If you keep up with news (from America if you’re not), you may have heard something about a wall. I’m not talking about current events today. I don’t want that much hate mail. Instead, Let’s talk about adventures you can drop in your campaign when an NPC is building a wall. A massive wall. The biggest. It’s gonna be huge!

  • Escort quests: To build a giant wall, the logistics involved are equally massive. Materials and workers have to be moved to the build site. Food, water and other necessities have to be shipped in to the workers (unless necromancy or other shenanigans are in play).
  • Defense: Usually, a huge wall is built to keep out some kind of enemy – and often they won’t sit idly by while the wall gets built. Thus, workers building the wall need protection while they labor. Sections of the wall that are already built can be attacked or undermined while defenses are concentrated on the new construction, requiring fast moving teams to counter attacks or run for reinforcements.
  • Rescue / recovery: When defense fails or doesn’t arrive in time, workers can be taken captive and resources stolen. Someone needs to strike into enemy territory to recover them.
  • Rounding up a workforce: Depending on the attitudes of the NPCs building the wall and the PCs themselves, recruiting a workforce can take the form of aggressive recruiting and acting as paymasters, to press-ganging the locals, to raiding for slave labor.
  • Clearing a building site: It’s not easy to route a massive wall around obstacles, so sometimes the path has to go through dangerous territory. Lairs, ruins, or hostile settlements all have to be cleared, and in some cases torn down or incorporated into the wall.