Ooze on First

Sample Encounter Creation Exercise: Ooze on First

This encounter is intended to illustrate the steps necessary to make a simple encounter work, step by step. Everything here is intended to be examples, while the encounter can certainly be run it’s more a sample of what you could do quickly and easily.

Deep in the forests is a glade that gets less sun due to the thick tree cover, it is inhabited by a selection of oozes. This encounter can run as a standalone where the characters are called to clean the area up, or can be a random encounter in any untravelled area.

It is designed to scale in difficulty for the characters that are there, quite possibly on the fly.

All monsters used are straight out of the books (for ease of running), but can obviously be modified.

Statblocks used:

Garden Ooze, CR 2

Hungry Fog, CR 6

Work out your Average Party Level (APL). Do this by averaging the levels in your party and adding one due to our generous stat arrays, then add 1 for each character over 5 or subtract 1 if there are 3 party members. Or just use the Encounter Calculator, adding one to the result.

Pick opponents, keeping to ones that you will be able to run appropriately in combat. In specific unless you are confident, avoid having more than two statblocks to keep track of (one is even better), avoid having anything with class levels (they are far more complex than most monsters) and really avoid spellcasters unless you are confident of looking up a lot of spells very quickly.

APL 2: 2 Garden Oozes (CR 4)

APL 3: 3 Garden Oozes (CR 5)

APL 4: 4 Garden Oozes (CR 6)

APL 5: 1 Hungry Fog and 2 Garden oozes (CR 7)

APL 6: 2 Hungry Fogs (CR 8)

APL 7: 3 Hungry Fogs (CR 9)

APL 8: 4 Hungry Fogs (CR 10)

APL 9: 6 Hungry Fogs (CR 11)

The encounter can clearly scale up from there, or substitute in different oozes, or even different monsters entirely. You can also bump up the difficulty on the fly by throwing in more oozes and/or some difficult terrain, probably mud.

Anything in a forest should have a few large tree trunks scattered around and possibly a large rock for interest.

Figure out range of start (the Encounter Calculator also lists these), in this case 2d6x10 feet. A Spot check is necessary to spot the Garden Ooze (modified for range), no check is needed for the Hungry Fog. If anyone fails the Spot check a surprise round will be called for, for everyone else.

Once you have your group set up and your encounter prepared, time to set the scene. Adapt to suit the situation of course.

Without Hungry Fog:

@emit The woods here grow deeper and darker and the undergrowth thins out, the thick tree cover blocking most of the light from the forest floor. The sounds of wildlife have dimmed and grown more distant, even the birdcalls have fallen silent. What seems to be a mass of diseased fibers growing on a plant suddenly moves and slithers independently from its sickly host, lifting up and approaching hungrily and with purpose.

With Hungry Fog:

@emit The woods here grow deeper and darker and the undergrowth thins out, the thick tree cover blocking most of the light from the forest floor. The sounds of wildlife have dimmed and grown more distant, even the birdcalls have fallen silent. Through the trees you catch sight of a mist, greenish and pulsing slowly with horrid shapes forming within its depths, it is floating toward you, approaching hungrily and with purpose.

Conclusion: Oozes are mindless and won’t know to flee, but if the fight is too easy feel free to toss in some more, attracted by the fight. Be aware that Rogues in specific will not like this specific encounter at all due to lack of sneak attacks.