The Outlands Odyssey Part 8: Behind the Screen

Another tricky session to prepare if you’re adding extra Outlands encounters. The players might flee from Tiac Rami No, and you have a handful of travel encounters to run; or they might travel with Tiac, and you suddenly have to run encounters on Yggdrasil or go blind into the Khaasta’s den. Or they might try and spy on Tiac if they overhear is murmurings. You could end up preparing several sessions of content.

In hindsight, this can be avoided by going for a more extended roleplaying session with Tiac Rami No if the players decide to hear him out. Or you could just run it as it is in the adventure, with no other travel encounters!

Rather than lean into sterotypes, I played Tiac for laughs by giving him the most inconsistent and insane accent I could conceive. Unusual vowels, even more unusual inflections, halting phrases; none of it remotely resembling any real world accent. Tiac was clearly "not from around here". The guy has his own walking tower, so his spellcasting power is pretty clear. Tiac ended up being funny, but his self-evident power gave him a disturbing edge. No-one was quite sure where they stood with him. I saved a lot of prep time by finding a free battlemap of a wizard’s tower – it’s easy to improvise descriptions from a detailed map.

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