Guests and Goblins
Hello everyone, and welcome back. It is my esteemed pleasure to inform you that today marks the beginning of Goblin Week, a week-long celebration of our latest full-release, The War of The Goblin King, which, as you all will remember from our previous announcements, has the honor of being our first for-pay product, and is now available for purchase for those of you inclined to do so. Some of you may have noticed on your way in that I’m not Alex, but don’t worry, there’s no cause for alarm – he will be back next week and everything will return to normal. For now, let me tell you a little bit about The War of the Goblin King, our first full adventure release. If you’re spoiler shy, you may want to read through the adventure before reading on.
When designing The War of the Goblin King, we spent a good deal of time focusing on the goblins themselves, and rightly so: after all, over the course of the adventure the PCs will cross swords with over 50 individual goblins in service to the goblin king. While it would have sufficed to simply give the goblins class levels (and we did do that), in order to really give the goblins a feel of credible danger, we had to do more than that. Flavorfully, we made the goblins into a horde of mighty subterranean crusaders out for vengeance against the surface world who spurned them, an organized group of tactically skilled commandos using everything at their disposal to crush their enemies. Mechanically we did everything we could to make the goblins more interesting and fearsome, including giving them giant fiendish scorpion war beasts and barrels of flaming oil to push on the PCs. Finally, in each encounter the goblins go out of their way to fight like real soldiers, making the best use of the tactical situation and the resources available to them. Combining all that with strong encounter design, I was able to leave the process feeling like the horde of the goblin king was truly a real threat to the PCs and the civilization where the adventure takes place. Only once that was accomplished could we comfortably move on to other areas of the adventure.
In The War of the Goblin King the goblins are aided by a trio of barghests in league with Yarrick, the goblin king. While originally these barghests where meant to be in charge of the goblin uprising and pulling the strings in order to accomplish some mysterious goals, as development went on it became clear that really the barghests worked better in more of a partnership role, providing the goblin king with the tactical know-how to win his war in exchange for worship and living sacrifices. In addition to providing tactical assistance to Yarrick, the three barghests allow the goblins a great deal of range in combat options. I feel this really came through in this adventure, particularly in the first section and early part of the second section where the spell-like abilities of two of the more active barghests, a rage-aholic named Maugrath and the devious Neral, allow the goblins in Yarrick’s horde to really make the best use of their individual talents. The presence of barghests in the goblin king’s army also adds a great deal of the flavorful mystique that sets Yarrick apart from all the wannabe goblin kings out there.
The War of the Goblin King underwent a long developmental process to ensure that we released the highest quality adventure on the market. Watching the adventure go from the collection of encounter notes and goblin stat blocks that made up the original, a one-shot hack-and-slash, to the fully-fledged and finely tuned adventure of the highest caliber, has truly been one of the great joys of working at Necromancers of the Northwest, and I would like to spend a little time going over a few of the more interesting parts of that process.
The single largest change to The War of the Goblin King was the development of the town of Springdale. Originally just a convenient backdrop for the first few encounters, now the town of Springdale is a fully decked out settlement with a rich history and plenty to do and see. Given the town’s new high level of interactivity, the investigation portion of the adventure takes on a whole new unique, organic feel that could consume entire play sessions by itself, and the fantastically rich environment will delight players as events suddenly unfold with explosive intensity.
A great deal of developmental work went into making sure that all the dungeon rooms where consistent and organic. In The War of the Goblin King, I can, after a great deal of effort on behalf of the Necromancers of the Northwest team, guarantee you that you will not encounter a dungeon room and think, “Well this room makes no sense.” Because of the attention given to subtle details, and even the big things people tend to forget about when writing adventures, our adventure possesses a fantastically organic, real, and consistent dungeon design that gives it an extremely high level of immersion not typical to premade adventures, a fact that makes The War of the Goblin King an excellent choice to begin a long-running campaign. While a number of subtle improvements were employed across the board, the most notable changes were to the barghests’ chambers and to Yarrick’s throne room, and made relatively late in the process. While the changes were effectively cosmetic, they really gave us the chance to tell our audience a little bit more about our NPCs and illustrate that our goblin hordes (and specifically, their leadership) don’t exist in 10’x10’ featureless rooms while they wait for the PCs to show up and defeat them. Each room has a number of features that can give you real insight into its occupants’ lifestyle and personality, and it’s that kind of rich background that lets our audience know there’s more going on than just a handful of terrific combat encounters.
The greatest development challenge in The War of the Goblin King was the assigning of treasure. As it turns out, 50 goblins with 4+ class levels (not to mention any other creatures the PCs might encounter) added up to something 150,000 gp in NPC gear alone. This was something like 90,000 gold more than a party of 5 PCs on fast treasure progression receiving the maximum amount of experience should be given, and then various awards, treasure for the three barghests, and other more interesting and challenge treasures were heaped on top of that. Suffice to say that the final figure came up to be vastly outside of what was reasonable to expect. This left us in something of a bind, as while we could simply reduce reward treasure down to a smaller figure, we couldn’t really eliminate any of the NPC gear, our largest offender by far, without seriously weakening our goblins, or cutting down the size of the horde, a position we refused to budge on. After much careful debate we settled on a best of both worlds kind of solution, whereby we found an existing and flavorful outlet to reduce the amount of NPC gear while leaving the goblins’ combat readiness completely unaffected. It was really a perfect solution, allowing us to use a facet which we had been doing relatively little with to do exactly what it was always meant to do. Want to know what it is? Pick up a copy of The War of the Goblin King and keep an eye out for the goblin king’s crown.
Well, I’m all out of design stories, at least ones I want getting out in public, so let me just make my quick little sales pitch and be done. I understand that since this release will cost you money you might be feeling a little disinclined to download our first full-length adventure. I urge you to reconsider – The War of the Goblin King is truly a first class adventure more than worth the five dollar price tag. Until next we meet, I would like to convey that we at Necromancers of the Northwest sincerely hope you enjoy reading and playing The War of the Goblin King as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.