Hello fellow nerds!

With our first release landing on Tribes this month, we’ve dropped a nineteen-page adventure to accompany our minis and bring their story to life on the table.

Everdune: Wrath of the Ekrothari is a 5e survival-based adventure that takes the player characters to the brutally unforgiving desert known as the Everdune, where they must confront the vicious desert elves that live there. Essentially, it’s designed to leave your players with this sort of feel:

After many, many hours of playtesting and proofing, we have a few thoughts we wanted to share on designing a survival adventure.

Be Modular

It quickly became clear when putting Everdune together that, though the story still manages to have a three-act structure, it would have to be narratively modular. In a survival-based adventure, you’re generally going to expect a lot of aimless wandering from one place to another, particularly in the early stages where the player characters are dropped headfirst into the sandbox (pun intended) and are expected to fend for themselves. A canny GM can make essential plot developments seem like chance encounters, but for the adventure to really work, there had to be a big element of randomness in how the players experience the Everdune. The main body of the adventure turned out to work best as a series of modular encounters that fit together differently depending on how well the players fare at navigating their surroundings. This means a lot of charts and tables, full of all sorts of random outcomes.

Set Phasers to Stun

There’s a fine line between unforgiving and impossible. The goal of a survival-based adventure is to evoke the feeling that each day is a challenge, but a series of gruelling challenges, in a system like 5e, can quickly snowball (sandball, in this case) into a death spiral. What we found was that survival mechanics should have very little chance of actually putting a character in the dirt. Instead, they should chip away at the characters’ resources and capabilities. Conditions like Exhaustion, Poisoned, etc, are far more valuable here than hit point loss. Instead of simply killing the characters outright, these kinds of mechanics make the prospect of combat a daunting one – the players aren’t necessarily battling the environment to keep themselves alive, they’re trying to keep themselves in fit enough shape for an actual fight. This serves as a nice middle ground between illusionary danger, and danger that is too punishing to enjoy. This is a great chance for GMs to explore any ideas they have about specific conditions – strange illnesses, location-specific hazards, etc.

Specialist Monsters

Paris wouldn’t be Paris without Parisians. In the same vein, your setting is partially defined by the creatures that populate it. A lot of thought should be put into how the monsters you’ll be throwing at your players have adapted to their ecosystem, and what that means in game-terms. The Everdune has the advantage of releasing alongside a whole range of minis with original statblocks – everything from the Ekrothari elves to the mythical sand drakes are designed with the desert in mind - but an adventure like this also presents an opportunity to take traditional monsters and put a new spin on them, something we had a great deal of fun with. I’d recommend looking at the contents of the MM and thinking up unique adaptations for some of the more iconic monsters that make them really belong in your setting.

Time Segments

One of the most important things we had to get to grips with when designing this adventure was time. Survival-based action is often time-sensitive, with the contents of every day making a difference toward the characters’ chances at staying alive. It’s best to chop up days and nights into distinct chunks that your players can spend like a resource on general courses of action. This might seem intuitively strange, but players get used to it quickly, and it achieves a few things. Firstly, it drives home the idea that in an inhospitable environment with few resources at hand, everything takes time. It forces the players to get used to the idea that time is valuable, and they have to think about their decisions. Secondly, it helps players to plan ahead: if they understand how time is segmented in the scope of the adventure, they can arrange their ideas much more solidly and feel as though they’re building a more concrete plan of action. Thirdly, once players understand the system, it streamlines the process of exploration and survival, meaning the players get more done in less real time, and experience more of the adventure.

Conclusion

Those are the most pressing thoughts we had regarding the adventure. Hopefully, some of this proves helpful to any writers or GMs out there. Everdune: Wrath of the Ekrothari is currently available via our Tribes, so if you want to kick your players out into the desert and watch them squirm, you can head on down there (https://www.myminifactory.com/users/MammothFactory). Come December, we’ll be leaving the Everdune for more temperate climes, and a very different kind of adventure.

All the Best
– The Mammoth

p.s.

We love to hear your thoughts - how do you design survival adventures? What are your experiences with it, good and bad?

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