Tips for Running Sandboxes Like Vallaki in D&D

any any tips for running the town of valiky and chris of straw it has so many things going on where do you put your characters first holy crap you have no idea dude well actually you do you're asking the question oh dude the town of valiky is a hot sloppy mess [Music] now really quick before we jump in i want to let you know that i am publishing a monthly pdf out to my patrons that includes tons of dungeon master resources for them to use in their games these are things that should reduce the prep time for your games and improve the quality of your games so we're going to be putting things in here like npcs traps villains with stat blocks for them puzzles really cool puzzles fleshed out in detail magic items encounters random tables and adventure ideas and every monthly pdf contains two entire d d fifth edition adventures for you with maps designed for use on virtual tabletops and i'm teaming up with the mad cartographer as well for some of these maps these are crazy high quality awesome maps by the way folks not just some piece of crap that i threw together on some program in two minutes the pdf as a whole is a high quality i've been showing you pictures on screen of this pdf it is not just some piece of crap i threw together in like two seconds there's some really good stuff but our last pdf was over 30 pages of resources for dungeon masters so if this sounds like something that might be useful for you and your games check out the link to my patreon page down below here's the thing um there's a lot of cool stuff in valiky in cursive straw lots of cool stuff going on and that town and the adventure or adventures that you run in it because there's lots of plot hooks potentially in there can be really fun and really cool but the town of valiky and curses strawd was really designed to be it's a very sandboxy town in the sense that there's lots of different things going on and the biggest thing with valiky is that the module doesn't really give you any guidance whatsoever on how to actually run that town like the module gives you a layout of the town it explains all these different things it explains how the mayor's you know has these festivals there's you know people are arrested for what do they call it um unhappiness like uh divisive unhappiness i forget they have a term for it but people get arrested for not being happy and then you have like a lady watched her who's really wants to run the town and get rid of the mayor malicious unhappiness thank you yes so there's lots of really cool things going on in valiky but the module gives you practically zero guidance on what to actually do when you get there you got the bones that are missing from saint angel's church but so there's this big mishmash of stuff and the dungeon master really has to figure out what the heck do i even do with this so in my opinion in my opinion that part of the module has tons of potential tons of cool stuff and i read it for my players recently and i think it was really cool we had lots of fun and stuff but the people who wrote it kind of just gave you a a plate of mishmashed stuff that doesn't have any guidance doesn't have any real order to it and that's up to the dungeon master to put that in order to make it make sense to give plot hooks to your players and stuff and i'm not as haven't answered your question yet i'm getting there which is which is an unfortunate way to write that part of the module it's like so much potential and yet they don't give the dungeon master a whole lot of guidance at all about how to run valiky so um that is the fault of people who wrote that obviously um but but you know the modules can never be perfect there's always going to be something wrong with them and there's always going to be some element to a module that you're going to have to flesh out and tweak on your own and in valiky that's very true too so what i basically did is i examined the village valiky and i decided as a dungeon master which parts of it i thought were cool that i wanted to emphasize to my players and i decided to run a sort of political uh mini game there or not a can it's not a political campaign political sort of adventure there what i decided to do was to have to emphasize the fact that lady watched her is trying to supplant what's the name of the mayor there the burgle master i forget his name they always have these weird names that i can never remember the lady watched her is trying to supplant the current virgo master if anybody knows the name of the current burglar master in valkyrie maybe ed please throw it there so i can talk like i actually know what i'm talking about valkovich oh my gosh we're gonna call him burger master v [Music] so lady watchers trying to supplant burger master b and to do that what i had done is i created this machination by which lady watched her is actually responsible for the stealing of the bones from saint andrews church so she essentially paid the coffin maker to get the one boy the gravedigger boy who then got the altar boy to get the the the priest forget his name to say tell him where the bones were and then you know one thing led to another the coffin coffin coffin maker ended up with the bones gave them to ernesto or something like that lady watched her spy guy who then planted i'm just telling the details about how i fleshed this out and set things up to actually make it an adventure for my players then the spy took those bones and hid them up in the burger master's house and then when this whole problem with the bones was revealed lady watched her had her her sons plant the idea with my players with my players characters that the virgo amount that the bones was a problem that the bones were missing and the town was in trouble and the idea what lady watcher really wanted is she wanted to frame the burger master for the stealing of the bones so that if horrible ill such as vampires attacking or something befell the town the burgo master would be blamed or if somebody like an adventuring party found the bones in the burger masters house her hope was the adventuring party with weapons and stuff might end up wiping out the burgle master wipe out his maybe uh what's the name of the guy with the demon hand i forget his name uh the demon hand boy ed who's the demon hand boy uh the burgle master's little lackey i forget his name you gotta help me out man i'm not good with names apparently isaac thank you so lady watchder wanted the adventurers to like either implicate the virgo master and get him in trouble politically or perhaps even ousted as a burglar master or just storm his compound and just wipe them all out like murder right and so lady watched her was manipulating these events and it was fairly successful too my players were following along the entire way except that right before they were kind of basically going to storm the virgo master they ended up going to lady watchers house found her bad stuff happening down in her basement the cult that she was running and then ended up um i forget exactly all the details but they ended up doing certain things where there was a threat to lady watched her and she was afraid for her life um and she left the town and fled to her estate in the countryside and then the players went into the virgo masters house even after they got the bones first they actually had they convinced ernesto to get the bones for them they turned the bones over to the priest and resolved that first but then they went back to the burgle masters house because there was a shoemaker that had been taken from malicious unhappiness from the church's congregation and the priest had been asking them to get the shoemaker released and so they went back and oh and they'd heard about um the virgo master's son up in the attic being super crazy and they didn't like isaac and they didn't like the whole idea where the burger master was putting people in the stockades and abusing them because of malicious unhappiness so they really had a vendetta against the virgo master anyway so they went back to the burger masters house for all intents and purposes pretty much killed everybody there they killed the burglar master they killed the son isaac or the son victor and then they later on took out isaac and all this kind of stuff so they they wiped out the burger master they ended up sending lady watched her running for the roads and then there was this vacuum of leadership in valiky and they ended up installing um who was it the the so there was a burger master in the town of berovia and he had a son and a daughter and the son's name was in bismarck and the daughter's name is uh oh she's like the most one of the most important npcs in the entire module she's the she's the girl that strad wants is his bride please somebody give me her name irina irena there we go irena okay cool so the pl with this void of leadership in valiky my players then went to irena and bismarck and were like hey you guys want to rule valiky and so they installed irena and bismarck i think his name was bismarck as the leaders of valiky and that's how they cleaned everything up but my point is i told you kind of the whole story of how i set everything up but my point is not to necessarily do it the way i did it my point is is that as a dungeon master you kind of have to figure out how you want to present valiky to your friends now i had no idea how my players would resolve everything i presented the situation of the political strife of lady watcher having to do with the bones and all this kind of stuff i didn't know how my players were going to approach it how they were going to resolve it what would actually happen as a result so i set the situation up and then my players just played it through and we saw how things shook out and so i tell you that story because that's just one iteration i could set up the exact same situation for a different group and it might turn out differently who knows so i didn't manipulate the plot i didn't guide them down a certain route i that that would be railroading right but i set the situation up and i allowed things to unfold and my point is that dungeon masters when you're running valiky curses stride or any town that's set up like that you have to do the same thing you have to set up some plot hooks establish plot hooks and things like that set up the situation present little plot hooks to your players i had about three different plot hooks i presented my players i told them about the shoemaker that had been arrested for malicious and happiness and it was being held in the burger masters house i told them that um uh the bones the state animals bones were missing and then i was constantly painting the burger master as this really bad guy who was being a bad ruler to the people and so i was planting all these little things and um i was just counting on them following up on one of them and just seeing where things went so i ran valikly like a very much like a sandbox where i asked where i prepared and established a bunch of different things and then my players were free to approach any of them and do kind of whatever they wanted within the framework of valiky right so it wasn't an undirected sandbox where i was like hey guys just do whatever you want and then they wandered around trying to find something fun and interesting to do it wasn't an undirected sandbox like that those probably are pretty sucky games in my opinion but hey that's just me instead it was more of a directed sandbox in that here's a big sandbox here are some plot hooks what do you guys want to do i gave them some interesting things for them to follow up on and do and so that's how i ran valiky and uh i thought it was really really cool and lots of fun for my players it was a whole lot more work preparing that part of the game than it was say preparing death house a simple location based adventure this was this is probably the way i ran valiky not only was it more of a sandbox but it was also approaching more of an event-based look an event-based adventure it was still location-based because there was still of location-based uh elements but it was also a little bit more trending toward event based as well and because this was the sandbox and because it was event-based to a certain extent that made it trend toward a lot more prep work and a lot being a lot more difficult to run at the game table um but it was super fun i thought it was fun my players hopefully they thought it was fun too they're still my players they haven't quit yet so we'll just say they thought it was fun [Music] you

Channel: the DM Lair

Views: 17,675

Keywords: d&d, d&d 5e, dnd, dnd 5e, dnd 5th edition, dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons, rpg, role-playing game, roleplaying game, dungeon master tips, DM tips, dungeon master advice, DM advice, the dm lair, luke hart, dnd vallaki, dnd vallaki cos, dnd cos, vallaki curse of strahd, dnd sandbox, dnd sandbox tips, dnd sandbox advice, dnd how to run a sandbox

Id: k90LjrTapXM

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021