D&D 5E [Tomb of Annihilation] The Flaming Fist

[CapnZapp]

My players will start the adventure at fifth level.

This means the Flaming Fist patrols need a bit of support to avoid being ignored as a presence by the party. I don't mean stronger guards. Instead I'm thinking about how the Flaming Fist can ever hope to enforce their authority unless they can act as a team.

I think I'll give each Flaming Fist patrol (the random encounter) a scroll of Sending or similar, which the second in command has orders to use if hostilities with unchartered explorers break out.

Unless there's a threat the entire Flaming Fist organization finds out about non-compliant adventurers, I fear a party will simply ignore any of their demands and kill off any patrols that attack them in self-defense.

If the XO of the patrol (the acolyte perhaps) has orders to respond to violence by 1) breaking off line of sight (to make it difficult to Counterspell the Sending), then 2) using the scroll to describe the interlopers. This during the very first round of combat. If the patrol subdues the explorers, fine. If not, it is critical to their organization that the offenders are identified ASAP.

If the same description is reported in this manner twice, Commander Portyr will either use a Crystal Ball herself or pass on the info to her superiors in Baldur's Gate, who has access to one, so an appropriate response can be formed; where Grand Duke Ulder Ravengard will use overwhelming force to catch the interlopers and demand a heavy tribute for their crimes, or fight them to the death if not.

The point here isn't to make the Flaming Fist into untouchable guards (like in the Baldur's Gate video games ) but to at least explain why low- and even mid-level rabble won't act against their authority. Isolated patrols are otherwise only a threat to adventurers low-level enough to be intimidated by the patrol itself, and that ends at or before fifth level.

A canny party can still fly under the radar in many ways. They should not feel forced to agree to the Flaming Fist's (rather unreasonable) demands. They can ask around for information on Flaming Fist procedures to learn their response. They can then pick-pocket the Sending scroll, so any altercation won't get back to Commander Portyr. This would greatly intimidate their leader. They can counterspell the Sending. More violently, they can use surprise and/or focus fire to (rather easily) kill the Acolyte before she can even act. Or, of course, they can profess ignorance, convincing the patrol they haven't found any loot.

As you see, the point isn't to make these patrols invincible DM pets - only a nod towards the magical and realmsian nature of the world they operate in. Not operating on reliable (=magical) communication would be a huge disadvantage for any organization with as ambitious goals as this one.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

It strikes me that trained messenger birds/flying snakes/flying cats might fit better, depending upon level of magic used in the campaign.
Also both the Flaming Fist and Order of the Gauntlet would probably have protocols to trace and investigate any patrol lost, in the hope of ensuring that their comrades are put to rest rather than wander as undead. A patrol killed by a group of high-level murderhoboes over 50g will very probably be followed up and the method and reason for their deaths discerned.

If the Flaming Fist do attack, make sure that it is obvious that they are using non-lethal attacks.
Have the threat of not buying a permit backed up by something other than an attack by a low-level patrol. Economic sanctions: the Flaming fist will use their influence to ensure that the PCs cannot buy goods except at extortionate prices.
Killing Flaming Fist members is also going to have severe repercussions when the party return from Chult, which any PCs aware of them will know.

 

[DEFCON 1]

What you describe with possible party interactions with the Flaming Fist is actually one of my particular bugaboos with "leveling" RPGs (and D&D in particular). As you point out, CapnZapp, the party can "outlevel" an authority figure or group quite easily, thereby rending them "immune" to the authority-- all because of the mechanics of the game, and not because of any in-world actions that would allow for this to happen. If we treat the Flaming Fist NPCs are just another bunch of numbers, the band of player murderhobos can eventually (after several months of playing) reach a point of game mechanic superiority that the threat of this organization is lost (at least in terms of combat.) Which can result in the party just walking all over everybody if they so choose, because the game's mechanics allow for it to happen. NPCs don't "level-up" usually like the PCs do, so by Level 5 like you say... every single character from the opening chapters of the game are merely speed bumps.

This kind of stuff does tend to bother me from a story perspective. The fact that police officers can virtually be just laughed at because the PCs have game rules that allow them to become superheroes in comparison. And while there are many in-game story sanctions that can be levied at the PCs for poor action as CapnKobold pointed out... they are still able to just be ignored by PCs who don't choose to follow the obvious story response.

So on the one hand... my first instinct when the party is meant to deal with the Flaming Fist is to "level up" the FF so that they always remain a game mechanics threat to the PCs. If the PCs are Level 5, then the average CR of each FF member is like CR 9 or 10. So that if the party tries to attack them, the FF have some mechanical weight to throw around. But on the other hand... this also ended up being one of the things that ended up bothering me about 4E (and the ease of leveling up monsters using the Monster Builder) and which would follow a similar path here. If a dragon is a CR 15 monster, and you can level up a Goblin to be also become a CR 15 boss monster... it throws threat level of different monsters all out of whack too, which just feels wrong to me from a story perspective. A goblin and a dragon should not feel like the same threat... but so long as the PCs can level up because of "game mechanics" but not necessarily level-up within the story (where they gain through story-action the right to ignore authority figures or whatnot)... then there's always going to be this issue of mechanics vs narrative.

So I think I'm going to end up having the same sort of problem you have, and really that's all due to the leveling mechanic of the D&D game. A normal human over time becomes virtually a god because they are "played", while every other non-played person or monster does not. It's been an issue all along in my various years of playing D&D... and unless your particular style of campaign is designed such that you continually "graduate" to ONLY fighting monsters applicable to your level and other NPCs like the Flaming Fist just don't show up anymore (rather than become murder victims because the party can just kill them with little to fear mechanically)... you will always have this problem of authority figures having no real game authority to affect the party. It can really suck.

For running a particular style of campaign such as ToA, I've actually started looking into (and doing my own personal playtests of) an E6-style Stamina/Wounds version of 5E in order to see if I can lessen these issues. Smaller "stamina" HP pool for each PC, but a deeper "negative HP" pool for wounds (your standard CON score of wound points). I did switch things up similarly for my CoS games where I replaced the 3 Death saves chart with the Exhaustion chart instead (so it took 6 failures to actually die, but each failure did grant a level of exhaustion)... and I'd like to continue to experiment to see if I can make ToA play differently as well (so that things like the FF can remain threats throughout the entire game.)

Best of luck with your adaptations, and I hope they work out for you as I hope mine work out for me!

 

[CapnZapp]

It strikes me that trained messenger birds/flying snakes/flying cats might fit better, depending upon level of magic used in the campaign.

I thought about Animal Messenger, yes, but it doesn't have the range unless you upcast it. Of course, that's a minor nitpick. My bigger reason was that Flaming Fist didn't strike me as particularly "in phase with nature".

Also both the Flaming Fist and Order of the Gauntlet would probably have protocols to trace and investigate any patrol lost, in the hope of ensuring that their comrades are put to rest rather than wander as undead. A patrol killed by a group of high-level murderhoboes over 50g will very probably be followed up and the method and reason for their deaths discerned.

I can't see the remains of a killed patrol ever being found (in time), unless you're talking Locate Object style of magic, and that's more powerful/expensive than Sending et al.

Remember, for veteran players feeding their slain foes to the crocodiles to prevent Speak with Dead comes naturally after decades of playing D&D!

If the Flaming Fist do attack, make sure that it is obvious that they are using non-lethal attacks.

Yes, that is a good idea.

Have the threat of not buying a permit backed up by something other than an attack by a low-level patrol. Economic sanctions: the Flaming fist will use their influence to ensure that the PCs cannot buy goods except at extortionate prices.

Not seeing the relevance for this adventure...?

Killing Flaming Fist members is also going to have severe repercussions when the party return from Chult, which any PCs aware of them will know.

You assume the Flaming Fist is aware of the perpetrator's identities, like that isn't exactly what I am talking about! This entire thread is about increasing the danger level of being caught from next to zero to some reasonable level.

 

[Sacrosanct]

What you describe with possible party interactions with the Flaming Fist is actually one of my particular bugaboos with "leveling" RPGs (and D&D in particular). As you point out, CapnZapp, the party can "outlevel" an authority figure or group quite easily, thereby rending them "immune" to the authority-- all because of the mechanics of the game, and not because of any in-world actions that would allow for this to happen. If we treat the Flaming Fist NPCs are just another bunch of numbers, the band of player murderhobos can eventually (after several months of playing) reach a point of game mechanic superiority that the threat of this organization is lost (at least in terms of combat.) Which can result in the party just walking all over everybody if they so choose, because the game's mechanics allow for it to happen. NPCs don't "level-up" usually like the PCs do, so by Level 5 like you say... every single character from the opening chapters of the game are merely speed bumps.

This kind of stuff does tend to bother me from a story perspective. The fact that police officers can virtually be just laughed at because the PCs have game rules that allow them to become superheroes in comparison. And while there are many in-game story sanctions that can be levied at the PCs for poor action as CapnKobold pointed out... they are still able to just be ignored by PCs who don't choose to follow the obvious story response.
!

This was my first thought as well. They are the local authority. That should be enough on it's own, unless you have an evil party that is willing to kill what are essentially police officers. Because of that, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of effort making them a combat challenge, but have repercussions if they do decide to fight them, similar to repercussions of someone going around and killing the town guards (I think the OP is on the right track in this regard). The hesitancy shouldn't be "how tough are they in combat", but "what will happen if we do this?"

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I would want to avoid making them a combat challenge. If every potential encounter is balanced against the party's level, the players go around expecting that they can beat every encounter they ever run into. Just my opinion of course, but that strips away how a living world feels. NPCs are appropriate for the area and role they play, regardless of PC level. Sometimes that may mean a cakewalk if they choose to fight. Sometimes that may mean a TPK. It makes players evaluate every encounter in totality, as opposed to only thinking in terms of a combat stat box.

 

[CapnZapp]

What you describe with possible party interactions with the Flaming Fist is actually one of my particular bugaboos with "leveling" RPGs (and D&D in particular).

<rant shortened >

Best of luck with your adaptations, and I hope they work out for you as I hope mine work out for me!

Yes, it's best to go into D&D with open eyes.

My changes aren't hoping to prevent level 11+ murderhobos from treating Flaming Fist as their personal playthings. I fully accept that level 20 characters can do pretty much anything. In fact, most of us have - it's just that as we keep playing and get more mature, we find better stories to tell

I'm just trying to think ahead - when a level 5 character asks herself "but why do we do what Flaming Fist tells us" there needs to be something extra to explain it, something the module blithely ignores. The threat of being reported and your identity known is one such deterrent.

My players won't start a war against Baldur's Gate and in the extension, the entirety of the Lords Alliance. That part is certain.

But they might well fight back if a foolish FF patrol attacks them, and by doing so they should realize that's their one and only strike - if it happens again, they're in big trouble. This is because they witness the report being sent.

All I'm saying is that I feel the Flaming Fist operation as described in the module to be inadequate. You can't expect grubby adventurers to follow your orders if you're a knight and half a dozen guards a hundred miles from the nearest backup.

 

[Sacrosanct]

All I'm saying is that I feel the Flaming Fist operation as described in the module to be inadequate. You can't expect grubby adventurers to follow your orders if you're a knight and half a dozen guards a hundred miles from the nearest backup.

You're also starting at 5th level, and they are designed to be encountered against level 1-2sh PCs (one of the first encounters of the game most groups would run into). I mean, 50gp makes the whole thing moot anyway, as that's the cost of a charter. They are not designed to be any sort of inconvenience for higher level PCs. That, combined with the fact that they are the authority, should be more than enough to expect adventurers to follow their orders during the phase they are expected to be encountered in.

 

[DEFCON 1]

This was my first thought as well. They are the local authority. That should be enough on it's own, unless you have an evil party that is willing to kill what are essentially police officers. Because of that, I wouldn't spend a whole lot of effort making them a combat challenge, but have repercussions if they do decide to fight them, similar to repercussions of someone going around and killing the town guards (I think the OP is on the right track in this regard). The hesitancy shouldn't be "how tough are they in combat", but "what will happen if we do this?"

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I would want to avoid making them a combat challenge. If every potential encounter is balanced against the party's level, the players go around expecting that they can beat every encounter they ever run into. Just my opinion of course, but that strips away how a living world feels. NPCs are appropriate for the area and role they play, regardless of PC level. Sometimes that may mean a cakewalk if they choose to fight. Sometimes that may mean a TPK. It makes players evaluate every encounter in totality, as opposed to only thinking in terms of a combat stat box.

I absolutely agree with your larger point towards the bottom, and goes along with it feeling weird for me in 4E when a goblin and a dragon could both become CR 15 challenges for no other reason than to actually make a threatening creature actually a mechanical threat should it devolve into violence. But really, all of these issues come out of the fact that its the PCs that are gaining all these bonuses to their "combat stat box" due to leveling that causes this disconnect in the first place. If PCs didn't "level up", then a band of hobgoblins would always remain a threat to the party, and attacking an adult dragon would be tantamount to suicide.

Now I fully agree that that's kind of the whole point of D&D to begin with... that the game was built to set the players up so that they eventually CAN become superheroes and take on and kill a dragon. But unfortunately that does run counter to many parts of the narrative type of roleplaying game. A 12th level party has nothing to fear from the town guard because they mechanically decimate them. But from a narrative POV, that isn't the case. So unless you have players who are willing to subsume their mechanically identity and "play to the story" as it were... voluntarily acting subservient to authority despite them being more than capable of destroying them all should a fight actually break out... part of my job as DM is trying to find/create/fix/change the rules to assist in this for the particular style of campaign I wish to run.

[MENTION=12731]CapnZapp[/MENTION] seems to have an issue here too. As he said above, his players will take the bodies of Flaming Fist mercenaries they kill and throw them to the crocodiles to destroy the evidence because they are veteran players and its the most strategically sound action they can take. Which sounds to me like his players are not ones who typically "play to the story"... where the party from a character perspective wouldn't necessarily kill these authority figures even though they mechanically know they can out-of-game... and most certainly wouldn't all be willing to just casually destroy the bodies in such a gruesome fashion just to avoid a Speak With Dead spell (which in-game who knows if any of these characters would ever think that would be a possibility in the first place.) The players all know these these things, which is why they do them... but do their PCs? Perhaps at his table, they consider them one and the same? No idea (although based upon how he talks about them, it seems this might be how they lean). So obviously his table plays much differently than mine does (not that there's ever been a question about that after 3 years of discussing how the game works for our players, LOL!) and thus what he needs to calculate and figure out and run will lean in a much different direction.

A Flaming Fist patrol with an average level of CR 2 will mean things much differently for my players, his players, your players, and everyone's players because everyone will treat them differently depending on which perspective they would see this patrol (combat-based, story-based, realism-based, game-based etc. etc. etc.) Which means figuring out the way to handle it becomes an important part of working the adventure to suit. And is also why not a single one of us should ever really wonder why any of WotC's books don't seem to "work right"... because they can only be written to satisfy a single certain perspective... and if we are here on EN World discussing and arguing and diving into the weeds of this game and all it represents, that perspective they are satisfying sure as heck ain't going to be ours. Most of us have probably "leveled up" past that perspective a long time ago.

 

[CapnZapp]

The hesitancy shouldn't be "how tough are they in combat", but "what will happen if we do this?"

This is exactly what I'm thinking about!

The deterrence isn't "oh noes, we're scared into submission by a bunch of low-CR NPC stat blocks". It's "ah, so it's not enough to kill a bunch of random dudes in the jungle and dispose of their bodies, because they have taken intelligent precautions".

To me it adds verisimiltude to see that the "cops" don't enter foreign and isolated territory without some kind of thinking ahead.

Especially since the Flaming Fist isn't exactly the good guys here. You guys might run a strictly lawful campaign, but in my world, if somebody attacks my character they will have to accept the possibility that this will cost them their lives...

In D&D life is cheap. That's why the Flaming Fist won't take significant action unless it happens twice.

After all, I agree with the module's basic premise - the Flaming Fist is something best avoided, not fought against.

 

[CapnZapp]

You're also starting at 5th level, and they are designed to be encountered against level 1-2sh PCs (one of the first encounters of the game most groups would run into). I mean, 50gp makes the whole thing moot anyway, as that's the cost of a charter. They are not designed to be any sort of inconvenience for higher level PCs. That, combined with the fact that they are the authority, should be more than enough to expect adventurers to follow their orders during the phase they are expected to be encountered in.

Yes, for a level 1 party no adjustments would be necessary.

Though most adventurers don't stay level 1 for long...

The 50 gp charter is nothing, just as you say. The "confiscate half of all loot" is another matter... that's outrageous at ANY level.