The Undead Sheepdog

Sometimes you need to herd the players. Your adventure is a bit linear and you need get those sheep to the other side of the field. Creeping death doesn't work. It's a roleplaying game so one plucky player will still try to meta past such obstacles - killing them for interpreting your push as a puzzle isn't fair. What you really need is a sheepdog.

If you're as old as I (my sympathies), you'll remember Lassie. Her most well known trope is showing up, barking, and leading the party to deal with the problem. People trust Lassie, no one has to figure out her ulterior motives - she just brings people to the action.

My sheepdog in this week's adventure went through a few revisions till I settled on making him an old friend of one of the players. This I think is key to making an effective sheepdog. The Barbarian player did question the reliability of the guide on one occasion. But the player who was the friend of the sheepdog felt they were permitted to define the friendship: No, this guy is alright, I know him.

The adventure is a short romp escaping from a ghost ship. It was tackled by 4 melee classes. (I had to halve the wolves in the dog pen because the Barbarian was a secret Dr. Dolittle who ended up adopting one of the wolves - and add an extra shadow because I'd lost track of how munchkin our half-orc fighter had gotten. I also omitted the finders-keepers coin, that's a dick-move that should be saved for an experienced group.)

Scully and Crosby, D&D 5e adventure for Lvl 1-3 characters

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Also, one of the players ran their own homebrew fox-race. All game I just thought of their character as Sir Didymus. It's quite fun bringing these things to the table though (so long as they're not O.P. nonsense). I'm quite tempted by the blue mage sorcerer myself.