On Yggdrasil: Behind the Screen

There are no special rules for Yggdrasil written down anywhere, so I made my own, which you can find here. I ran Naphraks without special planar rules.

One main priority this session was to include a brief encounter with some Ratatosk in their normal annoying mood, so that the players themselves would notice a difference in their behaviour in later sessions.  Even seasoned D&D players might struggle to recognise Ratatosk.

This session was hastily prepared because I was on holiday, but I used my travelling home train journey to throw together a fix for the woeful lack of maps of Naphraks. The scaling of the supplied maps are atrocious and inconsistent, and the map of the tower makes little sense to me. What is up with the staircases? And because the book says the PCs can arrive anywhere, I put the Naphraks map into a grid and used a die roll to determine where they landed. My map of the main tower is here:

 


 

Regarding statblocks for the khaasta, defer to common sense and use reskinned Lizardfolk from the 5e Monster Manual. There’s even a Lizard King for Haac!nss and a Lizardfolk Shaman for the Wise One.

I hadn’t prepared Crux either, so I threw together a combat encounter against a Child of Yggdrasil from Kobold Press’ Creature Codex as a stall and prayed the players didn’t decide to go to Crux first. If you don’t want to prepare Crux and Naphraks, just move the town slightly so that the players don’t see it before they get to the portal to Naphraks

 

Looking back, the party getting into the tower is one of my favourite moments of the campaign so far. Each of them got into the tower in a personal and unique way, with no help from each other; each character was individually capable, in a way that matched their character. It was really cool and I hope the campaign features more moments like that.

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