In a home brew adventure I’m writing, the big bad is going to wake up right under to player’s feet, complete with construct army. Of course, the players won’t be able to fight the big bad, so the first adventure will be about the players getting the civilians out of the city while the npcs engage in a suicide mission of holding the main forces off.
What I’m looking for are ways to really capture the chaos and panic of such a situation and break it down into ways for the players to manage the panicked civilians and get them out of danger.
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Age of Ashes and Ironfang Invasion both feature civilian evacuation scenarios. You could look at them for ideas.
I just ran an evacuation a few months ago. It is the beginning of Trail of the Hunted, the 1st module in Ironfang Invasion.
The module as written had the party in the tavern of the 400-resident village of Phaendar when a hobgoblin invasion surprises the village. The party has to fight the hobgoblin warriors who rushed into the tavern, then go from building to building telling people to evacuate over the north bridge, sometimes fighting hobgoblins in the buildings or on the way.
During session zero, to accommodate the goblin player character I moved the time to one week before the invasion. In that week, the PCs gathered information and scouted in the most likely paths for the invasion. The hobgoblin army came from an unexpected direction, so the party's only warning was a villager running into the tavern on the west side of town with the news that the hobgoblins had overrun the east side.
The party went to the general store in the center of town to assess the situation and found a handful of hobgoblins already raiding it. They defeated the hobgoblins and ransacked the store themselves before sneaking further east to assess the size of the army, which was bigger than the village. It was moving slowly to secure territory, so the party had time to warn more villagers to evacuate to the north bridge.
One party member, elf ranger Zinfandel, boldly started warning homes on the south side, immediately adjacent to the army. She had to switch to warning people via their back windows when the hobgoblins marched up the street. That led to her warning a family from a window as the hobgoblins broke into the front door. The mother handed their daughter out the window to Zinfandel as the father was stabbed while trying to delay the hobgoblins. The hobgoblins were more interested in capturing the elf outside than the people inside, so they left by the front door to circle the building. The father and mother went out the window themselves. Zinfandel had to fight three hobgoblins while trying to run away with the family. Fortunately, after 3 more rounds, they reached a group of city defenders and the village cleric who defeated the goblins and healed their injuries.
I think that is the mood that Matt Adams 259 is after.
Other party members, warning people further from the trouble, had less adventure, unless persuading stubborn people counts as adventure. But at the end, the party and other volunteers had to defend the north bridge as villagers evacuated over it, so all were putting their lives on line. An NPC defender died. Once all refugees were safe, they destroyed the old, unstable bridge.
The party rescued 44 villagers out of 400. Some other villagers might have escaped to the south.
I know it's not really the question you're asking, but I'd suggest that you be sure to lay out expectations ahead of time. Fairly likely you'll have a few players (at least! maybe all of them!) that assume that they're about to face a level appropriate combat encounter and will dive headlong into oblivion.
A discussion about how you envision that first event going during Session 0 would likely alleviate that particular issue.
I know it's not really the question you're asking, but I'd suggest that you be sure to lay out expectations ahead of time. Fairly likely you'll have a few players (at least! maybe all of them!) that assume that they're about to face a level appropriate combat encounter and will dive headlong into oblivion.
A discussion about how you envision that first event going during Session 0 would likely alleviate that particular issue.
This.
The insistence of the NPCs isn't necessarily enough.
Demonstrations of unstoppable power may not even be enough as the players may think you're simply setting up wonderful drama rather than an objective nightmare incarnate.
I had such a situation many years back where a heroic PC stayed behind to slow down the bad guy (since the party hadn't gotten the clue soon to run until a bit late). The BBEG rolled really bad, with some 1s in there while the PC rolled many 20s! BBEG ended up dying 5+ levels ahead of time! Oh boy.
(The party still had to run from his forces, so the evil army could retrieve his body for some undead shenanigans, but still quite a curve ball!)