Masquerade at the Palace

Setting a campaign in a city means that there are often a ton of NPCs on the board. I made this problem worse by deciding to name nearly all of them (and by having a lot of complicated alliance and inter-marrying between many of the families in Blackmarsh!). But it makes doing big, intrigue-heavy sessions such as this fancy party really fun

​

Above is the final map as players saw it; below is how it looked in my original notes.

I built this by first designing the room (size, location) and adding in all the essentials for a fancy party: food, a live band, space for dancing. Then I worked out which NPCs were likely to attend, and who they'd hang out with at a masquerade ball. The dotted line is me trying to work out if I'd made it possible for the party to get across the room with out being murder by a de Leon sister, or any of the other enemies they've made since being in the city.