I am DMing the Savage Tide and we are coming up to the adventure where the Fleet is getting ready to attack Farshore. My issue seems to be with the mapping.
My players spent several hours from our last session planning the defenses of the colony whihc include some surprises in the mouth of the small bay, and several well placed walls of stone between buildings to help funnel the attackers through.
So, I cannot run the events of the attack piece-meal.
They are also planning on splitting themselves up into areas they think will best be suited to their characters abilities and strengths. Which also leads to them being scattered throughout the town, augmenting themselves with help from the Jade Ravens and such.
I need a large map to coordinate as much as possible. I have a huge mondo mat(wet erase) but the scaling wouldn't be exact.
I COULD bite the bullet, change the scale and use the mat I have, however I would like to make this as precise as possible.
What have you all done for this encounter?
Any comments/advice would be welcome.
I plan to encourage the PCs to split up, too, and have all the encounters happen simultaneously. To make this possible, I'm planning to have the players control their cohorts, the Jade Ravens, and miscellaneous surviving NPCs that they've collected along the way as if they were regular PCs. I'll strongly hint that they should metagame placements so that there are conveniently the right number of named characters near each other.
Along with the tactical logic of not concentrating your forces, which leaves the rest of the territory exposed, I hope that fairly regular cohort-as-PC action will satisfy any players that are getting bored with their regular characters. It's nice to mix it up, since being the healer or the tank for 20 levels is a long way to go.
Anyway, once they have a few separate parties of temporary PCs, they can play each encounter area separately. Vanthus zips toward Lavinia immediately, while the Vrocks head toward the center of the city. The Golems hit whomever is left on the shore, and the Yuan-ti are the obvious duty of whomever is manning the Blue Nixie or Sea Wyvern. The players should know beforehand that any enemy group that is not dealt with, either because the PCs were forced to retreat or because the PCs decided to gang up on other enemy groups, counts as a loss of victory points even if the PCs later come back and eliminate the group.