I am DMing for a group of friends, a party of 7, that are almost level 4. I am starting to put into motion some quests from their backstories/things the players have said they want their character to achieve. However, one of them in throwing me. I have an Earth Gensai Forge Domain Cleric, whose god has an anvil (surprise, surprise) that was used in the age of gods to progress technology and forge many of the magical artifacts in the world. However, the forge has fallen silent for the past 1000 years or so, and this Gensai has discovered that the anvil need repairing. However, I am not sure about how to go about the whole process of letting the player repair this anvil. I am not sure if it should be a dungeon or like a series of checks/events that the party need to undergo?
If this is a side quest, I’d keep it fairly tight, you don’t want the whole campaign to become about this one character doing their backstory. Maybe something like they need to retrieve some special metal that can be used to patch the anvil. Then stick that metal in a treasure hoard somewhere that’s part of the main quest line. Then the cleric needs to convince the rest to go do their thing. Once there, maybe just spend a channel divinity or two to repair the anvil. The thing to watch for us, now the players will want to start using it to make magic items. In that case, you could do the standard, you need a recipe for how to make things and the ingredients, then you can use the anvil to make them.
Or just say this is for gods, not mortals, and once it’s fixed, the anvil disappears to return to the god. But the god is grateful, and give everyone in the party who helped with it a supernatural boon.
Thank you for the advice, they are about to go to a location with a treasure hoard, so I can very easily put the required materials there. I had not though of making the cleric use channel divinity, definitely going to have them do that! Using a supernatural boon as a reward, that is a very good idea - not one that I have ever done before. I think I will play it safe and have the anvil disappear.
My way of doing things like this would be as follows starting at level 5:
Levle 5-8: Find mentions of it in books, in murals, hear about it from NPCs. Around level 8 locate something that basically tells them what they have to do
Level 9: Throw a spanner in the works. There's an additional reason why it's hard. This delays them from attempting it right away.
Level 10: Learn that SHOCK the BBEG of the campaign is directly related to the reason that it's broken, and to defeat the BBEG they need to fix the anvil. Find stuff to fix it with which happily coincides with major storylines.
Level 11: Enter massive dungeon, this should feel really epic.
Level 12: Do the big encounter that will enable them to fix the anvil
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Hey all,
I am DMing for a group of friends, a party of 7, that are almost level 4. I am starting to put into motion some quests from their backstories/things the players have said they want their character to achieve. However, one of them in throwing me. I have an Earth Gensai Forge Domain Cleric, whose god has an anvil (surprise, surprise) that was used in the age of gods to progress technology and forge many of the magical artifacts in the world. However, the forge has fallen silent for the past 1000 years or so, and this Gensai has discovered that the anvil need repairing. However, I am not sure about how to go about the whole process of letting the player repair this anvil. I am not sure if it should be a dungeon or like a series of checks/events that the party need to undergo?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you.
If this is a side quest, I’d keep it fairly tight, you don’t want the whole campaign to become about this one character doing their backstory.
Maybe something like they need to retrieve some special metal that can be used to patch the anvil. Then stick that metal in a treasure hoard somewhere that’s part of the main quest line. Then the cleric needs to convince the rest to go do their thing. Once there, maybe just spend a channel divinity or two to repair the anvil.
The thing to watch for us, now the players will want to start using it to make magic items. In that case, you could do the standard, you need a recipe for how to make things and the ingredients, then you can use the anvil to make them.
Or just say this is for gods, not mortals, and once it’s fixed, the anvil disappears to return to the god.
But the god is grateful, and give everyone in the party who helped with it a supernatural boon.
Thank you for the advice, they are about to go to a location with a treasure hoard, so I can very easily put the required materials there. I had not though of making the cleric use channel divinity, definitely going to have them do that! Using a supernatural boon as a reward, that is a very good idea - not one that I have ever done before. I think I will play it safe and have the anvil disappear.
My way of doing things like this would be as follows starting at level 5: