Is D&D 2024e backwards compatible? Call me dubious.

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,

In 2024e, Surprised individuals … roll Initiative at Disadvantage.

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.

The 2024e version changes the mechanic and the name. It’s now “Heroic Inspiration,” and it allows instead a re-roll on any roll a player makes — an attack, a damage roll, a healing roll, whatever.

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.

Roll20 – Area of Effect templates

A home-made game aid for Roll20 that makes life (for me, at least) a lot easier.

For my Princes of the Apocalypse game (which we ran on Roll20 with a standard 5-foot grid), I built some Roll20 AoE templates for spells, to make it easier to see and use the AoE and to provide a longer lasting way to show a still-active area spell.

So why is this needed?

There are ways to show the area of a spell. At a minimum, you can draw something on the screen — but that gets messy and not always easily movable. It’s also hard to draw some shapes, like cones.

Also, even if you draw something with the circle tool, you have two problems — precisely knowing the center point to anchor it on, and, more importantly, clarity on what squares are affected by the spell or not. Yes, you can interpolate (“I think that’s less than half the square”), but that’s just argument fodder.

Roll20 and various adjuncts to it provide area tools for AoEs (Roll20’s native tools have improved dramatically of late), but they still have a couple of problems. First, again, they are actual geometric figures (e.g., circles), so interpolation is still needed. Second, they are non-persistent — you can set them to Linger, but a player can only have one up at a time (I’m not sure if two players can have theirs up simultaneously); you can maybe eke by for that initial Fireball, but if you have a Spike Growth that stays up for a long time, you’re back to drawing a circle on the map.

What I wanted was a way that players could express a proper spell area (cones, squares, circles, even rectangles) in full squares, that they could move as needed for placement, and that would let me (as the DM) resolve the effects on those within the area, whatever the shape, and that could be left on the map for non-instant duration spells.

The answer: AoE templates.

Now coming to a marketplace near you

You can buy spell templates in the Roll20 marketplace. In fact, I did.

Unfortunately, the ones I bought turned out to be one or more of:

Obtrusive (covering up too much of the underlying terrain).
Ugly (a judgment call on my part, to be sure)
Wrong (there are different ways of calculating a 15-foot or 20-foot radius circle on a grid, partly based on whether you are centering on a square middle or on a square corner. Who knew?) (And D&D 5e renders cones differently from other editions or systems.

I wanted something that would be:

Largely transparent — clear enough to be visible, but not blocking the map people were on.
Reasonably attractive
Correct, based on my reading of how (especially) cones and circles/spheres work, including anchoring on a grid vertex (corner), not (except in rare, specified occurrences) on the centers of grid squares.

So, after a couple of failed tries, I decided to roll my own.

Rolling my own

I used a drawing program I have to basically build up a sample AoE as a drawing, trimmed to the edges, with transparency on anything outside of the borders. There would be a grid within the AoE, with solid borders along the grid, and the squares inside tinted but mostly transparent, with a slightly thicker border around the edges to make its boundary clear. I sized it to fit a 70 pixel cell grid.

For a given shape (a 20-foot radius circle, for example), I usually started with something gray. I could then use the color select / color dump functions to remake it into different colors based on the type of spell — orange for a Fireball, green for a Spike Growth, etc.

Once I had a drawing how I wanted it, I uploaded it to my Art Library in Roll20. Then I created an NPC character named, for example, “Fireball (20r)”. I assigned the drawing to it as its image and as its token.

I dragged out a token, sized it to the grid properly, made it into a drawing, and then reassigned that as the token. Lastly, I assigned that character to be seen and controlled by the mage who could throw fireballs.

AoE 20ft radius orange — 20-foot radius orange circle

Now when that mage wants to throw a fireball, they can see in an “AoE” folder in their Journal “Fireball (20r)”. They can then drag that out onto the map, move it to where they want their fireball to off, and say, “Hey, DM, your orcs are on fire.” I can easily see the orcs in question, push the fireball token to the “bottom” of the token layer (something which Roll20 does not allow players to do, for some reason) so that I can click on each of those orcs, and start rolling saves …

And, once the excitement is over, I or the mage can easily delete the AoE. Or, if it were a more persistent spell, leave it there for people to see.

Embellishments and Edge Cases

Moonbeam (5' radius) AoE token — Moonbeam (5 foot radius) AoE token

For some spells, I felt the need to decorate. So, for example, my Moonbeam template has a little Crescent moon in it. And, yes, I did it as a circle, rather than filling up the squares, largely because it’s a small template, and there’s no question which four squares are encompassed by it.

Similarly, for the Dust Devil’s radius of effect, I included a little Dust Devil icon in the center.

AoE 10ft radius Dust Devil — Dust Devil (10ft radius) AoE token

The biggest hassle are cones, both because of 5e’s rules, and because the vary in shape depending on the direction they are cast. Which left me, for example, with these two templates for a 15 foot cone.

Yes, this is all about the confusion of trying to fit a cone cross-section onto a square grid.

Both of these can be rotated, by the player or DM, in increments of 90 degrees and still line up

The orthogonal one includes a bunch of question marks because of 5e’s cone rules. The basic rule there is that the cone is as wide at a given point as it is long. That means at ten feet away, it’s ten feet wide, etc. But you have to then ask “is that ten feet leaning to the left or to the right?” because, for symmetry, at ten feet away orthogonally, it’s actually a potential range across fifteen feet. So for the diagonals, the player has to say “This cone includes the questionable squares on the left, not on the right” or vice-versa. The alternative is to have two orthogonal templates, and that would be kinda crazy.

The diagonal one doesn’t suffer from that, though it does dredge up the concerns about how diagonals are counted distance-wise on a grid in D&D. In 5e, the basic rule is that a diagonal is as long as an orthogonal — vertical or horizontal — distance, which is nonsense, but quite easy to work with, and the rule we use at my table. Other folk use the older 3.x rule (given as an option in the DMG) that the first diagonal is five feet, the second is ten feet, then five, then ten; under that rule, my diagonal template would need to be changed.

Lastly, cones don’t need to be shot as a straight orthogonal or diagonal — they can be further canted. Fine, whatevs. Since I don’t want to force the players to pick from dozens of templates, they can just rotate one of these partially and we’ll interpolate. The “it’s as wide as it is long” rule makes that a bit easier.

In conclusion

Anyway, this works for my virtual table, and it’s pretty easily extensible as people level up and get new AoE spells of different shades and shapes.

I’ve made a bunch of the ones I crafted early days available here, for you to copy, recolor, and have fun with. Some of them are a bit rough, but that’s what you get for free, and, honestly, the roughness is very rarely visible one the Roll20 desktop.

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 13: “Hearts of Stone”

Wherein the characters start off their day by running smack dab into a Lich.

This is part of an a series my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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 13 (Day 20-21)

The unfriendly dwarf turned out to be a survivor of the Mirabar Delegation guard, Aldrik Oakhide. Their memory of the ambush, travel, and so forth was fuzzy and incomplete (though they had been friends with the dead Narl Elrok), but they were happy to join up against the party’s campaign against the Black Earth.
Renwick token

The next day they reached the Sacred Stone Monastery, and were promptly turned away at the front door. They decided to invade, climbing over the wall into a garden in the rear. On their first break-in to the building they disturbed a lich, Renwick, who occupied a decrepit wing of the monastery. He let them go, as long as they only disturbed the annoying monks.
Returning into the garden meant dealing with two gargoyles there.
Hellenrae token

They broke into another door, and investigated winding corridors. They found a room with a chest full of treasure. They also found a scriptorium full of diligent, oblivious monks. They also found a dojo, which led to a dire battle against the martial arts master Hellenrae, four of her students, and a couple of others from an adjoining room who heard the clamor. It was a hard-fought battle, with Nala nearly falling to Hellenrae’s wicked attacks, though in the end, and with much casting of (loud) spells, they defeated her. But … now exhausted, and in the enemy’s stronghold … what next?

Player Recap

An angry dwarf brandishing a large tree branch confronts the group. “All right you murdering cultists. Let’s be done with this.”

Gradually the situation de-escalated. Faith asks Aldrik about their history and intent. Eventually, everyone is introduced and plans are made. The bodies are burned and the group returns to the water cultists campsite. There are supplies and about 10 days rations in the camp.

Putting the puzzle pieces together, it looks like the Delegation was ambushed on the East side of the river. The delegates and a few others were kidnapped, brought down to the river, boarded boats and landed somewhere on the other side of the river. It is likely that Aldrik was separated some time after crossing the river. A second attack occurred at the site of the shallow graves North of Red Larch. It may have been the Feather Top knights. They did admit that they repelled a Black Earth incursion.

The night is uneventful. The obsidian dagger is not magical, though it was probably use in magical ceremonies. William attunes to the fist-shaped knob. It is an old artifact that has a single Knock spell upon it. It does not appear to be able to recharge. Faith proceeds with her morning prayer and William prepares his augury ritual. Aldrik looks through the cultist weapons and picks up a few javelins.

The trail continues in a ever-narrowing draw, where the sides of the canyon are so close that a person could easily touch both sides at once. Abruptly it expands into a wide rocky vale. An old stone temple is there that was recently reborn as the Sacred Stone Monastery. The group plans on approaching to return the stone dagger. Aldrik agrees to stay out of sight by the edge of the building. Theren climbs the stairs and knocks on the door. A panel in the door opens and a woman in golden mask styled as gargoyle. Theren tells the woman that they had found something of interest in the canyons that they might be interested in. She says, there is nothing of interest to us in the hills except our meditations. Faith tries to get her to open a door and the woman refuses: “The abbess does not allow interruptions in our meditations.” She then slams the panel shut.

Moony stealths around the outside of the building while the others retreat to the shade of the canyon. Parts of the monastery are in disarray, probably the state that the building was found when the Sacred Stone took over occupation.

Try the front door again and are refused again.

Three choices for entrance: garden with the gargoyle statues, the kitchen door, or the door near the dilapidated section of the monastery. Group chooses the garden entrance. Moony picks the lock on the outside door with a little guidance from William. He moves onto the door in the east wall that lead into the monastery. The lock fights him like it was magic, but he succeeds. There are stairs up to the main floor. On quiet little kitty paws Moony enters.

A gaunt and skeletal humanoid with withered flesh stretched tight across its bones. Its eyes are points of light burning in its empty sockets. It is garbed in the moldering remains of fine robes, and jewelry worn and dulled by the passage of time. There is a lich in the room. All of the windows are bricked up. Renwick: “I am not the enemy that you seek. They are in the areas of this building that I choose not to inhabit. I have reached an arrangement with them. They don’t bother me and I don’t kill them.” The group agrees to leave him alone and not continue into the area of the temple he claims.

Back in the garden, Moony investigates the gargoyle statue. It does not appear to be a real gargoyle. The party moves onto the door in the south wall. Moony listens at the door and is surprised by the gargoyle near the steps on the west wall.

Moony takes damage from the first gargoyle and a second leaps from his pedestal and attacks Nala. Faith reacts first and casts Shatter encompassing both gargoyles. A rumbling thunder fills that valley. Nala attacks with her sword. It hits but does not do its normal damage. She switches to her breath weapon doing significant cold damage. The first gargoyle attacks Moony, but only does minor damage. The second screams and attacks Nala, but misses. … Gargoyle One is defeated and the other gargoyle escapes by flying away

After the excitement, Moony returns to the south door and finds it unlocked. Explores the hall and checks several doors. Finally he misses his Stealth roll and opens a door into a monk martial arts practice room. One monk in the middle of the room with four slightly bloodied monks around her. She demands to know who they are. Moony steps back. The master monk comes out a different door and comes at Nala from the side hallway. She does three attacks on Nala. William casts Spike Growth in the dojo. Theren Scorching Ray. Reinforcements from another room. Difficult fight, with Nala going down, but in the end they succeed.

Game Notes

Sacred Stone Monastery was the first of the “Haunted Keeps” the party really decided to take down. They’d let themselves be intimidated at both Feathergale Spire and Rivergard Keep. This time, they were in it to win it.

Always assume that if there is a non-linear way of doing things — a way that makes no sense when you think about it beforehand, but that the players can find way to rationalize on the spur of the moment — that they will do so.

Case in point: the Sacred Stone Monastery has a front door. It has rules about the front door. It has attendants at the front door. It has write-ups of what happens if people try to pick the lock of the front door, kick open the front door, or otherwise insert themselves through the front door.

So, of course, the party went around back.

And, of course, the climax of the location (at least the upper floor, if not both) is a confrontation with the Lich, Renwick. So, of course, the first door they enter (with an astonishingly good roll with lockpicks, not even using the Knock artifact I’d given them) is Renwick’s.

Renwick

I was scared of Renwick.

I mean, sure, he’s a Lich. I should be scared of him. But I was mostly scared of him just wiping out the party. Time Stop plus Cloud Kill, if not Power Word: Kill, Finger of Death, or Disintegrate, are all scary things.

I was able to do a nice reveal of him (initially he’s a hooded figure/token at a work table, then a turn and his token shows up with that wonderful Dave Trampier drawing from the original AD&D Monster Manual).

Even our LG and fractious cleric decided that attacking the Lich, in his own space, was not a good move to lead with, which allowed some conversation to take place and his live-and-let-live (so to speak) attitude to come out.

Renwick, of course, has a backstory — he’s the brother of Samular Caradoon, the leader of the Knights of Samular. That means he’s enmeshed in the Narl story, as we’ll see. He also has a tie to the Knights, which might come out in the future.

As described, and as I played him, Renwick isn’t that bad of a guy. I mean, yeah, he plays around with necromantic magic and would as soon kill you for science as give you a cookie. But his main motivation is as an academic, and if you just leave him alone, he’ll leave you alone. Unless he runs short of parts.

Gargoyles

Gargoyle 5e — Okay, even if you are convinced it’s a statue, how do you NOT give this guy wide berth?

The battle with the Gargoyles was fun, and one of their first with non-normal creatures (the Ankhegs some time back notwithstanding). Biggest problem I had was that I wanted the marked garden plants to serve as difficult terrain, and it’s not drawn very well for that.

(I’m a big believer in the difficult terrain rule. The 5e rules RAW note that it can encompass ground debris and the like, but also passing through a friendly person’s square (“Pardon me, excuse me, coming through …”) and (and this is not RAW) into a square with a dead body (especially during battle).

Gargoyles are one of those critters — like Piercers — that are literally undetectable as to what they really are. So a Gargoyle will just look like a statue of a gargoyle, and there’s nothing you can do to prove otherwise, other than attacking every gargoyle statue you see (and battering the hell out of our weapon).

Anyway, they were fun, and they represented a sign of the party’s increasing level. Also, they require magic (or adamantine) weapons to hit, and that did not include any of our fighters. Yet.

Hellenrae

The take-down of Hellenrae is supposed to be a climactic moment as well, as she’s the actual leader of this keep (the high priest in the central chamber notwithstanding). The tangle of corridors where it took place, and with the party intermingled with the monks/troops (including some unexpected reinforcements) was such that it was a tougher fight than folk were expecting, with one player actually knocked down to 0 HP (which hadn’t happened since waaaaaaay back in the campaign, in the Tomb of Moving Stones).

Still, the party was still able to triumph, and Hellenrae got moved to the “trophy case” on the campaign landing page.

By the way, Spike Growth is an awesome tactical spell, at least at this level. It always seriously messes up the oppo forces. Thank Gygax the damage doesn’t scale up. In this case, at least, it seriously hampered the low-level monks, though I gave them some jumps and leaps to avoid most of it (their being monks, after all).

Aldrik

Aldrik’s inclusion unbalanced things a bit. D&D modules are generally written for five adventurers; this brought us to six. It definitely added martial capabilities.

That’s okay. I had some quick and dirty formulae to use to help balance encounters. And having an extra martial took some of the pressure off the cleric. And it was fun having my son play.

Problem is, I had set up Aldrik as a mystery. He had clearly escaped from the Monastery, but how? From/through where? Or had he been thought dead and dumped on the trash heap? I had established (with the player’s consent) that his mind was very muddle, memories hazy since the attack on the Delegation. But I felt like I needed to know what those memories were, both for the player’s sake and for mine.

Eventually, I’d figure it out.

Bits and Bobs

Not all cool looking things have to be magic items. Drosnin’s obsidian dagger, taken from her body after last game’s big battle, turned out to be … just an obsidian dagger, though likely one that had been used in unsavory ways.

One-use magic items (what Sly Flourish calls “relics”) are a great way to provide interesting and fun items that don’t unbalance the game. I thought a fist-shaped door knob with a Knock spell would be fun, and might make the team’s life easier some time — like dealing with getting into Sacred Stone Monastery. So, of course, they didn’t use it until some time later.

<< Session 12 | Session 14 >>

D&D 5e Rules – Ready!

The Ready Action is handled differently than in earlier editions, which leads to a certain amount of confusion.

Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.

It’s not always possible (or best idea) to just attack-attack-attack. Sometimes you want to … take some time, to seize the right moment, to make sure you understand the situation and can best act on it.

That’s what the Ready Action is for, probably one of the most confusing actions for new (or new, veteran) players.

So, what is the Ready action?

Part of the confusion here is that previous D&D versions have had the concept of “holding” or (4e) “delaying” a turn (“Go ahead and skip over me on Initiative for the round, I’m going to just hold on until I more clearly see what is happening and then act accordingly”). 5e reframes and reduces that concept to Readying an Action. It’s much more constrained as (a) it requires defining a trigger-response pairing, and (b) if the trigger doesn’t happen, your Action for that turn is lost.

Sometimes you want to get the jump on a foe or wait for a particular circumstance before you act. To do so, you can take the Ready Action on your turn, which lets you act using your Reaction before the start of your next turn.

So an important couple of things here. First you are waiting for a particular circumstance, and second, you are not only using your turn’s action for Ready, but it will depend on you having your Reaction left in order to use it. And if the circumstance doesn’t occur … you’ve essentially “wasted” your actions for the turn. (Yes, “they also serve who stand and wait,” but it’s still kind of disappointing.)

A different way of looking at a Readied Action is that it’s a called Reaction to a specific circumstance (vs a canned Reaction such as an Opportunity Attack or a spell that can be cast as a Reaction). You don’t so much declare an Action as declare a Reaction you are going to take before your next turn. (I wonder if it would be a bit less confusing if they called it “Ready Reaction” rather than “Ready Action”.)

First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your Reaction. Then, you choose the Action you will take in response to that trigger, or you choose to move up to your speed in response to it. Examples include “If the cultist steps on the trapdoor, I’ll pull the lever that opens it,” and “If the goblin steps to me, I move away.”

So the trigger has to be a perceivable circumstance. You can’t Ready an Action in response to something you are unaware of.

(Can you make some sort of Perception / Investigation / Insight check as part of that? Good question. The answer is no as an Active check, because that’s an Action (the Search Action, to be specific); the DM could let you do a Passive check, because that’s automatic. But, then, that whole Active/Passive check thing gets complicated, especially when combined with Hidden stuff.)

The Reaction to that perceivable circumstance is then to either take a single Action (if you are a high enough level fighter to have multiple Attack Actions, you can still take only one), or you can move.

(Note: don’t wait until the goblin steps up to you to move, or else they will get an Opportunity Attack on you; wait until the step within ten feet of you.)

When the trigger occurs, you can either take your Reaction right after the trigger finishes or ignore the trigger. Remember that you can take only one Reaction per round.

A Readied Action is binary: when the trigger occurs you must decide to take that Reaction right then, or decide to ignore it and the Readied Action goes away (though it doesn’t count as having lost your Reaction for purposes of other types of Reactions).

If you say, “If a goblin steps out of cover over there, I will throw my javelin,” then once the goblin charges out of cover, you can’t wait until it gets to as closer range to shoot: you have to take the shot right then and there.

When you Ready a Spell, you cast it as normal but hold its energy, which you release with your reaction when the trigger occurs.

To be Readied, a spell must have a casting time of 1 action, and holding onto the spell’s magic requires Concentration. If your Concentration is broken, the spell dissipates without taking effect.

For example, if you are Concentrating on the Web spell and Ready Magic Missile, your Web spell ends, and if you take damage before you release Magic Missile with your reaction, your concentration might be broken.

This is also important; a Readied spell burns the spell, whether or not the Reaction is triggered or you choose to let it be triggered. For this reason, a lot of magic-users only Ready cantrips, since nothing is “lost” if it isn’t used.

So, in summary:

Attacks are limited to a single attack, as with Opportunity Attacks. Even if you normally get three attacks on your turn, you can only Ready one attack. The Extra Attack ability notes that it only applies on your turn. Read more about Actions and Attacks here.
It only allows Movement or an Action (not a Bonus Action, as Bonus Actions only occur on your turn).
That said, you can Move and take a Bonus Action and still take a Ready action, all on your turn. So it doesn’t mean you are completely paralyzed.
You only get one Reaction between turns. If you make an Opportunity Attack, or any other Reaction (like Counterspell) before your Readied Action triggers, you lose your Readied Action (and vice-versa). On the other hand, if you managed to use your Readied Action, you cannot take another Reaction.
Readied spells actually burn the spell slot (if any) upon Readying, and require Concentration to hold onto until the trigger occurs (if it ever does), interrupting any other Concentrated-upon spells and possibly being lost if you fail a required Concentration check before it’s triggered.

What conditions can you Ready for?

To my mind, the “perceivable circumstances” for the Readied action require a something you can focus on — a place, a person, a proximity.

Examples that seem to me to be legit Readied (Re)actions

(beyond the ones mentioned in the actual Ready text above):

If an opponent steps into the doorway, I will Flamebolt them. [place]
When that archer steps back out from behind the tree to shoot me, I will shoot them. [place]
If an opponent steps next to me, I will hit them. [proximity]
Once the paladin engages an opponent, I will shoot their opponent. [person] [Rogues, this could allow a Sneak Attack, as that is allowed on any turn, not just yours.]
If an opponent steps onto the trap door, I will pull the lever. [place]
If an opponent gets within ten feet of me, I will run toward the door. [proximity]
Whichever of the two people I am standing next to first has someone step next them I will attack their attacker them. [person]
If Bob gets out of that cluster of bad guys, I’ll drop a Fireball there. [place]
If the guard pulls out her sword, I’ll stab her. [person]

Examples that seem to be to be too broad or complex or rule-bending to be an Readied action:

If an opponent steps next to me then I will Disengage and move toward the door. [You can act or you can move. Disengage is an action, and does not include actual movement]
If an Orc comes through the door, I will Flamebolt them. But if it’s an Orcish captain, I’ll Fireball them. [You can only prep one spell, and discernment as to Orcish rank is probably more complex than than you can take as a Reaction.]
When the Orcs arrive, If I am attacked I will Dodge, but if not, then I will Help my neighbor [You can’t plan more than one action or circumstance. Just Dodge instead.]
If an opponent gets within ten feet of me, I will Dash away. [Movement from a Ready is only up to your normal full movement, and is an alternative to taking an Action; Dash would be an Action, but it doesn’t actually move you, it just changes how far you can move.]
If people come out of one of the other three doors to the room, I shoot them. [Unless the doors are right next to each other, that’s too much to keep track of for a trigger; I tend to rule that focus of that sort is, most, over a 90 degree arc, about how broadly you can really see without moving your head.]

Remember that you are not obliged to follow through on a Readied action; you have enough Reaction time to either do the Readied action or to abort it (which, for a spell, means the slot has still been used up).

Spells

Also note that, for Readying a spell, that takes Concentration to maintain the readiness (you basically casting but holding the spell), so any Concentration spell you have running would drop when you do so. This is true:

Even if the spell you are casting doesn’t normally require Concentration — it’s the Readying and holding of it that requires the Concentration.
Even if you don’t eventually fire the spell — it’s the Readying that burns the spell and starts the Concentration.

There is an interesting extrapolation that since a Readied spell is actually cast on the player’s turn, not on the Ready-triggered release toward an enemy, then Counterspell would need to be cast as a Reaction on the casting, not the release. Which is really weird as it implies that the attacker knows you’ve cast (say) Fireball before it actually goes off, and is especially pernicious with an attack of Readying / casting a spell outside of Counterspell range, then running close enough to be able to actually release it as the trigger condition. Counterspell already makes my head hurt with its causality issues, so I’m going to try not to think about it.

So why does Ready work this way?

The Sage Advice Compendium goes into a bit of detail as to why things were designed this way, vs. previous editions (esp. 4e) that allowed folk to simply delay their position on the Initiative list in a round. It doesn’t change gameplay, but it’s still kind of interesting to understand the design goals.

For a variety of reasons, we didn’t include the option to delay your turn:

Your turn involves several decisions, including where to move and what action to take. If you could delay your turn, your decision-making would possibly become slower, since you would have to consider whether you wanted to take your turn at all. Multiply that extra analysis by the number of characters and monsters in a combat, and you have the potential for many slowdowns in play.

The ability to delay your turn can make initiative meaningless, as characters and monsters bounce around in the initiative order. If combatants can change their place in the initiative order at will, why use initiative at all? On top of that, changing initiative can easily turn into an unwelcome chore, especially for the DM, who might have to change the initiative list over and over during a fight.

Being able to delay your turn can let you wreak havoc on the durations of spells and other effects, particularly any of them that last until your next turn. Simply by changing when your turn happens, you could change the length of certain spells. The way to guard against such abuse would be to create a set of additional rules that would limit your ability to change durations. The net effect? More complexity would be added to the game, and with more complexity, there is greater potential for slower play.

Two of our goals for combat were for it to be speedy and for initiative to matter. We didn’t want to start every combat by rolling initiative and then undermine turn order with a delay option. Moreover, we felt that toying with initiative wasn’t where the focus should be in battle. Instead, the dramatic actions of the combatants should be the focus, with turns that happen as quickly as possible

In short, the 5e designers decided that somewhat more elaborate, and limited, rules for Readying Actions would actually make the game flow smoother, quicker, and in a less complicated fashion. I can’t say that I disagree.

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 8: “Shallow Graves and Lofty Spires”

Wherein the characters find dead bodies, hunt monsters, and are invited to join a cult.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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 8 (Day 15)

The heroes traveled to the hilltop where Larmon Greenboot had directed them. They found there the shattered (and only hours-old) body of Larrakh, as well as the hasty graves of a Dwarf craftsman, a Mirabar Army warrior, a Black Earth cultist (buried with their weapon), and a figure dressed in white with feathers on their cloak’s shoulders.
Surmising Larrakh might have been dropped from a great height, they headed toward Feathergale Spire, home of the rich boys’ flying club, the Feathergale Knights.
Approaching openly, they were welcomed in by Savra Hanadroum, the estranged daughter of Haeleeya Hanadroum, and introduced to the master of the club and castle, Thurl Merosska.
They attended the 10th anniversary feast of the Society, where many toasts were made, and the heroes encouraged to tell their stories. Thurl, in turn, talked of the evils lurking in Sumber Hills (and a bit of the History of the Dessarin Valley, in particular the loathed Cult of the Black Earth.
A Manticore was spotted. Theren, William, and Faith joined the night-fogged hunt for the abomination with four of the knights. Our three heroes distinguished themselves in the Manticore Encounter, and William was awarded the reward ring from Thurl. Thurl told them he might have a quest for them to undertake, to be discuss the next day.
As people prepared for sleep, Savra approached Nala and Moony for more info on the Black Earth infiltration of Red Larch. They told her about Larrakh‘s involvement, and their finding his dead body. She invited them to join the Feathergale Knights, that their bravery, honor, and magical abilities would be very helpful, especially as the Knights were learning about the magics of Elemental Air to combat their enemies. Nala declined, courteously, which Savra did not take well.

Player Recap

Lightly traveled road with some small cart paths branching off to homesteads, several of which are abandoned. They meet a couple on a cart with boxes, a shepherd with flock of sheep, and a group of well armed horsemen all heading towards town.

Something suddenly clicks for Faith, the dream from several nights past of being buried in stone until someone comes to help; it is really similar to the rescue of the boy Braelen.

Around mid-day they come across the split tree landmark Larmon told them of and evidence of a flock of sheep passing by. Traveling up the path to the crest of the hill. The path is steep. They are glad that they didn’t try to bring Buttercup and the cart.

On the crest there are four recently dug shallow graves covered in stones plus a fresh body – the center of some vultures’ attention. Shooing away the vulture they move closer and discover it is the body of Larrakh. There is a shattered staff and a broken crystal halberd near by. William examines the body. Larrakh was hit by several arrows and has suffered from a massive blunt force trauma. Looks like he fell from a very great height. Besides some gems and money, he has a chain with the Symbol of the Black Earth and several Mirabar trade bars. Removing the stone mask, Larrakh is still unfamiliar.

Looking around, there is a great view from the hill crest. They can see all the way to Red Larch and the Feathergale Spire to the NW surrounded by large birds.

The group moves onto the cairns. At Nala‘s recommendation, William looks around the site for other tracks. The first grave has a male dwarf in artisan robes. He has no possessions. The second grave has a female warrior in the surcoat of the Mirabar army. The third grave contains a human warrior is a strange stony armor, not unlike Larrakh’s. He is also wearing a necklace with the symbol of the Black Earth and has a short mace at his side. The last grave Human in a white robe with black feathers at his shoulders. All have died of arrow wounds or crushing blows.

William doesn’t find any trails, only broken arrows, a discarded javelin, and a torn grey cloak. Moony notes that the grave of the Black Earth fighter was given obvious deference. The constable had requested that the group determine if any attack was caused by bandits or other things dangerous to the homesteaders. This looks like it will not endanger Red Larch. Because of the connection to Mirabar, the group decides to go to Feathergale Spire to talk the the feather heads and see if they know anything.

The group approaches from the main path along the cliff edge rather than cross-country across the valley. **Insert color text here** The spire looks centuries old but with recent high quality repairs. The drawbridge is up and a couple of guards watch over from the spire crown. There is a bell on this side of the bridge. Moony rings (repeatedly). A woman opens a window from the gate house, greeting travelers, how can I help you? Nala briefly explain why we are here from Red Larch and asks for their assistance. “Your courtesy does us honor. You are welcome.” The bridge is lowered and they are greeted at the large double doors by a finely armored warrior who introduces herself as Savra Hanadroum. Nala introduces herself and the rest of the party. She steps back to allow the party to enter the tower. There are a couple of men in leather armor of a style similar to Savra’s There is a large steel eagle on one wall and fine tapestries on the others. They can see the controls to the bridge and the sturdy locks on the door. She brings they through to a circular staircase. At the top of the staircase is the top of the tower. There are green lawns and a large spyglass.

She introduces them to Thurl Merosska. He is very well dressed, extols the pleasures of flight. The human in the white robe with the black feathers would not be out of place in the tower. Nala describes scenes and asks if they may have seen anything. Thurl suggests that it is a topic better suited at dinner. They are celebrating the feather guild’s 10th anniversary. “Please join me and my knights at dinner tonight.” Thurl describes how the group goes up here to enjoy the wind and view. **Enter pseudo-philosophical crap here.**

Dwarves had built a mighty kingdom here. Their fortress which lay beneath the valley became a home to dark and loathesome creatures. About 600 years ago the Knights of the Silver Horn discovered and explored the ruins. They became quite wealthy and build several towers to keep the valley safe. That lasted for a few generations and then they too fell into disrepair. In our time they were called the Haunted Keeps. When Thurl decided to retire he and his friends decided to claim the tower and rebuild it. (Nala recognizes him now as a famous griffin racer.) Ten years ago today they set the first stone.

It appears that Thurl was not surprised to see the group at the tower. He invites them to take their leave in some room he will arranged for them to stay in. Faith reflects on the conversation with Thurl and feels that he is very happy that we have arrived. Maybe more pleased than the sight of new strangers might warrant. She also thinks that he is definitely dodging the questions about the bodies on the hill crest.

Mooney engages with Savra. He asks if she is related to Haeleya Hanadroum. She blanches slightly and affirms that Haeleeya is her mother. Moony exclaims Haeleeya’s virtue and caring for the community. Savra “Yes, she is caring for many but not all” Then rushes to show them their rooms off of the feasting hall.

The group walks into the first room together. There are two beds, two desks, and to chest. All very sturdy and comfortable. There is a window in the tower wall and tapestries on the others. There is a stack of books on the desk. They are basic books on writing and fighting and one titled Get Yours.

The group quietly discuss what they have learned or discerned. Theren moves to the other room set aside for them. Moony starts exploring the other rooms. One of the knights sitting at the main table, Sir Carelle, walks over to Moony and asks “Would you like me to give you a tour”? Moony immediately takes him up on the offer. When they enter the kitchen there are a few initiates are standing around a cauldron breathing in deeply. “Inhale the steam…Be the steam” Carelle starts to try and explain and Moony interrupts “So secret initiate stuff” Next is the solarium, chill now but would be pleasant in daylight. Carelle says that it is also very Moony compares it to a courtyard in a monastery. Next, the stalls of the lower levers. They continue to discuss the joys of flight and becoming one with your beasts. Finally, they adjourn back up main hall.

Savra comes to the rooms and invites the party to join the celebration. There they meet the other seven knights and Thurl. When everyone is seated, Thurl raise’s his glass with a toast. The table is served by four initiates. The knights praise their mounts, the joys of the sky, Thurl, and their adventures. The wine flows freely. Thurl, notices that Faith is not drinking and asks if the wine is not to her liking. Faith mentions that she doesn’t like wine and settles for water.

The group gives a summary on the bodies on the crest, the bandits on the road, and the hole opening up in the middle of Red Larch with the Dwarf ruins below. Moony leans over to Carelle and describes the adventure with the zombies and unicorns.

Nala notices that there is something odd about the initiates, but she can’t put her finger on it. They aren’t exactly acting like servants or devotees.

When the conversation turns to the graves. Nala describes finding the body of Larrakh and the graves from what appears to be a battle. Thurl: “The situation in the valley is dire. Some days ago there was an incursion, an invasion of murderous thugs, into the land we watch over. They were a cult cover everything over, bind people with shackles of stone. We drove them off to the East. There were 10 or 15. One of our own was lost.”

Nala describes the sighting of the people in the stone masks in Red Larch. Moony ask Carelle about the knight that was killed. He learns that he was not returned to Waterdeep, but Carelle believes that he is free and has joined the spirits of the sky.

Thurl slams the table and declares their support of the town of Red Larch as well as their own valley. ….

An initiate opens the doors and announces that the manticore is on the move again. “Now is the time to kill it for good.” He pulls a large golden ring and offers it as a reward for any who kills the beast.

Faith, Theren, and William join the hunt mounted upon hippogriffs. Faith sights the beast and Blesses the team’s endeavor. She then casts Guiding Bolt at the manticore and makes a critical hit. This is followed by Theren’s Chaos Bolt. When William’s turn comes, he casts Ensnaring Strike and hits the beast with an arrow. The manticore is restrained. He fails to free himself and plummets to the earth. His screams fill the air and he is crushed on the rocks below.

Much huzzahs greet the group as they return to the tower. After cheering their success, Thurl tosses William the promised ring. He totally misses the catch. It is very nice, heavy, gold, with a ruby and feather design. (Value 250g). “My friends you have impressed me, and that is not easily done. I think in the morrow, I can suggest an adventure that will help Red Larch as well as our little valley.”

Savra comes to Moony and Nala’s room begging and then demanding that they join the Feathergale Knights, to become air elementalists to fight the evil earth elementalists. She stormed off when both Moony and Nala said they preferred to keep their feet on the ground and that she should go and speak to Faith, William, and Theren since they actually fought and killed the Manticore.

Moony will be leaving after he no longer hears Savra in the hall so he can tell Faith, William and Theren her offer. Also, he will be trying to investigate the room on the lower level that was not a part of the tour.

Game Notes

The Red Larch vicinity is sideways

Red Larch Surroundings map — Why not create this in landscape orientation?

Nearly all of the maps in the game are oriented Top = North, as is true for most maps people encounter in life.

The “Red Larch Vicinity” map, laying out where some of the side quests out of Red Larch are situated, has North on the right. It confused my players every single time it got pulled up, since being zoomed in on the map to see things meant the compass rose wasn’t necessarily visible.

Is there a reason it’s oriented that way? No. It could just as easily be oriented with Top = North.

(The scale given is also wrong; 1 hex = 1 mile.)

If the map is sideways, their journeying out through it also gave the players a sense of how the Dessarin Valley was “going sideways” — abandoned homesteads (from the weather or the banditry) being a key clue.

The Shallow Graves

So I also created a map for the Shallow Graves setting, finding a random open space map and adding in where the graves were.

You might say, “But, Dave — nothing actually happens there!”

I know. But the problem with only having maps where things happen is that when there’s no map, the players assume, even unconsciously, that nothing is going to happen.

Also, I wanted to give them a visual sense, not just Theater of the Mind, as to the layout, and see how they investigated. Including an occasional, “Okay, where is everyone standing right this moment?” just to keep them on their toes.

The Long and Winding Road of the Mirabar Delegation

The campaign is filled with various notes and clues about what happened to the Mirabar Delegation and when, and, of course, they are scattered about the rule book. But nowhere is a concise, detailed description laid out. That may be why none of it actually makes much sense, both timewise (based on clues and hints various folk pass to the party) and spatially, which becomes even more clear when you map it out. Which Carl Jonard has done:

The biggest issue is if, for some reason, the Delegation went to Beliard, then got pursued and captured by the Black Earth at the identified Ambush Site … how the hell do they get over to the Shallow Graves location to the south of the Sumber Hills — apparently completely bypassing multiple routes over to Sacred Stone Monastery, the Black Earth destination?

(It also didn’t help that the original PotA Dessarin Valley maps had the wrong scale listed on them, and, in the electronic version I received, still do.)

I think even Jonard’s map underplays it, especially as it has the Black Earth party wandering around in the Sumber Hills, but never in the right direction.

Various folk have tried to rationalize this. Here’s my version, which worked well enough (even kinda-sorta time-wise)

The Mirabar Delegation sets forth from (derp) Mirabar. They include both Mirabar and Waterdeep delegates, as well as a Dwarvish Librarian and (last moment) the body of a young knight being sent home Summit Keep and the Knights of Samular. Everyone in Waterdeep is expecting them to just take the Long Road south to Waterdeep. Nobody from Mirabar sends word of any changed plans, despite the urgency of the MacGuffin.
The Delegation turns east off the Long Road at Westbridge, and later arrives in Beliard (other travelers at later times will mention this). The reason for this diversion this is twofold: taking the Knight of Samular back to Summit Keep, and because Teresiel has a supply of magic seeds for Goldenfields, further south (a chance for the dwarves in the group to see the fabulous Stone Bridge might also play into this). The plan is to go down the Dessarin Road to the Keep, continue on down to Womford, Teresiel splits off to Goldenfields, the rest of the Delegation heads up the Cairn Road to Red Larch and the Long Road, and they all meet up back in Waterdeep, easy-peasy.
All the cults have been raiding the valley for prisoners and booty. The reasons are sort of vague — manual labor, human sacrifice, creating an atmosphere of heightened terror upon which their cults can flourish, etc. Whatevs. But they are still operating in secrecy. Each cult has some advantages here:
1. The Howling Hatred uses aerial forces from Feathergale Spire, giving them speed and mobility.
2. The Crushing Wave dominates the Dessarin River, a rich trading route.
3. The Black Earth’s Temple is closest to the surface, making it easier to sent out sorties.
4. The Eternal Flame uses spies and rumors. They can afford to because they are more powerful.
At any rate, a large Black Earth raiding party intercepts the Delegation, chasing them off the Dessarin Road, killing most of the troops and taking the “important” people hostage.
But then what? The Black Earth raiding party obviously wants to get back to the Sacred Stone Monastery.
1. They don’t want to travel north — Beliard and the Stone Bridge are choke points and might betray the raiding party’s existence.
2. They can’t take the road south, because of Summit Hall and the knights there.
3. Unfortunately the old bridge across the Dessarin River, close to the Monastery is long since fallen. (Note: in retrospect, I would have made that very, very recent, so that it was their planned line of retreat.)
4. So they go westward, inland, along the traces of ancient dwarvish roads, turn south along the river, skirting past Summit Hall, down to the flats, until they can find (what turns out to be) a Crushing Wave ship to cross the river. The Black Earth and Crushing Wave are … somewhat cooperative, the Crushing Wave folk are always willing to be paid something valuable for service.
For some reason, they don’t book a trip all the way up the river to the base of the old bridge.; maybe it’s just too unwieldy an ascent for a group this size (that’s what I later decided), or maybe the only valuables they have — those antique books — are just enough to pay for a ferry across, nothing more. Or maybe the Crushing Wave have decided to subtly throw some sand into their operation — not block them, but slow them. That sounds like something the crafty Water Cult would do.
The Black Earth know they can circle around to get to the Monastery up the Larch Path, even if that brings them dangerously close to Feathergale Spire and the Howling Hatred. They choose not to cross-country north through the Sumber Hills to the Monastery — perhaps they know about dangers we don’t, or maybe the geography makes it a more difficult journey than it seems.
The worst case scenario happens: the Howing Hatred spot the Black Earth forces making their way cross-country, and attack them. The Howling Hatred take one of the hostages (Deseyna) but are driven off, taking losses. The Black Earth bury the dead (even the fallen air cultist; what better fate, from their viewpoint, than to stuff their body into the earth?) and continue on their way, cutting across to the Larch Path, up and over and around the long way, arriving at the Monastery with their prisoners, some of whom are put to work in the basement mines, some of whom are sent further below …

It’s convoluted and speculative and doesn’t line up well with the timing (though no proposed scenario actually does), but it created a narrative storyline for me to use as a touchstone. The players didn’t necessarily need to know all the details (MacGuffin!), but having the sense that the details made sense was very important.

But what about Larrakh?

In the Campaign As Written (CAW), Larrakh, if he escapes the Tomb, simply vanishes from the narrative.

Ho-hum.

I toyed with the idea at one point that he’d actually been sent to Red Larch as punishment for the fiasco of that Black Earth mission. The timing there never really gelled (it’s unclear how long he’s been in Red Larch, but it’s been longer than that).

But I did speculate on him heading back toward the Monastery after the Tomb fiasco. Rather than the obvious Larch Path, he heads toward Rivergard Keep, planning on booking a one-person passage toward that fallen bridge (where his Spider Climb spell would be very handy.

Alternately, he uses some mystical means to check in and is told to find out what happened to the raiding party at the Shallow Graves, so he heads that way.

One way or the other, he finds the Shallow Graves after the shepherd has come and gone. Unfortunately, he’s also spotted by the Feathergale Knights (telescope!), who come along, grab him, lift him up, and drop him from a very great height.

It was a waste of good bad guy, one one level, but it also provided some closure for the party about the guy who’d nearly taken them out — and indicated that there were other threats out there. It also made the site a bit more layered, with events happening in multiple timeframes.

On to Feathergale Spire!

Feathergale Spire is Backward

Feathergale Spire (per the book) — Sun from the south, bridge extending … east?

The picture of Feathergale Spire provided as a hand-out for the players shows it anchored to the east side of the valley, illuminated by the sun from the south, the Sumber Hills to the north in the background.

The Sighing Valley map shows Feathergale Spire anchored to the west side of the valley. There is talk about parties approaching up a path along the cliff edge, but no path is shown. The southern part of the Sighing Valley is by far the most dangerous (the Manticores, the Griffons), but it would be the first area entered if one approached through the valley; it has that “as you explore further in” vibe, which makes no sense unless it’s actually to the north, but it’s not.

But the Sighing Valley also extends to the north.

Feathergale Spire map — Bridge extending west.

The Feathergale Spire dungeon map also shows the tower anchored to the west cliffside.

The Feathergale Spire text talks about the broad valley extending from there to the east.

Oh, and running out of the Sighing Valley is the Lost River … which is, truly, lost, as it shows up on none of the Dessarin Valley maps, nor in any description of the party crossing it or dealing with it as they head toward the Spire.

What a mess.

Feathergale Spire. The right way around.

I tried twisting the map around 180 degrees (with the idea that the river actually gets “Lost” into Knife Edge Gully), but that really didn’t help. In the end I just flipped the handout picture of the Spire on its vertical axis and called it I-hope-nobody-pays-attention.

(For all I know, the art was originally correct and some layout editor flipped it around to make it look “better” in the book, not realizing that obsessive-compulsive DMs would fret so over it.)

Somewhat more useful notes on Feathergale Spire

Feathergale Spire is the first of the Haunted Keeps, the first set of cultists encountered, the first gang of bad guys to engage with that aren’t Red Larch locals.

It’s possible (but probably hard) to stealth or assault the spire from without. An alternative is to decide on a ruse to enter — the CAW always recommends either “We’re bringing a message from Higher Ups,” or “We’re eager recruits” — then strike from within.

For some reason, this party was a bit apprehensive about dealing with these folk in a violent fashion. There were a lot of bad guys, a lot of them mounted on giant birds. The party was only 3rd level (though that’s what this was geared for), so they were leery about confrontation. That would lead to Interesting (and Complicating) Stuff for the DM.

Savra

Savra Belabranta is the lieutenant of Thurl Merosska, the top dog at Feathergale Spire. She’s the only other named person in the place, and she greets the party as they arrive.

That is literally the extent of what is written about her.

Bo-ring.

I decided to play on a relationship that they had built up while in Red Larch. There was a woman there named Haeleeya Hanadroum, who ran a dress shop and bathhouse. Some of the party members had gotten pretty close to her.

She’s noted as a foreigner, and I imagined a woman from the south who had married a merchant from Waterdeep, moved with him to Red Larch, and who then, when her husband died, tried to raise their daughter — who was in near-perpetual conflict with her mom, and who, one day, when a dashingly handsome and powerful Feathergale Knight landed in town to get some supplies, rode off with him, leaving her dusty dead-end village behind.

Thus, Savra Belabranta became Savra Hanadroum.

I figured Savra was oriented around a few key points:

Still angry with her mom … but also missing her after a few years.
A go-getter and enterprising lieutenant to Thurl — for whom she has the equivalent of a schoolgirl crush (unrequited, because, I eventually decided Thurl only has eyes for Aerissi Kalinoth, the Prophet of Air, whom he wants to woo, wed, and supplant).
A devotee of the Howling Hatred … but mostly out of rebellion and because that’s what Thurl would want her to be.

In short, Rebellious Teen With Heart Of Gold Joins Local Mob Outfit, Makes Good. That covers all the elements of a potentially tragic or happy ending. My hope was that the party would see her as a sympathetic character, but a potential enemy, but someone they might be able to sway, but still a risk.

It all worked beautifully. Was it essential to the campaign? No, but it made a previously established relationship useful, it gave them a person to talk with and not just a nameless mook, and it helped emphasize the creepiness of the cultist life in a way that felt more real.

The other folk of Feathergale Spire

Thurl Merosska is the rich college jock who had great success in race car driving (or the local griffon-based equivalent), but then nearly lost it all in a crash. He’s now driven by ego, desire, and, under it all, fear. He’s happy to use the Howling Hatred to potentially lord it over all of Faerun — especially if it means he could take over Aerissi’s job, and if it meant that Yan-C-Bin’s power could keep him safe.

He’s horribly deluded, but he’s big and boisterous and charismatic and his own cautionary tale over the power of delusion. Under his command, Feathergale Spire is half sporting club, half cult recruitment station, with the folk trying to join up reduced to silent starvation, and his followers driven to acts of bravado and cruelty.

That said, Thurl is the classic case of the Guy Who Is The Hero In His Own Head. He is very easily able to see his endeavors in a noble fashion; his desire to protect Red Larch as his own little fiefdom is sincere (if exploitative), and his hatred for the antipodal Black Earth cult is fierce and couched not just in elemental antipathy but in the desire to win against the other team.

(Thurl’s efforts to rope the party into the inter-cult warfare isn’t the first time this trope is used in the campaign, but it carries some cachet given that the Black Earth has been doing nefarious things around them so far.)

Thurl also gave me an avenue for doing more infodumping about the history of the Haunted Keeps, even if a bit biased in its presentation.

The rest of the spire is occupied by the Feathergale Knights, almost all of them (Savra is a notable exception) the offspring of wealthy families in Waterdeep, all of them fans of flying mount riding, and all of them bought into the cult conspiracy behind their frat. I gave them all names (conveniently all starting with different letters), mixed up the genders a bit, and wrote out some quick personality notes. I probably went a bit overboard, but since the interactions were everything from riding competitions to the feasting table to potential combat, I wanted the dozen-plus Knights to stand out as at least slightly individuals (especially, as we moved forward, each new set of cultists would become more and more generic, and less and less conversed with).

Not so individual, though, were the Initiates, who are masked, sworn to silence, and basically the grunt workers in the castle. They, too, are wealthy scions and heirs, but have not yet proven themselves. They were damned creepy, once the party knew what to look for. If the Knights were all frat bros (and whatever the female equivalent is) of different types, the Initiates were the people standing over a cooking pot, chanting, “Breathe the steam … be the steam …”

The Initiates are properly labeled “Howling Hatred Initiate” in Roll20 but (a) that’s way too wide for a token on the Roll20 map, and (b) kind of on the nose in telling the players what’s going on here. I renamed them all as “Initiates” (and would do similarly with the low-level mooks of the other cults). Similarly, there’s one “Hurricane” in there — basically the Howling Hatred equivalent of a Monk — which I renamed to “Ascetic” to match the description and mask everything else.

I loved putting in each of the Knights’ rooms, almost like a Gideon Bible, a book called Get Yours, which, when examined, combined the motivational philosophies of Positive Thinking, the Prosperity Gospel, Ayn Rand, and How You Deserve It All. It felt very Howling Hatred-like, along with their constant drumming on mental “freedom” (unless you are an Initiate) and physical “purification” (though the Knights dine quite well).

The cult symbols here were very under wraps — literally. Rather than necklaces or cuff links or something, I had the cultists all regularly scarifying themselves on their chests with the Howling Hatred symbol. When the party finally discovered it, it was quite the moment.

Knights’ Quest

Hey, DMs! Here’s a cool scene where the party gets pulled into a Manticore hunt. Flying. At night. With no rules as to how any of that works. Enjoy!

Holy crap. I was terrified of running this encounter, but it was so cool and so a part of the Thurl vibe, I didn’t dare not. I did a whole bunch of reading about flying combat and 5e (it’s pretty crude), looked at a bunch of home brew rules, and ended up just abstracting the hell out of the actual movement (3D!) of it.

Everyone seemed to have a fun time anyway.

What next?

Thurl is obviously interested in making use of Our Heroes. We’ll see how next time. Of course, I also expected Our Heroes to resist and a big battle for Feathergale Spire to ensue …

<< Session 7 | Session 9 >>

D&D 5e Rules – Mounted Combat!

Sooner or later, either the good guys or the bad guys are going to charge in on a mount.

Part of an ongoing series of 5e Rules notes.

This came up in my Princes of the Apocalypse game, related to Earth cult Burrowshark riders atop Bulettes, but the questions discussed apply to random folk on horseback just as much.

An historic note that may be of interest or illumination to some of the questions here: it is said that when the early indigenous peoples of the horse-less Americas — including in the sophisticated realms of the Aztecs and Incas — first saw the Conquistadors on horseback, they thought they were seeing some horrifying human-animal hybrid. The dividing line between the Rider and the Mount is the focus of most of the rules in 5e around mounted combat. As you might expect, the answers are not always intuitive ones, otherwise “anyone could do it.”

Main Caveat

As noted endless times before, D&D 5e is not an accurate simulator of reality; it’s a fairly effective (usable with minimal fiddling) simulator of reality, with just enough verisimilitude to make it both fun and grokkable. Also, even though it’s derived originally from military miniatures combat rules, Napoleon’s Old Guard didn’t have to deal with gigantic flying dragons with Liches riding them, so its miniature/grid rules sometimes get weird.

Second Caveat

A lot of this also depends on playing on a grid (square or hex; the examples I’ll give are for squares). If you are running Theater of the Mind, you can rule on this however you like, and nobody can say you nay.

In other words …

In other words, Rules As Written (RAW) are pretty crappy (or, to be more delicate, inadequate to the task) on this overall subject. Let’s look at them — Mounted Combat rules (PHB 198).

Right. Time for my interpretation.

So here’s my first question: Where is the rider on their larger mount, and how does that attack the rider’s reach and the reach of those around the mount?

Where is the Rider on the Mount?

So, take the image to the right:

The Bulette is a Large creature, and so “occupies” a 10×10 space (4 squares). The Rider is a Medium creature, and so “occupies” a 5×5 space (1 square).

(Note that this would work the same for a Horse (a Large creature) and its Medium Rider.)

So some questions:

In which of the four squares of the Bulette does the Rider actually sit?
How does that affect the Rider’s ability to attack (their reach)?
How does that impact Area of Effect spells that only partially overlap the Mount?
What about Opportunity Attacks against the Bulette — will they also reach the Rider, or only if the Rider is “adjacent” to the attacker?

In the picture, I have the Rider in the upper right corner of the Bulette. The Rider is a 5 foot reach from Initiate 1, but 10 feet from Initiate 2. So …

Can Rider only attack Initiate 1?
Can Initiate 2 only attack the Bulette, not the Rider?
If the Rider wanted to attack Initiate 2, can the Rider just move to the lower left-hand corner of the Bulette? If so, does that cost Movement for the rider, and does it provoke an Opportunity Attack from Initiate 2?
If the Bulette moves one square diagonally down-right, both Initiates could presumably Opportunity Attack the Bulette, and Initiate 1 could Opportunity Attack the Rider … but could Initiate 2 Opportunity Attack the Rider?

On the last question, as noted above, the rules actually answer it:

If the Mount provokes an opportunity attack while you’re on it, the attacker can target you or the Mount.

But how can that be?

It can be, because where your token is in your occupied area, regardless of size, is an approximation.

As a Medium creature, you “occupy” five feet square of space. But you don’t really occupy that space like a 5×5 wood frame.

There’s a lot of space there to shift around in. Heck, if on the opposite sides of the squares, those guys couldn’t even reach each other with swords.

Put another way, a Bulette is not really a circle with a radius of 5 feet. It does not actually occupy a 10×10 foot square.

A Burrowshark (Bulette rider) on a Bulette.

So looking at the picture, a Bulette is pretty wide. But not square. And that’s even more the case for horse. A horse is a Large (10×10) creature for game purposes, but for real purposes it should be more like 5×10.

The area a Large creature takes up (ditto for even bigger categories, but let’s keep it “simple”) is the area it “controls” in game terms, such that you cannot stop within it unless you are two size categories smaller or more. In a quantum sense, the creature exists within that area as an abstraction, a probability field, moving and shifting and occupying all that space such that a horse (or Bulette) can be attacked with 5-foot reach weapons from either side.

(Remember the Main Caveat about D&D rules, above.)

The same is true for the Rider, who exists as an abstract occupant of the entire area of their Mount, moving around as the Mount moves around, attacking and attacked by all 12 adjacent squares. That’s the only way of rationalizing “If the Mount provokes an opportunity attack while you’re on it, the attacker can target you or the Mount” (or the Mounted Combatant feat that lets the Rider force an Opportunity Attack to be on them, not their Mount).

Again, think of a knight on horseback in combat. He’s not sitting there like a 5×5 lump on a 10×10 bigger lump. The horse is wheeling around, rearing, as the knight guides it forward and back and side-to-side and about in circles, raining blows in all directions.

Remember, Facing is an optional rule. If in a six second turn, a creature can attack both front and back, without spending any movement to do so, than the Rider on that creature can do the same.

So to go back to my questions above. In my informed opinion:

The Rider can attack both Initiate 1 and Initiate 2 — and be attacked by them.
If the Rider has the Bulette withdraw, both the Bulette and the Rider can potentially take an Opportunity Attack by either or both Initiates.

Now, as you can imagine, this is not immediately obvious, and not well-spelled out by the rules, and is subject to a lot of varying opinions. D&D 5e Designer Jeremy Crawford has provided a number of guidances here that don’t necessarily agree with my opinion.

Crawford does note that a Rider can be considered to be on any square of their Mount (though that is not the same as saying all squares of it). Indeed, Crawford suggests that Riders can “move” from one square of their Mount to another using movement rules — which opens things up to that whole Opportunity Attack question again (if I shift from one side of my Bulette to another, does the foe on that one side get an OA on me? Madness!)
Crawford also notes that being on a Mount doesn’t change a Rider’s size. Which I’m okay with, for effects that are determined by size/mass. A Medium Rider doesn’t really become Large, I am just considering them to be anywhere within the Large space occupied by their Mount.

Aura issues get weird — if the Rider has an aura extending ten feet away from them, is their abstracted location all-encompassing (the aura extends from the full Mount, not just a square (the rider) within it? Or do we still pick a square? I don’t have a good answer for that.

AoE issues are also weird — if that Fireball hits one, two, three squares of that four-square mount, does the Rider have to make a save? Or maybe a save at Advantage? Well, the Mount takes full damage and has to make its save. I would suggest that the Rider has to do the same. .

This gets even weirder when you consider long weapons, like lances, which explicitly Disadvantage you if you are attacking a creature five feet away. The only ruling that makes any sense to me here is that if there is a square within the area of the Mount that is ten feet away, then you can control the Mount to be there so that you are not at Disadvantage.

(Note that I keep referring to “you” as the Rider. The rules also apply Uzbarkh the Unholy is the Rider bearing down on you.)

Does this begin to break down when you consider Huge Mounts or above — a character flying on an ancient red dragon is not going to simultaneously be on every square the dragon takes up, for attack or defense right? Except, again, the figures are shown on a grid as squares/circles, which means there’s a presumption of movement within the space, and if a dragon can bite in every direction on its turn, presumably the Rider on its neck can do the same with their sword.

Some pertinent articles:

Riders, mounts and weapon reach
4e rules on the matter — not dictating 5e, but a good example

Controlling Mounts and Attacks

I didn’t do this well when I was overseeing that Bulette battle. Going back to the mounted combat rules in the PHB:

While you’re mounted, you have two options. You can either control the Mount or allow it to act independently. Intelligent creatures, such as dragons, act independently.

You can control a Mount only if it has been trained to accept a rider. Domesticated horses, donkeys, and similar creatures are assumed to have such training. The initiative of a controlled Mount changes to match yours when you mount it. It moves as you direct it, and it has only three action options: Dash, Disengage, and Dodge. A controlled Mount can move and act even on the turn that you mount it.

An independent Mount retains its place in the initiative order. Bearing a Rider puts no restrictions on the actions the Mount can take, and it moves and acts as it wishes. It might flee from combat, rush to attack and devour a badly injured foe, or otherwise act against your wishes.

So, first off are Bulette’s intelligent creatures? The general threshold for Intelligent creatures is INT 4 (Animal Friendship, Awaken, and Detect Thoughts all fail if INT is higher than 3). Bulettes (and Horses) are INT 2, so they are not intelligent.

The Wisdom (Animal Handling) skill can come into play here (bulletizing mine):

When there is any question whether you can

calm down a domesticated animal

keep a Mount from getting spooked

intuit an animal’s intentions

the GM might call for a Wisdom (Animal Handling) check. You also make a Wisdom (Animal Handling) check to:

control your Mount when you attempt a risky maneuver.

Note that AH is not actual training. You can only control your unintelligent Mount if it has been trained. And for combat purposes, a Mount really needs to be trained to the noise, smells, and pain of combat, otherwise it will be uncontrolled and probably try to run unless you’re spending all your actions on AH (to an unintelligent, untrained Mount, anything in combat is a “risky maneuver”).

To break the above down into a matrix:

	Controlled Mount	Independent Mount
Unintelligent Mount	Requires training/AH to accept a Rider. Use Rider’s Init. Moves as directed (may need AH for dangerous sitches). Can only Dash, Engage, Dodge as actions.	Requires some training/AH to accept a Rider. Has its own Init. Can move and act as it pleases, including attacks. With training/AH, can be guided by the Rider.
Intelligent Mount	N/A. Intelligent Mounts are always Independent	Has its own Init. Can move and act as it pleases. As it is intelligent, it may coordinate with the Rider if training or communication is possible.

So if we assume that the Burrowsharks have trained their Bulettes to combat (they have, plus there’s some mystic ju-ju going on), then they have two choices:

Keep the Bulette under control. Initiative is synchronized. The Bulette will only Dash/Engage/Dodge, but is unlikely to break, flee, etc.
Let the Bulette be “independent” under its combat training. The Bulette and its Rider have different Initiatives (requiring more coordination), but the Bulette can attack. Note that it may sometimes choose to attack (or dodge, or whatever) differently than the Rider wants. (This is a bit more fuzzy when the GM is running both characters.)

D&D 5e does not, btw, demand DEX (or Athletics) saves for Riders whose Mounts do something the Rider doesn’t expect.

When I first did this kind of thing, I allowed the Bulette to act independently, but synced its Init with the Rider. I also had their attacks probably more coordinated than they should have been (combat training will let the Rider guide the attacks of their unintelligent Mount, just as the Rider can guide their movement, but the Mount remains independent and more likely to snap at what attacks it).

Something else to note here: the restrictions on a Controlled Mount are to Actions. One can posit that a Controlled mount should still have access to Bonus Actions (very rare) and Reactions, including Opportunity Attacks.

Pertinent link: When is a mount considered too intelligent to be controlled?

Falling Off Mounts

This didn’t come up last I ran mounted combats, but it could have. For the record:

If the Mount is moved against its will by an outside force (e.g., a Thunderwave spell), the Rider must make a DC 10 DEX save, or else fall off.
If the rider is knocked Prone by an attack/spell/effect, the Rider must instead make a DC 10 DEX save, or else fall off.
If the mount is knocked Prone, the Rider can use their Reaction to dismount as it falls and land on their feet, or else fall off.

Fall off = land Prone on a space within 5 feet of the mount. The RAW does not address the (very real in historic terms) danger in that last instance of having your mount fall atop you, probably doing substantial damage.

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 7: “Believers … or Not!”

Another talk-heavy episode, as the players learn that uncovering the conspiracy doesn’t always solve the problem.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents ● The Party

There will be SPOILERS. If you are playing in a PotA game, please don’t read this. But 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 7 (Day 14-15)

The party was welcomed back by Albaeri Mellikho, who took Baragustas Harbuckler off their hands.
Constable Harburk Tuthmarillar got a briefing, and a tour of the Tomb, including the Chamber of Moving Stones. The Brothers of Woe were IDed as transient workers in town. Harburk had words with Ilmeth Waelver about the tunnel in his back yard.
Imdarr Relvaunder, the temple priest, gave Faith some history of the Dessarin Valley. He also identified Ogremoch as a great being of earth elemental evil, and IDed the Symbol of the Black Earth.
Elak Dornen called a Town Hall to explain to the populace about the Believers, and the burden they’d taken on upon discovering the Chamber of Moving Stones, the Delvers, and how the Delvers could make the stones move to warn the town of impending problems. He, and the Believers who identified themselves (Albaeri Mellikho, Rotharr Hatherhand, Ilmeth Waelver) wanted only to protect the town, and were now concerned that “outsiders” (the party) had revealed their secrets, allowing others to possibly steal them. The Town Hall was broken up by Moony raising the issue of Larrakh and his curse upon the town.
There were conversations overheard between Albaeri and Rotharr, and between Harburk and Elak.
Faith tried to intervene to protect Braelen Hatherhand from his father’s wrath.
While the others slept, William spotted some figures lurking around the Mellikho Stoneworks quarry, but was unable to pursue them.
DING! Level 3!
The next morning, the constable reported finding where someone had been hiding at Waelvur’s Wagonworks. Larmon Greenboot, a shepherd, reported finding some fresh graves on a hilltop a half-day’s travel east of Red Larch, near Feathergale Spire. The constable asked the party to check it out (and conveniently get way from the problems in town).
Brother Earndon, staying at The Swinging Sword, passed on that he’d met the Mirabar Delegation in Beliard two tendays ago, with the impression they were traveling south from there, but expecting to be in Red Larch by now.

Player Recap

When we last left our heroes

The DM Said: Couple of follow-up notes, since we kind of rushed through the end there last game. You established you took the straight path out of the dungeon.

– What did you do with Baragustas, the manacled old man who had been guarding the door of the Tomb of Moving Stones? Released him and brought him with us to the quarry exit

– Did you stop to loot the area around the petrified dwarf? Yes (though neither Nala nor Faith took anything)

– Reszur – Moony spent some of the short rest to attune to the dagger and learn more about it’s powers. (+1, glow, silent)

– Were the spells that Larrakh was throwing clerical or magical? Not determined.

– Grund was gone when you passed through. The bodies of the folk you killed were all still there.

– You did not run across the body of the boy, Braelen Hatherhand, though there were a few small spatters of blood further down that hallway.

Emerging at the quarry

Albaeri races towards us and greets us warmly. She is very glad to see us and asks over the us and the Delvers. The couple of workmen give us sideways glances but also Albaeri. Rest of workmen have been sent to put stone barriers around the sinkhole for traffic. They do not appear to be Believers. Faith asks about Braelen’s father and is directed towards the cobbler. The party heads for the inn to get cleaned up an plan their next moves.

Kaylessa greets them, immediately orders warm water and thanks them for their bravery. They head to their room and put their heads together. Ghileeda and Iraun bring in a soaking tub and warm water. There are concerns about the party’s safety with the Believers / Fancy Boys Club.

The Butcher makes a house call

Harburk arrives and demands to know what the hell is going on in his town. The group shares their story with the exception of Larrakh the spider pig. After that they head back to Mellikho’s Stoneworks to show him and a deputy the underground chambers (Tomb of the Moving Stones). The bodies of the farmers are no longer there. They identify some of the cultists’ bodies as transient laborers that have been staying at Mother Yolantha’s boarding house. In the end Harburk is obviously not happy, but doesn’t necessarily blame the party. They all exit through the shed in Waelvur’s Wagonworks yard. They are spotted by a worker, who calls out to Ilmeth. When Ilmeth arrives the constable converses briefly with him. Ilmeth asks the party to leave.

Going to the Chapel

Faith and William head off to the temple, while the others return to the Swinging Sword. Light streams in through the chapel windows on the South. There is a candle on one side of the alter, but no one else in the main room. Faith and William leave a tithe. Faith pauses to say her daily prayers while William watches over her. Imdarr comes from the back room and waits for Faith to finish. Faith asks after Lymmura. She is off seeing to the pastoral needs of those involved in the incident this morning. Imdarr patiently waits for Faith to continue. He appears interested in the group, but not judging.

Faith asks about the Delvers and what is going on underground. He doesn’t recognize the name. She describes what they found. “We do live in the Forgotten Realms. It has been probably 5000 years since there were Dwarves around here. I think the last was the kingdom of Besilmer. A few ruins remain and of course the “Stone Bridge”.” Faith describes the spells and Imdarr suggests that it is likely earth magic and asks “Did you show bravery”. Faith describes the punishment of Braelen. They chat further and eventually, he asks after the child’s name, which Faith shares. They chat on the town meeting. Finally William asks about the Ogremoch. Imdarr throws a warding sign. “Ogremoch is an evil legend, a dark earth cult, the Mountain that Moves. That is very concerning. That symbol: The Cult of the Black Earth”

A word with the master of the house

Nala asks for a private word with Kaylessa. They step outside. Nala lets her know that we have been very pleased with her Inn and the service that she has provided. Then she lets her know that we might have to leave suddenly tonight, but asks her not to tell anyone.

At the Helm

Theren chooses a table near the kitchen. Garlen greets them and offers them a better table, but they decline. He calls to Justran to bring the table some wine. He arrives with a dusty old bottle from the back of the cellar. He joins the group is a glass and gossip. They feed him a line about artwork. As the sunset falls, the building fills up. The party receives a lot of looks but none too angry.

Elak enters: “Years ago we discovered the a chamber under the town, interpret the stones, Believers, secret to keep it safe and keep our town safe.” Albaeri, Ilmeth, a gentleman we don’t recognize stand. “Forgive us my friends. Were it not for the events of today with the sinkhole and the intervention of the outsiders.” Moony waves. “We’ve been bearing the burden of this secret.”

A town’s man asks about the safety of the hole. Albaeri assures them that they are looking into how to stabilize it. Watching Elak, the neo-experimental religionists, William thinks that Elak believes a lot of what he is saying, but his motivation is suspect. The crowd then peppers him with questions. They range from safety to keeping secrets.

The constable arrives a little late. Gaelkur is not there.

Faith “I’m sorry, did my falling in the hole in ground make it hard to keep your secret?” Albaeri tries to turn it against them. “Why didn’t you just rescue the people and come back up” William “Of course we needed to look around, we needed to make sure it was safe. If part of it has caved in other areas might be unsafe.” He further challenges Elak to explain how long they have kept the secret (“10 years”), and points out that humans have been down there 30 years ago. The constable takes a hard look at Elak.

After more back and forth where Elak questions the intent of the party and dodges the questions about the men who attacked us. Moony raises the question that all of the group wanted to ask. “So, why are you not talking about Larrakh the evil Black Earth cultist, who wishes to curse the town to sink into the earth.” Elak finally sputters, “I have no idea what you are talking about” turns and leaves. Harburk the constable follows him out and Moony slinks behind. Rotharr yells at the people in crowd and leaves loudly with Albaeri.

After the meeting

Faith overhears Rotharr and Albaeri talking about how poorly the meeting went and what to do about the strangers. “Don’t worry about the strangers, I’m sure that the High One will return and take care of them. You should see to your boy and make sure isn’t spreading any tales.” “Oh, I’ll see to my boy all right”

Faith turns and runs for the cobbler’s house. Passing the temple, she sees Imdarr and asks him to delay Rotharr. Faith knocks on the cobblers house calling for Braelen. The mother answers and says that Braelen is not there and has been out all day running errands for his father. Faith tries to explain that Braelen is in danger and the Rotharr is heading this way to “silence him forever.” “I don’t believe you,” the mother says and slams the door.

Moony finds a spot outside of Elak’s and tries to overhear his conversation with Harburk. All he hears is “Come clean, Elak.” When Harburk leaves he nods to Moony, “Hope you got an ear full.”

Theren and William leave out the back through the kitchen. The owner thanks them for the crowd they drew. Nala proudly walks out the front. Theren convinces William that it is not a good time to slink around the tombs. There is a traveling cleric enjoying a quiet drink in the main room. The three head back up in their room.

Moony catches sight of Rotharr storming to the butcher’s house. Jalessa sends him away with a bug in his ear. Returning to the swinging sword, Moony chats with Brother Earndon, a priest of Lathander (God of the Dawn). He is a pleasant older half-elf who travels from town to town. This draws Moony’s interest and he questions him about Larrakh, Ogremoch and the Black Earth. The priest is shocked. “I would never think such evil walks in this area.” Moony “There is an entire town of worshipers here. Good night!”

Morning has broken

There is a slight smell of damp earth around William as folks get up. The party is invigorated and empowered (Level 3). Faith gets up early and heads to the temple. While chatting with Imdarr, he mentions that the priest who is staying at the Swinging Sword has some news about the delegation that we were looking for. She gets back about the same time as a deputy arrives to request the come down to the constable.

The constable is looking more worn that usual. He’d been up all night, and had staged a search of Waelvur’s Wagonworks pre-dawn; they’d found signs that someone had been hiding there, but had fled suddenly, leaving behind a pack.

Gaelkur arrives with a shepherd, Larmon Greenboot. He is recently in town, but reports seeing four “shallow graves” on a hill top, covered with rocks, a dozen miles out to the East past Feathergale Spire. They weren’t there a month ago. It is too far from the “feather toppers” (rich folks from Water Deep have a tower out East and fly in vultures and other animals) for them to be burying folks there. The constable asks the party to check out the graves. It will probably be good for them to be out of town for a few days.

The party returns to the inn to pack. Moony heads out to buy spikes and checks on Buttercup and pays for her stabling.

Before the party leave, Brother Earndon comes down and Kaylessa lets him know that the group would like to talk with him. William describes the concerns that the delegation from Mirabar have been delayed. The priest is surprised. “I was in Beliard ten days ago and the delegation was there. They should have passed through Red Larch by now.” The delegation was planning on heading South before rejoining the Long Road in Red Larch. After thanking the priest for this time, they head out of town on the Cairn Road.

Game Notes

Yeah, it’s another talky-talky episode. Sorry.

It’s perfectly legit in PotA to have the Believers conspiracy just plain old collapse at this point — conspirators fleeing, others being arrested, chapter over, let’s move on. Indeed, that’s how the book sort of writes it up.

Because I’d invested so much in this story, though, I wanted to treat it with some respect.

The Believers Strike Back!

The Believers have taken a terrible blow — their hidden temple found, their “master” revealed, their less savory practices exposed — but they’re not idiots. They can, potentially, recover and take control of the new status quo. Indeed, with some judicious actions, they can even better their situation.

My speculation is that, with all else going on (the party gone for at least three hours, including the time they took resting in the Chamber, plus the time taken with giving the Constable a tour afterwards, and all of his actions), the Believers, especially the main conspirators among them, have had more than enough time to scramble frantically and figure out some plans.

First step is cleaning up. The burnt bodies of the sacrificed farmers get tossed into a corn field somewhere. The bodies of the Bringers of Woe are left — they’re some of the ugly riff-raff that the Elemental Evil Eye’s influence have been bringing this direction, and so don’t directly implicate any of the Believers; indeed, they help point up the danger of strangers in town.

Next step is getting rid of witnesses. I was surprised that the party so easily handed off Baragustas to Albaeri, but that was perfect. The garrulous old man is shortly thereafter killed, and his body buried that night near Albaeri’s stoneworks (William spots something of these goings-on while druidically communing with the stars, but doesn’t choose to follow up — a bit of evidence I held in my back pocket for whenever it might seem worthwhile bringing back up).

Grund, who’s been doing most of the heavy lifting of bodies above, and is just obeying orders from his “betters,” isn’t so easily done away with, so he’s told by said betters that the Constable is going to arrest him and throw him in irons, so he better get the heck out of Dodge. Grund, easily scared (and, likely, having been mistreated by the law before) does so. Which leaves me another character to bring into the narrative later.

The final step is town “leader” Elak Dornen trying to get in front of all this: calling a town hall himself, explaining to all his dear friends of our fair town about how the Believers have been working in the best interests of the town all the time (not completely untrue), but that the town is now menaced by their magic oracle (the Tomb) having been revealed, and it’s all the fault of these meddling ~~kids~~ outsiders!

I didn’t really expect torches and pitchforks, but the party did have to do some quick talking, and eventually left matters in disarray.

Poor Constable Harburk is in a mess: he knows there’s bad stuff going on, but a lot of evidence has already been covered up, it’s all way over his pay grade — and, for that matter, some of the of the folk accused of misdeeds are, themselves, the people who pay him. It’s easier for him to (1) tackle the less respectable folk implicated in all of this, the low-hanging fruit of people who have clearly done misdeeds (like Ilvur and Grund), and (2) come up with a way to get the “meddling outsiders” out of town.

Fortunately a report of “shallow graves” found on a hillside a half-day’s travel out of town is a great opportunity to do this — and a great opportunity for the DM to get the party moving on to the next challenge.

The saga of the Believers isn’t over … but it is going to go on the back burner for a while.

Bits and Bobs

Faith pursued the Braelen child abuse sitch. That was unexpected, unplanned for, mostly improvised, and very cool.

Tyar-Besil and Besilmer — This map I found of Tyar-Besil will crop up a little later.

I’d introduced Brother Imdarr when they first arrived as one of the two visiting priests at the All Faiths Shrine. That gave Faith a place to dig out info about “Ogremoch” (mentioned by Larrakh last time) and that cryptic symbol (of the Black Earth) … and presented the perfect opportunity for some infodumping as to the history of the Dessarin Valley (which I also put into a journal entry for the players), with focus on the fallen Bessilmer Kingdom and the Haunted Keeps tale. Perfect timing as they headed out on a path that should take them to Feathergale Spire.

The party dinged to 3rd Level, having had a Long Rest after clearing out the Tomb. Just in time — and the last point where Milestone Leveling worked quite right for, well four more levels. This is, in theory, the point where the book’s main suggestion about starting the campaign begins. Bah. I regret nothing about the previous seven (eight) sessions.

As a reminder to the players about the campaign MacGuffin, hints and tips about the Mirabar Delegation were served up. This got them looking at a (redacted) version of the Dessarin Valley map, which again got them focused outwardly from Red Larch.

(We’ll have a discussion about the Delegation the next installment. Their behavior and movements are very poorly recorded in the campaign and not well explained and actually don’t make a hell of a lot of sense. In part, PotA gets away with that because they are a MacGuffin, but since that guides all the Haunted Keep stuff, it’s a bit annoying. If you’ve been confused in what you’ve read about it … it’s not just you.)

That’s Larrakh who’d been hiding out at Waelvur’s Wagonworks (all improvised, as he’s not really written to survive the battle in the Chamber). His mission in town blown, he’s headed back to the Sacred Stone Monastery to reporting on goings-on. We’ll see next time how that works for him.

I’d given the party a horse and cart some sessions back (obtained from “Bears and Bows” bandits), but the more experienced players realized that sort of equipment never goes well when it came time to dungeon-delve. Ah, well. Eventually they were both sold, when the party tired of paying for stable space.

The Shallow Graves report also let me give an intro to Feathergale Spire, the nearest Haunted Keep, and how it’s seen by the locals: fancy rich boys from the Big City riding around on flying mounts, but also arrogant SOBs who sometimes come into town for supplies — or, the constable hints darkly, raid local farms for livestock to feed their birds and themselves. Some of the locals think they are dashing and handsome, “those magnificent men in their flying machines” sort of thing, but the constable is far too no-nonsense for that.

<< Session 6 | Session 8 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 6: “The Tomb of Moving Stones”

Wherein the party nearly get their hat handed to them, but manage to triumph.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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

Petrified Dwarf Inscription — 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.

Displease Not the Delvers — 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.

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.

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

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.

<< Sessions 5 | Session 7 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 5: “Like a Great Black Pit”

A sink hole strikes Red Larch. What could be at the bottom of it all?

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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.

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

Red Larch 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

<< Session 4 | Session 6 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 4: “Stormy Weather”

Sometimes the DM talks too much. Sometimes it’s the DM’s NPCs who do so.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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 4 (Day 13): The party camped overnight, ignoring / coddling / threatening Oreioth; the next day they dealt with final exploration (and experimentation with light and shadows) of the traps and threats of his cave.

Returning to Red Larch under an increasing stormy weather, they turned the necromancer over to the Constable. Faith inquired with Lymmura Auldarhk about the mysterious sigil they’d seen. Theron and Nala reported to Kaylessa Irkell about how her predictions of “fell magic” had come true.

Moony and William enjoyed a hot bath at Haeleeya Hanadroum‘s establishment (where the proprietress mentioned something about a “fancy boys club” of local notables including Elak Dornen, Ilmeth Waelver, and Albaeri Mellikho as both elders of the town but also part of a secretive midnight group that meets up at Waelvur’s Wagonworks). They then went on to Gaelkur’s establishment, told stories, and drank a lot.

Theren, Faith, and Nala eventually headed to dinner at the Helm. They noted Ghileeda, the servant girl at the Sword, chatting with Justran Daehl, the Cellerer, and then a table of Elak Dornen, Albaeri Mellikho, Aerego Bethendur, and Ilmeth Waelver. Dornen came over to the party, bought them a fine bottle of dessert wine for their efforts at Lance Rock, and then tried to find out when they were leaving town. Theren suggested he might hire them to clear out trouble along the Larch Path into the Sumber Hills.

Everyone eventually staggered back to the Inn for a good night’s sleep.

Player Recap

Camping at lance rock: Mr. Crazy Pants [Oreioth] is causing a fuss and Nala wakes Faith, who just threatens to bonk him on the head with a rock. William asks some questions and determines that he does not have any specific concerns and leaves him to Nala. William spends some time watching the stars and heads back to sleep. The next morning the Moony ties up the necromancer to the wagon and they head into the cave. Nala sneaks in, the lead in front has the Driftglobe and Faith casts light on her shield taking up the rear.

With the new dynamic lighting [Roll20!], they probe the remaining unexplored areas of the cave. Open path ends in a room with two large empty chests. Faith picks up a jug of alcohol from the large room with the slab and the stairs in case we need to clean anything. Moony inspect the door at the top of the stair. There is a small hole with a small round chamber with two large chests in it. He pulls a lever and a large quantity of rock fall on the chest from the first room that we explored.

In the end, there is no new treasure in the cave and no ripe berries near Lance Rock.

On the trip back to town, Oreioth pleads to return to his cave and the protection of his “army”. The group does not pay much attention. He goes on about the [Elemental Eye] sigil. Theren puts together pieces Oreioth ravings and wracks his brain for any arcana trivia, but comes up empty. Moony asks questions about unicorns and William’s goddess Mielikki. Faith notices that thunder and lightning is rolling in quickly.

Distribution of loot and leveling up: Nala will take the Driftglobe and Theren gets the wand of magic missiles. The group then discussed the new skills that they acquired.

Back in town: The group brings back Oreioth to the Harburk and the constable and let’s him know about the events of the cave and Orieoth’s raving. It is late afternoon/evening. Faith heads to the temple to pray to both of her gods and then talks to Lymmura. She brings up the topic of the missing farmers and their symbol of Chauntea. They discuss the possibilities. The farmers were practically devout, but not overly so. When pressed, she doesn’t have a specific ask for Faith or any rumors to pursue. “I think then tomorrow, I will go to the ‘person’ that you have turned over to constable to see if a friendly face will encourage more information.

A Bath and Booze: Moony and William drop off Buttercup at the stables. Iraun takes the horse and wagon with little interest in the details. Moony asks about unicorns and Mielikki, He doesn’t have much to add. Later on they wander into Haeleeya Hanadroum’s bath house. It is late, but she is happy to heat the water for the men’s bath and adds some manly scents. Moony enjoys the bath, dries himself and tells Haeleeya about zombies and unicorns. She states if a unicorn was going to come to Red Larch, the “Elder Boys” would like to hear about it. They are a club of influential people in town that includes Albeiri the stone works owner and her competitor and Waelver the wagon works guy. They thinks that they are so clever, gathering in the night, but we who are alert notice them. They gather at Waelver’s wagon works.

Moony and William enjoy their time in the baths and eventually head to Gaelkur’s after a proper soak. They acquire some drinks and Moony tells them about the unicorn and the captive. William asks for “Milk Piss”. Gaelkur comes up with a clay jug and says, “I think this is something that may be like what you want”. William takes a swing of questionable liquid. The fermented goat’s milk is not what William expects, but it is boozy and not completely inconsumable. Though it smells like rancid milk with some interesting notes. Moony takes the questionable wine instead. He goes on about the necromancer and Faith’s need for manacles. William sits back and enjoys his rotten milk.

The folk drinking at Gaelkur’s are hanging on every word and debate visiting the constable to view the evil man. He is completely crazy. William agrees, “crazy pants.” The audience is mixed on the plans to visit the constable. Mooney pulls forth the needle and draws additional attention. Getting back to Faith’s need for manacles, everyone agrees that the smith is the most likely source. Mooney implies that the smithy is part of the cabal that runs the city behind the scenes. Finally, Gaelkur sets him straight, that the smith doesn’t have time to be part of boys club that Haeleeya was talks about. They spend the rest of the evening drinking and talking about unicorns and such. They are welcome any time. (More people have filled place but few have left.)

The Responsible Ones: Nala and Theren return to the inn and fill Kaylessa Irkell in on the adventure. She returns the room payment and promises a fine dessert wine for the group to celebrate. She is excited about the news, but doesn’t press too much about details, Nala gives her a full account.

The rain has stopped, Faith and the others have decided not to wait for Moony and William. They head for the Helm for dinner. The place is full and several parties are looking for a place to sit. Theren notices the parlor maid chatting with the wine steward Justran. They head for a table on the first floor that will accommodate the full group, if they ever appear. Theren attempts to overhear the conversation between Justran and the maid. Theren remembers that the maid had previous said she never takes hard spirits.

The group looks around and notes some familiar faces. Shortly they notice Elak Dornen who was at the table with his stoneworks competitor, Albeiri Nellikho. He offers the group drinks or some wine, noting the benefit the group has given the town. Nala accepts, with the caveat that Dornen join them. He orders some wine and sits at the table. He is the other quarry owner, who registered the complaint with the constable and the shenanigans. The Constable is sometimes too hard working of a man. Do take care not offend him with your meddling with the town.

Happy Faith is not happy. She thinks that he is not happy with the party’s activities. Nala mentions the missing caravan and Elak has nothing to add. Dornen leaves politely. Justran arrives with the wine and says “There are not many who come away from a conversation with Master Dornen with a smile.” The wine is good.

Game Notes

So after a rollicking adventure the previous episode, things this time turned into … kind of a wandering dialog-fest, catching up with new acquaintances and making newer ones. Not necessarily bad conversations, but feeling a bit like players searching for what to do next and my not finding (or pushing) hooks to make it happen.

Largely my bad, though I did manage to get some clues building about the Believers (a.k.a. The Old Boys Network, or the “Fancy Boys” and the players started calling them) who run the town behind the scenes and have covert meetings at night). That sort of thing is impossible to keep secret in a small town, so it makes sense that various folk know about it, though not necessarily about what they are up to.

I also did some setup of the link between Ghileeda and Justran, and between them and the Believers. I also helped establish Dornen as the likely main man and tacit opposition they face in town. So that was good.

And we’re starting to get some special relationships being built. People like Haeleeya, the bath house owner, and that would give her a bigger role in later episodes. Gaelkur never played off quite as well as I liked, but he did recur further down the line, so that was good.

Still … too much dialog. Maybe I should have had a masked gang of thugs try and take out Moony and William on their way back from the dubious digs of Gaelkur’s, but it’s still just a bit too early for the bad guys to panic that way.

We did play around a bit (both GM and players) with the new Dynamic Lighting setup in Roll20. Despite some technical issues in its early implementation (and some still around), it is truly an awesome tool for someone who grew up on pencils and graph paper for game maps.

This is not a heavily Darkvisioned party (only two of the five), so figuring out light sources and sight lines turned out to be somewhat important early days.

Oh, and we got some unexpected heavy rain. Weird.

Ah, well. Things get more exciting next time.

<< Session 3 | Session 5 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 3: “The Lord of Lance Rock”

The party finally delves a minor dungeon! Woot!

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 Driftglobe and 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 …

unicorn token — 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

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.

<< Session 2 | Session 4 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 2: “Welcome to Red Larch”

Wherein we meet people. Lots of people. A town full of people.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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!

Table of Contents. The Party.

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.

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.

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.

Bad Token — 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.

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

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.

<< Session 1 | Session 3 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 1: “And the Evening and the Morning”

Wherein the party heads to Red Larch, where the campaign pretty much starts.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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 1 (Day 2-9): The party journeyed north on the Long Road in a caravan led by Lela Linber, into the Desserin Valley. After fending off an attack by bandits, the party arrived in the quaint village of Red Larch, picking up accomodations at The Swinging Sword, a place to worship at the Allfaiths Shrine, and discovering some tasty ale at the Helm at Highsun.

Player Recap

Morning of the first day:

Faith and the Feather Bed: Faith has never slept in a feather bed. It brings her odd dreams. She decides that she needs to make sure the master of the house is still in his coffin..

Breakfast and shopping: Moony heads to the market for some last minute shopping.

Nala stays at the house and sharpens her sword and then thinks to check in with Captain Gervain, the captain of the watch. After some polite conversation, Nala brings up the missing delegation. Upon hearing that she is investigating on Gemvocs’ behalf he gives her more information on the delegation. Also refers her to Helvur Tarnlar, the tailor in Red Larch, and to the Waterbaron of Yartar, Nestra Ruthiol.

Theren returns the book he borrowed and converses with Valkh about the upcoming trip. Valkh did not make the arrangements and couldn’t add much info.

Faith joins William as he heads to the market to do some last minute shopping. While Faith is distracted at another booth, an elf from the Emerald Enclave turns out to know of WIlliam’s plans to find the delegation. The elf offers no direct help, but does mention a person in Red Larch who is friendly to the enclave.

Theren enters the magic shop, where an elf engages in high-minded conversation, ending with a request to help locate a dwarf scholar who may be delayed or lost; they have manuscripts for the local library.

The Delegation:

Teresiel, a Silvermoon elf
Rhundorth, a dwarf from Mirabar
Deseyna Majarra, a Waterdhavian noble

Contacts in Red Larch:

Harburk – Constable of Red Larch – Recommended by Gemvocs
Helvur Tarnlar
Haeleeya Hanadroum

Other Contacts:

Nestra Ruthiol – Waterbaron of Yartar
Bruldenthar
Darathra Shendrel, the Lord Protector of Triboar

The Caravan:

Departure: We are passengers with food and conveyance paid for already. Not fancy, but we have our choice of seats. Warm welcome

Day 5 – Amphail: Well known for their horses and the heroic deeds of their founder. Boring town but decent food and friendly people. Some conversation about the vagaries of the weather. Faith visits the shrine and chats with a priest staying at the shrine. He has heard talk of strange weather and the moving of the earth to the North.

Day 6 – Attack: The caravan stops to collect water. Ambush by bandits while stopping for water. We manage to kill several and the rest flee. At Lena”s preferred camping site once again has water in the well.

Day 7 – Weather: Travel begins with cloudy skies followed by a short rainstorm. After about 15 minutes the clouds clear and the lovely spring weather returns. The caravan will be camping south of Red Larch tonight. Lena gave a good introduction to the town and the surrounding lands.

Red Larch

The Swinging Sword: We are met at the door by Kaylessa Irkell, the matron. The group takes a large bunk-room for the night. The room is large and clean if not luxurious. The kitchen is not available, but the Helm is the best choice for food in town.

Faith and Moony stop by the Allfaiths Shrine. There are some people talking behind closed doors and later Lymmura comes out of another door and chats with Faith. They later join the group at the Helm.

Justrin the cellarer comes by and checks on the group. Tharan says the house ale is OK. He has a glass of the “Branch” which is much better.

Game Notes

Factions

So the previous session I’d done a bit of this and that to try and get the party all on the same track toward the Dessarin Valley and the overall campaign.

It occurred to me that I might do a bit more. So while everyone was out and about doing shopping with their newfound spending money, I had some of them encounter appropriate representatives of the various Factions, pursuing their interests in the Mirabar Delegation.

William was visited by an Emerald Enclave ranger, asking him that, as long as he was off looking for the Delegation members, Teresiel was particularly important to the EE folk because of the magic seeds she was transporting to Goldenfields.

Nala was approached by her former boss in the City Watch, asking her to keep an eye out for the Delegation as a whole, due to the urgency of the diplomatic mission they were on and the importance to Waterdeep (and the Lords’ Alliance)

Theren met a Harper — appropriate, given his fears over his own magic. She asked him to look into Bruldenthar and the books he was transporting down for the Great Library.

Everyone passed on to the individuals the names of folk in Red Larch and elsewhere who might help, and further warnings about how some creepy magic stuff was going on off in the Dessarin Valley.

Again, the idea was to give some individual motivation to the players (not just the group motivation from Gemvocs), as well as pass on some contacts, and bump up the sense of worry over the area. It also let me establish the bigger picture of the Factions of Faerun (even if that never really goes far in this campaign) as well as explore some of the player backgrounds.

Other hooks

Faith, I decided, would Have A Dream. I tend to lean heavily (maybe too heavily) into using dreams to convey clues, moods, concerns, or opportunities coming up specific to a player. In her case, as she thinks of all the odd things she’d seen that day (her first out of the orphanage, and already on a quest!), and the white carriages in the streets …

… and how they curled around the odd house up the hill in the Street of Groves like wisps of smoke, and the very odd man who answered the door there, with his ugly face and polite manners, and the man who appeared from the smoke, despite (or maybe because) of how hard you prayed, and the strange story he told of a lost delegation up north, and a rising evil, and an eye opening, and you’re seeing an eye in the darkness …

… except the darkness is all around you pull back from the eye of another old man, except his irises are triangular which is very odd,and his beard looks to be of smoke, like the smoke from that incense

… and the old man is at a table, writing a scroll that looks like the message you got, with a golden quill like a gorgeous feather, but the words are all wrong, but that’s okay, it’s a dream, right …

… and he is looking at you and smiling, “One I have touched to one I have touched, the chain is forged another link, another volume, to end the rising destruction, and you go on a journey” …

… and you’re flying through the window across river and dell, field and forest, approaching a high series of hills lit by flames and lightning, gusts of windswept rain, and there is a hall, castle, on a high hill … flying over the walls, around a tower, through a great stained glass window … and a group of knights gathered in a circle, heads bowed, over … an empty casket.

“Something is missing. Find it. Tyr would have it restored. I would have its story concluded aright.”

The old man is smiling at her again. “Knowledge is power,” he says and winks and it’s morning and you’ve never slept in a featherbed before.

That’s Deneir, the god Faith was shifting away from, starting to point her toward the “find the lost body of the young Samular knight which was being transported back to Summit Hall with the Delegation” subplot. The character, a cleric, very much took that direction to heart.

I ran out of creative gas with Moony, so I asked him about his dreams. When in doubt, players can provide colorful detail about this kind of thing, and it gives the GM more hooks to use later to provide satisfying story.

The Road to Red Larch

So it could have been an easy thing to simply FF to “you arrive at Red Larch,” but I was still getting a feel for the tools and the system and the campaign, and I wanted the players (esp. the ones still feeling their way into 5e) to have a chance to do the same before the Real Story started.

Thus the caravan, which would serve a couple of purposes:

For me to get a feel for how the players would operate.
For the players to get a feel for the combat system.
For me to pass on some further background about the Dessarin Valley, etc.

So Valkh the half-orc majordomo bid them a hearty farewell. “I’ll be here on your return. If you return. The Master was a bit vague on that. But I’ll be here.” And they headed off to their reserved seats on a caravan going up the Long Road.

The Dessarin Valley, as laid out, is kind of an interesting place. There’s thousands of years of history (a lot of it defined in this campaign), but for the most part it’s small villages, a couple of large towns/small cities on the northern end, and the Long Road running up its left side, carrying the land trade between Waterdeep and the areas further to the north.

I’ve seen write-ups of the campaign which basically make Red Larch the back end of nowhere, but a better analogy is a small town along the Interstate. There’s a lot of travel that goes through town, and that allows for rumors and news to be passed along.

I sort of made up from whole cloth (the game really doesn’t discuss Waterdeep, even though it’s implied as a big city nearby the action, and a place where the party can go if they need to buy stuff or get resurrections, etc.) the vast caravansary outside Waterdeep’s city walls, as well as the caravan, its captain (Lela Linber), her crew running the wagons, and a couple of other travelers trailing along for mutual safety. I wanted it to feel real, part of the campaign, with the opportunity to start engaging with the mystery around them.

I actually probably wrote up too much, but I was getting my creative juices back flowing. So they never learned the story of Gimble Gerrick, the gnomish elixir salesman returning home to Conyberry where his husband and their three kids (fostered from his sister) lived. Or what was going on with the two mysterious dwarves in their own wagon, who always ate by themselves and never socialized. It was a start to creating that layered verisimilitude that makes the players feel like everything around them is real, not just the rails taking them to the next destination.

Lena was fun — a take-charge woman that, as long as it didn’t interfere with driving the caravan and keeping it safe, was happy to chat with paying passengers along the way. A friendly face, to make it clear as well that not everything was automatically going to be a threat. And she was part of Gemvocs’ web as well:

She knows Gemvocs from a letter she received five years ago to the day, suggesting she take the coastal route from Mirabar to Waterdeep, and mentioning what she was eating for breakfast. Being no fool, she did so, even though it added two tendays to the journey. She later found out that hill giants in the Crags, south of Mirabar, were attacking caravans on the Long Road, and she’d avoided getting embroiled in a great battle around Xantharl’s Keep. When she received word on arriving back in Waterdeep five days ago that she’d be taking five passengers with her to Red Larch, she assumed accordingly, and bought some extra provisions.

The trip was to take 7 days. Is that how long it actually is meant to take? I recall, as researching, that the travel time between Red Larch and Waterdeep was estimated quite differenetly in different places. Seven seemed a good compromise.

The trip gave the party a chance to learn a bit about the geography — as the players watched the Dessarin Valley map, and the characters got stories from Lena about each of the places they passed through. After five days, they were passing through Amphail. The next day saw some low hills to the east that Lena said she didn’t like to camp near (laying the groundwork for Rundreth Manor, if they ever went down that side quest, which they didn’t).

And, of course, at some point in the woods they were attacked by bandits, while some of the wagon crews were off with a big barrel down by a known creek. That battle wasn’t meant for much, just to blood the party — let them see how combat worked, mechanically, as well as, for the team, tactically.

(Besides, it was the second meeting and there hadn’t been any battle. That seemed near-blasphemous for a D&D game.)

I did try to tie things into the story — Lena had told them that banditry was on the rise, in part because of disruptions to the economy due to Bad Things Afoot in the Dessarin, in part because more evil / cranky / crazy folk seemed to be showing up over the last few years. That info would, like the weather, be repeated often.

Experience

PotA gives the option of tracking Experience through normal XP rewards or through Milestone Levels. We’d used Milestones in the Tyranny of Dragons game, and they’re awesome — a tonne less work for the GM, and a removal of penalties for missing a game, not being part of the main action, etc., while also not incenting Search & Destroy missions through every dungeon level.

The game provides clear guidelines of when leveling should occur (or what level people should be for different areas).

That said, Milestone Leveling is a little problematic in as sandboxy a campaign as PotA. Sometimes (as happened for us), missions / dungeons just aren’t properly completed, but as the party moves on to the next zone, they really need that bump. The result can be awarding things too quickly in some cases, too slowly (or with too long an interval) in others. And, without that XP counter, there’s no way for the players to anticipate that next ding.

It’s also a major criticism of PotA that there are no guard rails to keep players from wandering into a much harder zone than they can handle. I am not in favor of killing characters if it can be reasonably avoided, and TPKs are something I’ve managed to avoid during my entire GMing (and playing) career.

I ended up instituting some guard rails later on. For the moment, though, it was bothering me.

So we had a battle with bandits.

Weather

So Lena the next day tells them about how wonky the weather has been in the Dessarin Valley. Which is something the book is clear enough over and over. I found a fun discussion about a Random Weather Table for the game that I adapted, and tried to very faithfully to roll first thing every morning.

GM rolls 1d8 + roundup(partylvl/2) – 4 (min 0, max 8). This was my way of having the weather escalate; when the party reached 7, the full table would be in play.

0 Pleasant / Normal

1 Pleasant / Looming: Tomorrow, if you roll a 2-6, there is chance you will treat it as a 7 (Extreme Weather) instead (that chance is 25% per Pleasant day in a row). There is a sense of vague disquiet during the day.

2 Pleasant / Shaky: but several minor tremors throughout the day. The tremors are not severe enough to damage creatures or structures.

Each round of combat, there is a 10% chance of a tremor. All creatures standing on the ground must make a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw or fall prone. Creatures with more or fewer than 2 legs have Advantage on the saving throw.

While traveling overland, PCs have a 10% chance of encountering a landslide in hills or badlands, or a 20% chance in the mountains. Spotting the landslide ahead of time requires a Passive Perception of 15 or success on a DC 15 Wisdom (Survival) check. If successful, this provides Advantage on the following save, and no damage on success. Each character must make a DC 10 Dexterity Save, taking 6d6 bludgeoning damage on a failure or half as much on a success.

3 Pouring rain: Overland travel speeds are halved, and everything is lightly obscured. The DC of all tracking attempts increases by 10.

Characters near a river, lake, or swamp have a chance of encountering floodwaters equal to 20% per day of rain. Noticing an impending flood requires a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check. Noticing allows characters to make a Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check to flee to higher ground before the floodwaters hit (the DC is between 10 and 20, based on how close the group is to higher ground). Characters swept up by the flood must make a series of DC 15 Strength (Athletics) checks to keep afloat.

- - After 1 failure, the character takes a level of Exhaustion.
  - After 3 failures, which need not be consecutive, the character begins to drown.
  - After 3 successes, which need not be consecutive, the character swims out of the floodwater, unless they find some other way to escape the flood sooner (such as being helped out by an ally).

4 Sunny, hot, and dry (or humid, if it rained yesterday): Every 4 hours that a character travels overland, they must succeed at a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or suffer a level of Exhaustion. Characters in heavy clothing or medium or heavy armor have Disadvantage on the saving throw. Characters resistant or immune to fire automatically succeed.

5 Cold and windy: Wisdom (Perception) checks based on hearing are at disadvantage. Overland flight speed is halved.

Characters without warm protective clothing or resistance or immunity to cold must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw every 4 hours they are exposed to the wind. Characters engaged in vigorous activity, such as overland travel, have Advantage on the saving throw On a failure, they take a level of Exhaustion.

Each round of combat, there is a 50% chance of strong winds, or 25% if the characters are in a protected environment such as a box canyon or dense forest. During a round of strong winds, ranged weapon attacks are at Disadvantage. Flying creatures must land at the end of their turn or fall.

6 Overcast and Thunderous: Rumbles of thunder and strikes of lightning: Magnetic disturbances cause compasses to malfunction.

If a creature takes lightning damage in combat, the DM randomly selects 1 creature within 15 feet (including the creature that took the initial damage). The selected creature takes a further 1d10 lightning damage, which doesn’t trigger this effect.

7 Extreme weather: It will occur during the day at time 1d4 (1=Morning, 2=Mid-Day, 3=Afternoon, 4=Night). Roll 1d4 for result.

1 Snowstorm or Hailstorm (summer): The storm lasts 2d4 hours. Predicting its onset requires a DC 10 Wisdom (Survival) check.

Snowstorm: Use the rules for Extreme Cold (DMG p.110). — end of each hour DC10 CON check or 1 lvl of Exhaustion. Each hour produces 6″ of snowfall; ground with 1 foot or more of snow is difficult terrain. Snow melts at a rate of 1 foot per day, or 4 feet per day when it is hot out.

Hailstorm: Characters out in the open are pelted by hailstones, and each round must succeed at a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw or suffer 1d4 bludgeoning damage. When caught out in the open, characters can improvise a shelter with 1d4 rounds and a successful DC 10 Wisdom (Survival) check. Waiting out the storm in such a shelter still requires a DC 15 Constitution saving throw; on a failure, the character suffers a level of Exhaustion.

2 Tornado: PCs have an 80% chance of encountering a tornado in plains or badlands, a 20% chance in the mountains or on a lake or river, and a 50% chance elsewhere. Predicting the tornado’s arrival requires success on a DC 15 Wisdom (Survival) check and gives the characters 10 minutes to find shelter.

Spotting it requires a Passive Perception of 15 or success on a DC 10 Wisdom (Perception) check and gives the PCs one minute to find shelter. Shelter can be located with a DC 10 Wisdom (Perception or Survival) check, with disadvantage if you only have 1 minute to get there; or the PCs may already be near obvious shelter, such as a stone building. PCs under shelter when the tornado strikes must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or suffer a level of Exhaustion.

PCs out in the open take a level of Exhaustion and are pelted by debris for 2d6 bludgeoning damage. They must then make a DC 20 Dexterity saving throw to evade the tornado. On a failure, they must make a DC 15 Strength saving throw to avoid being swept away. On a failure, the character takes 3d6 bludgeoning damage and is flung 3d6x10 feet up into the air (see Falling damage). On a success, the character takes half damage and is not flung.

3 Earthquake: The earthquake is severe enough to destroy buildings and cause avalanches.

Characters outdoors on relatively level terrain are safe from these effects. Otherwise, characters must make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw. On a failure, characters in stone buildings or mountainous terrain take 10d6 bludgeoning damage, and characters in wooden buildings or hilly terrain take 6d6 bludgeoning damage. On a success, characters take half damage.

There is a 20% chance of a fissure opening beneath the characters (whether or not they were caught in an avalanche or building collapse). Anyone standing in the area of the fissure must succeed on a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw or fall 2d6x10 feet into it.

4 Wildfire: PCs have an 80% chance of encountering a wildfire in grassland or forest, a 20% chance in swampland or near a river or lake, and a 50% chance elsewhere. Use the rules for Extreme Heat (DMG p.110). Exposure without access to drinking water means rolling a CON save each hour or take 1 Level of Exhaustion — DC 5 the 1st hour, +1/hour after that. Medium or Heavy Armor, or in heavy clothing, means Disadvantage. Fire Resistance or Immunity, or adaptation to hot climes, means automatic save.

The wildfire moves 50 feet per round and is 2d4x100 feet wide. Spotting it more requires a Passive Perception of 15 or succeeding on a DC 10 Wisdom (Perception) check. Characters who spotted it ahead of time have 3d4 rounds to escape; otherwise the wildfire appears only 1d4x50 feet away. A character in the area of the wildfire must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw: (1) Taking 2d10 fire damage and a level of Exhaustion on a failure (2) Taking half damage and no exhaustion on a success. (3) Taking half damage and a level of Exhaustion if they have Fire Resistance. (4) Taking no damage but a level of Exhaustion if they have Fire Immunity.

8 Same as yesterday (for Extreme weather, re-roll 1d4)

Overall it worked pretty well, despite looking kind of complex. It always gave NPCs something (the weather) to talk about, and the increasingly radical results escalated the tension about what the Elemental cults were up to. The main goal was to emphasize that whole ‘Tain’t Natural aspect of the Dessarin Hills.

Red Larch

As the session was coming to a close, the wagons reached the caravansary (here basically a raider-burnt barn and a muddy parking lot) south of Red Larch. They got some final travelogue from Lena about where the roads go from there (laying the groundwork for later adventures, including warnings about the Sumber Hills, and a tourist recommendation to visit Lance Rock), and about the town itself.

Red Larch is an amazing resource in this game. Half the buildings and seemingly half the residents are fleshed out to some degree. You could base a homebrew campaign out of Red Larch, easy.

Unfortunately, neither the campaign nor Roll20 make it all that easy.

The Roll20 Conversion of PotA

In the book, the material on Red Larch is scattered, in keeping with the whole What Level Are You Starting At? Question.

There’s a huge chunk in Chapter 2 (on pp. 18-29), which talks about the place in general, important people, groups, summaries of the 1st Level Adventures, summaries of the 3rd Level Adventures. Then there’s a lengthy section about each of the marked locations (shops, inns, etc.) in town, with more stuff about people in it (and sub-notes for the 1st Level vs 3rd Level shenanigans).
There’s another short section in Chapter 6 (p. 148-149), about key places and people. The rest of Chapter 6 details the 1st Level adventures around and in Red Larch (plus also some side quests once at Level 3).
But there’s also a small bit in Chapter 3 (p. 41) that summarizes the Level 3 clues in Red Larch, before going on to all the stuff you do once you leave town.

In other words, the information management here is an unholy mess, hardcopy or electronic, hampered by WotC’s inexplicable tendency to completely ignore the radical idea of having an index to the book, but also by key bits of information for a given spot or person being given in multiple places (usually, though not always, consistently).

In adopting the campaign to Roll20, in some ways, WotC has made it worse, because it’s lumped things together into journal entries that are far too long. That “lengthy section” in Chapter 2 about each of the marked locations in town? All one journal entry, which makes it nearly impossible to cross-reference everything needful.

I ended up myself breaking out every building and every person in Red Larch into their own journal entry, so that if I needed to walk into the Swinging Sword, I could do that and not worry about the notes in four other journal entries that I would have to manually scroll to. It was a lot of work — but by the time I was done, I knew the town, and people, of Red Larch a lot better.

I put all the Red Larch locations, and Red Larch people, into their own subfolders. This also gave me the opportunity to pull up some artwork for the locations and, even more important, create tokens for everyone. It is, frankly, shoddy work for a named person in the book not to even have a token on the screen, or have it be a generic “commoner” token, or even just a token with a name written on it. I wouldn’t have it.

(Which also gave me an opportunity to diversify the looks and genders of the folk being encountered. Just saying.)

I would ultimately end up breaking out a lot of the other large-chunk journal entries into smaller pieces for easier look-up and management. I never did it with a dungeon, but ultimately needing to make the info spread out into Chapters 2, 3, and 6 coherent and usable for me required a lot of extra work (which all paid off).

I also ended up creating a lot of new tokens, a lot of broken-out journal entries for named characters or places that didn’t come in the package.

One other thing I ended up doing: the Roll20 implementation had a bunch of material for monsters or major characters that consisted of two journal entries:

A character sheet that had all the info for that race and some notes from the game (in the bio page), the character sheet, and the attached token.
A handout that had a picture of the thing, to show to the players.

That makes little sense for Roll20. So I usually just used the main character sheet entry, moved all the secure info into the “GM Only” section, pasted the handout picture into the bio image (if not already there), and could then just share the character sheet journal with the players when I pulled it up for myself — I only needed to pull up one document, and they could only see the bits I wanted them to.

(I also tried to update locations and character sheets / journal entries with information as the party learned things. My goal — which mostly worked — was to avoid, “Hey, I don’t remember what Bob told us back at Feathergale Keep before we killed him. GM, what was that again?” They can look up Bob themselves, and the info is there. (Hell, I can look up Bob if I forget.)

In short, I did a lot of extra labor in reassembling the Roll20 implementation of this game. But it was worth it, and I learned a lot about the campaign it would have been easy to miss.

<< Session 0 | Session 2 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse, Session 0: “The Wake”

We kick off a game that’s going to last us the next 2½ years.

This is part of an a series my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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.

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 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

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.

<< Pre-Campaign Thoughts | Session 1 >>

Princes of the Apocalypse – Pre-Campaign Thoughts

On D&D, me, my DMing philosophy, my home rules, and why I ran PotA.

This is part of a series about my DMing Princes of the Apocalypse, a D&D 5e adventure by and copyright Wizards of the Coast.

Table of Contents. The Party.

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!

Our group’s previous game was winding up — the whole big Tyranny of Dragons two-fer, GMed by a friend of ours — and I was hankering to do some DMing myself.

This is that story.

So who am I?

I’ve been playing FRPGs (as Fantasy TTRPGs used to be called, back before being Table-Top was a minority position) for over four decades — but rarely actual D&D.

In college my gaming group did a lot of homebrew FRPGs. Mine was loosely based on mechanics from Runequest. While other students were spending their Saturday nights getting blitzed, I was reworking my spell books and setting up errata for the following Friday’s game. Or hand-drawing elaborate invitations for same. I had no life, but it was good. (It was especially good because it was in a friend’s game that I met my future wife, so huzzah for gaming!)
Post-college, I got heavily into GURPS (oh, the crunchiness!), a variety of Super-Hero RPG rules, and Amber Diceless Roleplaying (oh, the non-crunchiness!).
In the early 00s through 10s, the gaming group I was in got pulled into the D&D 3.5 orbit, and we did a lot of different games and settings. I myself DMed a number of campaigns, including some fun spy-based stuff (run both under FATE and using the D20 Spycraft rules). We also did a lot of indie RPGs — Sorcerer, Nobilis, and the like.
The 20s brought the Virtual Tabletop — an answer to “How do we, as adults with kids, drive to a game after work, play a game, drink beer during the game, then drive home safely after the game?” We were eventually doing Roll20 stuff well before COVID, and loving it. Sure, it meant much less of an excuse to binge on Nacho Cheese Doritos, but it meant a lot more opportunity to game, and with people outside the geographical area. We did a lot of gaming in that context, but some of my favorite used Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) rulesets, esp. Masks.
And then a friend of ours offered to DM a game for his wife, and me, and my wife (the same one as see first bullet above) — the whole Tyranny of Dragons D&D 5e campaign. And this led to much buying of 5e books. And we would do it over Roll20 (even though we lived just 5 minutes away from each other) because (a) parenting and then (b) COVID. And it all worked beautifully.

Which, again, once it came to a close, was my cue to step up and be the DM for the first time in a decade-plus. No small trepidations there, but, rather than rolling my own scenarios, I’d be using modules, which … for better or worse … I thought I could deal with. But what would I DM …?

The Campaign’s the Thing

My criteria for what we were going to play?

I wanted an official WotC campaign. That seemed the safest bet. It was limiting, but I figured it had the biggest resource base (producer and players) and so would be the best errata’d and “fixed” through both the company and the community.
I wanted something that would run characters up through most of their potential levels. In other words, a long game. Going from 1-5 would then mean looking for something more. If I could find a game, like the Tyranny of Dragons, that would take the characters up toward the max, I’d be quite happy.
I wanted something supported by Roll20, our VTT of choice (or at least what we were used to, and that’s a debate for another forum). I mean, I was sure I could scan something in and build maps and things like that, but I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew. (Ha!)

So I read through reviews, weighing things that looked cool vs. things that looked daunting. And finally decided on Princes of the Apocalypse — a wide-ranging, level 1-15ish (13, actually, but some of the lit says 15) romp across open terrain and underground and fighting against the end of the world as we know it.

And, overall, it was a good choice. It’s a complex project, lots of moving parts, and very sandboxy (or, rather, non-railroady). In ToD, it all felt like “Okay, you have done X, now on to do Y.” In PotA, it’s much more, “Okay, you have done X … what are you doing now. Oh, yeah, there’s Y, Z, Q, and any other direction one might want to go.”

Let me do a quick eval of PotA and some of its strengths and weaknesses.

PotA Writing and Age and Support

PotA came out in 2015, one of the earliest 5e campaigns (though post-ToD), which means lots of folk have played it and DMed it. While this could mean spoilers, etc., it also means that there’s a lot of advice for things to do/not do, supplemental home-brewed materials, and so forth. I drew on that a lot, and will highlight materials I used further down the line.

It is, though, an “older” game, meaning that a lot of the lessons that WotC (and others) have learned in module construction in 5e since the system went live aren’t here. There are places where it plays more straightforwardly than it might, and places were it’s not quite as sophisticated a story as possible. A good DM, though, will be ready to apply appropriate scalpel and spackle to make those rough edges work.

There are also some weird disconnects between the artwork and the text — due, from what I’ve read, to a months-long gap between when the illustrations (including maps) were due and the text of the module finally pinned down. As a result, there are rooms that have content that doesn’t match the description, places where maps are mislabeled, or where imagery in the book doesn’t match up with the story which doesn’t line up with the maps (the layout of Feathergale Spire and Sighing Valley and the larger scale maps and where the compass points are and so forth is nuts).

For that matter, the book has a big appendix of “here’s some crazy concepts we had about what these sorts of characters look like, but rejected as too crazy,” which is awesome, but they don’t always have what they actually settled on.

There were also way too many places that were significant settings, but with no maps to go with them. Beliard? Womford? Summit Hall? Sorry, we blew our budget on Red Larch. A lot of the side missions, especially out of Red Larch are similarly short-changed.

(Note: between the time I started the campaign and the time I ended, 2½ years later, I discovered a minor industry on Etsy that filled in some of those gaps that I filled in myself. The Internet can be your friend.)

Similarly, I’m a believer that if you, as a module, are going to name an individual, you should give us, the players and DM, an image of them — even if it’s a stock image, or not all that complex. PotA continuously let me down here, and that got compounded once we got into Roll20.

The Virtual Tabletop

The Roll20 support of PotA was huge factor, and it made a tremendous difference. I never want to do a non-VTT D&D game again. And the Roll20 adaption itself was … not bad. Indeed, in places, it was invaluable, with the dynamic lighting already mapped out (halfway decently, and as time went on, I did a lot of remapping of that dynamic lighting).

In other places it was also not good — or not as good as I wanted. Most of the dungeon maps were done at half-scale, blown up to the point of fuzziness, and didn’t align to a 5-foot grid (in the book they have a 10-foot grid and are really set up for that, but that’s not how 5e works). Light sources were also inconsistently applied (compared to the text descriptions).

There wasn’t a single map I didn’t end up tweaking in one place or another — adding in a detail that was described but not illustrated, changing the light/shadow barriers, changing the token layout, etc.

Speaking of tokens, aside from some mediocre token art or cropping suggestions in too many places, there were also way too many cases where named characters (characters with backstory and motivation and so forth) either didn’t get their own tokens (e.g., these two NPCs are merchant traders with names, but we’re going to use the same “Noble” token to represent each of them), or else tokens with just their name in text.

This drove me nuts, and I spent a lot of time redoing or creating new tokens. (Tokenstamp is your friend!)

Another area I found frustrating with the Roll20 adaptation out of the box is that they had too coarse a granularity in how text was broken down into journal entries. Too many things (or people!) that should have been in in their own entries came lumped together, making both sharing material or using it (or even finding it with the simple title search engine!) a big pain. I ended up, again, investing a lot of time into breaking stuff up into logical chunks and vastly reorganizing it to my use and way of looking for things. While this helped me understand the material a lot better, it still felt like I was gamma testing the whole module

Overall, the Roll20 implementation of PotA is a huge time-saver for VTT users (beyond just the value of VTT systems themselves). What was provided was far better than my having to start with a PDF or hardcopy module and adapting it into the VTT. But the fit and finish were … not up to snuff for my taste. WotC needed to supply more art resources; Roll20 needed to improvise where WotC didn’t.

The PotA Sandbox

There were plenty of warnings that this was a difficult campaign to DM — and, to a degree, play — because of the openness of the world. Railroading is a cardinal sin for D&D; as a player, I like an indication of where the story wants me to go, but an option to outflank it.

PotA commits the opposite sin of railroading — lack of guidance. There are usually prompts of things that are brewing that the players can choose be guided by, but often multiple prompts, in multiple directions, with multiple ways of getting to them. There are a thousand different courses one might take, and very few guard rails to keep your characters from (a) skipping stuff that they really shouldn’t be skipped, or (b) getting into over-their-heads trouble too early.

Part of dealing with that is just DM management (putting up guard rails, hidden or not), part of it is learning to let go a bit.

The other thing the sandbox meant as we got into it was that prep for me as DM was much more … holistic. “Where are they going next” became “Where might they go next, and where might they go that I’m not thinking of.” That had an upside because it meant I had to read (and regularly re-read) a lot of material ahead of time (letting me come up with interesting ways to tie it together that aren’t in the book), but it also meant always feeling like I was running the Red Queen’s Race to stay ahead of my players — or calling to mind in The Fugitive Deputy Marshall Gerard’s comment about Richard Kimball’s flight:

All right, listen up, ladies and gentlemen, our fugitive has been on the run for ninety minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground, barring injuries, is 4 miles per hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area.

That’s what it took to consider where the players might go next.

All that said, there is a delicate balance between players being led by the nose from encounter to encounter, and players being clueless as to what to do next. PotA leans toward the latter a bit too much, which makes more work for the GM if the players are not to be frustrated.

Storytelling

There’s a metric ton of stories going on in PotA, both side bits (Red Larch alone could support a campaign) and in the overall saga. The number of types of “dungeons” one encounters is extraordinary. Each of the four Keeps feels very different, for example, as do the elemental Nodes. And the underlying epic — the history of the Dessarin Valley and Tyar-Besil, the battle between evil elemental princes and how it’s played out in the Keeps and Temples, the characters in the Keeps and Temples and Nodes — it’s all very rich, and a lot to play with.

Unfortunately, a lot of it gets thrown away, unseen. Unless the GM really digs into their imagination, there’s little opportunity for the players to learn much of anything about most of the oppo characters encountered, aside from some brief monologuing by the bosses before they get gacked. If you rotated the Prophets in the Temples (Aerisi as Prophet of Fire, Marlos as Prophet of Air, etc.), it really wouldn’t significantly change the story, because there isn’t really an opportunity to interact with them (or their followers) in a meaningful way.

(For all we get descriptions about the different mentalities of each cult’s membership and motivation, when it comes to a wave of mooks charging at you at 5th Level, its really doesn’t seem to matter much which cult they are from.)

There are also a few places where the story makes little sense. Mapping out the course of the Mirabar Delegation, when/where they were taken, and their later travels as captives of the Black Earth cult (e.g., the basis for the Shallow Graves encounter) makes absolutely no sense. Or, rather, you can handwave some sense into it, but it’s a rough haul, and the book blithely ignores / underexplains it. It’s up to the GM to papier mâché something that will hold together.

That all said, it’s still a rollicking adventure that presents challenges and increasing pressure for the players to avert the rise of the Princes. Whether a group is a hack-and-slasher, or leans heavily into role playing, a GM can tailor the campaign accordingly with what’s given.

It’s a long haul, and not an easy one, but it can all work out out well.

Essential Resources

These sites and links were really useful to me when I was starting off:

A Guide to Princes of the Apocalypse – A tonne of discussion and notes and summaries chapter analyses and observations and maps and links. Worth reading and re-reading at strategic points of the game.

Walkthrough and notes on PotA – Good overview of the campaign.

Outline and notes for the campaign – great DM reference material on how to run the campaign.

Outline/flow chart of the campaign, showing suggested player levels and how places/dungeons are geographically and narratively connected.

Index to the PotA book – Places and Dungeons, at least. Still, better than what WotC provides.

Reference Sheet of characters, places, connections, in the early/Red Larchy days of the campaign.

Advice on running Chapter 6 (Level 1) — Good early-days advice from SlyFlourish.

Advice on running from Red Larch through Rivergard Keep – good discussion of sandbox vs linear play in the early levels of PotA.

Update: Here are my House Rules.

This Series

So I kept extensive notes through most of this campaign. My goal is to share them here in this blog, covering the 84 sessions of play we had over a couple-plus years. It may provide some insights over how to run the game, or just some general DM notes.

We had fun with this campaign. I hope you do, too.

Session 0 >>

Reading through “Unearthed Arcana 2022 – Character Origins”

UA 2022 Character Origins is the first of the “OneD&D” playtest docs. My reactions to reading through the doc it fall into three categories (not exclusive):

1. Huh. Not a bad idea.
2. Ugh. That is a bad idea.
3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.

So … let’s take a look.

1. Huh. Not a Bad Idea

Simplifying Tool Proficiency and tool kits: This has always felt a bit fussy in 5e to me, to the extent that most folk I know engaged in these a little as possible. Sure, it’s unrealistic, but it smooths a bumpy area.

Orcs as Player Characters: I’m okay with that. I mean, at some point the number of intelligent races in the world starts to get a bit ridiculous, esp. if they can now all interbreed, but, hey, whatevs.

Making Backgrounds more important: I think that makes a lot of sense. I like getting a Feat out of it, at least. And getting a Language (with suggestions) makes some sense. Except … shifting the Ability bumps to this seems a bit weird, at least 3 points worth.

Level-associated Feats: Probably a good idea. While it begin to smack of feat trees from 3.5e, it does mean that trying to make Feats all fit the same level of power can be given more nuance. At the very least, it shakes up all of those “These are the best Feats to take” articles, but represents another awkward moment for backwards compatibility.

Natural 20s: I don’t think it was necessary to make nat 20s and nat 1s auto-successes/failures for everything (I know people have said it was a common house rule, but it wasn’t at our house). But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either, so fine. (As noted below, I’d be inclined to house rule that a nat 1 gets you Inspiration, rather than a nat 20.)

Having crits only double damage on weapon and unarmed attacks (but not attack spells) is … also okay. It balances Martials vs Spellcasters a bit.

Spell groups: Narrowing the groups of spells (Arcane, Divine, Primal) is a nice bit of efficiency, at least on the face of it.

Grappling: The Grappled condition changes are interesting. I like the Disadvantage for non-Grappler attacks. It’s interesting that they’ve shifted to a Saving Throw with Dex or Str vs the Athletics/Acrobatics skill roll.

Unarmed Strikes: I haven’t done a lot with fisticuffs in the past, but the expansion here (combined with the Tavern Brawler feat) looks like some added detail that will be useful and handy.

2. Ugh. That’s a Bad Idea.

Half-races. “But I don’t wanna be a half-orc or a half-elf. I want to be an Orc-Gnome. I want to be an Ardling-Tiefling. I want to be a Halfling-Ent!” Ugh. I mean, maybe just as well that they came up with a standardized mechanic for it, but it just seems kind of silly to me. It’s not like there’s a shortage of races and demi-races already.

And, of course, that begs the question of quarter-races (“My character has a human-elf hybrid father and an orc-dwarf hybrid mother”), and how to handle them in the rules. “And so, ad infinitum.”

Muddying racial differences. This one is contentious, I know. I am very aware (admittedly from my cis-het-white-male perspective) of the very powerful arguments behind getting rid of race-based Ability Point tweaks. Human history is full of ugliness where different “races” of humans were (and by some still are) assumed to be fundamentally different from “normal,” physically and mentally. Tropes in the game that resonate to that should be examined critically, if not discouraged.

At the same time, it’s one thing to say that Black humans and White humans and Asian humans and whatever pseudo-racial classifications you want to come up with (because we are all, after all, one species) are really the same, and quite another to continuously grind away the differences to say that Dwarves = Humans = Elves. In that case, why bother having those distinctions at all? (“Bob is a sentient who happens to have pointed ears, high cheekbones, and celebrated his 147th birthday last week.”)

Or, as one consders it, why keep the distinctions you are keeping or adding (lifespan, size, appearance, old and new innate abilities) vs. getting rid of the ones you aren’t (stat increases and decreases). Especially since a number of those special innate abilities are just stat bumps in disguise (lookin’ at you, Dwarves).

Or, put another way, nobody seems to have a problem with Vulcans being stronger and smarter than Humans in Star Trek, as long as there are countervailing disadvantages. Why is it wrong for an Elf to be more Dexterous than a Human, or even, given their ages, have a higher Intelligence. I mean, nothing in the old rules actually prevented a Half-Orc from becoming a powerful wizard; it was just a bit more difficult to min-max the stats that way. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. People can do anything, but the Halfling basketball player is going to have some special, epic challenges.

In short, I’m quite fine with backing away from dictating cultural-biological absolutes (“Orcs are all evil! Evil, evil, evil! And they eat human babies, too!”), even with creatures of demonic origin (the convolutions over Tieflings are fascinating, even if they inadvertently let an actual alignment show up in one of the Lineages). But I’m also okay with saying “The physical differences we’re literally describing here are reflected in the Ability stats of characters of those races.” (Mental stats are a bit more dodgy; I’d be okay with leaving them out of the picture for races.)

Character Sizes: Small (2-4 foot) Humans? Even when we are talking about Pygmies or people with Dwarfism, that’s below average. I don’t object, it just seems an oddly specific call-out. (They also show up as an option only with Humans, Ardlings, and Tieflings; all other races are other Medium or Small only, which seems … racist? What about tall Halflings? What about diminutive Elves?)

Racial Spells: More races have literal spells that they get to use on a dailyish basis (once per Long Rest if you don’t have additional spell slots). That seems to muddy the magic waters some, giving spells to all classes. Especially with Feats that do the same thing. I’m not sure creating a more magic-rich environment is actually needed.

Ubiquitous Inspiration: Inspiration is a mechanic that seems to be quite underutilized in 5e by too many DMs. The “solution” to this in OneD&D is to make it pop up all over the place, robbing it of its RP-supporting intent.

True, it gets lost after a Long Rest now — except for uber-versatile Humans. But PCs get Inspiration from rolling a nat 20 (i.e., after 5% of all rolls). Players can get Inspiration as a group from someone with the Musician Feat. In short, everyone’s going to have and use plenty of Inspiration to gain Advantage on rolls.

That’s not necessarily bad, but I’m not sure it’s good. It certainly waters down the “Wow, that was an awesome bit of character play, so take an Inspiration,” because it increases the chance they already have some.

(Frankly, I’d house-rule-tweak at least one thing there, if nothing else: you gain Inspiration on a nat 1 — anger and determination to do better — rather than on a nat 20! That’s a very non-D&D idea, to be fair.)

Backgrounds and Ability Bumps: Are Acolytes really that much Wiser than the average person? Are Cultists that much more Intelligent? Not in my gameplay experience. I know the Ability Bumps need to somewhere if you can’t baldly do it with races, but allocating 3 points here seems a bit extreme.

Multi-Lingualism: I guess maybe it makes life easier, but everyone knowing three languages (Common, a Standard Language, and a language from your Background) does seem to be a lot of linguistic lore (and, if players cooperate in chargen, allows for covering pretty much all the languages they might need).

Long Rests: These are so baked into the game at present (even if they do ridiculous amounts of healing) that having it be interrupted by any Combat feels like a major shift.

3. Yeah, this is 5.5e.

There is a qualitative difference between characters generated under the present 5e rules, and characters generated under these rules. The two will not mesh well together, and efforts to run both types in any given campaign will lead to madness. If nothing else, automated character sheets and tools will have to choose one or the other (whether from WotC or a third party like Roll20).

By extension, that implies a difficult fit between existing 5e modules and the new system. That’s already true to a degree (just as the Genasi), but will continue to grow over time.

That does not mean the 5.5e changes are, per se, a disaster. There are a lot of good changes in the system already that have evolved it from the baseline 5e of 2014 to where it is today. All those changes in supplemental tomes (Volo’s, Tasha’s, Xanadar’s, Mordenkainen’s, etc.) have changed the game in mostly good ways.

And, to be fair, the changes discussed are not the 3.5 to 4, or 4 to 5, full-edition levels of significance. The basic underlying systems, action economy, etc., are there. But this is more than just “5e Forever, man!”

So why not bite the bullet and admit this is a new (or distinct sub-) edition? If WotC’s plans involve you buying a new set of hardcover books for “OneD&D” (and they do), then why not just call it 5.5e and be done with it? For the sake of marketing?

Because, really-truly, I guarantee that more supplemental books will come out after that. And every 5-10 years they’ll do a true-up of new PHB/DMG/MM tomes, “backwards-compatible” claims or not. If “OneD&D” in 2024 is not comfortably compatible with 5e, what will it be in 2028?

(Which argues the intent to pivot to a new direction and go to all-digital rules that you license on a regular basis. Want access to Xebulon’s Big Bucket o’ Game Mods? That’ll be $2/mo, or $20/year if you want it to plug into your official WotC modules and official WotC character generator. But I digress.)

I’ll continue to read the feedback (which is all over the map), and when 1 September rolls around, I’ll provide my feedback. If 5.5e came out like this, I would suck it up and play with it that way. But I would want WotC to admit this is not a backwards-compatible seamless evolution of 5e, from 2014 or 2022. This is something new that deserves to be recognized as such — and identified as such to WotC’s customers.

“One D&D” to rule them all (maybe)

So WotC has announced what they’re doing with D&D 6e. Or 5.5e. Or, maybe … no e.

Instead, they say, we will have “One D&D,” with the whole concept of “editions” becoming instantly obsolete, because WotC believes 5e doesn’t need complete revamping, just evolution. Sort of like an OS being constantly patched, the baseline ruleset will be updated over time so that there is just “D&D the way it is today” and no need to ever, ever, roll out a new version.

How that will work with books isn’t clear. Will they keep coming out with “patch” books like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything? Or will the core ruleset be republished (and rebought) every X number of months/year. In either case, that’s different from what we have now because …?

Of course, maybe the idea is that we won’t have “books” at all, but online rules that can be slipstreamed electronically to the current text (with some sort of versioning so that you figure out what’s going on), but that you have to subscribe to …

None of that was really discussed, just three broad pillars for “One D&D”:

Ongoing updates to the current baseline 5e (ssshhh!) rules.
Expansion of D&D Beyond, the compendium toolset they recently bought.
Creating D&D Digital, apparently a 3D VTT, the pre-alpha version pictures for which look pretty impressive, and which will be both a content delivery tool (“Here’s the dungeon for this game”) and content creation tool.

Now, just because they are dealing with the rules on a patch basis doesn’t mean there are potentially significant things coming out beyond additional content. For example, Backgrounds are being completely revamped, to give Ability score modifiers and feats, which does sound kind of keen.

Other changes already raised: simplification of spell lists, and making a Nat 1 a miss for any roll, not just attacks.

Color me … somewhat dubious.

I get the idea that completely revamping the rules every several years is increasingly more difficult. I even buy the idea that 5e is a pretty decent platform to build on, with caveats.

But one reason why D&D is still with us, several editions on, is because audiences and tastes change. What people want in terms of crunchiness vs simplicity, hack-and-slashery vs role-playing, not only changes with an individual over time, but with the industry.

If D&D doesn’t change, in its bones, every now and then, those changes in society and audience will lead people to go elsewhere.

Here are the dates for rule releases:

1974 – original
1977 – AD&D 1e
1989 – AD&D 2e
1995 – AD&D 2e Revised
2000 – D&D 3e
2003 – D&D 3.5
2008 – D&D 4e
2014 – D&D 5e

5e is already 8 years old — older than any except the longevity from the original AD&D to 2e, when the audience was much smaller. It’ll be a decade old 2024 when One D&D is planned for release.

At what point will everything start to feel a little creaky, no matter how many patches and content packages are released?

So maybe — and if how rules changes are handled is well-planned and -executed — this extends the 5e platform another 5+ years, with the homebrew variations that we have today multiplied as various rules continue to evolve and change (and the similarity on the surface to the 5e of 2014 continues to dwindle, without, somehow, breaking the “backward compatibility that WotC has promised). When will whoever owns Hasbro decide what the world needs is to put out One D&D 2nd Edition?

Playtesting for the rule updates can be found here.