key for me was to emphasize that the passage was new, the result of a sinkhole (or recent seismic activity). That way I could foreshadow the cave-in throughout: rumbling noises, trickling water that abruptly stops, and breezes that change directions. I wanted to let the characters know that these caves were dangerous and changing, and that way when I sprung the cave-in, it was expected.
Action!
The action of this encounter is the cave-in, which we’ll use a skill challenge for. When I ran this encounter, I startled the players by rolling a fistful of dice across the table and announcing the cave-in had started. The dice didn’t do anything, but it sure got their attention.
I think this would have worked better at my table if I’d connected the beginning of the cave in to an event they’d participated in, like slaying a large monster or removing some load-bearing treasure or something. Then they’d feel like the cave-in was more earned, I think.
The key part to remember when running this skill challenge is that the cave-in will happen no matter what, and the group will be trapped underground no matter what. The skill challenge is just about what kind of position they’ll find themselves in afterwards. If they make it past the initial collapse, you can inform them there was another collapse farther up the passage. Let them work on those rocks for a while before the dust settles and you reveal there’s not a way out anymore—the air in the cave is still as a tomb.
That means the skill challenge is all about the character trying to do one or more of the following:
- Trying to dodge or avoid falling rocks and collapsing tunnels
- Saving their friends and companions from certain death
- Sticking together and staying oriented to their surroundings
They’re trying to get eight successes before three failures. If you forget how the Quest Brothers like to run skill challenges, check the box in this section.
I always like to let players choose their own consequences of failure, especially in a scenario like this. It gives them more control over their own fate, which they’ll always appreciate. For this encounter, I used this list of choices (each can only be chosen once):
- They’re trapped in a collapsing tunnel and have to squeeze out, leaving some valuables behind. They lose a magic item of piece of equipment—entombed in the rock forever (unless they want to spend precious time getting it out).
- Rocks fall around them (or a companion) and they’re forced to use a spell slot of their highest level to save the day (or a lower level, if they can justify which spell would help).
- Debris falls on them, causing 4d10 damage. If someone is knocked unconscious this way, they’ll need a friend to carry them!
Resolving this Encounter
The skill challenge ends with the characters being trapped underground regardless of if they succeed. But they can end up in a much better position to survive if they win than if they fail.
If the party succeeds on the skill challenge, they might be in a position where they:
- Have plenty of supplies and some way to light their path
- Are unharmed and have their class resources available
- Remember (or receive magical knowledge of) a way out or through the cave
If the party fails the skill challenge, they might be in a position instead where they:
- Are out of supplies and torches, with no way to get more
- Are injured or low on spells and abilities
- Missing the crucial magic items or weapons
- Have no idea where they are, or are disoriented and going the wrong way
Adjust your outcome based on the actions they took during the skill challenge. No matter what, the party is now ready for the next phase of your plan.