A few years ago, I was running a D&D 3.5 steampunk pirate campaign (yes, I know, -so- 2007). It started at 1st level but one of the players had wanted to play a “Shepherd Book\Priest with a Past” that would really only work if he started as a Rogue, and then multiclassed to Cleric later on. So, rather than stick the party without a healer for that vulnerable first level, we agreed to let him play another cleric with the expectation that I could find some entertaining way to kill him off by 2nd or 3rd.
My setting had a few crime syndicates and we worked out his back story as a member of one of those mafiosi (the Buoanottis) who would cross paths with our intrepid party. That opportunity came when the party’s ship took anchor at a secluded cove to take on fresh food and water. The party had set off on a foraging expedition and I was going to set up the introduction of the next character by having them run across the corpse of a Buoanotti explorer who was killed by something.
As to what that something was, I rolled on a wandering monster table that was a couple of CR’s higher than usual. I figured that I’d throw something at them that was big, scary and deadly, kill the priest and chase the survivors back to the ship; and continue with the rest of the plot. The party has played a lot of D&D, and I had made up my own wandering monster tables wih a bunch of template buffed monsters (undead elephants, kobolds wth class levels, that sort of thing).
Needless to say, that regardless of what WIzards used for scaling Challenge Ratings by tweaking hit dice or adding templates, these homebrew wandering encounters weren’t balanced at all. I rolled for a zombie tiger. I don’t think it was a dire tiger, but it was certainly something that I expected to give the party a run for their money.
It didn’t.
It failed to even kill its target. What it did achieve, though, was arouse the party’s curiosity. They started asking what an adventuring mobster was doing here in the back of beyond and what the connection was with the undead. There had to be one. So, rather than just telegraph “WANDERING ENCOUNTER! NOTHING TO SEE HERE” I just humored them and said that, “uh, yes, the corpse had a journal and reading through it you realize that he was here prospecting.”
PartyLeader\Swashbuckler: “Prospecting for what?”
DM: “Uh… according to the journal, he was chasing rumors of black onyx in the hills to the north. The Buoanottis might pay handsomely to have this journal returned to them.”
Swashbuckler: “Screw that idea. We should come back here and take the gems for ourselves.”
Priest: “Spellcraft check for seeing if black onyx is a vital spell component for anything. 22.”
DM: “Why, yes, {metagaming cheater}, augmented with your Knowledge (religion) you know that it’s a vital component for necromancy magic.”
Swashbuckler: “So! The presence of the zombie tiger means that the onyx is real and, even better, someone else has found it and is already extracting it for their own purposes! We just have to take it from them.”
DM: “Uh, sure.”
And, so that’s how one wandering monster encounter led to a plot arc that lasted across twelve sessions, and involved a four way contest between the goblinoids who were running the mine, a coven of criminal vampires, a cabal of corrupt Church officials and our own party, who were beginning to display an excellent nose for trouble. I wonder what would have happened if the dice had just landed on the feytouched wolverine instead.
