Unleashing the Full Potential of Prisoner 13: A DND Adventure Reimagined

Last updated on March 21, 2023

Hello! And welcome to the college of lore.  I’m professor Anthony. 

Prisoners 13 is a free heist adventure hosted on DND Beyond.  The original adventure is set for a level five adventuring party.  

When I wanted to play dnd last weekend, only one person was available.  I wanted to test my limits with a premade adventure.  Here’s how I was able to scale the adventure up to level 13 and how I made Prisoner 13 fun and challenging.

First let me start by summarizing the adventure if you haven’t read it yet. 

The hook:

Characters are approached by a dwarf, Varrin Axebreaker, who has had his fortune stolen from him.  All he knows is that, the location of the key to get into this vault lies inside the mind of prisoner 13.  A dwarven woman locked up in the icy north mega prison, called Revel’s End.  He is dodgy about the specifics of how he knows this prisoner 13 or what she has done to wind up in prison, but if pressed you might find that she used to work for his family but betrayed them and stole the wealth for herself shortly before getting locked up.  Varrin has spent the last of his remaining wealth on getting information about the prison.  If you accept his terms of a 10% cut of the vault’s treasure, he says he will be able to sneak you into the prison taking the place of one of the guards or cooks during the next 6 month resupply.

The meat: once you infiltrate the prison under the guise of guard or cook and find some private time to chat with 13 you will find that she is not interested in giving away the key for at all, AND she doesn’t even want to leave the prison.  As a bit of back story, if it comes up, She’ll tell you she is running several spy networks and criminal enterprises from the prison magically sending messages when the guards aren’t watching.  Thirteen pretty much has the run of the place as one of the first prisoners at Revel’s End.  The prison itself is rather beautifully designed as a glorious panopticon set high above the frigid cliffs so, it’s kind of like an Alcatraz on crack.  If you bargain properly, Prisoner 13 will reveal that if you get her the wardens Ledger that contains all details of every prisoner What they’ve done including how many years left they have in their sentence.  Only then, will she give you the key you seek.  This proves to be slightly challenging as no one is allowed in the warden’s office and all the doors in the panopticon are locked all doors are locked with an arcane lock spell.

The good: What I really liked about this scenario was how well the prison was designed.  I liked embellishing the 1-mile boat ride through freezing ocean from the north end of the sword coast to this island prison.  The 10-minute elevator ride to get from the docks, to the bottom floor of the prison, the lightning storm sporadically lighting up the hallway where my player was desperately picking the arcane lock of the Warden’s office.  If you take some time to describe the setting it’s very beautiful and not something I had a lot of experience with in DND. 

Also, I liked the very interesting and fun mechanic of “Suspicion” This simple table allows the Game Master to increase the number of guards that players may run into as they sneak around.  The mechanic is pretty fun because it uses decreasing sizes of die to show the suspicion level.  If there is no cause for alarm it’s only on a ONE out of Twenty chance that you will run into a guard, or 5%, and a DC10 CHARISMA check for players to talk their way out of it.  But it’s your prerogative to increase the suspicion level for any reason! The larger the party is, and the more split up they are, the easier it is for them to simultaneously increase global distrust of all guards in the prison.  Remember, many of the guards have been stationed here for 6 months or longer and the party is coming in with a few other guards as the “New Guys.” I liked using that to my advantage. 

I also really liked the fact that your goal isn’t just to break 13 out of prison.  The shock and pivoting from the hook’s setup (to break her out in exchange for the key) to the reveal from Thirteen saying she would rather stay in prison all the while I imagined my party bargaining with her by passing notes, meeting her in her cell, or pulling her aside in the courtyard and increasing the suspicion from the other guards made for increased tension and more fun!

The bad: the Warden of this prison makes no sense to me at all.  Get this: she apparently is infrequently possessed by a lawful good shield maiden Dwarf fighter. While unpossessed, she is a level 9 Lawful good Mage who works for the Harpers.  The harpers are like a secret society of do gooders.  Trust me this is important for later, anyways, back to the Ghosts! When possessed, this warden likes to make merry and have a good time drinking ale and rabble rousing.  Apparently, all the guards know this and are OK with it.  Remember back to the main point of this adventure when you have to steal the warden’s ledger? Why would Prisoner 13 want this ledger? We know she doesn’t want to get free according to her write up. What could she use the ledger for?  One of the flavor text notes actually informed my decision to replace prewritten warden with my own.  Quote: “This Ledger Documents the names, crimes, sentences, and commutations of every prisoner who has been incarcerated at Revel’s End.  The records include death certificates for prisoners … The cause of death is always given as “natural,” “accidental,” or “unnatural,” with no details.” Interesting… What if EVERY prisoner at revel’s end always died.  What if the warden was the type of person who thought prison wasn’t good enough for these criminals.  Think about the prison.  It’s a perfect panopticon, a locked down vault.  Even if you escape, you have to contend with the frigid water.  Characters who are exposed outside the magically heated interior must make con saves just exist for an hour outside or risk exhaustion.  This was very interesting.  Maybe 13 wants the ledger to prove that the warden is killing prisoners for no reason at all.

Here’s how I adapted Prisoner 13 for my one friend.  The first thing I did was to tell my friend to play any level of character he wanted for a single player heist game.  He picked a level 13 rogue air Genasi who could levitate, cast a few spells, and most importantly had a +15 to lockpick checks.  Looking at his stats a few hours before the game, I saw he had No Rizz.  Only an 8 Charisma.  [T1] I decided to keep that Sus Table as is[T2]  (I swear this is the last one).  Essentially when you’re scaling any adventure, start by looking at the modifier any character and apply the DM’s guide for DC’s:

Another way to think about it for people with a +15 Stealth / Slight of hand check… is they only have to roll a 2-20 to break a DC 15, so 95% of the time, any level 11 or higher rogue with expertise will be able blow through any DC17 (According to this table: Medium).  So, let’s shift these words and their difficulty by probability to DC and Verbal description using some beginner level statistics and remembering that a 1 is a failure:

Task Difficulty	DC	Modifier	Required Dice roll	Percent Chance
Trivial	5	+15	2	95%
Trivial	10	+15	2	95%
Trivial	15	+15	2	95%
Trivial	17	+15	2	95%
Easy	20	+15	5	80%
Medium	25	+15	10	55%
Hard	30	+15	15	30%
Very hard	32	+15	17	20%
Nearly impossible	35	+15	20	5%

If things like probability are interesting to you, I can do a whole separate video on that!

Here are some other cool things I added to Prisoner 13!

1. The doors.  All the doors are in the panopticon are locked.  You find that the doors you “Should” have access to open normally to you during normal hours of operation.  This is due to a small arcane crystal sewn into the hem of both of your sleeves.  You’ll find that if you are a guard, you may open guard doors (not the central tower door, marked surveillance) but not the armory or the kitchen areas.  To get into these areas you might be able to dirty a guard’s uniform forcing them to have it washed and reveal the location of the latrine which also has a wash station for clothes.
2. Flimbo, an over worked, underpaid wizard goblin who watches a permanent scrying spell cast by 20 scry balls.  He never sleeps and works on the base level of the panopticon tower in the surveillance room, he wears a pointy hat and dirty robes and nervously tics between each ball at random, looking for something wrong with the prison.  He worked with the head chef Gordita Lambsey to enchant his coffee cup to have the strongest go go juice in all Toril.  There are twenty invisible scrying eyes at every door way looking out into every hallway, like security cameras.  Inside the doorways are blind spots.  Some scrying eyes can see doors, others cannot.  A successful DC 20 perception check let’s a player notice a shadow being cast from an object that isn’t visible.  A hint to the fact that it’s there at all is the note that there doesn’t seem to be many guards out in the open, just a few blocking doorways to sensitive areas.  If a player ever fails a check, or happens upon a sensitive area I liked to double the hit chance from 1 to 2 for the suspicion table to see if Flimbo was watching that particular scry ball at that time and could send a guard to check up on the behavior.  If a player fails a check or visibly walks into view of an area where they’re not supposed to be, and it would be narratively beneficial for them not to be discovered, maybe Flimbo fell asleep? He is overworked, over caffeinated, and underpaid after all. 
3. My player snuck in as a cook! I didn’t expect this but to make things very fun I added a Michelin star holding chef that cooked the finest French food in this prison for staff & held herself to the highest standard.  Of course, her name was Gordita Lambses.  She was a perfectionist, and if my player failed an int.  check for cooking they would be stuck washing dishes for the meal and unable to contact P13.  She’s secretly planning a prison break that a wealthy mafia Don sponsored to get one of their members back (Prisoner 111), in exchange for letting Gordita work at a high profile, glamorous restaurant that they own.  If things go horribly wrong for the party and they set off high alert, this event is triggered to aid in their escape as a skill challenge.  Chef Lambses is unaware of Varrin Axebreak, the party, etc.  They exist to hinder party member disguised cooks in the kitchen from interacting with 13, They provide a direct route to the Warden in terms of poisoning their food, which is different from everyone else’s.  They also provide an end game skill challenge as a crescendo to the story.
4. The Aforementioned prison break skill challenge.  Four successes before two failures is what is required to break out of the prison in this adventure.  I knew eventually, a failed skill check would happen and one player against an entire prison would not go well.  I set the DC for all checks at 13.
   • Initial surprise: The prisoners break their shackles, pull weapons, and attack the guards!
   • Prisoners have advantage on their sneak attacks against guards armor.
   • They make a break for the walls closest to the boat (western wall) while avoiding crossbow bolts. 
     • Athletics / acrobatics check
   • They attempt to thrown the grappling hooks
     • Dex check + Prof.
   • They climb
     • Athletics / spells work too. 
   • They fall through the air, using rings of feather fall to land safely. 
   • They get onto the boats and escape until they are pursued by invisible stalkers (x2 in the prison). 

I didn’t stick exactly to this script and instead described the scenario and asked how they assisted. A spell slot of level 1 reduced the DC to 10, while a spell slot of level 3 or higher cleared the check.

5. My favorite part that I added to Prisoner 13 was my new Warden of the Prison Alistair Blackwood.  I doubled the health of the mage template and added an extra 4^th level spell slot.   Upon reading the notes of the dead prisoners in the ledger, I thought to myself, what if the whole panopticon was invented and run by a Machiavellian, controlling, evil, narcissist Wizard.  This would make sense with all the magic in the place needing to be maintained, as well as the construction of the prison, and the fact that it was built to contain highly competent criminals who more than likely have access to magic.  When building Alistair, I actually used ChatGPT to help flesh out the character! He serves as a great antagonist who you want to rip down from his mighty tower in the ice. 

• I introduced the character with a failed prison break.  He dominantly stops the single actor from escaping using an invisible stalker and casting hold person after Flimbo alerts him of the location.At the end of a successful prison break or if characters get caught breaking into the office, or as I ended up doing: a combination of the both.  At the climax of the story, Whisper fails to check for traps on one of the office doors, alerting Alistair Blackwood with a silent mental Alarm spell.  He has a few moments to actually break into the correct drawer.  During this time Alistair dresses, and prepares to confront the threat before raising the alarm.  Whisper hypnotic patterns and actually succeeds, pausing Alistair in the middle of the open doorway, leaving Flimbo the goblin only moments away from noticing a slack jawed cane outstretched Alistair, who would then sound the alarm.  Whisper gets the ledger in the next action but hears the klaxon alarm sound which rouses Alistair.  Having not but a moment, he dashes through window of the office just as Alistair rouses and casts a cone of cold through the window. The prison break starts just as Whisper lands in the center of the panopticon.  All the cells open and the anti-magic barriers drop this is due to Gordita Lambsey dimension dooring from her bedroom into the Surveillance room and killing poor Flimbo and setting the prisoners free. Whisper convinces 13 to take the documents with her and run, as having the documents and staying isn’t going to look good, Alistair saw Whisper take the Ledger and will attempt to kill both of them. They succeed in making it to the docks but not before Alistair catches up to them blowing up their means of escape re-iterating that no-one leaves Revel’s End except in a body bag. Combat begins and quickly ends with 13 taking her revenge, realizing she had fooled herself into thinking she was free in his prison long ago and it took until now to wake up and smell the coffee. 

As the prisoners close in, determined to make it to the next boat, Whisper misty steps onto the boat as 13 turns into a ball of flame destroying the dock and swimming, covered in fire, toward the next, boat, which isn’t on fire.  Now safe, she reveals the key, the design of which is tattooed on her arm and is the only way to get into the vault.  She doesn’t yet reveal the location but makes a new deal to Whisper to double cross Varrin in exchange for 20% of the treasure, double what Varrin offered, still determined to cut him out.  Whisper agrees setting up a possible next One shot to break into the Vault of Varrin. 

I was working on adding a prison fight club as another take on this prison perhaps with a different warden or even the book warden.  Somehow using the numbering scheme of the prisoners as a rank and status earned by crime or participation in the fight club.  The twist would be prisoner 1 is actually the warden, trapped in the prison but ruler over all.  I hadn’t fleshed it out but please take the concept and run with it!

If you liked this video, please toss a like / subscribe my way.  I don’t make videos often but when I do, they’re bangers.  If you really really liked my video check out my website where I have a copy of the transcription, a onenote file of the one shot you can use to help run your game complete with handouts, ideas, initiative trackers and more.  The three tabs that contain the most useful information would be “Mandatory Guard Meeting” which is a great scene I wrote, Optional Skill Challenge, and Optional Fight Club.  Well I think that’s the bell, I’ll see you next time – thanks for coming : )

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