The 2024e edition is a new set of rules. WotC doesn’t want you to believe that.
Or whatever it’s being called this week
WotC has been insistent, insistent I say, that the new edition of D&D is not, in fact, a new edition. This is not D&D 6e! This is not even D&D 5.5e! This is …
Well, they call it 2024e, because that is not at all confusing with what 5e is being called now (2014e).
But, of course if it were not a new edition, why would we need to refer to it differently?
Or, to look at it another way, why not just call it D&D with new optional rules like have shown up in things like Tasha’s, etc.?
Because then they wouldn’t sell new books, amirite?
But we’re not to call it a new edition. It is simply rule changes that are completely compatible with the older, um, previous, er, differently-numbered-year edition not-an-edition set of numbers.
A Caveat
Note: the changes in rules from 2014e / 5e to 2024e are not necessarily bad. In fact, a lot of them sound kind of interesting. But are they backwards-compatible? Do they not imbalance encounters and conflicts in earlier modules? Will players in a given campaign be able to change to 2024e without making any difference? Will 5e characters be as good against new 2024e campaigns? If some players want to switch but others do not, will that work well? Will various Virtual Tabletops handle mixed parties and/or modules?
Two examples that got a fair amount of play in my reading today:
Surprise in 2024e
In 5e / 2014e, when a group or individuals are Surprised, they roll Initiative as normal, but are unable to take any Actions or Reactions or movement through their first turn, after which they can only React until their next turn.
So that’s pretty harsh. Surprised foes (or friends) are at a serious deficit here. In an Action Economy,
That’s a much simpler mechanic, but it’s also a lot easier mechanic. Rather than missing out on an entire turn, you just tend to come late in a turn.
Either alternative is arguable. But are they the same? Can you have a mix of players choosing a different version, for themselves or their opponents? Can you seamlessly change the rule to match previous challenges? Does it just become another option? Is it a significant enough change to actually alter how an encounter ends?
Inspiration in 2024e
Inspiration is an optional rule in 5e / 2014e. The DM (with input from the players) can give someone up to 1 point of Inspiration. That Inspiration can be turned in (in advance) for Advantage on an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check.
Okay, pretty straightforward. A D20 roll can be rolled with Advantage.
A key here, from the designers, was the sense that too much adds Advantage. That’s kind of ironic, as Advantage was intended as a way of simplifying the endless plusses/minuses of 3e, 3.5e, and 4e. But there was here a sense that too much was being simplified and rolled into a trinary Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic.
In addition to that rather significant change, there are now a variety of mechanical ways to gain “Heroic Inspiration,” including a Fighter subclass that just basically gets their point refreshed every turn.
It’s an interesting design choice, and I can see a lot behind it. It can make for more ways to leverage Inspiration (through broader dice rolls, and also by taking out of the unstackable Advantage bucket). It also makes, through its expanded Inspiration, a more reliable way of getting it.
On the other hand, it introduces Yet Another Mechanic. And it weakens that RP focus of the current Inspiration mechanic.
Good? Bad? I can see arguments either way. But it’s a very distinct choice, and something a table will need to decide One Way or The Other. Unlike the Surprise mechanic, I don’t think it changes balance — but does that make it Backwards Compatible?
Just call it a new edition, fergoshsakes
People who have bought 5e, will have three choices.
Change to 2024e, either mid-campaign, or next time there’s a module change (and upgrade any 5e-era modules to use the new rules).
Stick with 5e, and hope they can “backwards compatible” the mechanics of 2024e-era modules into those rules.
Mix and match — in existing campaigns or in new ones, evaluate the 2024e rules that have changed and depending which ones to pull in and which to continue using (and where players can select different conclusions).
Option 1 is pretty standard for a new actual edition. Option 2 might be possible with an actual edition change, but it would be a bit of work. Option 3 only is possible if that “backwards compatible” notion is real.
These sneak peaks (the first 2024e volume only comes out in September) make me think that WotC has tried to come up with something better enough and different enough to justify getting a new set of books (or virtual add-ins to the VTT … or both!) while pretending that it’s just a set of optional improvements.
I resent that.
I will almost certainly get the new edition of books and rules and use them in the future. I will remain resentful that WotC has been playing games with the whole thing to make money and pretend like they aren’t.
So Thunderwave (PHB 282-83) is a pretty cool spell, and usually ends up in a lot of parties’ repertoire (also in the repertoire of a lot of enemy parties). It does decent damage, an AoE, a push, and the CONstitution save it carries makes it most useful against spellcasters. It does make a godawful racket (carrying 300 feet away, which any DM should take advantage of), but it also scales damage by spell slot.
Overall, a nifty spell. But we’re not going to talk about any of that.
Thunderwave and its Area of Effect
This came up in a game, so afterwards I did some looking into the odd Area of Effect world that is Cubes and Thunderwave.
(There’s a lot about 5e that I respect, but their AoE stuff is kind of janky in general and then the fit onto a grid map — which 5e really sort of dislikes on principle but cannot ignore because a lot of tables really love it, like ours — is even more janky.)
Thunderwave has Range: Self (15-foot cube).“A wave of thunderous force sweeps out from you. Each creature in a 15-foot cube originating from you …” blah blah effects.
So, what does that mean? How does the cube relate to the caster? You would think a Cube AoE would be easy. Yet some of the writing on it approaches being Talmudic in its intricacies to figure out what RAW means here. This is my current interpretation:
You select a cube’s point of origin, which lies anywhere on a face of the cubic effect. The cube’s size is expressed as the length of each side.
A cube’s point of origin is not included in the cube’s area of effect, unless you decide otherwise.
AoE and Grid Maps
DMG 251 notes the following on “Areas of Effect” in relation to grid maps:
The area of effect of a spell, monster ability, or other feature must be translated onto squares or hexes to determine which potential targets are in the area and which aren’t. Choose an intersection of squares or hexes as the point of origin of an area of effect, then follow its rules as normal.
And Xanathar’s echoes this, speaking of “Area of Effect on a Grid”:
Choose an intersection of squares as the point of origin of an area of effect, then follow the rules for that kind of area as normal (see the “Areas of Effect” section in chapter 10 of the Player’s Handbook).
This is one that drives me bats as DM, because everyone wants their spell to be centered in in the center of a square (in origin, in target, in range calculations), and the rule are very clear that is not the case: for where spells start from, land (if not targeting a creature), and calculating the range, it’s all about intersections.
So, standing in a 5×5 grid square, any of the four corners of the square / intersections of the grid are at a range of “self” and are corners that could be the face of the cube you are going to create (including a cube that you are part of, if you are touching the outside face from the inside). Here then would be the possible arrangements I can see:
Cube AoE arrangements
Any of the above can be rotated in increments of 90 degrees.
I.e., you can be on any of the squares outside of the cube, or on the inner squares of the cube, wherever one of the corners of your square touches (red blips) part of the perimeter (side) of the cube. But not in the very center, because you can’t reach that outer face from there.
I’ve not seen anyone actually include the bottom left “corner” example, but it seems to fit the rules to my eyes.
Insider Casting
There is some debate as whether being on the inside of the cube (bottom right-hand two examples) is allowed. I don’t read anything in the above, though, that says it isn’t. That might mean including yourself in the spell effect (but hold that thought for a moment).
Note that though you can be within the cube, for the Thunderwave spell, “the thunderous force sweeps out from you,” so you yourself are not affected when you cast it, even if you are in the area. (Which is a fancier way of saying that you, as the point of origin, are not affected by spells that have a point of origin; a point is not dimensionless, in this case.)
(But Dave, you might be saying, if the point of origin is the grid intersection you are casting from, then doesn’t the thunderous force emanate from that and, if you are inside the AoE, affect you, too? To which I say (1) remember how I said some of this stuff gets Talmudic? and (2) go away, boy, you bother me.)
When would you use a case, of being inside (not the center!) of the cube? Two use cases I can think of:
To reduce the effective effective range to 10 feet rather than 15 feet (potentially important in an indoor combat).
To include a tiny opponent in your own square (an edge case, but a potentially helpful one).
To sum up
So, unless anyone has any objections, that’s how I consider the area for Thunderwave to work.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
GM Recap
Session 9 (Day 15-17)
Moony scouted out some of the as-yet-unrevealed portions of Feathergale Spire (3), Nala contemplated the hungry ferocity of the Initiates, William camped out on the roof, and Faith had a dream.
The heroes were invited in the morning to a rooftop assembly where, under heavy Knight presence, Thurl asked them to investigate the possibly-evil, possibly-Black Earth monks of the Sacred Stone Monastery, far into the hills.
Choosing not to fight over it, the heroes traveled east to the Dessarin River and Rivergard Keep to gain transit up to the monastery. Along the way they were attacked by a trio of Ankheg (eek!).
They camped out overnight, short of their target, to regain spells and HP and so forth. DING! Level 4!
They arrived at Rivergard Keep. They were met at the heavily guarded gates by an officer named Holger, and were escorted into the presence of the apparent lord of the castle, Jolliver Grimjaw, who did not seem pleased to meet them.
Player Recap
After Savra leaves Moony and Nala, Moony quietly slips out and goes to the other room. Moony “Are any of you joiners?” He explains Savra’s offer and wonders if information might be gained by pretending to join. At Moony’s prompting, Faith provides extensive background on the elemental practices and realms. After some discussion, Moony returns to his room to share the knowledge with Nala.
A bit later William leaves the South room and walks up to the roof. There are a couple knights and their vultures on guard, looking out at the fog filled valley.
Nala is thinking over the dinner and remembers that there was something odd about the initiates. She realizes that the initiates only spoke when spoken to. There is a sameness about them, they move in a similar fashion and when at rest there hand steeple in a triangle pointing down. They are also hungry, lean but not emaciated.
Conceptual art for a Feathergale Knight … which is kind of all you get.
Moony gather up some tools and heads down to the entry hall. The initiate in the main hall does not pay attention to Moony, muttering to himself swaying slightly. Quietly opening the door off of the staircase, Moony finds a bunk room with 4 sleepers in the bunks. He moves onto the room off of the entryway; it is well lit with several initiates standing at windows looking out at the entrance. He steps back and quietly closes the door unnoticed. The final unexplored floor draws the curious cat. There are four doors on this level, all of them with raised bars on the outside. At the first door, he hears some chanting or praying on the other side. No noise comes from the second door, but it is well sealed. Through the third door, Moony hears sobbing; likely this is Savra’s room.
As he descends back to the main floor, the initiate is still standing at the window. He overhears the words free.. free.. Moving to a better spot to see, Moony observes that the initiate, while doing something on his chest, is chanting, “Free me, I must be free, I will be free, I am free”.
Another bad dream for Faith – Looking from a very great height, feeling weightless as you slowly circle the landscape, a narrow valley in the hills, a river winding through it … your eye catches on something below … your vision is narrowing, as though you were suddenly dropping, dropping, the screaming of the wind in your ears, sight fading to blackness but the screaming, the howling continues, like cries of wild beast, the angry shouts of the mad, echoing from the walls about you, screaming to be released to rend and slay and … Savra knocking on the door. Savra asks the group to join Thurl on the pinnacle. Faith explains that she needs 15 minutes to pray first, but will join them shortly. Faith asks Theren to look for William to let him know. Savra then goes and wakes Nala and Moony. They get ready and wait for Faith to finish her prayers before heading up together.
Theren arrives at the top of the stairs and William wakes up. There is the sound of a lot of bird flapping. In addition to the two guards, there are four mounted knights. Thurl is on the opposite side of the tower. He invites us over to him. The knights and Savra are not looking as friendly as they were last night. Savra appears to be angry at our turning down the offer of joining the knights. The others knights are giving her side-long looks and appear to side with her.
Thurl greets us and again toasts our victory. He says that we would make good knights, but … You are brave and honorable people. You would have made fine Feathergale Knights, if circumstances were different. But your lives’ paths, your station … and your narrow vision, all weigh in the balance. I have a proposal for you. To the east and into the hills lies the so-called Sacred Stone Monastery. Those reclusive monks harbor, I believe, great evil, perhaps even association with the Cult of the Black Earth — their very name reeks of their bound and stifled souls. Go there. See what you find. If there is evil, dash it upon the very stones they claim for their symbol, and mark yourselves champions for liberty . Do this for me, and I will know you are no threat to the freedom of my people, or the empowering of each individual in the realm. Do this for me, and you will be greatly rewarded.
Nala asks more about what Thurl is asking us to do. William senses that the party is a weapon being pointed at a target. He is more interested in the fate of the target than the party’s welfare. Thurl offers some rations for the trip. They go with Savra to collect the rations and head out. Thurl sees them to the gate and wishes them well.
The journey towards the river is quiet at first. The party discussed their impressions of strangeness about the tower.
Shortly past the Shallow Graves, walking through the grasslands the party feels another tremor hit. This is different from the tremors they have been feeling lately. The earth upslope is breaking apart and starting to roll down hill. Abruptly, a giant insect erupts from the ground. Its long antenna twitching, hook-like limbs clawing out the dirt. The first Ankheg moves to attack as a second and third Ankheg emerge from the ground. Spells and arrows fly, weapons ring out, acid spews, but the fate of the Ankheg is set as one by one they go down. (The GM weeps as the final Ankheg misses his cool bite attack).
The party moves on and as it is getting dark they choose to camp for the night rather than press on toward the keep. Refreshed and unmolested overnight the group awakes. They feel stronger and more competent. After wondering at their own changes, they notice a wolf curled up on William’s bedroll.
Shortly after breaking breakfast they arrive at the gates of Riverguard Keep. They are questioned rather rudely by the guard. William explains that they merely want to go up-river and if they want proof of their good deeds, he can walk out and see the three giant insects that they killed last night. Faith offers to feed any in need and is snubbed. Moony takes over the conversation, reiterating that the group wants to catch a boat heading north. Eventually they pass into the castle yard and follow the guard to the great hall of the keep.
A large gentleman stands up from behind a table cluttered with papers and says “Who the devil are you?”
Game Notes
Sooner or later, the party is intended to defeat the Feathergale Knights.
This party declined, for the moment. Courteously.
Thurl Merosska
Which pulled me up short. I’d thought the confrontation on the spire-top was the moment that bloodletting would occur — the FKs were scary, but not that scary — but the party sort of knuckled forehead and told Thurl they’d be happy to go check out Sacred Stone Monastery.
I didn’t want to just start a melee from the FKs’ side — it made no sense as set up (especially as Thurl really was pointing them as a gun toward the Black Earth cult), and would feel very railroady.
Okay, fine … but … what about Milestone Leveling?
They hadn’t really taken down Feathergale Spire … though they had engaged with it a lot and learned from it. But Rivergard Keep was optimized for Level 4. I didn’t want the party wiped out (in my own way I was as paranoid about a TPK as the players), and I suspected it was a location that would not be easily escaped from if they got into a fight. (An interesting concern, given what happened the next session.)
So … I let them ding up to 4th Level. I’m still not sure if that was a mistake or not, but it wasn’t the last I made, certainly.
Bits and Bobs
All the cults have hand gestures that are used to signal who they are and, outside their strongholds, maybe signal others of their kind. These gestures (which sort of echo the cult symbols) are sometimes labeled in the Campaign As Written (CAW) as a way to prove bona fides when going into someplace secure.
But the number of opportunities to point out someone is doing something with their hands, without really lampshading it, are pretty limited. I tried, but it wasn’t something the party ever picked up on.
The creepy initiate at the window muttering about wanting to be free was, by the bye, doing more scarifying. But his back was turned, so Moony couldn’t see it.
I have no idea what Faith was dreaming about. A Manticore? Could be.
Poor Savra. She’s cut herself off from home, but still misses it. She wants to be Thurl’s indispensable lieutenant, but he just uses her. She meets some cool new people who seem to want to be friends, and then they turn down her offer to join her exclusive club. No wonder she’s crying during Moony’s search of the tower.
Faith’s player had her studiously praying every morning. Just a bit of character color … that I was able to do a very creepy thing with down the line …
Ankheg!
Hey, we got a hit on the Random Encounter Table for this level, and, hey, it was Ankhegs. Coolness! Even if they got taken down far faster than I expected (a common theme through the entire campaign).
The entrance into Rivergard Keep was much less friendly than that into Feathergale Spire, and the wrap-up on their being presented to Jolliver and having him snap out, “Who the devil are you?” was fun. I had no idea what the party was going to do the next time, but I suspected they’d be coming to blows with the pirate lord of Rivergard Keep.
The Landing Page
It was around this time that I started crafting a Roll20 landing page for the campaign — a map where all the players would land when they signed in each game before I shifted attention to the actual campaign map. I mean, sure, you can have the “campaign book cover” landing page as provided in Roll20, but it’s a scosh busy and also a snapshot from a moment of time in the campaign.
What I had evolved over time, but its elements included:
The campaign name
A cute campaign logo
The session number and day number of the session
The phase of the moon (which the druid asked for at one point)
A tableau of the player character tokens
A tableau (where it could be done without spoilers) of tokens of figures they were likely to (re)meet the next session
A tableau of tokens of prominent enemies they had encountered, with a note as to their status.
A list of outstanding questions (i.e., clues I had dropped, things they had thought might need more investigation, etc.), as a reminder of what they had been focused on last time (or what I wanted them to focus on this time). Some of it was sometimes a bit tongue in cheek. This list also showed up in the campaign page in Roll20.
A map of the Dessarin Valley, showing where they were (eventually maps of the dungeons they were in, with unexplored areas masked, showing where they were), as a reminder.
Once they got into the Temples and Nodes, a “band tour” listing of the places they had explored.
I eventually set up an amusing (to me, at least) layout as if this was all being done as a Quinn Martin production series intro:.
ELEMENTARY … a Hill-Consortium Production … Starring … [player character tokens] … with Guest Stars … [various likely folk they would encounter, no spoilers] … Special Guest Star … [usually the main baddie I expected them to face, no spoilers]. Tonight’s episode … [episode title].
To avoid spoilers, I crafted a series of “question mark” tokens I could fill in.
Yeah, it’s not the prettiest thing, and it sort of grew like Topsy, but it served my purposes.
You can google Roll20 landing page and actually get a lot of cool examples (and some templates for sale from enterprising entrepreneurs).
There are a number of rules that deal with the basic question of “How do I get past that guy?” Note that all the below are caveated by class or racial powers that may say otherwise. Monks and rogues and some smaller creatures get special abilities to do some of this stuff.
Note also that if you use any of these, you still run the risk of an Attack of Opportunityif, once past, you continue running beyond someone’s reach.
Also, if the either of the opponents here is one of those that does damage to a melee attacker “within five feet,” I would as DM incur that penalty to these maneuvers as well (even if they are not, strictly speaking, melee attacks). In other words, if you are shoving, shoving past, or even tumbling around that flaming guy, you’re going to get burned (and if it’s the flaming guy trying to move through, the target’s going to get burned, regardless of whether the attempt was successful).
The Magic of the Five Foot Square
Guys in a couple of five foot squares
Okay, if you are doing Theater of the Mind, more power to you. I run on a 5-foot square grid.
Obviously a Medium creature (as most players and many opponents are) does not fill the entire square, like some sort of gelatinous cube. Instead, the square represents what war-gamers would call a “zone of control.” A player in a 5-foot square can be anywhere (and, in a sort of quantum fashion, everywhere) within it. Even if you are leaning waaaaaaaay over to one side to shoot arrows at that goblin behind partial cover, you are still blocking that orc from traipsing through the other side of your 5-foot square.
The basic rules of 5e (and D&D in general) is that, with some identified exceptions and weird edge cases, opposed beings cannot occupy the same 5-foot square. So, other than slaying that enemy in your way, how can you get past them?
Here is a summary of the ideas spelled out below …
If you are _____ than your opponent …
… then consider _____.
Bigger
Overrunning
Bigger (a lot) or Smaller (a lot)
Moving Through
Stronger
Shoving, Shoving Aside, or Overrunning
More Agile
Tumbling Past
Moving Through
You can move through a hostile creature’s space only if the creature is at least two sizes larger or smaller than you. Remember that, even in those cases, another creature’s space is Difficult Terrain for you.
Cost: Difficult Terrain movement.
Shoving
There are a couple of possibilities here — a bog-normal Shove attack, or an optional Shove Aside.
Note that in neither case do you need to worry about “Difficult Terrain” as you are never deemed to be in the same square as the enemy (don’t think about it too hard).
If we think of You (Y) doing one of these attacks against the Enemy (E), here is where they would end up with a Shove (S) or an (optional) Shove Aside (A)
S S S
A E A
Y
Shove
You can use a Shove as an attack in the round, pushing the target away from you 5 feet (think of the offensive line in a football game). Once you push them away, you can step into their space and then beyond.
For a Shove, the target can’t be more than one size larger. You as the shover make a Strength (Athletics) roll vs. their (choice of) Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics).
You could also knock them Prone with a Shove attack but that doesn’t clear out the space for you to move through.
Cost: One Attack.
Shove Aside
This is an Optional Rule on DMG 272: Rather than using a Shove to move someone back (or Prone), you use Shove to move them to the side.
Essentially, this is a more difficult Shove attack, with the same skill comparison, so you as the shover roll at Disadvantage. If successful, the opponent is shoved 5 feet to the side, meaning you can move through their square at no additional movement penalty.
As a DM, the added difficulty seems quite fair and I wouldn’t hesitate to allow this optional rule.
Cost: One Attack.
Tumbling Past
This is an optional rule, so check with your DM first. DMs, this can provide color, but it can also make your sneaky rogue types (who probably have a high DEX) a lot more dangerous.
This can be found in the DMG, page 272: As an Action or Bonus Action, you do a Dexterity (Acrobatics) vs Dexterity (Acrobatics) check; if you win, you can move through the hostile creature’s space (as difficult terrain).
There’s no specific penalty for failure here — except that you’ve burned an Action or Bonus Action, successful or not.
Costs: Action or Bonus Action; Difficult Terrain movement.
Overrunning
Yet another optional rule, on DMG page 272, this is basically just shoving your way past the opponent (or using your Strength to do a Move Through).
As an Action or Bonus Action, you roll a Strength (Athletics) check vs the defender’s Strength (Athletics). You are at Advantage if of a larger size, or Disadvantage if of a smaller size. If successful, you can move through the square (as Difficult terrain).
Cost: Action or Bonus Action; Difficult Terrain movement
But what about Jumping Over them?
The Jumping rules really don’t allow this. Or don’t work well with it.
First, High Jumps don’t help, since they are only up-and-down, according to the rules. (Yes, Olympic High Jumps involve some horizontal distance, though often not much, I don’t think anyone is envisioning jumping backwards over an orc and then landing on their own back on a huge fluffy pad.)
Second — this is not an easy thing to do. Even under highly controlled non-combat situations.
You just can’t jump high enough on a Long Jump to reliably get over an opponent’s head. The height you achieve on a Long Jump, with a successful Strength (Athletics) check vs DC10, is (distance/4) feet; assuming the space a Medium creature controls space is not just 5×5, but 5x5x5, you would need a distance jumped of 20 feet (20/4=5) to get past them (i.e., with a Running Long Jump, that means you’d need a STR of 20).
Magic might help: a Jump spell (or Ring of Jumping) triples your jumping distance, thus your someone with a STR of, say 16, would theoretically be able to Jump 48 feet, clearing 12 feet high …
… although that the irritating Jumping rules still, even with a spell, restrict your Jumping distance to your Speed. If your speed is 30, you can only jump 30 feet (or 20 if you are doing a Running Long Jump that takes a 10 foot run-up). That still lets you clear that 5 foot height (20/4), and it means you only need a Strength 10 to (barely) jump over an opponent. (Speed magic would help here even more.)
That said … is a 5 foot height being the vertical control zone actually a real thing? Eh … given that D&D tends to be a bit vertically challenged in terms of accommodating things that are above ground level, you could argue it for most Medium characters (esp. as weapons and armor aren’t generally pointed at / oriented toward / limber regarding upward attacks). If you remember the Golden Rule that D&D is not a physics simulator (it’s not even a combat simulator), it kinda-sorta works fine.
Since you would be flying over the enemy’s head, there is no Difficult Terrain consideration. Thank goodness for that.
Taller creatures will tend to be Large in Size, and thus fill up (or control) a 10-foot square space (a lot more to jump over), but even if they don’t, maybe the best way to handle it is with a higher DC on that Strength (Athletics) check (DM discretion).
What does happen if that Strength (Athletics) check to jump over something fails? In theory, just as with a non-opponent Long Jump, the jump fails at that point, and you end up, probably Prone, in the square in front of the enemy you tried to jump over. But we’ll leave those esoterica as an exercise for the student.
Sliding past/under, or jumping up-over, a bad guy is a pretty bad-ass cool move, the sort of thing that will have characters (or their players) bragging about over beers for months or years to come.
Which means, on an exceptional basis (e.g., in a boss fight) the DM should probably be willing to bend the rules at least a bit to allow such an attempt, even of the numbers don’t quite work out. The rules are there to let you know what should normally work and what normally shouldn’t. But ultimately, that judgment belongs to the DM — and a balls-to-the-wall unexpected heroic attempt … should get at least a bit of latitude.
I grew up in the era where you always had a mage in the party who took Detect Magic to spot the glowy magic items, and then Identify to suss out what it is.
5e has simplified this a great deal, though much of the info is in the DMG (p. 136). There are several ways of getting at whether an item has magical properties and, if so, what they are:
As the DMG says, the fastest and easiest way to reveal an item’s properties is with the Identify spell. Note that Identify can be done as a Ritual, so any wizard, bard, or cleric of divination can do it, taking 10 minutes and not burning a spell slot. If you don’t know the spell, then 10gp will hire someone (in an appropriate locale) to cast it for you.
You can also focus on a magic item you are in physical contact with during a Short Rest. I usually require the characters to sort of wield the item more or less like they would — wear the boots, hold ring in your hand, wave the sword around a bit. At the end of the rest, you have learned the item’s properties and how to invoke them.
You can also try to do an Intelligence (Arcana) check to see if something about the object can identify it (“The elves often put wings on the leather of Boots of Flying” or “That is the symbol for the Orcish God of Fire” or “Rings that chime with that particular note are most likely magic, from the lost realm of Midoria”). This is much quicker than the Short Rest option, but likely less complete. (Some suggestions on how this might work.)
A little taste of a potion will tell the taster what it does, and probably won’t kill them.
Alternately, you can guess from clues on the item itself, or can just start wielding it and figure out how it works.
Attunement
Some magical items require more than just identification and working instructions to invoke its magical powers. Instead, they are of sufficient power that they require a mystical bond be created between the wielder and the item called Attunement.
If an item requires this, it is listed with the item. Until such an item is Attuned, its magical properties do not manifest (an unattuned +3 Vorpal Sword is just a very cool looking normal sword in combat). Note that some items can have a prerequisite (e.g., class, race) for Attunement.
Attunement takes an additional ShortRest (beyond the initial identification), in physical contact and focusing on the item. Practice use of or meditation over the item might be helpful here. At the end of the rest, “the creature gains an intuitive understanding of how to activate any magical properties of the item, including any necessary command words.” More complex or powerful items may require additional Short Rests or presentation of circumstances where an ability manifests. (“You suddenly feel no fear of the flames, realizing they are not harming you but humming softly.”)
An item can be attuned to only one person at a time, and a person can only attune to three unique items at a time.
Attunement ends if prerequisites are no longer met, if the item is over 100 feet away for at least 24 hours, if the owner dies, or if another creature attunes to the item. You can also voluntarily drop an attunement with another Short Rest.
Spell-casting items
Items that allow spells to be cast are cast at the lowest possible spell and caster level, don’t expend any spell slots, and require no components (unless otherwise specified). Rules for range, casting time, duration, and concentration apply (again, unless otherwise specified).
For items that depend on the user’s spellcasting ability, if you don’t actually have a native spellcasting ability (e.g., a Rogue with Use Magic Device), the ability modifier is +0 but your Proficiency bonus does apply.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
GM Recap
Dwarf handout
Session 6 (Day 14): An inspection of the chamber found the dwarf statue to be the broken-and-reassembled remains of a petrified dwarf, with a note. A thin circle of gravel seemed to hold offerings to the statue–coins, gems, and a dagger (Reszur), the last of which Moony picked up.
A dire inscription
Cries for water led the team to the room to the west, where they found a room with an imposing black monolith of stone (with a “Displease Not the Delvers” inscription). They also found their pickle-making friend Grund, who insisted they had to leave and was willing to attack them to make it happen.
Grund was subdued, and under a pile of rocks, an 11yo boy, Braelen Hatherhand. Moments after freeing Braelen, who told them about the Believers, they were attacked by the fierce Bringers of Woe, dudes in leather armor, Symbol of the Black Earth on their chest, cloaks, and stone masks.
Choosing to press on, the party encountered the elderly Baragustas Harbuckler, a Believer standing guard at the Chamber of Moving Stones. He begged them not to disturb or anger the Delvers.
Module’s provided image for the Tomb of Moving Stones
In the massive chamber, the party found stone tables with skeletons on them, a room full rocks that floated when you stomp hard on the ground next to them, and an Earth Priest named Larrakh that nearly killed everyone before he fled.
The party recovered for a couple of hours, took a tunnel from the chamber to Waelvur’s Wagonworks, then backtracked to Mellikho Stoneworks, where they were greeted with wonderment and open arms.
Player Recap
Stepping into the large room with the statue of a Dwarf. There is a wooden frame supporting the statue and it looks like some parts have broken off. There is a circle of gravel around the statue. Within it there are coins, a dagger, and other items. There is a piece of paper stuck to the wooden frame. It says “Petrified Ironstar(?) dwarf, found 1459 DR in Red Larch West Quarry in broken condition.”
It is currently 1491. The tributes look newer, though the statue is more dusty. Ironstar is a tribe of dwarves. On closer examination, the dwarf looks like it was turned to stone and later pieced together. William and Faith both toss a copper inside the circle. Other than a gentle clink, nothing happens. Moony, reaches in and attempts to remove the dagger. The dagger comes free easily and Moony examines it further. The name (?) “Reszur” is graven on the dagger’s pommel. It is decorated with star motifs and a grip of night-blue leather. Moony notices dried blood coating the blade.
While investigating the left-hand door, Moony and William hear a noise. There are sounds coming from the opposite door. “Water please,” After checking for traps, Moony opens the door and moves in. There is a pillar in the room, it is engraved with the “Displease Not the Delvers”.
Grund steps out from behind the pillar. He recognizes Moony and tells him that he does not belong. Moony tries to bluff, but misses on the password. William tries “pickles” but also is incorrect. Grund grabs a club and rushes forward. The group decides to take Grund but not kill the simple giant. The group quickly subdues Grund and Nala manacles him.
From the pile of rubble, is a young boy, Braelen, about 11 years old. He asks for water which Faith gives him. I disobeyed my father and I didn’t deliver the message to Ilmeth the wagon master, so I am being punished. He talks about the Believers. Those that believe in the Delvers, the ones who came before. They make the stones move and my dad and the others elders interpret them. They keep us safe.
William notices some levers and chains beside the door. Moony goes to investigate. After some more questions, the child asks if he can leave. The group agrees and Moony asks about the way out. It is just down the tunnel off of the main cavern. William asks Braelen for the password: “A believer approaches.” They send him off with the other cloak, a waterskin, and some crumblecake.
There is a high pitched scream coming from the doorway the kid had just gone down. “We are the bringers of woe. We are here to satisfy your curiosity.” Faith raises her hands and thunder rolls from her, killing several and pushing their bodies back. Moony calls out as more come from the other door. The cultists are grunting and makes angry sounds. The group splits taking on the two groups. The neo-experimental religionists are focusing on the lightly armored party members, while the group takes down all comers. The cultists all have stone masks, leather armor and dark cloaks.
The party patches themselves up as best they can and moves to the unexplored door leaving the room with the Dwarf statue. Moony and William add a few things to their pockets. Moony hears a whistle on the other side. There is a passage illuminated by a lantern. Moony surprises an old man, Baragustas, whittling. He quakes in fear of Moony. The old man is a “Believer” watching the chamber. Faith enters and convinces him that they are not going to hurt him. Moony ties him up while he natters on about the Delvers. They move the stones when no one is not around. The Earth Priest interprets the movements. There have been dire portents of late. William asks if there is anyone in the chamber. He is uncertain. The priest may be in the chamber or others may have enter from the other entrance.
Going through to the “Chamber” they discover a large room with sarcophagus and many large stones. There are a couple of more floating stones. As Moony passes between two floating stones, they settle gently to the ground. The first sarcophagus turns out to be a stone table and has a skeleton resting on top of it. The chest has been crushed. Faith sees a figure rushing towards a stone table on the south side of the room and racing up the wall. He is wearing what appears to be stone armor and crystal glaive.
Faith and Nala go down. William moves up to stabilize Faith. Larrakh comes down off the wall and yells “Silly fools, Ogremoch will consume your souls and drag you to the depths of the earth.” Then he smacks William unconscious. Theran and Moony bravely continue the fight. After a large hit from the magic missile wand, “Black Earth take you!” and starts to run away. There is a large burst of speed and he leaves through a door on the far side. Theran stabilizes William. An hour later Faith and William regain consciousness. Faith heals Nala and the wounded party members take a short rest to regain some hit points.
Looking around the party discovers that the stones elevate when you stomp your foot near them. They also note that the stones tables are worn and the skeletons all have blunt trauma injuries. Moony discovers the hidden door the Larrakh left through. The door leads to a rough hewn tunnel that winds around. There is a choke point in the tunnel with debris and a canvas stretched across the tunnel. Past that debris looking back, the painting on the canvas and the fallen rock, make it look like a total cave-in. Past there, the party emerges into a shed in the wheel-wright’s yard. Someone across the yard spots them and calls out for the Master Waelver.
The party pulls back into the tunnels and heads towards the other exit to the North. This brings them back to the Mellikho Stoneworks. The passage ends in a wooden door and a container of sand holding a few torches. There is the sound of activity around the door, while there is no one in the immediate vicinity. Moony chooses to come out of the door and exclaims we are out of the hole at last. Nala joins him and also shields her eyes from the sun. The others follow them out into the sun. Albaeri Mellikho comes across the quarry, greeting them warmly.
Game Notes
Whoosh. A lot happens here. If “The Cave of the Necromancer” was an intro to dungeoning, “The Tomb of Moving Stones” is the next grade up, with traps, drama, multiple combats, and an opponent who outclasses the group (but who loses to Action Economy, as one does, every time).
I ended up rushing through the very ending, because the session ran long. That just sometimes happens. I started off the following game with some details I should have established at the end of this one.
I created a handout for the inscription on the statue, just because I wanted them to be able to easily reference it. That was probably overkill, especially as the players started making noises about how they might want to start investigating the West Quarry, which would be quite the dead end. I decided that the West Quarry had flooded a while back, so as to forestall any further investigation in that area, since it really didn’t matter overall.
Well, it matters to the extent that it (and the whole Tomb) all ties into the history of the Besilmer Kingdom of Dwarves five thousand years ago — but that really doesn’t get played up yet. The DM here, though, should read the background notes for the campaign and around this dungeon carefully to be aware of, and hint at, those multiple layers of history, which will pay off later.
Poor little Braelen
The kid being punished, Braelen, was kind of a weird one-off — look how awful the cultists are! — but I played with him in a couple of ways. First, I decided to spook the party into thinking they’d sent him off into the hands of cultists who’d killed him immediately (the scream) (Actually, they just cuffed him hard). Then when the party followed up later back in town, I was able to turn his home into the deeply abusive atmosphere that some of the party members decided to do something about in later episodes, with Faith eventually arranging for the kid to be fostered off in Waterdeep, resonating with her own life experience.
Did all this advance the overall campaign plot? Nope. But it was good character time, something that some of the players decided to care about, and I find that sort of thing is the mortar that holds the walls of the story together.
Ditto, in its own way, for Grund. You can play him as a looming menace, but I’d made the half-witted guy likable, with his pickle business and fascination for the Tabaxi in the group. So when they met him again in the Tomb, he was clearly torn between Important Job he’d been given and not wanting to hurt “Mister Kitty.”
As a result, he survived … and would circle back into the campaign later.
The attack by the Believer thug squad spanned two rooms, which gave the party some lessons on both splitting forces and line of sight. Learning occurred!
Between the Kid and the Old Dude standing guard (Baragustas — whom I think had not been mentioned elsewhere, so, hey, yet another denizen for Red Larch and another journal entry to build!), the party by this time had a pretty good idea of the conspiracy.
Larrakh, the Black Earth Priest
They were not ready for the Earth Priest, Larrakh, who was smart enough to (a) ambush them, and (b) do it spider-climbed up on the wall so that they couldn’t stab him. The party was also split up, searching the room, and the Roll20 dynamic lighting made it much easier for people to be unsure what was going on elsewhere in the room.
Being only 2nd Level, we had a couple of party members go down pretty hard (I like the 5e Death Save mechanic, which folk were introduced to here, much to their shock), at which point Larrakh got cocky and came down from the wall. Some lucky attacks from the rest of the party, and it was Dash + Expeditious Retreat time for Larrakh.
Which on one level was a bit of as problem, as the book mentions the possibility of his escape, but not what it means, story-wise (an issue that comes up with other villains all the way down the line). But it was also an opportunity for some shenanigans to be inserted later on, so, um, yay?
Being so man-handled by Larrakh came as something of trauma to the party. It made them a bit gun-shy for some time to come.
Larrakh also gave a shout-out to “Ogremoch,” someone they hadn’t heard of before … and so began building the lore of the Black Earth.
(Side note: the module, includes a bunch of imagery for various bad guy classes, but it also frames those drawings as “extreme” versions that were discussed and kinda-sorta rejected, without giving more reasonable alternatives.)
By the end of the scenario, the secrets of the Believers have been torn off the hinges. It’s all over, right?
By no means.
Resting
So, in the Real World, (a) injuries can take days, weeks, months to heal, and (2) we don’t have healing magic so who knows how that works?
D&D 5e’s current rules on Short Rests (1 hour, spend hit dice to regain HP) and Long Rests (6/8 hours, spells regained, all HP regained) are weird on one level (The Real World Doesn’t Work That Way!), but also convenient. HP are, of course, about more than bodily integrity — morale, exhaustion, mental fatigue, all of these play a role (which is why HP goes up when you level). The problem with accurate healing times is that they are simply Not Fun, unless you want to take weeks-long time outs in the campaign. Does 5e make it too easy to heal up? Mmmmaybe, but it also keeps the healing process from getting too much in the way of the story.
The problem is, players want to do it at the darnedest times.
Granted that they didn’t know this was the final chamber, and that they also wanted to wait for a couple of party members to regain consciousness. If they decided to then Rest, would they really really do it in the Spooky Chamber of Moving Stones? Even if they hunkered off to one side in case Larrakh came back?
Seems unlikely, but “when and where and how do we Short/Long Rest?” is a constant issue. Allowing people to rest willy-nilly makes resource consumption meaningless, and is narratively irritating. But restricting rest can be frustrating unless the players agree that it’s reasonable. The game in general tries to discourage people from resting in dangerous places (like the Keeps, the Temples, etc.), but generally does so by throwing Random Encounters at them, which is the worst (most time-consuming) way of doing so. I struggled with this the whole game.
Passwords
All through this campaign, there is the possibility of the party getting past guards and getting access to places by use of passwords and hand signs.
Which is cool and awesome and provides a way to advance that doesn’t involve steel and bloodletting.
Two problems:
First, there’s really no opportunity for the party to figure this out — to learn what the passwords are or even to reasonably suss them out. Even being a somewhat liberal DM who would have been happy for folk to do such a thing, and be willing to stretch it to reasonable pass-phrase alternatives … there was really nothing for the players to work from.
Which meant, second, that the party felt little motivation to take that approach (not helped by not really having a Face Man character). And, honestly, the advantage the module provides for knowing the Secret Words is relatively minimal.
It just feels like a lost opportunity in storytelling.
Bits and Bobs
Crumblecake
The party leaned into crumblecake. That I made up some images of it, and that NPCs talked about it all the time, got people bringing it up at every drop of a hat — including giving some to the half-starved Braelen.
My biggest regret from all this was that this dungeon has a lovely hallway trap setup that the party completely bypassed. I eventually had them discover it when they went back into the complex to search out the northern exit.
Why is Albaeri — one of the more nervous of the Believer leadership — greeting them with open arms as they exit the Tomb into her ? Ah, we will see next time.
So, as an example, the 6-foot tall Fighter with a Strength of 16 (+3 Bonus) can:
Do a Running Long Jump of 16 feet forward (clearing a 4 foot high obstacle)
Do a Standing Long Jump of 8 feet forward (clearing a 2 foot high obstacle)
Do a Running High Jump of 6 feet high (with a reach of up to 9 feet)
Do a Standing High Jump of 3 feet high (with a reach of up to 6 feet)
If you land in difficult terrain, you need a DC10 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check to not fall down prone.
You can extend your arms half your height above yourself during the jump. Thus, you can reach above you a distance equal to the (height of the jump ) + (1½ times your height). (See, putting a height value on your character sheet finally means something!)
Movement and Jumping
The RAW rule is, your jump in feet (up or across) counts against your Movement. That implies that if you have a Speed of 30, and you want to try and long jump 20 feet, you can only move 10 feet beforehand. (Jumps can’t split across turns.)
For example, the Jump spell or a Ring of Jumping lets you triple your Jump — so the Fighter described above would get a Running Long Jump of (16×3=) 48 feet, right? Nope. If their Speed is only 30, they can only Jump that far (or less, given the 10 foot lead-up to a Running Long Jump).
This limitation can be extended, though, through:
Speed magic (e.g., Haste, which doubles your Speed)
The Dash action (which effectively doubles your Speed for the turn).
There are cases with spells where it is possible to jump higher than 10 feet, which raises the question as to whether you then take damage upon landing again.
People can disagree, but I’d be inclined to say no, especially as magic is involved: if your (magically-enhanced) muscles can propel you upwards 20 feet, they can absorb the (same) shock in landing after returning to the ground.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
GM Recap
Session 5 (Day 14): Faith‘s sleep is disturbed by dream where she is being pressed into the ground by her sins and failures. The next day dawns warm and humid. After some logistical scurrying, the party gets swept up into a new problem — a sink hole twenty feet across at an intersection that has swallowed some kids and an adult. Their efforts to mount a rescue are hampered by some of the town’s leading citizens — Albaeri Mellikho, Ilmeth Waelver, Ulhro Luruth — who seem to want nobody going down the hole, certainly none of the “strangers,” and who make cryptic comments about the “Delvers” who keep the town safe.
Fending off their efforts, along with Elak Dornen, who brings along the constables deputies, the party goes in (sending the people who have fallen in back to the surface). They find themselves in a large, mined chamber, from which leads a passage and a stone door, beside which are two hooded cloaks and a water skin. Going through the door, they come to an intersection, which two half-open doors decorated with a relief of dwarvish warriors.
The Symbol of the Black Earth
They go down the left passage, and find a small room with three rat-eaten corpses. Disposing of the giant rats, they think two of the bodies might be the missing farmers. All three bodies had a mystic symbol carved in their foreheads.
The next room had a stone floating in a magical zero-gravity field in the center of the room.
The room after that was a large one, in the center of which was a statue of a dwarf.
Player Recap
Faith has a bad dream: Is it a dream? You feel a great weight on you, lying on your cold, cold, bed, like someone has stacked stones on your body, the weight of your sins, the disappointment of your elders. There is danger approaching — but are you safer trying to break free and run, or lie still and take your punishment? Faith chooses redemption through prayer and penance. That is when she falls out of bed. Moony “We aren’t on a ship, Faith, you shouldn’t be rolling out of bed if the room isn’t moving” Faith “Sometimes the world rolls.” Moony returns to sleep and Faith spends some time praying before going back to bed.
The Next Day: The air feels muggy after the storm. Breakfast is simple, crumble cake and small beer. After packing some supplies and crumble cake, the group stops by the Ironhead Arms to check out the wares and stock up on arrows. Nala goes to Haeleeya’s to see about a net for the drift globe.
As William hitches up Buttercup to the wagon, screams are coming from the East side of town. The party races to the sounds. There is a large sink-hole. Several kids and a woman have slid into the hole. Albaeri and Ulhro the Tanner are trying to get people to back away from the edge and yelling that this is a town matter. Faith lights her rope and tries to see into the hole. Unfortunately, the edge crumbles as she approaches and she slides in. William arrives with the wagon and Nala climbs up on the cart to get a better view. The hole is at least 20′ deep.
Faith finds four kids and the mother at the bottom of the hole along with a broken cart and some mounds of dirt. They are in a large chamber. Everyone is okay. The mom asks if Faith is there to help get them out. This is not a natural cavern. Faith explores while the kids and mom scream, afraid that she will leave them to die. She finds finds a locked door and a corridor to the north.
Meanwhile up at ground level. Moony follows Ulhro Luruth who runs down to #12 Elak Dornen. Ulhro is panicked. “I’m afraid it will disturb the Delvers” Elak “I’m not worried about the Delvers, I’m concerned about the outsiders.” Back at the hole, William appears to Kaylessa, to tell the crowd that we are there to help. She encourages us to save the kids. Ulhro and Albaeri keep pushing to keep this as town affair. Finally, Kaylessa says “You don’t speak for the people of this town.” About then Lymmura arrives and asks about the children screaming. Albaeri tries to send her away too. The crowd is not supporting the Fancy Boys Club.
William uses the rope to descend into the hole. Faith helps him to secure the rope to Tsali, the eldest child. Nala spreads out near the lip of the hole to help lift Sally over the edge. The edge crumbles and she ends up dangling slightly before the crowd pulls her back. The remaining children and mother make it safely out of the cavern.
Moony quietly follows Elak as he trots to the butcher shop. Moony overhears Elak yelling at Jalessa. She is giving as good as she gets. Harburk is not at your beck and call. Eventually, several constables come out head to the commotion. Back at the sinkhole. Ulhro knocks on the barber’s door.
Theren slips into the cavern. The discussion continues above. Theren uses prestidigitation to have a sea shanty, Moony doesn’t hear it, but Nala does. She convinces Elak that she will try to get her friends to leave the hole. Theren and adds the smell of rotten flesh to the illusion. William calls up to Nala, “Do you remember the circus? I think you should see what they are up to.” Nala, thinking that there are undead there, pulls the rope from Moony and “Falls” into the hole. Moony “Oh No!” He hands the rope to Elak, “What is this?” “It’s a rope. Don’t you have ropes in Red Larch? No wonder people are always falling in holes.”
Elak yells at the deputy to clear everyone out of sink hole. Deputy yells back “What do you want me to do? Go in the hole? Can you smell that?” Moony – “Yes, smells like something dead, probably zombies and unicorns.” Elak visible blanches at the mention of zombies. With that Moony scrambles down the side of the hole. The deputy calls to him from above. “Here now, Mr. Cat, please don’t do anything that causes more of the town to collapse. I’ll fetch Harburk and bring him back as soon as possible.”
While the groups decide what to do next. Moony finds some cloaks and water skins near the door down below. They look fresh, not dusty. The cavern looks like it was an very old mine. The floor is smooth and the walls have been worked. Moony opened the locked door and the group slowly moves down a hall with dressed walls. Two doors with reliefs of stern dwarves across the hall from each other. Doors are ajar. While the images are old and stylized, there is no writing or hidden secrets engraved in the panels.
Past the left door, there is a hall. Soon the smell of rotting flesh. It gets stronger as they move deeper into the mines. The tunnel opens up into a square room with three rotting bodies and a couple of giant rats gnawing on the bodies. Moony takes out the first rat and Nala finishes the second. And that is when the remaining rats swarm. They are quickly dispatched. The bodies look like they are a few weeks old. The skins are tan. The male body look a bit like Farmer Jowen, Senior. Something has been carved into their foreheads.
Continuing down the tunnel to the next room. There is a floating rock in the middle of the room. As Moony approaches the rock it is like he stepped into thin air, struggles, and land on the other side of the rock. His passage clips the rock which moves a few inches. They determine that there is a zone in the middle of the room that causes things to float. Faith tests it out and floats to the top of the room and plays around a bit. When the rock is pushed out of the zone it hits the floor.
Past the room with the rock, the hall ends in a door. Moony slowly pulls the door open and peeks inside. There is a statue of a dwarf in the center of a large room.
Fancy boys club: Albaeri, Ulhro, Elak, Ilmeth
Game Notes
After last time’s gab-fest enough events fall together to head toward the climax of the low-level Red Larch narrative: the Tomb of Moving Stones. Not only does this tie together a bunch of threads, but it kickstarts the players toward the next phase of the game, dealing with the Haunted Keeps.
The Sink Hole
The Sink Hole is hidden back in Chapter 6, in the “If your players are doing Levels 1-3” material, but is also mentioned up in Chapter 3 around the Red Larch section. The Tomb of Moving Stones is also back in Chapter 6, as it’s designed for Level 2. Yes, once again, the PotA book organization is kind of nutty.
It only comes into play (only collapses) if the players don’t find the other entrances. They’d gotten scared off their one check of Albeiri’s stoneworks, and never really delved into Ilmeth’s place, so Sink Hole it was.
There is no actual location given for the Sink Hole in the book (sigh), just “in the middle of Red Larch.” Some resource I found mentioned that the Tomb fits decently (if at an odd angle) if placed so that the Sink Hole is at the first intersection coming down the Larch Path, near Gaelkur’s (#17), so that’s where I put it.
There is no token or art given to represent the Sink Hole, so I provided my own on the map.
The Believers
Something is rotten in the little burg of Red Larch
Red Larch doesn’t have a city government — even its constable is a part-time job — but like all communities it has an informal government of the old, the rich, and the otherwise respected and/or influential.
Partially intersecting with that circle of influence are the Believers. To me, this group is the first test, not just of the player characters, but of the GM: what kind of cult horror film are you playing here?
It’s really, really easy with PotA to chalk up all the followers of the different elemental cults as crazed fanatics, making human wave charges and willing to destroy the world just because their gods command it. In other words, an Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Bo-ring.
Generic Cultist icon, used as mooks for all the different elemental cults.
I mean, sure, some of that. Not every encounter is going to be nuanced. Howling Hatred Cultist 7 in the room isn’t going to start engaging his fellows or the players on a discourse about the meaning of existence and what constitutes a moral vs immoral act. He’s probably going to wave his dagger and charge the infidels in the name of Yan-C-Bin.
And, sure, the book pretty much leans on the “all the cultists are there because they believe this, that, and another extremist thing, and the cult has further brainwashed them until they live or die for their deity’s victory” thing. Indeed, between different elemental sites, all the lowest-level cultist mook icons are the same.
Still boring, if that’s the only note you play.
“The Conspirators” by William Strang (1859-1921)
The Believers (or the “Fancy Boy Club” as the players started to call them, though some of them are not at all fancy) are a challenge for the GM. Are they simply mustache-twirling lunatics, killing their fellows at the behest of the Black Earth Priest in their midst? I mean, you can have them be that, in order to get into and out of Red Larch as fast as you can.
Or you can make them fellow townsfolk in a community that gets a lot of outsiders passing through, but a strong core fellowship within. They discovered something wonderful (the Moving Stones), came up with an explanation that satisfied them, and are now being manipulated by the Black Earth, step by step, from one sin to the next, into increasing darkness. Some are aware of this. Some are unaware. Some think it’s worth it to protect their town … or maybe their position … or maybe just their family. Others worry about what they will be asked to do next. And still others … well, yeah, sure, they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.
Elak Dornen
Not considering how Elak Dornen is a different person than Marlandro Gaelkur or Ilmeth Waelvur or even Grund … and how each of them has their reasons for how they’ve gotten into (or pulled back from) the Believers … makes these guys cardboard cut-outs, and foretells a very, very long hack-and-slash campaign. Which, if that’s what you want, go for it.
I wanted a story.
So, here: the sink hole has opened up in the middle of a major intersection, and the Believers on the scene are in a panic — some because their crimes may be about to be revealed, some because the Tomb might be disturbed and the Delvers displeased, some because without the secret they feel they might lose influence, some a combination of those. Some try to wave the crowd back from fear, some invoke the solemnity of the power they wish to wield, some run for help from their fellows.
Characters, especially named characters, should be treated as individuals as much as possible. Sometimes that will be a stereotype — Elak Dornen as the one who considers himself the important (and smartest) person in town — but even just latching onto a trope can differentiate him from Albaeri, the other quarry owner but a very different person, at least as I played her.
Another thing I did — which, again, I did a lot of — was create in Roll20 and frequently linked to (including in the entries above) public-facing journal entries for each of the named characters and for the Believers as a whole” what the party knew, who in town seemed to know about them, who they were (links to their individual journal entries), what the party knew they’d done, etc.
This isn’t the Old Days. If you push lore and other information at players, don’t expect them to take notes and memorize it; this isn’t school. Stuff that characters in-world would remember because they’d speculate about it for hours around a campfire simply isn’t stuff that players will absorb unless they can easily retrieve it.
The Cult Symbols
The Elemental Evil symbols
This episode introduced the first of the four cult symbols, which would become increasingly important as the game continues. I had to find on the Internet or craft my own, of course, because the game did not include much in that way as things to use in art or tokens.
I ended up having special Roll20 handouts about each of the cults, including their symbols and significant people and places around them, to help the players keep track of what they knew and to add to the color text.
This also marked the episode I realized that the cult symbols — something spooky and secretive and not at all public — were published in every freaking corner of every campaign map. (Rolls eyes.) As far as I know, my players never noticed, but it bugged the hell out of me.
Cult Interrelationships
There’s a lot of info about the Cults in the PotA book, but, like everything else, it’s spread out in a lot of different places. Early days I built a diagram showing how the cults interrelated. I didn’t use it too long into the campaign — writing up stuff like this helps me internalize it — but feel free to use it or modify a copy to your own needs.
House Rules note
We learn by doing. The fight with the Giant Rats was the first case of a close melee/arrow combat in the game where the problem of “Do your friends block your ranged weapon shot?” The rules as written basically assume they do (or, rather, provide half-cover, AC+2). The party members (even when reminded it applied to the bad guys) didn’t think that made as much sense, so we borrowed from 3.5 rules for this house rule: and said that if the attacker can ignore the obstacle if it is closer to the attacker than to the target; i.e., if someone is right in front of you, it’s easy to shift in your 5-foot square to get a clean shot across the room; if someone is fighting right in front of your target, not so much (we also decided not to include the “you missed your target, did you hit your friend?” optional rule). (More discussion here.)
Bits and Bobs
I love dream entries, probably to a fault. Faith was suffering a crisis of conscience (or else getting a poke from a deity) for the killing she’d done.
Loved the bit of adding an illusory stench of dead bodies from the pit to discourage anyone coming down there.
Though nothing was provided in the game, I took time to draw a very nice hole on the map of Red Larch to show where the hole was.
Jalessa
I did have some favorites among the NPCs in Red Larch — Haeleeya, Kaylessa — but Jalessa was special. The owner of the butcher shop, and constable Harburk’s wife, she had a long-standing weariness about people calling her husband away from his real business (the shop), as well as a take-no-shit attitude about anyone who caused him or the town any grief. Even Elak Dornen can’t intimidate her. Always a favorite to bring back in when the party revisited the town, and she gets a fitting “reward” at the end of the campaign.
I was briefly afraid that the party was not going to go down the sink hole. The whole Tomb reveal would be a lot less interesting conveyed by townsfolk at the tavern that night. Fortunately, they went for it.
Small call-back, but having the bodies discovered down below include the missing farmers made all the improv work a couple of sessions earlier worth it. Though it did mean I had to go out and find some “dead body” dungeon map art to use, because despite being clearly mentioned in the text, the map has no such thing in that room. Sigh.
The session didn’t end on a cliffhanger as I prefer, but it was getting late and there was a melee just ahead, so it made sense to pause there.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
GM Recap
Session 3 (Day 11-13) “The Lord of Lance Rock”
The party attacked and quickly subdued the brigands in the woods, with rapid, deadly exchanges of arrow fire. Faith killed her first person, and did not feel good about it. One of the bandits got away. They also freed a bear that had been caged by them. The goods in the brigand’s cave were put in their (?) wagon and brought back to town.
Constable Harburk Tuthmarillar was happy to see them, and the results, but upset that there had been another disappearance, a young couple from an outlying farm. He also warned Nala and Theren that Elak Dornen, an Important Man, had filed a complaint about their shenanigans at Mellikho Stoneworks.
Moony and William saw their new horse put away under the care of Iraun Thelder, the stable master at the inn.
Theren and Nala interviewed Tandelle Ethburk, a merchant traveling south from Mirabar. She knew something about the The Mirabar Delegation, and rumors of their working to strengthen or expand the Lords Alliance. She’s trying to get to Waterdeep before them; she says they should be just a few days behind her.
Kaylessa Irkell offered to William to hire the party to seek out the fell magics, dire circumstances, and darksome influences up at Lance Rock.
The next day the party journeyed to the farm the Constable spoke of, the home of Joen Endrath and his wife, Mira. There were no signs of foul play, but the dinner meal had been interrupted, and a clay holy symbol to Chauntea was missing. The horse in the stable was also gone. Joen’s father came by, and milked and left with the cows.
The Necromancer’s Symbol
The party continue to journey to Lance Rock, where they found a sign warning of plague, signed by the “Lord of Lance Rock.” Ignoring the warning, they entered a cave complex, fighting a variety of skeletons and zombies, and ultimately confronting the “Lord,” Oreioth, whom they defeated amongst his warnings about the blurry Necromancer’s Sigil and an Eye that was watching their every move.
They exited the caves to camp out overnight and regain their rest and health. Ding! Level 2!
Player Recap
Looking for Bandits Down the Cairn Road: Following the road out of town we find two sites that have been abandoned for a while. Approaching the third site, we small meat cooking. The party pauses and Moony moves ahead quietly to check things out. There are 5 brigands and a cart with a bear in a cage. A mighty battle ensues where the group learns all about cover and difficult terrain. One brigand runs off and the bear remains alive in the cage.
Crumblecake
William gives the bear some crumble cake and calms it down enough to be released safely. In a cave near by the group finds some money, goods, cheap weapons, and a worn down draft horse to pull the cart. We head back to the constables office with the loot and bodies.
Theren and Nala head to the constable/butcher’s office to report. The shop is closed, but the constable is at his house next door. Harburk applauds their success. He doesn’t recognize any of the brigands bodies and calls his “boys” to take care of them. He does note that more strange things are happening. Out of town of Cairn road, a farmer and his wife have been reported missing. The ground tremors have the whole town spooked. There is also a general discussion of increase in strangers passing through that don’t look like merchants. Finally, he tells them that a complaint was lodged about the shenanigans at the quarry. It wasn’t Mellikho, but came from Dornen the other quarry owner.
Faith visits the temple and contemplates the life she took today. She feels the weight of her actions. Lymmora, the acolyte of Chauntea, comes out from the back room and asks if there is anything she needs. Faith turns her down. Lymmora continues and asks if Faith might stop by tomorrow to discuss something and then leaves Faith in peace with a blessing.
Kaylessa
William and Moony head to the Swinging Sword to see about stabling the horse, Buttercup, and storing the cart. The one-eyed stable man, Iraun Thelder, says they have room and will fix up a stall. There are a couple of horses belonging to guests and one at the end, Daisy, that looks like it belongs to the inn. Moony strikes up a conversation with Iraun who turns out to be a retired sell-sword. They chat about the customers, a hobbit merchant and a lady travelling with a caravan from the North. William chats with Kaylessa about their adventure and asks for some water to be heated for baths. The conversation moves onto the “Fell Magic” of Lance Rock.
Theran and Nala join the woman travelling from the North in hopes of getting information on the delegation. They exchange introductions. Tandelle is a merchant from Mirabar and looks to profit from the upcoming negotiations. When she left Triboar the delegation had recently arrived. She is hoping to make it to Waterdeep before the delegation arrived. Since they will likely stay a few days in Triboar, she expects the delegation to arrive at Red Larch in a few days.
Down on the Farm: William takes an opportunity at breakfast to talk with Kaylessa about looking into the “Fell Magic” coming from Lance Rock, South West of town. The “dark influences” are causing the bad thing and making everyone nervous. She is willing to pay. It has been several years that she has felt the danger rising.
Faith returns to the temple and Lymmora offers her support and words of wisdom about the trauma of the day before. She also asks if Faith is intending to stay in town long. Lymmora says that there might be someone in town who could use the group’s help. They can talk again later.
The group picks up Faith on their way out of town. With Buttercup pulling the wagon, they follow the constable’s direction to Jowen and Mirra Endrath’s farm. The farm is quiet. The cows in the barn have not been milked in at least a day. The house is closed and the fireplace cold. There is an interrupted meal on the table. Nala notices that it looks like the evening meal and the lamps have burned down. Jowen’s father shows up and demands to know what is going on. Faith is the Power of Not Helping.
William steps up and explains that the constable sent them and that it looks like they up and left in the middle of dinner. Jowen Senior eventually agrees and notes that a clay holy symbol to Chauntea, (Goddess of agriculture) is missing from above the fireplace. We don’t see any tracks going anywhere but the field and road. The saddle is still in the barn, so they didn’t ride away. In the end Dad wants to milk the cows and get them back to his farm. Before he leaves, we ask him for directions to Lance Rock.
Lance Rock!: The group parts ways with the farmer and heads South. They find the path from the road that leads towards Lance Rock. The ride is pleasant with slight hills through mostly grassland. The occasional copse of trees breaks up the scenery. Soon they can see the rock about 6 miles away. Lance rock is a single pillar that juts out at a sharp angle. The stone is different from the surrounding limestone. As they approach the rock, Faith suddenly realizes what the farmer meant by folks coming here for picking berries – wink wink – nudge nudge.
Beyond the rock, there is a ravine with a sign that says “Come no closer lest you catch the disfiguring plague that afflicts me! The Lord of Lance Rock” Ignoring the sign, the party heads down the path single file. Moony stealthily goes ahead. Followed at a distance by Nala, William, Theren and Faith. The trail opens and Moony comes back to the group with the layout. There is a cave ahead with another sign warning of the plague. There are putrid smells coming from the cave. Before entering, Faith casts light on Nala’s sword. Moving closer and Nala yells announcing their presence, but not in an intimidating way. Again Moony scouts ahead, the air is thick, dank and cool with almost of feeling of fog.
A ways inside the cave there is a dead body. It’s probably been dead for four days and looks like he might have been disemboweled. William goes back to the cave entrance and gets the sign post to poke the body. As he rolls the body over, it reaches for William. Faith strikes first with Guiding Bolt doing significant radiant damage. Moony steps up with a sneak attack with his rapier. The body dies again. Nothing of interest on the body. To make Faith feel better, Theren sends a fire bolt at the zombie. The smoke of rotting flesh follows the party as the path opens into an open space.
There is a flat rock in the middle of the cavern. It looks like an altar with dried blood on the surface. As Moony enters into the space, he nimbly sidesteps around a falling box of rocks. The rocks are followed by two zombies jumping off of a ledge. The battle is joined and damage is exchanged. In the end the heroes are victorious. Theren confirms that the alter was used for necromancy.
There are two exits from the cavern. The group chooses to go left. Creeping down the narrow passage, Moony spies a zombie in a frilly dress and heavy makeup. Nala moves to steps to the front, but Faith passes her to check it out. The zombie lady is accompanied by a zombie man wearing a bearskin and a zombie hobbit in clown makeup. This zombie circus is a disturbing and ridiculous sight. The group is hampered by the narrow passage, but eventually fells the lady and the bear. They struggle to hit the zombie clown, either because of his small stature or absurd visage.
A warren of tunnels lead from the room. Moony eventually works his way to a room that looks like it has more alters. Returning to the group, they decide to go slowly forward with Faith in the lead. There are three flattened boulders inside the opening serving as tables that hold a variety of body parts. A hooded figure stands at the farthest slab. They appear to be drawing a long needle with thread through the flesh in front of it. Moony opens the battle with a sneak attack on the hooded figure. Several creeping hands with jagged claws are moving towards the group. Faith and William each take out a claw. Theren takes out the remaining three claws with magic missile.
Suddenly a UNICORN appears in the room. (DM: Don’t do anything yet, I need to deal with the unicorn!) [Note: the Sorcerer summoned a Unicorn via his Wild Magic, one of three times it happened in the entire adventure.] It descends in a kaleidoscope of color, rainbow colored sparks dance from it’s hooves as it touches down. The magnificent beast turns and glares at Theren. Nala continues to attack hooded figure. Faith resists the urge to pet the unicorn, but misses with her mace. William moves forward and throws himself at the ground before the unicorn and calls out “Mielikki, my goddess, how may I serve you?”
Theren runs past the unicorn to attack the zombie. The unicorn is a bit confused, first turning towards William and raises an eyebrow and then tracks offending sorcerer passing by and raises it’s other eyebrow. Glancing around the room, they eventually faces William. Through the unbelievable chiming tones he hears “Get to your feet, child”. Seeing the glittering unicorn, Moony is enchanted. “Pretty horsey” Moony says and he moves toward it.
Faith smashes the zombie’s head but it remains standing. William stands before his goddess and says “Thank you for coming and saving us from this great evil.” Theren gets another hit in but the zombie won’t die. The unicorn looks at William, it’s eyes are dark and filled with starry depths. “You are hurt, child,” It lowers it’s horn to touch William and heals him. Moony remains enchanted by the pretty horsey and asks it he can pet it. Nala gets another hit on the zombie; it remains stubbornly animated. Faith finally delivers the killing blow. She then move towards the unicorn, also wanting to pet it. Eventually, the unicorn give a soft snort at the group and with a final glare at Theren disappears.
Traveling further into the large cavern they come upon another workspace. There are stairs going up the right side of the wall towards the ceiling and a stone protrusion leveled into a rough table on the left. Saws, knives and other tools litter the surprisingly clean table. Just beyond the circle of magic light Theren and Moony see a group of skeletons. A voice yells from the darkness beyond, “Leave now or feel the wrath of the Lord of Lance Rock”. As the sound of footsteps recedes, the voice screams “Obey your master! Kill Them!”
The attack begins, blows are exchanged and Nala goes down while holding off three undead. Theren takes out one of the attackers. William jumps up on the table yelling to draw their attention. Unfortunately his bow shot misses. Faith says a short prayer to stabilizes Nala and jumps in front of the remaining two skeletons. Moony attacks and moves to Nala’s side. The skeletons attempt to hit Faith, but miss. Theren, Faith and Moony take the battle to the skeletons. William does not fall off of the table. Finally Theren and William finish them off.
After a short rest, everyone is back on their feet, ready to take on the “Lord of Lance Rock”. Faith leads the way on through the tunnels beyond the skeleton. They come upon a cavern. Purple tapestries line the walls and a pillar made from bones supports a glowing sphere in the center of the room. There is a blurry sigil hovering above the globe.
Oreioth, my favorite NPC
Faith sees a figure step into view from behind a tapestry. He is an attractive young man, Oreioth. “Can’t you see it? It’s the Eye! It sees your every move! Don’t you fear it?” Faith has no patience left and smites the lord of crazy. He grabs at her with something in his hand. Three darts shoot out from a wand and strike Faith. Her eyes flash with mystical light and injurious radiance hits Oreioth. The rest of the party joins in fight. As Nala passes the globe the sigil disappears. In the end, Faith pulls her final blow and drops the “Lord of Lance Rock” unconscious.
With Oreioth tied up, they investigate the room. Behind the tapestry there are niches for food, clothes, and treasure. The loot ranges from rare delicacies to stale crumble cake or worse. The glowing globe in the center is a Driftglobe. It produces light (Daylight spell) when activated and it will float after you. Oreioth’s weapon is a Wand of Magic Missiles.
The party decides to rest and recover before exploring further. They set up camp near Lance Rock for the night away from the cave. When they awaken in the morning they are Level 2.
Game Notes
This was really the first episode where I felt everything was firing on all cylinders. We had action and adventure. We had dialog. We had investigation. We had some interesting characters and some things that would become touchstones in later episodes.
Faith’s experience — her first kill — was a great little character bit. I can’t remember now if it was something I prompted for or something she raised, but it’s sort of a landmark experience, especially for such a naif. It’s always good to look for those “first time” experiences, good and bad. Characters are not just character sheets.
Side Quests
There are a slew of side quests around Red Larch, many more than you need (but I had to prep for all of them, depending on what the players might do). The party had gotten clues to all of them from the locals, some of which eventually paid off many, many episodes down the line (almost certainly better than they would have here).
The Bears & Bows fight against the guys in the woods with the bear is a great intro to D&D combat, including ranged and melee, concepts of Cover, Hiding, etc. It was also an encounter that, for some reason, I was expected to build my own map, complete with cave (or arrow point to where the cave was off-stage), cart, etc. (There’s also no mention in the section about a horse, which I had to add in back at the cave.)
Dear WotC: If you describe an encounter, provide a map. It’s not bad exercise for the GM to find the resources and do it, but it’s also something that should be covered in the $50 dropped for the book (or VTT campaign).
(Note: There were a lot of maps missing from this game. I made them all up. After the fact, I discovered that enterprising folk on Etsy and other places had done the same. I prefer my own efforts, but allocate your resources as you find most valuable.)
The Necromancer’s Cave at Lance Rock is also a cool little dungeon crawl (though, again, a picture of Lance Rock would have been nice), and was a fine intro to both me and the players of how Dynamic Lighting works in Roll20. It’s not an easy encounter for Level 1 characters, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t turn into a TPK. The party was beginning to learn their SOPs for dungeoneering and combat, which was nice to see.
Oreioth the Necromancer is presumably intended to be killed here. Instead, in one of those weird twists with this party, they decided to capture him and bring him to justice back in Red Larch. Which was awesome because it was fun to play him as the crazy-pants egomaniac he was (intermixed with moments of existential dread because of What He’s Seen Coming — the Elemental Evil Eye thing).
The fact he was captured also meant that he could later escape and show up later on in the story at an appropriate or amusing moment. Again, setting up those threads is an important part of the GM’s job, and a bit of schtick that the players loved.
The Elemental Eye of Evil (if you unsquint)
I actually created a visual effect for the final scene here. It’s supposed to be, on re-reading, just the image of the Elemental Evil Eye, but I took all the parts, blurred and twisted it, and set that up as a puzzle image for the party as they would be progressing against the various elemental cults.
The neat thing is that the players actually remembered this symbol, and it made the eventual revelation of its in-focus instance, way down the line, much more exciting.
Two magic items from this encounter — the Driftglobeand the Wand of Magic Missiles — were useful for the rest of the campaign. Both of them, actually, ended up in the possession of Nala, the Dragonborn Fighter, who didn’t have Darkvision, and who didn’t have a decent ranged weapon. It’s a great example of how something the players pick up early can have an influence way down the line — and so how the DM should be mindful of same.
Night at the Improv
So there are all sorts of scary things going on around town. The party has already experienced the weird weather, and everyone talks about that (as townsfolk would) as well as the strangers passing through town, raids and disappearances of people, etc.
I mentioned to some party members about a couple who had apparently been kidnapped from their outlying farm. That’s a bit of “Oooh, scary things going on” that the module just throws out there. But the players asked where, and I told them the farm was (random numbers in my head) to the west …
“Oh, hey, that’s kind of on our way to Lance Rock. Let’s investigate.”
So in the middle of all of this, I had an unexpected / unplotted / unprepped visit to a improvised farmhouse where undefined people had been kidnapped. None of that’s in the book. And since they players were showing an active interest, I didn’t want to just do a “You visit the farm, but find no clues” handwave.
So I had to improv a farmhouse, and farm, and names, and what the scene looked like, etc. As they were being kidnapped by folk from town, the Believers, for fell purposes, I figured that there would be no sign of forced entry or even much of a struggle (“Oh, Mistress Mellikho, please, come in!”), but that the cultists would also nick the holy symbol at the fireplace. I needed to come up with names off the top of my head, how long ago it had all happened (and how that would affect the milk cows), and even add a dad to come along and take over the scene so that they could get a move on.
I mean, that could (and does) happen at any time in any campaign, but it’s a cautionary note to new DMs that, even if you have a big thick book full of campaign stuff, the players will still find a seam to peel back and explore through.
That said … it let me do something a bit creepy in a few episodes …
A quickly improvised Unicorn token
The other big improv moment this session was the Sorcerer rolling a 1 on his Wild Magic in the middle of the battle of Oreioth’s zombies, and summoning a Unicorn. Which, it turned out, I did not have an icon for, let alone any knowledge of what its stat block was like until I pulled it up, etc. Pay no attention to the GM tap-dancing behind the curtain!
It turned out to be a very fun encounter, since the unicorn was unamused about being summoned, but half the players broke off from the melee with zombies to pet or bow down to the unicorn. Hilarity ensued.
Leveling
It’s not strictly Rules As Written, but I prefer to level up after a Long Rest. The “I’m walking along and there’s a huge ‘Ding’ and I’ve gained new spell slots and abilities” has always been a bit too computer game for my taste.
So the party leveled after their Long Rest having cleared the Lance Rock complex. That milestone wasn’t clearly defined, but it seemed a good opportunity … and a way to escalate things with the goings-on at Red Larch.
Another Favorite Moment
Crumblecake
The campaign mentions that Red Larch is somewhat famous for a somewhat superior version of crumblecake, a meat-bits-protein-loaf kind of food that can be used as a provision or something you order at a tavern.
Add lots of jokes about crumblecake, but it became a fun little bit about people eating it, comparing it to crumblecake from other towns, the party taking it as provisions, even using it as feed for the bear they rescue.
It’s a small thing, but something entertaining and non-threatening to lean into.
So this one is short and sweet, but an important guideline to remember. It shows up in multiple 5e rulebooks, including the introductory material to the Players Handbook [PHB 7], repeated for emphasis in Xanathar’s and Tasha’s (emphasis mine):
Whenever you divide a number in the game, Round Down if you end up with a fraction, even if the fraction is one-half or greater.
That is, for those of you with an Excel frame of mind, always use TRUNC(), rather than ROUND() or CEILING().
A common example of this is with damage Resistance, which some monsters have. Resistance to a type of damage means it’s halved. If you do 15 points of fire damage to a creature with Resistance to Fire, they only take 7 points (15 / 2 = 7½, Round Down to 7).
Is there some deep, important, mystical and/or pragmatic reason to Round Down by default? No. I suspect things would all balance out decently enough if we handled rounding in a different fashion. But it is important that there be a rule so that one isn’t having to look up every case where fractions show up, seeing how the rounding should work for each. Consistency makes for faster, easier, less contentious gameplay.
Of course, as the preceding general rule in the PHB says, exceptions beat general rules, and there are places where there are specific exceptions to Rounding Down called out — either specifically changing how things should be rounded, or more often providing a minimum. For example, you regain half of your maximum Hit Dice used after a Long Rest, but the rules note a minimum of 1 Hit Die is recovered (otherwise 1st level characters would get nothing, as 1 HD / 2 = ½ HD, rounded down is 0 HD).
But unless an exception is called out, the general rule is always to Round Down.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
GM Recap
Session 2 (Day 10-11) “Welcome to Red Larch”: After an overnight, quickly-melting snow, the party became acquainted with the town, visiting contacts and gathering clues.
Red Larch, courtesy of forgottenrealms.fandom.com
The constable, Harburk Tuthmarillar, wanted help with bandits.
Endrith Vallivoe, with the sundries shop, told Theren of an odd arrow-in-a-skull warning he’d heard of.
Faith, William, and Moony had a useful trip to Haeleeya’s Bathhouse and Dress Shop.
Moony learned the wonders of pickles from a half-orc named Grund.
Nala chatted up the family at Tarnlar’s, bought a cloak, and learned from the kids about a mysterious warning of plague at Lance Rock.
She also talked with Kaylessa Irkell, who pointed to “fell magic” and an “evil presence” at Lance Rock, and offered to hire the party to go investigate.
Nala and Moony stumbled upon the barber (and fence/pawn shop) of Marlandro Gaelkur.
Faith chatted with the priest Imdarr Relvaunder.
Theren talked to some workers from Mellikho Stoneworks and learned of their being watched by stone-masked, cloaked figures during night shifts.
The party visited the quarry at night to investigate, but were chased off by Albaeri Mellikho; the party then called it a night.
The next day, they traveled down the Cairn Road to check out old bandit camps … and appear to have found one.
Player Recap
Morning of the first day:
Breakfast of Champions: There is snow outside and the party heads down to breakfast. Crumble cake and small beer. Rough cooking because the kitchen had a fire and they are cooking outside. Moony enjoys the meats and William focuses on the porridge and eggs.
Harburk the Butcher and Constable: Shopkeeper identifies us easily as strangers and likely looking for Harburk. He tells us that the Mirabar caravan hasn’t come through town. Asks for some help with some trouble outside of Red Larch. Theren offers to help if the constable would help them with some additional questions. Harburk directs everyone to the contacts they ask about.
Endrith and the missing manuscript: Denies any knowledge of the manuscript. Prattles a bit about this and that and then mentions something odd. I heard about the weirdest thing the other day: Someone saw a skull pinned to a tree with a black arrow with a warning or curse attached to it. Located half days on the Larch path and then East into the Sumber Hills. Theren buys a map before heading back to the inn.
Nala meets Helvur the Taylor: The finest clothier within a 100 miles (frequently interrupted). Nala inquires of the Delegation and he denies knowledge of their passing. He asks about their composition so he might be prepared for their arrival. Talk of the weather and offers a selection of cloaks for the cold. Nala buys one (
Moony learns about baths: Haeleya Hanadroum owner of the bath house and dress shop, located on the North end of town. Elegant and slightly foreign looking woman is chatting with a couple of women who have obviously been to the bath. The dresses are very nice and fancy. William waves at the vase in the window and indicates the “friends” from Water Deep suggested that she might be helpful in his tasks. She speaks of weather, robbers, goblins, ghosts and earth moving. She is nothing if not a full of the gossip. She also recommends that we talk with Mistress Irkell at the inn. Quarry to the North has stopped working at night because of spooky things. Shift the conversation to Faith and dresses/accessories that she is looking at. William dissuades her from a fancy dress, but buys for her a scarf that is purple with gold and tassels. Moony tries to look into the baths to figure out what that is all about, but Haeleya intercepts him and explains the baths. He [a Tabaxi] is shocked and distressed. Haeleya suggests that there is a sunny bench out front if he prefers.
Trouble at Quarry Mellikho #18: She declines that there is anything wrong, but the worker for the quarry calls out about the “watchers.” Mellikho changes subject: But you are are interest in something They say that there is treasure in Trickle Rock cave. It is up Larch Path and on a trail at the forked tree. Friendly banter and disparaging of the other quarry on the South side of town.
Return to the Inn of the Swinging Sword #2: Nala seeks out Kaylessa Irkell. She blames all the troubles on fell magic coming from Lance Rock. “It is an evil place” She is willing to hire us to check it out. The group catches up and shares what they have learned and then head back to the constable. They learn the details of the bandits to the South and his opinions of the other happenings.
Wandering around town: Faith visits the temple and meets Imdarr Relvaunder, a priest of Tempest. He offers some advice to the young cleric on the honor of war and tells her about the Dwarf shrine of the Dancing Water in the hills. Moony meets Grund the half-orc pickle seller and discovers that he doesn’t like pickles or “strong water”. He also learns that there will be a market in 7 days. Moony and Nala discover Gaelkur’s, the barber/bar/pawn’s shop. William seeks out the caravan grounds. He chats with a lone dwarf merchant. He is heading to Waterdeep from Triboar. No trouble on the trip. William let’s him know about the bandits we met to the south. Nala returns to the tailor, a lady greets her. The cloak is almost done, she lets them know that she will be leaving early and would pick up the cloak early if convenient. Nala brings up the children’s adventure near Lance Rock. About 3 days ago they were hunting berries and goofing off when a Dwarf prospector appeared and shooed them away because there was plague.
Dinner at the Helm: The party gather for drinks and dinner. Theren walks over to a table of quarry workers and ask about the “Watchers”. They laugh and tell Theren he wants the Mellikho miners: They’re crazy. Later the other miners come in and Theren learns more about the “Watchers”. They showed up a couple of months ago when they were working the night shift. People in stone masks were watching them from the quarries edge. Best description is they are creepy. The group decides to wander to the quarry to see if the watchers show up. Mellikho is not happy and sends us on our way. William dances in the fields behind the inn under the moonlight. He and Moony sneak back in later that night.
The Next Day
Looking for Bandits Down the Cairn Road: Following the road out of town we find two sites that had been abandoned for a while. Approaching the third site, we smell meat cooking
Red Larch Contacts:
Harburk #11: Constable and Butcher. Has asked for our help.
Endrith Valivoe #22: Seller of oddities and Theren’s contact
Helvur Tarnlar #7: Runs a clothing store, reputedly the best for quality clothing for a hundred miles. His wife is Maegla Tarnlar, who appears to actually run the business. They have four rambunctious children: Vintul (m,10), Alia (f,9), Saeza (f,7), Thul (m,6).
Haeleya Hanadroum #15: Bath house and dress shop, located on the North end of town.
Albaeri Mellikho #18: Owner of Mellikho stoneworks. Middle-aged and potbellied. She is usually in the quarry itself, overseeing things, cajoling and cursing the sweating stonecutters here. When not in the pit, she becomes much more jovial.
Kaylessa Irkell – Inn of the Swinging Sword #2: Clean and well managed. The current home for the party. A recent fire destroyed the kitchen, so most meals are taken across the road at the Helm, (#3).
Imdarr Relvaunder #1: One of the visiting priests at the All-faiths Shrine in Red Larch. His holy symbol shows him to be a follower of Tempus, a god of War, Honorable Battle, and Unstinting Courage.
Grund #21: Half-Orc pickle vendor. Not too bright.
Marlandro Gaelkur #17: Barber, bar keep, fence and gathering spot. Shopkeeper and barber at Gaelkur’s in Red Larch. A slight man, quite the smiler, always willing to make a sale, or even buy something from you he thinks he can resell. A hint of an accent in his voice.
[Note: I think I gave my wife Inspiration for the length and detail of this player log.]
Game Notes
A lot of roles being played
So, to be open and honest, and as has already been mentioned to death: I am a story-teller. I love role-playing. I am big into the chit-chat between NPCs and PCs.
Not everyone is, and that’s including some in the group playing this campaign. So I did need to balance and temper how I handled RP and social interactions with spell-slinging and sword-ringing.
I will admit that I was not always balanced when it came to Red Larch.
Part of the problem was wanting to slowly set up the situations and information. I didn’t want clues to just pop up, or Quest Givers to be standing on the corner with question marks floating over their head. I wanted to more organically build the characters’ knowledge, have them figure out where to go (with appropriate nudges) and what was their priority.
That did make, though, for some slower sessions where nothing was set on fire or stabbed. Like this one. Mea culpa.
Still, by the time the session was over, they’d started learning about the whole Believers cult (though not by that name), had some clues as to the side quests outside of town (and were actually on their way to one), and were learning (from the get-go) about the weird weather. And I’d gotten to play a few dozen characters, which was fun (if a bit exhausting), at least for me.
There were some fun bits, too, and things that unexpectedly ended up lasting the entire campaign. Like the very nice winter cloak that Nala picked up, and was still carrying with her 2½ years (real-time) later.
Harburk
Red Larch is fun because the players will likely (and, here, did) revisit it multiple times over the PotA campaign, and each time it and its denizens will have evolved due to the player characters’ actions (or inactions). Harburk’s final fate many episodes later (in my game) had more tragic/heroic meaning once the players had gotten to know him, the jobs he did, and his relationship with his wife.
I always try to remember the writers truism that everyone is the hero of their own story. Thinking about who these people were, their part in their local society, and their motivations for acting as they did, not only made for better sessions early days, but built NPCs that could be revisited later on.
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Red Larch
As mentioned previously, the Red Larch stuff is rich, complex, and crap for organization in the book (or its VTT version).
I did some initial organization in a big spreadsheet (feel free to borrow, modify, and enjoy) of places in Red Larch, the people there, how they fit into the Level 1-3 adventures (“Trouble in Red Larch”) and, in a bit less detail, how they evolve for the Level 4 main adventure chain (“Rumors of Evil”).
But I realized pretty quickly that I was thinking too small. The Roll20 Journal is an incredible tool, basically a mini-wiki that you can add too, break apart, and cross-link to an extreme.
So … why have a bunch of individuals in a single, long document/handout. For that matter, why have a bunch of key locations in a single long document/handout, too?
Setting a trend for the entire campaign, I basically deconstructed and then reassembled in more usable bits all of Red Larch. I created individual Journal handouts for all the significant players, and for many of the significant buildings, grabbing imagery (for private use only) for both to make it all feel more real and more worthy of investment of attention and interest for the players.
It worked out, to my mind at least, swimmingly.
I paid money for this token?
I also created tokens for individual NPCs when they either did not exist or were just “names in a circle” tokens. I made use of both sets of generic tokens you can find out there on the Internet, or I took the images I’d found and used the the amazing TokenStamp tool to create them.
There are two ways to put together entries of this sort in Roll20:
Create a basic Journal Handout for the person, including a picture. Create a token from the picture. Stash the token, on the GM layer, somewhere on the map so you can find it. This is easy to setup, and quick to open, but can require a bit of searching for that token (which is non-functional) to deploy.
Create a basic Journal Character for the person, including a picture. Create and associate a token for the person. When you want them, drag them onto the map. This is a bit more difficult to set up, slower to pull up the hand-out, but easier to deploy a usable token.
I did a little of both of these, which was annoying later on.
What all this meant was that whenever the party encountered someone (or somewhere) for the first time, or even later, I had a handout I could share on the screen to set up or refresh the players’ memories, and, for characters, a token so that they could see at a glance who was where and chatting with whom in town.
All in all, I created many dozens of new Journal Handouts and tokens for the campaign as time went on, and reorganized the entire Journal to my use. It was a lot of work, but it helped me feel like I’d done my part, and it sure made my life easier.
CryptoCartography POI Markers
After a session or two, I also picked up a nice Roll20 marketplace item, POI Markers CC, that gave me some markers I could use to identify the various buildings around the Red Larch map (and, later, on the Dessarin Valley map). Not necessary, but a nice touch, and something I’ll use in the future. (No, I don’t get a kickback; I just like the product.)
Updating the Journal
I also made the effort to update those journal entries after each session to reflect the interaction the player characters had had with people and places, something that would come in handy for both players and the GM in the games to come.
This was a tactic I used, successfully, throughout the campaign. Trying to remember that weird engraving, or where you last saw Kaylessa, or where Lance Rock is? It’s all in the journal, not just for this visit to Red Larch, but for every visit to Red Larch.
As you approach town, you see Harburk running toward you.
Sorry, who’s he again?
(“Share With Players” the Harburk journal entry I have linked to this part of the campaign.
Oh, him. I ask how his wife is.
Ditto for every other town, location, group, individual, and noteworthy thing. It was a heck of a lot of extra work, but it made life a lot easier for me in-game, and for the players, too when they availed themselves of it. And by taking an hour or so after each session to do it and all the other note-taking, I did it while it was still fresh in my memory (which could be refreshed the following week).
My favorite part of the session
Grund
Playing Grund, the half-wit half-orc pickle briner living rough out at the market grounds, interacting with Moony the Tabaxi, was a hoot. Enough so that I brought Grund back a few times, later in the game.
A creature you touch becomes invisible until the spell ends [Concentration, up to 1 hour]. Anything the target is wearing or carrying is Invisible as long as it is on the target’s person. The spell ends for a target that attacks or casts a spell.
Well, that sounds ominous. Uber-rogues! Hidden assassins! Parties just waltzing through dungeons!
Hmmmm … but what does that really mean?
An Invisible creature is:
Impossible to see without the aid of magic or a special sense (see below for more detail).
Heavily Obscured (so that you are effectively “Blinded” while dealing with such a target).
Still detectable by any noise it makes or any tracks it leaves or any scent it gives off. A fairly common ruling, though not backed by RAW, is that this (under certain circumstances) represents a Disadvantage on Perception checks. Note that being detected doesn’t necessarily change the Disadvantage to attack such a target; in general, it mainly offers the opportunity to attack it.
“I have no visual or auditory or olfactory sign that there is anything near me. So I will not start swinging my sword.”
“I heard a footstep, I saw a splash in a puddle, I smelled a familiar perfume — I swing, but I know I am at a Disadvantage.”
On the other hand, “I saw footsteps running through the puddle!” while not making you an easy target, does make your presence known and, potentially, dealable with.
When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have Disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the DM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly. When a creature can’t see you, you have Advantage on attack rolls against it.
What does that mean, basically?
Attack Rolls against an invisible creature have Disadvantage
Attack Rolls by an invisible creature have Advantage.
Which is pretty awesome, but is not game-dominating.
Delving deeper, the Invisibility spell:
Requires Concentration. That makes it pretty good for “I will make you invisible, go scout ahead.” Less so for “Here, let me make you invisible mid-battle, as long as I OH MY GOD THE FIREBALL!”
Unless you are an Invisible Stalker, where Invisibility an innate condition that doesn’t require Concentration.
Ends when an Invisible creature attacks or casts a spell.
For a Rogue, that attack that drops the spell is probably a Sneak Attack, since that gives them Advantage.
For a multi-turn spell-casting, starting the spell breaks the Invisibility.
So what might counter Invisibility (beyond footprints and being noisy)?
Blindsight: “A creature with blindsight can perceive its surroundings without relying on sight.” These are mostly underdark creatures.
Tremorsense: “A monster with tremorsense can detect and pinpoint the origin of vibrations within a specific radius, provided that the monster and the source of the vibrations are in contact with the same ground or substance “
Truesight: A creature with truesight can, out to a specific range, see in normal and magical darkness, and see Invisible creatures and objects.
In general, the above are either (a) creatures living belowground or in the dark, or (b) beings of a higher order.
Dispel Magic will work against an Invisibility spell just fine … but you need to be able to target it, meaning (most likely) a Perception roll first, with the caveats above.
Create Water is also a good way to be able to perceive an invisible creature, either through raindrops or through puddles.
And, just as a general note, Area of Effect spells are an excellent tactical counter to Invisibility (think “Depth charges vs suspected enemy submarine”).
I want to set down the macros I’ve end up using over the past few years of playing D&D 5e on the Roll20 VTT.
(Yes, I owe a bigger article about Roll20 and its plusses and minuses. One day.)
Roll20 has a moderately rich macro language, and an mod/API setup sitting behind that for further extensions to what macros can do.
I have written very few of these; most I inherited (and then tweaked and refined and customized) from the guy who was DMing the game before me, or else found out on the Roll20 forums, or sub-Reddits, etc. I apologize to the original authors for losing their names.
In Bar Macros
These are macros that I indicate should be in the macro bar at the bottom of the page.
The PC macros have player character names in them. The full names need to match the names on their Character Sheet in the Journal for the macro language to pick up the values in their character sheet.
PC-Health
This creates a quick list in the chat for the GM of current and max HP for each character. Sometimes that’s more useful than looking at health bars.
This gives to the GM in Chat the Passive Perception and then an Active Perception roll for each character in the party. I find it works faster (and is often more useful) to roll this for everyone at once than select a token and do it for an individual character, even if there’s just once character I’m interested in.
I use this same macro for Insight (insight_bonus), Investigation (investigation_bonus), and Stealth (stealth_bonus).
We had an intelligent weapon in our Princes of the Apocalypse campaign. Rather than fumbling with the Chat each time I wanted to say something from Windvane (the weapon) to Faith (the person carrying Windvane), I wrote this macro, which was a lot faster to use. For recurring NPC→PC chat partners, this can be easily tailored for use.
/w Faith &{template:default} {{name= A soft whisper in your mind ... }} {{ ?{What message from Windvane?} }}
Token Actions
These macros are IDed in the macro as being Token Actions, i.e., they are only valid (and show up for use) after you select a token you control (the GM controls all tokens, the players generally only control their own).
This rolls Initiative for a player character, putting it up both in the Chat and into the Initiative Tracker.
Inspiration
This giver/taker of Inspiration is based on the work of Keith Curtis (see here and here), and uses the Dealer API in Roll20.
You’ll need to create an infinite 1-card deck with whatever symbol you want to use (I use a golden D20), and when you give Inspiration to a token, it “deals” that symbol atop their player ID at the bottom of the Roll20 screen and makes a little announcement in chat; when you take Inspiration, it takes it away. This makes Inspiration very visible to the GM and to the Players.
(Note that it does allow for multiple Inspiration to be given to a character, which is not how the rules operate, but that can be handled manually.)
Inspiration-Give
!deal --give --Inspiration
&{template:npcaction} {{rname=Congratulations!}} {{description=**@{selected|character_name}** has just been granted **Inspiration!**
[x](https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.d20.io/images/210322160/r0ri9AKLAaLbYyle0nhPCw/max.png)}}
The image URL is what that card image translated to, so that it shows up in the chat entry.
Inspiration-Use
!deal --take --Inspiration
&{template:npcaction} {{rname=Inspiration!}} {{description=**@{selected|character_name}** has just spent their **Inspiration!** }}
Light
This uses the invaluable TokenMod API by The Aaron. It applies various lighting and vision conditions to a character. It could use some tweaking, but it’s useful in its current state.
This let me easily roll Initiative for NPCs without going into their character sheets. I also have a tool that lets me execute a macro against multiple selected tokens, so that’s handy, too.
(Technically, the rules say that all creatures of a given type roll a single Init, but that’s an artifact of pencil-and-paper gaming; we can do better on a VTT and let each goblin have their own go.)
NPC-Save
It’s easier to have all the saves rolled for the highlighted NPC, even if it takes marginally longer to proc, than to select a save type. Everything is rolled twice in case there’s (Dis)Advantage. If there is not, I just take the 1st roll.
Another one that uses TokenMod. This takes an NPC token as provided in the game and turns on/off all the settings I want for it that differ from the Roll20 (or scenario) bog-standard. (What each element is doing should be pretty obvious.)
This lets a player or the GM make an ability roll on the prompt-selected Ability without going into their character sheet.
And, yes, there are those weird HTML special characters that are necessary to make it work and which have a tendency on this (and the succeeding macros) to get messed up (e.g., by re-opening the macro editor) at which point the macro will stop working and you need to cut and paste the text in again.
For our party druid, Circle of Stars, when he would take on his Starry Form. Good example of a macro that does something without choices. This one turns things on and off by reinvoking them in TokenMod.
Zeroes out the status markers on a character. Uses TokenMod API.
!token-mod --set statusmarkers
Status-Set
Adding (or turning off) a status marker on a token, grouped by broad function. The markers used are from my custom status marker set, but you can modify it to use any status markers, including the defaults. Again, uses the TokenMod API. You can undo any of the statuses by reinvoking it.
Just a shortcut to quickly put the Surprised status marker on a token (uses the name from my custom token marker set, so you can change it to whatever you use). Uses the TokenMod API.
So in addition to being a Tactical Guy, I’m a role-player, so I will likely emphasize those aspects in any game I can.
D&D is not a RP-heavy system by design; it’s originally derived from miniatures warfare gaming (which doesn’t reward someone running into the middle of the battlefield with a white flag to negotiate a truce), and the Experience Points that folk are incented after are for, frankly, killing things. So, as a general rule, one does not hop into a D&D game expecting penetrating psycho-drama and lengthy inter-character dialogs.
Right. Got it.
There Will Be Role-Playing
I still encourage players to think about the personality aspects of their characters — 5e has rather clumsily loaded traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws into the character creation process, related to background. It’s a start, but I would hope players would come up with something a bit more organic, using those background-driven items as, well “inspiration.”
Role-playing is also important, in my games, when encountering people not in the party. The folk encountered, especially in town, are not pop-up clue dispensers. I can’t promise Shakespeare, but there will be character interactions, so I expect something more than “I walk up to the Bartender and roll on Deceive.”
All of which ties into the post topic: Inspiration [PHB 125]!
What is Inspiration?
Inspiration!
From a meta standpoint, Inspiration is an optional rule, based on whether the DM wants to use it. I’m not sure why they would not, but if your tables doesn’t use it … it’s worth asking why not.
Mechanically, here’s what the book say (emphasis mine):
Inspiration is a rule the game master can use to reward you for playing your character in a way that’s true to his or her personality traits, ideal, bond, and flaw.
By using inspiration, you can draw on your personality trait of compassion for the downtrodden to give you an edge in negotiating with the Beggar Prince. Or inspiration can let you call on your bond to the defense of your home village to push past the effect of a spell that has been laid on you.
Those examples given are a little misleading. You get Inspiration by (as a limited example) drawing on those personality traits in some fashion … and can then use Inspiration to do something batter. RP-wise, you can draw on that connection (“As I talk to the Beggar Prince, I remember that morning giving my last gold piece to that hungry child [for which I got Inspiration], and I hold onto that insight as to what hunger really means as I negotiate for my friends’ release”), but it’s not completely necessary.
Gaining Inspiration
Your GM can choose to give you inspiration for a variety of reasons. Typically, GMs award it when you play out your personality traits, give in to the drawbacks presented by a flaw or bond, and otherwise portray your character in a compelling way. Your GM will tell you how you can earn inspiration in the game.
As noted, good role-play will (or should — see below) almost always net Inspiration at my table. Sometimes it might not happen until after the session when I’m doing the game logs, but …
As noted below, I also give Inspiration for particularly fun, imaginative, or memorable action by a character. If it’s the sort of thing you’d tell stories about afterwards in a tavern, or that might even be mentioned in the Saga of You that some bard will write someday — it’s worth Inspiration.
Since the DM controls the reward of Inspiration, you can keep it from becoming too mechanical or from players “gaming” the system for it. Inspiration should feel like a real reward for doing something for doing something that makes the game more interesting, entertaining, or enjoyable for everyone at the table
Using Inspiration
If you have inspiration, you can expend it when you make an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check. Spending your inspiration gives you Advantage on that roll.
Basically, any time you roll a D20, you can burn your Inspiration to gain Advantage. It’s not always a game-changer, but it’s a nifty little boost.
Some tables include house rules letting you burn Inspiration to give someone else Advantage, or even to given an enemy Disadvantage. Thematically that’s a bit more dubious; it’s also potentially imbalancing.
Something tangential to the that, though, is this:
Additionally, if you have inspiration, you can reward another player for good roleplaying, clever thinking, or simply doing something exciting in the game. When another player character does something that really contributes to the story in a fun and interesting way, you can give up your inspiration to give that character inspiration.
Don’t let this erode down to players just giving their own Inspiration at the very last second to someone else who badly needs to make a roll. It should most likely happen out of combat, and the giver should provide some justification. (Note, though, that some tables effectively pool their Inspiration together; to me, that robs it of some of its color.)
Use It Or Lose It
Inspiration is a binary — you either have it or you don’t. You can’t earn multiple “points” of Inspiration.
That means that if you do something Inspiration-worthy, and you still have your Inspiration, you don’t get anything.
The biggest problem I see with players (myself included, when in that role) is holding onto their Inspiration “just in case.” Better to use it at the first point where it would be useful, and work at earning more.
The DMG [p. 240] suggests each character should get around one Inspiration a session. That seems a bit high to me (and I’m not wild about an Inspiration quota), but if you have players that are doing solid RP and coming up with interesting ideas, it’s certainly not an impossible rate for them.
Some GMs put some bounds as to how long Inspiration can hang around out there — resetting it at the time of a Rest of some sort, for example. I understand that thematically, and it certainly encourages people to use their Inspiration while they have it, but I tend to be more lenient than that.
Helping the DM
There are a couple of ways (at my table) that helping the DM can generate Inspiration.
A player who makes substantive contributions to the game outside of it (keeping game logs, posting lots of funnies in the campaign forum, etc.) might sometimes get Inspiration for their character. I don’t do this every time because I don’t want it to be quite so quid pro quo, but occasional Inspiration is a nice tip-o-the-hat to a helpful player.
I know as a GM that I often have a dozen balls in the air, and keeping an eye out for someone making the game “more exciting, amusing, or memorable” sometimes fails because I’m too busy trying to decide what spell the evil wizard is about to cast.
Because of that, I encourage players to let me know if someone deserves Inspiration. I rarely say no (largely because I’m rarely asked for an unworthy cause).
Closing Thoughts
The DMG [p. 240] has further suggestions of when and why to award Inspiration, and some variants on the rule. It’s worth a read.
Inspiring!
I find that players often forget they have Inspiration available when playing in a VTT like Roll20. A simple way around that is to create or designate a Token Marker for Inspiration. I use the Dealer API/Script by Keith Curtis (see here and here) with some simple macros to put (or take) a shiny gold D20 on the player IDs on the Roll20 desktop, complete with an inspiring message. Fun!
I’ve found Insight rules terribly underutilized in the D&D games I’ve been in. Wisdom (Insight) [PHB 178] is essentially Perception for personalities.
Your Wisdom (Insight) check decides whether you can determine the true intentions of a creature, such as when searching out a lie or predicting someone’s next move. Doing so involves gleaning clues from body language, speech habits, and changes in mannerisms.
Examples of using Insight
Bob the Tailor is a town elder, who’s fluttering around trying to keep the party from the abandoned mine outside the town. It would be useful to know where his fear is oriented — toward the party, toward the town, or toward himself. Is he lying when he talks about the mysterious music people have heard in the area? If we we say we’re going to the mine anyway, does his fear spike — or is it anger? Is his smile when he sees the constable approaching the confidence of seeing an approaching ally, or a deceptive cover for terror at being discovered? Insight can help with all that.
In other cases, you might use Insight to figure out if the guy you’re gambling with is confident in his hand? How does he feel about that last card he drew? Is your date having a good time? Sure, she says she likes that roast beast you ordered for her … but how is she really feeling?
If someone’s trying to actively resist others using their Insight against them, they usually roll Charisma (Deception). (This is a case where one could easily use other base states for the Deception role, however — an academic using Intelligence (Deception) in hiding their bias in a paper, for example, or someone using Strength (Deception) to hide how incredibly freaking heavy that chest of gold is.)
But rather than active rolls, this is also a case where passive skills come into play — the GM can consider passive Insight (or another’s passive Deception) to give give unsolicited clues about “He’s behaving a little twitchy,” or “He seems genuinely worried about you,” or even “You notice she seems attracted to the barkeep.”
Limitations of Insight
It does have limitations. It can indicate that someone is lying — but not necessarily what they are lying about, or why they are lying, or what the truth is. People lie, after all, for a lot of reasons. Insight might tell you that the city guard you’re talking with still seems highly suspicious of you after your story … but it won’t tell you that he’s going to let his friends know to keep an eye out on you, or that he’s going to try to ambush you later on.
Insight gives you, well, insight into underlying feeling, reactions, etc., but not necessarily why they are reacting that way. Is the guard at the door speaking a bit flatly when he tells you about how great a guy the grand vizier is? Yeah, you can pick that up with Insight, but it’s going to be more difficult (i.e., take more time and questions and other actions) to tell if the change because of some sort of loyalty spell, or from fear that the vizier’s secret police are monitoring him, or even just boredom with people pumping him for information about the vizier.
The nature of Insight — picking up on tells, physical and verbal expressions, etc. — requires you have a way of perceiving and interpreting such things. Dealing with the human barkeep at the tavern is one thing. Trying to read the body language of a gelatinous cube is another.
Even in less extreme situations, Insight might be hampered by unfamiliarity with the target’s customs and culture: shouting and waving around your spear might be an expression of hostility by this never-before-met humanoid, or it might be a ritualized greeting, or a mating display. Insight might still work, but less reliably.
Remote use of Insight
Finally, Insight can be used without the target standing in front of you — picking out a great gift for your girlfriend (or for the prince) based on what they’ve enjoyed in the past, or figuring out how the savage Orcish war leader you keep encountering is likely to attack the city or respond to various counters. I’d probably use a normal Difficulty DC as the opposition, and familiarity (or lack thereof) with the target would be a key in determining how difficult the estimate was.
Overusing Insight
Because it deals with interpersonal relationships, Insight can be easily abused or overused. Overuse of Insight is a bit like overuse of Perception (“I evaluate every person in the bar” is like “I search every room thoroughly”); it’s doable, but should carry some costs (time being a major one, but also something like the likelihood someone is going to catch you staring at them — or their love interest — and take offense).
Overuse also takes away a bit from Role Playing. The DM should be able to use passives to feed needed clues to the players about how people are behaving without their insisting on active Insight rolls, just as they feed visual prompts in the normal course of things rather than players requiring active Perception roles as they walk through town.
Who rolls Insight?
Note: Insight is one of those skills (like Perception, etc.) where sometimes it makes more sense for for the DM to roll it for a character, to determine if you can figure out something, can’t figure out something, or are deceived in your insight about something.
There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. If you are DMing a PotA game, or are a DM who wants to see what the ride was like … read on!
So two recaps were kept per session. I had a short GM Recap — “When Last We Left Our Heroes” — available as a hypertexted Journal entry in Roll20 for the players to consult (I always started each session reading from it). There was also for much of the campaign a Player Recap kept by my lovely wife, which usually included a lot of color text. It was kept in the Roll20 forum for the campaign. I’m going to include both.
GM Recap
The party was summoned as individuals by Gemvocs Leofhyrn, an oracle of Waterdeep, and given the task of stopping some great evil arising in the Desserin Valley by saving The Mirabar Delegation.
Player Recap
The Invitation
Theren: Comes to town for reagents. The halfling shop keeper hands him an envelope. Inside is a note on fine vellum, in a good hand, offering an invitation from Gemvocs Leofhyrn.
Faith: During her exit interview from the temple orphanage with Edgrid bids Faith farewell and wishes her solace and peace. A donor, one Gemvocs Leofhyrn, has made a small endowment for Faith and they send her off with travel goods and some spending money. There is also a note that arrived when you endowment was made. Faith shares the contents with Edgrid.
Nala: In the mercenary hall, there is a steady flow of people in the hiring hall and the main hall is a swirl of merchants, runners, and members. An urchin comes in from the street and runs up to Nala. He delivers a high-quality envelope with a note in fine vellum, an invitation from Gemvocs Leofhyrn. Nala thinks they might know the name, but she can’t pull it from her memory, until she passes an apothecary. Early after their departure from the clan, her parents were very sick. The innkeeper brought medicine for them. What is odd is that the innkeeper had received the bottle before the Dragonborns had even arrived.
Moony: Wandering the markets and thinking of where to bed down, when an ornate carriage draped in white catches his eye. Random passerby points out the funereal nature of the carriage. Moony jumps onto the back of the carriage and slowly rides to the funeral until a guard shouts at him to get off. After he disembarks the carriage continues on. A slender man hands him an envelope from Gemvocs Leofhyrn. After some comedy Moony reads the note.
William: A women in peasant dress steps up and engages with William and similarly gives him an envelope. William knows the name Gemvocs Leofhyrn. At one point his father received a note from a stranger suggesting that he plant a different grain and included some money to purchase it. The next year the new plants thrived and the ordinary crop failed. It saved the homestead from a very hard winter.
An invitation from Gemvocs.
Rumors:
Theren – Blue dragons have seen. (“Not again!”)
Nala – River levels are not what they should be. Either too high or too low. Also, a fortune teller has left town for Baldur’s Gate because it is safer.
William: Castle is buying a lot of supplies in preparation for a big treaty negotiation.
The House on the Street of the Groves
Valkh – I loved this guy
Valkh the half-orc majordomo for the late Gemvocs Leofhyrn
Richly appointed, the walls and shelves lined with odd curios from distant lands and books whose spines are often illegible with age, or with foreign script. Magical lighting above illuminates the room dimly. Plush chairs are on either side of a fireplace and a central table, where a small cask sits, an incense burner placed atop it it.
Smoky Ghost Host. Speech [below].
Game Notes
The Party
The party, starting out, was five:
Moony – the Tabaxi rogue, constantly looking for shiny things and distractions. Having left his homeland for adventure, he’d sailed on merchant vessels before, getting bored, he’d just arrived in Waterdeep.
Nala – the Dragonborn fighter from a disgraced clan, a former Waterdeep city guard (leaving that group because of political and criminal corruption), searching for a noble cause but reluctant to become a leader.
William – the Human druid from a rural community, seeking knowledge and growth, as well as the soothing balm of the forests (which he would get none of this campaign).
Theren – the Half-Elf sorcerer, a hermit afraid of the fire powers that nearly killed everyone around him. Anti-social but charismatic.
Faith – the Human cleric, a newly emancipated orphan in the midst of a crisis of faith between LG and LN.
In Session 11, a new occasional (between college terms) party member joined:
Aldrik — the Dwarf Barbarian, gruff and taciturn, and of odd interest to a number of the bad guys.
The Characters and Session 0
Prior to the above game log stuff, we did the standard Session 0 business. Everyone had been building, in light collaboration, their characters, prior to our get-together (virtual get-together, through Discord and Roll20). As mentioned previously, we’d not gamed together (TTRPG) as a group together before, but I’d gamed with all of them. Four of us had only just gotten back into D&D over the previous year during the Tyranny of Dragons campaign (including the GM of that saga). The other couple included someone who’d been out of D&D since the 3.5 days, and his wife, who’d done a lot of TTRPG in the college and post-college days, but not with D&D specifically and not for quite a few years.
My son, who also wanted to play, was dealing with that inconvenience of college, which meant I’d need to deal with his character on again and off again — which, in a sandbox environment like PotA, shouldn’t be a lot of trouble, right?
(It was, in fact, a lot of trouble, but it also let me add some additional layers and flavors into the campaign. I’ll talk about them later.)
We also spent some time touring Roll20, our VTT for the game. It’s what we’d used in Tyranny of Dragons, so most of us were familiar with it, but even there I’d discovered a few tweaks and wanted to establish some defaults as we got started. That included the main Roll20 screen, character sheets, token, and macros.
I’d previously created in the Roll20 forum for the campaign separate threads for
Character Builds (not much used after the initial activities)
Scheduling and Logistics (also not used much after early discussions)
Rules (house rulings on how things worked, and simplified explanation of 5e rules, often added in following a session where a question came up)
Fun (usually an excuse to post D&D memes)
Game Logs
We also decided who was taking notes for the game log (William’s player, my wife) and who was tracking treasure (Faith’s player).
Then I rolled into the session stuff described above and below, and we were off to the races.
Starting a PotA Campaign
Princes of the Apocalypse can be started (per the book) in two ways.
Players can begin as gathered, experienced adventurers in the town of Red Larch starting at Level 3, ready to head out into the Dessarin Valley and see what’s going on there.
Or they can begin as Level 1 characters and go through some preliminary adventures in and about Red Larch first before setting out.
I made the decision to go with the latter — I wanted people to get used to their characters, and the system, and, frankly, I wanted the padding of time and experience to make it all work and get back into the DM swing of things. Also, Red Larch as a setting, and some of the side quests off it, were fun (for me, at least). I think it was the right decision.
Oddly enough, the book sort of presumes you’ll do the Level 3 start. Chapters 1-2 are setting the strategic and tactical situation, including a bunch of info about Red Larch and other places in the Dessarin Valley. Then Chapter 3 starts you off at Level 3 going to the Keeps, Chapter 4 has you going through the Temples, Chapter 6 has the final fights in the Fane and the Nodes … then Chapter 7 has the Level 1 adventures in the Red Larch area, as well as side quests that can pop up anywhere. It’s definitely not how I would organize such things in a book, and it made the original distribution of material within Roll20 even awkward to use. I was already starting to reorganize things within those Roll20 journal entries.
(As a side note, the book clearly states on the back cover that this is an adventure for Levels 1-15. In Chapter 1, it clearly says, “This adventure is designed for 3rd-level characters.” And the last node is noted as being designed for Level 14 characters, presumably dinging up to 15 at the end.)
But all of that begs the question of how our party got together in the first place. The book offers two choices.
First, the campaign provides a number of hooks (mostly focused on those 3rd level sorts). There are a couple of pages of individual ties and hook suggestions — some friends of yours were kidnapped, one of the named NPCs killed your friend, someone hires you to break a loved one free of a cult, etc. These were pretty ho-hum once I looked at them, and all to a degree just hand-wavingly assume that after you succeed, you’ll be sucked into the great battle against Elemental Evil. Maybe.
Second, there’s some somewhat heavy-handed influence from the Factions, the groups in Faerun that run things behind the scenes (something that was sort of new in the 5e books and still sort of being worked on). But none of the players opted into any of the Factions in their character creation (though I suggested it was available), and much of the Factional material involves …
The Mirabar Delegation
This is a group that was traveling down from Mirabar (a dward/elf enclave away up north) down the Long Road to Waterdeep — three representatives from up there, plus a Waterdhavian noble (whose name is Deseyna Majarra in some campaign material, and Deseyna Norvael in other places, he said, rolling his editor eyes), plus some other hangers-on (a librarian, the body of a Knight of Samular being sent home for burial, etc.).
The ambush of the delegation, and the kidnapping of their members by various cult factions, is supposedly the thing that really draws the attention of the powerful to the goings-on in the Dessarin Valley, and kicks off the proceedings.
But there are three problems with the whole Mirabar Delegation storyline:
The map-drawing around the kidnapping of the Delegation just makes no sense. I had to layer a lot of extra story to explain why these kidnappers went way over here to be attacked by those cultists rather than just going to this other place and being safe.
A lot of GMs writing about this campaign have said that the Delegation is just not that engaging, as written, to their players. In part, I think that’s due to those GMs not being engaged by it, but part of that may derive from the third problem.
The Mirabar Delegation are MacGuffins (definitions here and here). I mean, there’s the mysterious coded message, and the important books, and the secret seeds, and there’s the undying gratitude of certain Factions if they get rescued. But ultimately the Delegation members themselves aren’t a dependent part of the story. If you never mentioned them, if they vanished without a trace, it would impact nothing. They are purely there to (a) attract the Factions’ attention, and (b) give the party something concrete to pursue before learning about the Real Menace.
I wanted something more — or at least I wanted to make more effective use of the Delegation.
The Ghost Host with the Most
Spooky!
Enter Gemvocs Leofhyrn, the greatest Oracle of Faerun you’ve never heard of, spoken of only in shadows and among the very powerful (and only in my campaign).
The first name was a play on “GM vox” or voice, and the last name an Old English version on my own name. Gemvocs was literally the voice of the GM, me, laying out the stakes and getting the action into play.
So …
All the characters were starting in Waterdeep on the same day, doing business in accord with their characters’ story, and hearing various rumors about rising water levels, weird phenomena up north, a big meeting being scheduled by the Lords Alliance, etc.
All of them received, in various mysterious ways, an invitation to the home of Gemvocs — a figure who has in the past played a role in their lives (Gemvocs sent some seeds to the farm of one player’s family when a child, which saved them from famine; Gemvocs paid for a young orphaned girl’s education as a cleric, which she discovers as she leaves the orphanage today; etc.).
When they arrive, separately, at the person’s house at the appointed hour, they discover the gathering is a wake — Gemvocs died mysteriously a few days earlier (burned to death in his bathtub), and his half-orc majordomo, Valkh, had distributed the invitations as previously instructed. It’s good to be the employee of an amazing Oracle.
It becomes clear, during all this, that Gemvocs has known about the approaching moment of crisis for decades, including observing / protecting / supporting / recruiting the individual party members, to bring them all there at that time. (That orphan girl discovered the invitation, addressed to her, was included with the endowment when she entered the orphanage years ago.)
They all get a big incense-driven vision presented to them — the equivalent of the videotape during the reading of the will:
Greetings, my friends.
It has been an honor to be of service, directly or indirectly, to each of you. I must confess, it has not been selfless of me. I knew that I would need to call on your service some day, though I had not expected under such belated circumstances.
I wish to hire you to a purpose. To the north of this city, in the Vale of the Dessarin River, a group of people — a delegation traveling from the great mining city of Mirabar — is lost. They were due here a week ago. I knew of their coming but … they fell into darkness, somewhere in the Dessarin River valley.
Over the last year or so, my vision of the future for that region has grown clouded. I have caught … glimpses, unfathomable, of ruin and light, of destruction and cleansing, of events that could shake the world — and destroy it.
I know it sounds alarming. Believe me, you get used to it.
I have arranged for you to travel to the town of Red Larch on a caravan that leaves on the morrow at Noon. Seek the caravan of Mistress Lela Linber. Your presence will be of assistance.
When you arrive, — I don’t know what you will do, which is an odd circumstance for me. You might speak to the constable, Harburk Tuthmarillar — an honest man who has been of service in the past. But … there are so many voices, some of fear, some of care, some of deceit, some of madness — it has all gotten very confusing.
Regardless, I beg you: find the delegation. I do not know what has happened to it, but I do know that finding it is essential to stopping the evil. And I do know yours — each of yours — presence there can do it, if it can be done. It is your fate, one way or another, just as this is mine.
You will be provided with 25 gold pieces for any last-minute supplies you need. And, once the threat has been resolved, there will be — (smile) — 30,000 gp for the survivors to divide amongst themselves. I’m not sure how many that will be, so I’ve picked a neatly divisible number.
Heh. Oracular Humor.
Be well, my friends. But be vigilant. I jest, but I can afford to do so, for I am dead now. You, amongst the living, face a far greater, more fraught challenge. Find the evil that lurks in the Dessarin Valley. Find those who are … who are lost … but do not delve too deeply … too quickly … Something, something is awakening — an Eye is about to open, and when it does, all will be cast to ruin!
(Shudders.) Ah, well. (Smiles sadly.) Time for my bath. Fare you well.
And it was in that bath that he died horribly, presumably from Fire Cultist jiggery-pokery.
What I tried to do with all this:
Set up the party as a party. Give them a reason to be together, even as each has their own motivations for doing so.
Convince them that Something Big Is Afoot. After all, Gemvocs said so. And has been preparing for this for decades. And his discussion is all laden with doomsaying and references to the Elemental Evil Eye,.
Provide that focus on the Delegation. But note that Gemvocs never says that the Delegation itself is all that important, just that “finding it is essential to stopping the evil.” Find the delegate members, and in doing so you’ll perforce be thwarting the real threat.
Provide them with significant information and initial resources, but not give them someone they can run back to. They are on their own.
The players seemed to like it, enough to willingly step into the trope of “we are in this together” and not fight against it, which is all any GM can hope for.
And that was the first session, which, for being all-talk and no-combat, worked out pretty well.
So something happened in the game the night before I wrote this up that, at the time, I kind of blew through, but I wanted to give it some thought. This is, of course, just the sort of thing I have sometimes taken justified criticism for overthinking. But it’s a situation we’ve run into more than once, and I’d like to have figure out a rubric for myself to adjudicate against.
And, as a caveat, it’s always worth noting up front that time and combat in D&D are abstractions designed to turn the chaos of real-life combat into something manageable. While a level of verisimilitude is the goal, the manageability always trumps that. Just as D&D is not a physics simulator, it’s not a great combat simulator (falling somewhere between an FPS and Chess).
When the slow guy is supposed to lead off the attack
So, here was the sitch: as the party crept up stairs into the upper floor where the local BBEG had their throne room, the plan was that Theren the Sorcerer was going to begin combat by lobbing his Vitriolic Sphere into the center of the bad guys.
How should the combat have been sequenced? Even handwaving aside the question of whether anyone knew that Theren was going first (there was probably an excess of allowable coordination between the two subgroups, since you were going up two different sets of stairs and not using any sort of communication magic) …
Did Theren’s action take place outside of the Initiative order? Did his executing the attack start the combat so that’s when everyone rolls Init?
(Short answer: no.)
Did Theren’s Init get changed to the top of the Initiative order? Since he’s the one initiating the combat?
(Short answer: still no.)
Did everyone with Init rolls before Theren sort of get skipped over? (That’s what I did, but it effectively means that those higher Init rolls become low Init rolls, which is “unfair”.)
(Short answer: it should have been “voluntary”)
Did everyone before Theren in the Initiative order (ally and enemy) actually get go in some fashion before Theren did?
(Short answer: it should have been that way, yes.)(TL;DR: The ultimate
And did it matter if the bad guys were surprised or not?
(Short answer: Yes and No. But in this case they were not — the Baroness had perceived you coming up the stairs and called for you to come in and play.)
In short: Initiative is rolled when combat begins. You can not make an attack outside of Initiative.
So, no, Theren doesn’t get to bypass the Initiative roll, or have his Init moved to the top of the order, or whatever. (Some folk have house rules for this, but they create their own problems.)
So let’s simplify the situation a bit and say that the top initiative order, when rolled, was (leaving out other players and bad guy mooks):
20 – William
15 – Baroness BBEG (the enemy)
10 – Theren
The first question is: is there Surprise? This is determined before Initiative is rolled, technically, though I don’t think it makes a difference.
If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren’t.
So if Baroness BBEG were surprised by this attack out of nowhere in her throne room (ignoring the previous sounds of the battles below), it counters her Initiative to a large degree. The beginning of the combat can be handled this way:
William says he is choosing to Ready an attack if anyone runs up to the top of the stairwell before his next turn. He’s doing this to let Theren get that shot off as agreed, rather than running into the middle of the room and spoil the AoE plans. It’s essentially giving up his turn, but there you go.
Baroness BBEG is Surprised — she’ll effectively see Theren coming, but will be unable to act on her turn. After her turn occurs, she would be able to take a Reaction (if she had Counterspell, she could then use it against Theren’s impending attack), and she will be able to act normally at the beginning of her next turn.
Theren pops up and acid bombs everyone’s ass.
So Surprise mechanics make things simple(r), because they provide for higher-Init enemies to be locked in place (but ready to go next time).
But in the case of the game that triggered this discussion, there was no Surprise (the party simply wasn’t stealthy climbing those stairs). Which means that there is a disconnect between Intent (lob an Vitriolic Sphere before they can act) and Execution (oh, they acted before I could lob my Vitriolic Sphere, because they had better rolls on Initiative). Or, as one site I saw put it:
“If your player wants to stab the bandit in the face before he has time to act, that’s what a high Initiative roll is for, not a surprise round.”
Without Surprise, it’s Theren starting to move for his guns first, but the other folk outdrawing him.
“But Dave,” you may say, “she couldn’t see Theren before he came up the stairs.” That’s true, but because she isn’t Surprised (i.e., she was aware of a threat, and so ready to act/react), she still is able to act first as she chooses, because her Initiative is higher.
This gets into the whole idea that 6-second Rounds are themselves an abstraction — if there are six people in the room it’s not that Person 1 literally goes in the first second, Person 2 in the second second, etc. It means that within that six second timeframe, Person 1 acts before Person 2, who acts before Person 3, etc. That doesn’t completely match reality, because not everyone is declaring their actions before they happen as in some games (so that higher Initiative folk know what is coming), but it is essentially how 5e abstracts “People running around and into each other with intent to do mayhem.”
So here’s what should happen (should have happened in this simplification of last night):
William does whatever he’s doing — Dodging, Readying an action, casting Spike Growth in the middle of the room to make sure that nobody runs away before Theren can act, whatever. He’s choosing to back Theren’s play, but still moves faster/before Theren does, because he has higher Initiative.
Baroness BBEG “Readies an action.” Because I’m the GM, you don’t get to know what it is (“Chuck my spear at the first person atop the stairs over there”). Neener-neener. But she does this before Theren because she isn’t surprised and has higher Initiative.
Theren reaches the top of the stairs and turns to cast his spell …
… and Baroness BBEG executes her Readied action (throwing her spear at the first person atop the stairs, Theren, which hits) …
… and, if still alive, Theren throws his Vitriolic Sphere.
(Note: one of the players reminded me afterwards that Theren was Invisible. This gets into Perception checks, Active vs Passive, etc., to deal with his footsteps and verbal components, etc. In which case she might have been Surprised or she might have been aware something screwing was going on and still chucked her spear with Disadvantage against an Invisible foe before Theren could cast his spell (which would then drop his Invis).
Note that Theren could have said, “Well, heck, they aren’t Surprised so someone might plan to attack me” and change his plans from what had been intended. Or maybe, despite his intent and the team’s plans, William might have taken an action to attack or distract the Baroness, which might have led to another change of plans by Theren. While Initiative lets people act first, the structure of the game from that point means that people are aware of the actions taken previously by people with better Init, and can revise their plans accordingly.
(In the Action Economy, there’s a significant advantage in going first … but after that, Initiative is, like Time: just a way to keep everything from happening at once.)
The bottom line is, you can’t easily plan your way into something that is the equivalent of Surprise (“I go before anyone else does”) if there is no Surprise present and you roll a low Initiative. That’s what Initiative is kind of for — if you roll poorly, you go later in the round. If the other players who would have gone first want to effectively skip their turn (do a Dodge or a Ready or maybe even a Help), that’s their prerogative for the tactical situation. The enemy is under no such obligation, and if any of them have higher Init than the “this is how I am starting this combat,” they get to do their thing first (which may be standing there in Surprise, or may be shooting you under the table).
Even if Greedo intended to fire first.
Here are some articles that touch on this — which, given the volume, shows this is something a lot of GMs fret about, though most of the scenarios here involve Surprise, which, as noted, simplifies the question a lot.
So there’s one more area where this kind of thing has come frequently into play, the “We arrange ourselves at the door and charge in” scenario, when the Doughty Fighters at front roll crap Init (because they used Dex as a dump stat) and everyone queued up behind them roll sbetter than them and basically have to:
Move through the Doughty Fighters (as Difficult Terrain, and potentially exposing themselves to attack, which is kind of why you wanted the Doughty Fighters to run in first).
Ready an Action to move in when the Doughty Fighters have and the space is clear (but not then being able to attack or anything, because Ready only lets you take a single action or move).
Fire ranged attacks past the Doughty Fighters.
Waste their turn.
The bottom line there is: yup, those are kind of your choices when everyone in front of you is slower. Hopefully the bad guys inside the room are Surprised!
I tend to be rule-abiding. But sometimes the rules just aren’t fun. So … sometimes the rules need to change.
So here are the house rules we play with at my table.
I tend to follow the Rules as Written (RAW), sometimes the Rules as Intended (RAI), as makes sense. I’m not big into whole-hog replacing play-tested sub-systems, if only because I’ve seen how easily that can send things heterodyning all over the place.
That said, not all rules are created equal, and things that make for grinding busy-work and management by the player or GM can usually be elided or adjusted when playing with mature individuals who are there for fun.
My House Rules
I use Inspiration. I also encourage players to nominate each other’s characters (or call out their own character to me) to receive Inspiration. It’s a fun mechanic to reward special moments of RP or action.
Bookkeeping that is no fun is no fun.
I tend to be loosey-goosey about Material spell components, except for expensive ones. (Verbal and Somatic I do pay attention to.)
I tend to be loosey-goosey about encumbrance, unless things look ridiculous.
Keep track of your arrows. I mean, it’s not that big a deal. When guidance is needed, I use the “you can recover half your missiles from any combat.”
Dead bodies constitute Difficult Terrain.
We play on a square grid. We use the basic “1 square vertical, horizontal, or diagonal = 5 feet” variant in the PHB 192, rather than the someone more accurate “the first diagonal square is 5 feet, the second is 10, the next is 5, etc.” variant in DMG 252, because it’s just simpler.
Leveling takes place during a Long Rest. Unless for meta purposes it makes sense to do it some other time. But, in general, “I just realized, I know more spells” seems more suitable to happen overnight than while walking down a path.
I prefer Milestone Leveling to getting finicky about XP, dealing with absences from encounters or the table, etc., in ways that leave players unbalanced. Defining adventure goals as the basis for leveling just makes more narrative sense to me, and makes it easier for me and the players.
You take a Short Rest as you Long Rest. So you can be back up some HP if attacked before the end of your Long Rest.
I tend to Roll Actives vs use Passives, since VTTs make it trivial to do so.
You can use a successful Dexterity (Acrobatics) roll to keep you from going prone when you land from a fall, vs a DC equal to the damage you took (stick the landing!).
Flashing Before Your Eyes: Any time you are dying during your turn (other profound incapacitations might apply), the DM (if he remembers or is reminded) will ask you a question about your character or their history. If you answer the question, you get Inspiration.
If an obstacle to your ranged weapon is closer to you than to what you are shooting, you can ignore the obstacle (no cover); otherwise, use the cover rules (usually half-cover, AC+2). I.e., a close obstacle can be easily shot around.
Ranged attacks with altitude difference: (Discussion)
thrown/twanged weapon at a higher altitude target: the effective range is the sum of the horizontal and vertical distance
thrown/twanged weapon at a lower altitude target: the effective range is the greater of the horizontal or vertical
spell: the range is the sum of horizontal and 1/2 the vertical.
People may be assumed to be sleeping in their armor, unless humor or the DM who has a specific reason for it otherwise make a note that it is not so. Changing out of or into armor is time-consuming and Not Fun. If there are no 5e rules penalizing swimming in armor, we can assume that in this world armor is lightweight and comfortable to wear and sleep in.
In a similar fashion, it’s assumed peoples’ weapons are always with them, unless it is noted otherwise by players or DMs. That would be socially (and logistically) awkward most of the time, but the alternative is a lot of Not Fun moments.
Concluding Notes
Finally, I always try (though sometimes fail) to remember two things about Rules and D&D:
D&D 5e is not a physics simulator. It’s not even a great combat simulator. Appeals to reality are less important than verisimilitude (feeling like reality), and both of those are less important than keeping the game rolling along smoothly.
The Rule of Cool should always have a place at the table. If someone proposes doing something one-off that is going to be one of those cool moments in a movie that people will talk about for ages … don’t worry about RAW, but remember why you’re all gathered around the table to begin with.
You can lend your aid to another creature in the completion of a task. When you take the Help action, the creature you aid gains Advantage on the next ability check it makes to perform the task you are helping with, provided that it makes the check before the start of your next turn.
Sometimes two or more characters team up to attempt a task. The character who’s leading the effort–or the one with the highest ability modifier–can make an ability check with advantage, reflecting the help provided by the other characters. In combat, this requires the Help action.
A character can only provide help if the task is one that he or she could attempt alone. For example, trying to open a lock requires proficiency with thieves’ tools, so a character who lacks that proficiency can’t help another character in that task.
Moreover, a character can help only when two or more individuals working together would actually be productive. Some tasks, such as threading a needle, are no easier with help.
So it’s not enough to Help by holding the thief’s tool kit while they are picking the lock, or shouting encouragement to the guy trying to climb a cliff wall. You have to be able to do the thing you are assisting, and describe how you are helping.
What is the difference between Help and Working Together? The former is an action type during combat. As GM, I might be a little lenient on combat-setting “how are you helping?” actions, e.g., “I stand there, looking menacing at the attacking goblins, while screening the Rogue from view as she tries to pick the lock so we can get out of here” (you’re not directly assisting with the lockpicking, but you are sacrificing your action to let the Rogue focus on their without worrying about being stabbed = Advantage!).
Helping with Combat Rolls
More frequently, Help is applied directly to combat situations, as well.
Alternatively, you can aid a friendly creature in attacking a creature within 5 feet of you. You feint, distract the target, or in some other way team up to make your ally’s Attack more effective. If your ally attacks the target before your next turn, the first attack roll is made with Advantage.
This might be a way, for example …
If you know the opponent has resistance or immunity to your flaming sword, maybe you can be more effective Helping the other fighter with a cold-based weapon.
If you know the opponent will be hit harder and more effectively by an ally (because of the nature of their weapon, or just because they have a huge damage bonus on strength), you might consider whether its worth effectively giving up your attack(s) for them to get an attack at Advantage.
While a Rogue will be automatically able to Sneak Attack if you’re within 5 feet of a target, giving them Advantage to deal out that ton of damage they’re about to roll may be tactically the best course.
Note that this not a matter of Reach, but a 5 foot limit. So if someone with a Glaive wants to provide Help, they need to step in to 5, not hang out at 10 feet.
Also note that Help is just for the first attack. That makes it somewhat more useful at lower levels, when you are only sacrificing one attack to make that happen, and the bonus is going to the only attack the attacker has yet.
Also note that you are Helping a specific attacker. “I am going to help the Rogue with their attack on the goblin I’m next to.” If the Paladin goes after the goblin first, they so not get the Advantage bonus. And if the Rogue decides on a different target, the Help has been wasted.
Help is also usable to assist with spell attacks, granting advantage on any sort of spell attack roll against that target.
Finally, Help is an action frequently assigned to familiars and animal companions and the like — these often cannot attack, but can be commanded (or urged) to “Help the Fighter!” (“Bark bark!”)
As a GM, I like to encourage players to give me some idea of what they are doing to “help” in this way. “I wave my hands and attract the orc’s attention.” “I try to keep her sword busy clinched with mine.” “I shout, ‘Ashtuk, is that you?'” No mechanical effect is applied except the Advantage it provides, but it’s nice color regardless.
Questions about this pop up sooner or later in every campaign, as it’s an area that 5e either does fine or poorly, depending on which online forum you go to or specific question you examine.
So what happens when instead of bashing each other with hunks of steel or eldritch energies, you get up-close and personal
You can attack to Grapple
This is discussed on PHB 195. Essentially you use one of your Attacks to make a skill contest:
Attacker: roll Strength (Athletics)
Defender: roll Strength (Athletics) or Dex (Acrobatics)
In other words, Grapplers need to be a lot better at that skill, or be pretty darned strong.
If you win, the target is Grappled (technically, has the Grappled condition, PHB 290).
Which, honestly, doesn’t do much. It basically reduces Speed to 0, even if it has other features that increase its speed beyond base.
But a grappled target can still punch grappler, stab them, etc. They are more restrained by being within 5′ of their grappler (which gives them Disadvantage on spell attacks or ranged attacks), but melee attacks are just fine.
Grappling does keep the grappled target from running away until help arrives or until the target breaks the Grapple. They can try that by taking their Action to roll Strength (Athletics) or Dex (Acrobatics) vs the grappler’s Strength (Athletics) again.
The grappler can also slowly (half speed) drag a grappled target with them — or continue attacking them at close range (with no particular advantage, and with the same disadvantages).
Note:
When you have Grappled someone, you are not yourself considered Grappled.
When you have Grappled someone, you are using up one hand (the other hand is considered free for attacks, etc.)
Aside from breaking free of the Grapple through a contest, it can also be broken by:
The grappler being Incapacitated.
An effect knocking the grappled target out of the reach of the grappler or the Grappling effect, e.g., being knocked away by a Thunderwave.
What if more than one person at a time is Grappling you?
While executing a Grapple takes one Attack (of however many you have within your Attack action), escaping a Grapple takes an entire Action. If more than one person has you Grappled, you can only escape one Grapple per turn … which means tag-teaming Grapplers can seriously cause you a problem.
Monster and Spell Grapples and Restraints
This is where things get a little tricky. Or more straightforward. You decide. The Grappled and Restrained conditions are quite separate, but come up a lot in spell and monster attacks: e.g., a Giant Octopus grapples you with tentacles; a Web spell causes the Restrained condition (PHB 292).
Just like with a Grapple, a Restrained creature’s speed becomes 0, and it can’t benefit from any bonus to its speed.
Attack rolls against the Restrained target have Advantage, and the their attack rolls have Disadvantage.
The Restrained target also has Disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws.
(Note that the Grappler feat lets the grappler get Advantage on the Grappled target — but, more interestingly, it lets a grappler roll a second Grapple attack, which, if it succeeds, means both the grappler and the grappled target are both Restrained. Which actually seems kinda sucky.)
So, Dave, how do I do something useful with this?
Grappling by itself is kind of limited in what it can do. But with a little work, it can make an effective attack. So how do you grab an opponent and actually subdue him.
The vast consensus I’ve read on this is Grapple them (so they can’t get away) and then do a Shove attack (PHB 195, same Ability checks as the Grapple) to knock them Prone …
… at which point they get the Prone condition’s effects (PHB 292), and as Prone:
they can only crawl (but not if they’re Grappled and at speed 0!)
or they can get up (but not if they’re Grappled and at speed 0!)
they are at a Disadvantage to attack (Prone!)
attacks on them have Advantage (Prone!)
… and they probably have to use their whole Action to try to desperately break the Grapple.
Are you, the attacker, also Prone at that point? A good question. Consensus seems to be “No, but describe what you are doing to your DM.” I’d think of it as the arm twist behind the guy on the ground; you’re enough on your feet that you are not considered Prone, and can defend attacks normally (albeit with one hand), etc.
Given that, as long as you maintain this, you can continue attacking the Grappled+Prone guy and other folk can attack them, too, with Advantage, and that should distract them from attacking you back (as they desperately try to break the Grapple).
In 5e, combat takes place with the 