Comment on “The Breather Before Town”

I'll cop to having essentially done "you leave the wilderness aaaaand you're back in the city" last session*. I'm finding myself really hard pressed to come up with descriptions and possible hooks on the fly. You'd gnash your teeth if you saw how often I've shamefully zipped the players from A to B, with minimal mention of the people, buildings, roads, signposts, smells, sounds, sights along the way...

My current prescription: practice writing brief descriptions and hooks during the week, then recite them out loud like an actor's lines to install in my head some choices I can fall back on. We'll see if a month or two of that ups my game.

* They were disturbed from finding a lemure at the bottom of their first dungeon ... an encounter I dragged out over the course of multiple other fights as it teleported in and out, nabbing the unconscious.

Could have easily TPK'd them after it landed Suggestion on the strongest member [level 3 fighter] and the only one armed with a magic weapon. But the others intelligently defended themselves, grappled the victim, etc. so I softballed a bit. Laid down big damage on allied NPCs, then had the lemure cancel Suggestion and disappear "for good."

I judged what might really get their goat is having a tough and inscrutable enemy who could show up anywhere. Seems it worked -- they're obsessed with finding more magic weapons and settling the score.