By Jason Campbell

I’ve been running a weekly 5e campaign in Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting since January 2022, the player characters are currently 16th level. It can be difficult to run a 5e game with higher level characters while keeping the game challenging and the players engaged. This campaign diary series features notes from my players and I about the challenges of playing high level 5e.

Interlude Sessions

Many of the sessions in a long term campaign will have the player characters on their way to an epic encounter, or fighting a big bad villain at the climax of a story arc. There will inevitably be a few sessions where the characters are accomplishing less epic tasks, talking with NPCs or doing some investigation in their home city. My group had such a session this week. One of the players couldn’t make the session, and although we play when one player is out (by agreement in the group), the characters were about to confront what they knew was a key bad guy for the campaign, and they didn’t want to have this pivotal encounter without everyone being there. The characters were at their home for a long rest before this battle and they chose to do a few “small things” for this session and save the big fight for the next session.

Pacing an Interlude Session

Although the players chose to have this sort of quieter session, I still don’t want them to get bored. The players had a few ideas about things their characters wanted to do in the city , so we began with those things. I had notes of secrets and clues that the characters might learn soon (see Secrets and Clues from Mike Shea), and I wove some of those into the social encounters as the PCs visited NPCs and checked up on a few loose ends.

The session went pretty well, and we had about a half hour left in the session, so I introduced a more exciting encounter to end with. I knew this would lead to ending the session on a cliffhanger. I don’t get to do that often but the players appreciate it happening once in a while. I had written up a encounter where a large swarm of shadow creatures attack the city, summoned and controlled by a deadly fiendish NPC and her lietenants. The PCs are now considered protectors of the city so they naturally jumped into action, so we had a brief combat with some of the shadow creatures, who I knew would be no threat to the PCs. The fiendish NPC then uses a spell to bring all the PCs to her, except one. I ended the session with 4 of the 5 PCs being sucked through portals which immediately disappeared, and the lone PC frantically trying to find and help his friends.

Conclusion

All of the events of this interlude session were things I had noted to happen sometime in the future. Some were tied to likely events and some were clues that could have been used anytime. The closing encounter with the shadows I had anticipated happening later, after the PCs had dealt with the key bad guy that they’d put off until the next session. I let the players steer the story and the pieces I added lead to an interesting session, paced to a strong conclusion. If you have rough notes for future secrets, clues and encounters that aren’t necessarily tied to specific events you can piece together an interesting session by rearranging these items to fit the flow of the evolving story.

What do you think? have you run or played in an interlude session? How did it go? Let us know in the comments.