Undermountain Level 3 Play Report: Commence the Beatings

Let's begin our first of several game sessions that centered around Undermountain level 3, the Sargauth Level.  (Sarguath is the slow moving river that flows south along the eastern edge of the map).  Ah yes, the map - I've included an image below to make it easier to follow along, and added some simple annotations.

You'll notice when the party comes down the stairs from level 2, they are immediately faced with a go left/go right type of decision.  Go left (east) and you'll find yourself in a small sub area that houses a drow temple, prisons, and various drow torture/sex rooms.  If the players go right, they'll make their way to the partially collapsed remain of an ancient dwarven city called Stromkuhldur, which is now a drow military outpost.  There are some "no-man's land" tunnels between the drow outpost and the other half of the ruined dwarven city, which is now a hobgoblin base called the Hold of Azrok.  I put a few stars on the left edge of the map where there are paths to Skullport, the underground pirate city.  By way of reminder, the party's overarching goal in Undermountain is to scout level 3 and find a way to Skullport, and once there discover how to get into a secretive thieves' guild headquartered beneath Skullport.  Finally on the map, there's the river itself, and several caves and lairs which can only be reached by boat across the river.

The level 3 map is very large, but also somewhat linear.  The river is the principle feature that gives the players freedom to skip elements of the linear path, as well as the ability to explore the caves and lairs on the far side.  As we go through our play reports, you'll see my players never really learned to exploit the river in their exploration of level 3.  Because of this, they were very challenged by the drow elf hold over the middle of the map.  Level 3 presented them with a good mix of exploration, combat, and roleplaying opportunities, and several sound defeats.  Let's get on with recounting their first one!

The drow elves on this level are led by a priestess who has converted a Dwarven temple into a spider temple; they've been kidnapping people, possibly even citizens from the surface, and using them to incubate spider eggs and give birth to giant spiders.  The temple is festooned with corpses in webs with burst egg sacs that grew out of the victims.  It's a fantastic set piece if you want to accentuate a horror vibe.  There are several clues in the caves and passages before the temple, such as a hapless adventurer who died from things bursting from within, to give the players some foreshadowing as they explore the eastern area.  At the time, the characters in our party were still Bosko (goliath barbarian), Virsk (human cleric), Alfred (human fighter), Ace (elf wizard), and Teukros (drow rogue).  Their attitude was in the vein of, "Yay, we're going to smash the guts out of some spiders…"  After a relatively easy time breezing through levels 1 and 2, they would be coming back to earth very soon.

As a DM who has his roots in the 1980's, let me tell you something I'm enjoying about running this 5E megadungeon:  many of the encounter areas consist of zones where a group of rooms contain like-minded or allied inhabitants.  When the players enter the zone, you can give the monsters a tactical response as warranted by their intelligence and organization.  It's a chance to be creative.  Throw the kitchen sink at the players if you want.  Have fun.

An old school mind-set is to be tough but fair; you are an adversarial DM from the perspective that you're not there to let the players win.  They make their choices, they roll the dice, the chips fall, you report on the results.  That's how the story gets made.  You are a neutral arbiter of their actions and how the inhabitants of the game world react.  When those inhabitants are highly intelligent, organized, and dangerous, watch out, players.  Carelessness can alert whole areas and find the adventuring party taking on a much bigger force than expected.  Many combats in 5E feel like two opposing sides bashing each other with styrofoam weapons.  Escalating the tactical situations as intelligent opposition forms against the players is where you get to feel Gygaxian again.

Maybe you can see where this is going… as the players explored the eastern dungeon, they tripped on the sentries for the drow temple (which included quaggoths and a drow elf mage) and got bogged down fighting mooks while the mage gathered reinforcements.  (In 5E terms, a "mage" is a 9th level wizard, so they usually have access to some serious damage spells like cloudkill and lightning bolt).  Cloudkill synergized well with the quaggoths, who are immune to poison, while the confined spaces maximized the impact of the cloudkill on the player characters.

This battle was many game sessions ago, so apologies if I'm fuzzy on the play-by-play.  The drow mage leveraged "greater invisibility" to stay invisible while attacking, after alerting reinforcements in the temple proper.  Once the players got crushed by a lightning bolt, Ace realized they were facing an invisible caster and used "detect invisible" so he could counterspell and duel the enemy wizard.  The barbarian and Alfred hacked their way to the entrance of the temple, carving up quaggoths, troglodytes, and giant spiders along the way.  Virsk, as a storm cleric, figured out that gust of wind could take care of any further cloudkill nonsense.

The big gun in the main temple was the drow priestess.  As she made her way to the front, she dropped more giant spiders on the party through "conjure animals".  I still haven't yet succeeded in a "summon demon" roll to bring forth a Yochlol in one of these drow priestess combats, I'm 0-4.  Ace was able to knock the drow mage to zero hit points, but no one was able to make it over to his body and finish him off; my players know not to assume that powerful NPC's are instantly dead at zero hit points.  By now, the party was fairly injured after smashing through a guard post of quaggoths, an assault of troglodytes, several waves of giant spiders, and dueling an invisible drow elf wizard.  When the drow priestess dropped an insect swarm on them, characters started to drop.  Alfred died; he got put at zero hit points, and it took the players long enough to drag his corpse out of the insect swarm that he accumulated enough 5E failed "death saves" to be truly dead.  The casters were out of spells and everyone was limping along.  I think Teukros, their own drow elf rogue, dropped a darkness spell behind them so they could retreat and regroup.

The players retreated to a nearby cavern where they activated their Daern's Instant Fortress to create a secure location to rest and recover.  Virsk had been holding onto a raise dead scroll which they used on Alfred.  (This was before they made Revivify a staple).  When the players emerged from the tower after a rest, they discovered it was completely webbed and besieged by phase spiders, which was a fun combat and a reminder they were camped entirely too close to the enemy.  The players quickly made their way away from the "temple side" of the dungeon and towards the ruined drow city.

I've seen other game reports regarding level 3 of Undermountain; getting roughed up by the drow priestess seems to be a common theme; I've even heard of full on TPK's in this area.  My players would face her a couple more times before finally quelling the threat.  Next time we'll pick up with the drow outpost and their visit to the Hobgoblins.

In Praise of the Humble Experience Point

America is having a tough week.  Actually it's been a tough year.  We've got the COVID, the protests against brutality, the escalating police violence against said protesters.  We've got murder hornets.  We're all personally affected by the stuff going on to one degree or another - here on the east coast, I know many people who have lost loved ones to the virus.  I sat down to write something cranky, but figured we've got enough negativity going around.  Let's talk positively about something I do like - the humble experience point.  And heck, maybe there's a way to make friends with the milestone approaches, too.

I had a terrible experience with 4E back when it was fresh and new, and that's what pushed me and my gaming group back to 1st Edition AD&D. We learned what the OSR folks were up to, and embraced the modern analysis of what made those earlier styles of play so much fun.  In fact I'd say the project of my blog has become how best to run 5E in a style that leverages lessons from the heyday of the OSR and early D&D.  Our weekly Tomb of Annihilation game is really close, but I'm not satisfied with the approach I took to managing experience.  That's a story to tell sometime.  So the larger work continues.

Let's step back and distill the essence of this play style I'm praising.  Those early legendary 1970's dungeon masters ran megadungeons, sprawling multi-level complexes.  Game structures were primarily site-based (dungeons or hexcrawls) and featured exploration as the principle motif.  Whatever story is bolted on top the underlying exploration chassis (such as stopping the rampaging giants, discovering the secrets of the evil temple, finding the lich's treasure, pursuing the evil Drow to their underground city) is almost secondary to the exploration.  Players are principally engaged with testing their wits against a hostile dungeon full of challenges, collecting experience points, and increasing their power.  This mode of play maximizes the amount of choice and agency to the players.  The players plan what they want to do each session, including resource planning.  (Ideally the referee collects their ideas at the end of the current session to better prepare for next time).  The game needs to telegraph enough information about the relative risk and reward opportunities so the players can incorporate that into their planning.  This is simple in dungeons, where each new dungeon level down has more dangerous monsters and more wealth.  In the hex crawl, distance from civilization is usually the barometer of danger.

Experience points are a complimentary game mechanic to site-based adventures.  They let the players keep score on how well they're doing in the game.  They're earned, not awarded.  The exponential nature of those early experience charts motivate the players to seek out greater challenges to maintain the same upward momentum.  Note that XP for Gold yields slightly different results than 5E's approach, XP for Fighting.  XP for Gold is an abstraction - all the effort that went into finding treasure - fighting monsters, casting spells, disarming traps, solving puzzles, and so forth, are all assumed to be part of the effort of recovering the treasure.  It's not meant to be realistic, but it is simple, transparent, player facing, easy to track, and non-arbitrary.  XP for monsters defeated isn't horrible, but it does emphasize different behavior.  I've found XP for Gold encourages craftier play, and games better reflect the Sword & Sorcery roots of D&D's earliest literary influences - Conan, Lankhmar, The Dying Earth, those types of tales.

With site-based adventures, the referee can mostly dispense with level-appropriate game balance.  The ref might populate the local area with the goblin mines, the ogre caves, the vampire's tower, and the dragon's lair in the distant mountains.  Or if the principal locale is a sprawling dungeon, you have level 1, level 2, level 3 of the dungeon, and so on.  It's important to telegraph to the players, through rumors, talking to people in the setting, and similar information gathering, which adventure opportunities are going to be more dangerous. The players choose what to go after - it's on them if their first adventure is to go knock on that vampire's tower door.  The creation of these sandbox locales or dungeon levels is really about seeding the setting with experience point opportunities.  It's both art and science calculating how much of a dungeon level or wilderness area you expect a party to encounter before heading on, and populating it with appropriate experience opportunities.

There are challenges with sandbox creation.  First, they can seem like a daunting amount of work - I think of prep time in terms of the sandbox triangle (you can have a lot of detail, but it takes a lot of work; or you can build out a bigger area with not a lot of detail for the same time investment).  Older editions put a lot of emphasis on random tables, both wilderness encounters and dungeon wandering monsters, to create a sense of a living world and give the referee some help creating content on the fly.  Finally, while there will be story reasons for various lairs and dungeons in the setting, and "plot hooks" that may motivate the players to go explore them, sandbox games are less about scripting an intricate story-line in advance, instead turning the keys over to the players and seeing what emerges from their activities.

I love site-based settings and exploration based play, and I strive to turn as much of the decision making and planning over to the players.  Incidentally, these are still the most popular adventure styles with the 5E crowd, too; go to any ranking list on the official 5E adventures and products like Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, or Lost Mine of Phandelver, are consistently top of the lists, along with Tales from the Yawning Portal or Ghosts of Saltmarsh.  Hint:  they all feature exploration-based dungeons and open world sandboxes.  I've been wondering how it would look to shift from having the players bean-count their experience points to using something even more abstract like milestones.  Below are a few recent attempts.

Dungeon of the Mad Mage

When I was running Dungeon of the Mad Mage, the gigantic 23 level megadungeon for Waterdeep, I dispensed with experience points.  Mad Mage's levels are calibrated to where a 4 person party needs to literally clear (as in fight, kill, or drive off) every single monster on a given level in order to collect enough experience to level up.  It's tiresome to even think about, and way too much of a slog to be enjoyable.  Nope.  Instead I made the discovery of each new dungeon level into a milestone - the idea being the effort to explore a sprawling dungeon level, overcome traps, challenges, monsters, and so forth, represented achievements worthy of advancement (either a full or half level gained).  Mad Mage's staircases are geographically remote on each dungeon level, requiring a party to negotiate large swaths of the dungeon level before descending.  Normally I'd consider that a poorly designed map, but in this case those remote stairs became a feature, supporting exploration-based milestones.  That campaign went on the shelf due to COVID, so we only got through the first few levels, but it was going exceedingly well.  The players focused a lot more on scouting, negotiating with monsters, and using wits and guile to find those staircases in lieu of slaughtering every last monster.  In this case, milestones worked well as stand-ins for experience points - they were player-facing, transparent, allowed the players to keep score, and influenced player planning.

Mad Mage is not popular with the vocal part of the 5E crowd.  People look at 23 dungeon levels without an overarching scripted story, and they don't know what to do with it.  I'll add a discussion of Undermountain to my backlog on posts I'll get to at some point - what we did to make it more engaging.  Its not hard, but the dungeon master does have to do some work to overlay interesting story goals onto the megadungeon.

Dragon of Icespire Peak

Icespire Peak is the starter adventure in the second 5E boxed set (the Essentials Kit).  On it's face, it describes a sandbox type area of the Sword Coast, with 12-14 adventure sites.  There's a loose story in the sandbox - a white dragon has moved into the nearby area, and this has created some ripple effects that have put the sandbox in motion.  The dragon has displaced a mountain orc tribe, and the mountain orcs have descended into the valley, attacking places or displacing other monsters that are now encroaching on the villagers.  It uses a quasi-milestone approach... gain a level for each starter lair completed, then gain a level when completing two mid-tier sites, and so on.  I'm running a new Tuesday night game with some of the adventurer's league guys via Zoom, bi-weekly, so we're getting some experience with this one.  The adventures are presented as quests from the town master; the next 1-2 quests become available as the players finish the prior ones and level up.  The fetch-quest approach isn't awful; the players have been able to collect a couple of quest ideas at a time from within town, map them out, and plan efficient ways to go tackle exploring 1-2 locales on an excursion out into the wilds.  It's still enabling player-facing planning and decision making.

The village and Town Master is lackluster, and I'm finding it's critical there are interesting and engaging NPC's so the players learn more about the sandbox region.  There are cool places on the map to explore, not tied to any quests, and the players need to hear about them from NPCs.  As written, the quests and locales don't telegraph to the players the level of danger at each site.  That's an element the referee needs to work into the player-facing aspect of Icespire Peak.

Neither of these approaches to merging milestones and site-based adventures left me completely satisfied.  I suppose the Mad Mage approach was closest.  Listing out the attributes I like about experience points - they're simple, transparent, player-facing, easy to track, and objective (ie, non-arbitrary) - the Mad Mage approach comes nearest to meeting the requirements.  Unfortunately it puts a heavy constraint on how you construct your dungeon maps, and doesn't translate equally well to lairs or the hexcrawl space.  Might just be easier to maintain using experience points, as they apply equally well in most situations.  Would love to hear if any readers have successfully ported milestones into their exploration-based dungeons.

A Turning Point with 5th Edition

I've been dubious about 5E.  I do not see eye to eye with modern adventure design and the expectations of modern players (post TSR players).  The story of my blog has become a search for a middle ground - running the system my friends all prefer (the 5th) while running a game that satisfies my own expecations, too.  However, I finally think we're getting there.

If you've read my game reports on Tomb of Annihilation (TOA) you know TOA is one of 5E's adventures I praise liberally.  It's flaws are modest, it's virtues are many.  It thrusts the players into an old school style hex crawl, requiring that they plan and manage resources.  The story isn't about an author's scene-based plot to follow, it's an emergent story built over time based on player actions.  Tomb of Annihilation checks off some good boxes.

We are in the capstone dungeon of the campaign, a grim place called the Tomb of the Nine Gods (the erstwhile Tomb of Annihilation itself, the namesake).  It means what it says on the cover.  Death lurks around every corner.

I've noticed a big change in the players.  Everyone has been leaning in a little more at the table.  They take their time discussing spell choices and preparations for the adventuring day.  Planning matters.  There's a nervous energy as I describe the next room. It's palpable.  The threat of instant death has a way of sharpening the mind.

It brings to mind a Flannery O'Connor quote, from a "A Good Man is Hard to Find":  "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

5E feels the most like D&D when there are real consequences behind every player choice.  Many of the hardback books are too "balanced" and forgiving.  I'm starting to see what it takes to deliver a good game of 5E (my definition of a good game, at least).

The Tomb of the Nine Gods is not unfair, and I'm not an adversarial DM.  Sure there are save-or-die effects, and massive damage traps, and literal death rooms that can kill the whole party.  It's an homage to Tomb of Horrors!  But there are clues, and high level characters are not without resources.  Mostly though, the players are surviving because they are planning well, making smart choices, and sometimes getting a little lucky.  They've cheered each other and high-fived each other and relished their hard won successes.  It's been real fun on both sides of the screen.  It's been D&D.

I wasn't sure how this bare-knuckled style was going to play out in a Fifth Edition setting, and it's going quite well.  My 5E "training period" is coming to a close.

PS:
Mandatory Corona-vacation will shift us online for our next game session - I'll come back with a report on what tools we used and how it went.  And I'll get a game report posted with some details of these "player victories" in the Tomb.

Checking in on Chult - Fane of the Night Serpent

In my weekly home game, we're about to start the final chapter of Tomb of Annihilation (the erstwhile tomb itself).  We just finished "Fane of the Night Serpent", the third chapter.  Tomb of Annihilation is the best written campaign adventure for 5E, particularly if you like older adventuring styles.  The campaign features 4 general story arcs - free form exploration across a sprawling jungle hex crawl; discovery and exploration of a lost ruined city sunk in a jungle chasm; infiltrating a subterranean fortress of Yuan-Ti in the ruined city (the Fane of the Night Serpent); concluding by finding and entering the Tomb of Annihilation itself.  If you're a long time D&D player familiar with TSR's history, I'll point out the hex crawl sections of Chult are very reminiscent of X1 The Isle of Dread from the 1980's Expert Set.  The ruined city and Yuan-Ti fortress are nods to I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City.  The Tomb of Annihilation itself is a riff on S1 Tomb of Horrors.  It's several fantastic old school homages in one big campaign.

As the players explored the ruined city, it became apparent they needed to collect nine stone cubes from various trap-filled shrines in order to enter the Tomb.  They were harassed by ambushers and spies of the Yuan-Ti while exploring the city, culminating with the final shrine, where they learned the cube is already gone, and a taunting message from their Yuan-Ti adversaries dared them to come to the Yuan-Ti lair, the Fane of the Night Serpent.

There's no right answer on how to prosecute a conflict against the Fane.  There are ways to infiltrate it stealthily, and characters in the level 7-8 range have various magic resources to come up with an appropriate plan - disguises, invisibility, trickery, scouting for back doors, you get the idea.  Not my guys - they opted for your basic "full frontal assault".  It's 5E after all, and they're practically comic book heroes.  (My old-schooler in the group frequently gripes his dwarf cleric is basically a "Villains & Vigilantes" character with super powers).

The entrance to the Fane is a 20' tunnel beneath a ruined palace, ending in colossal metal doors on tracks.  They used Stone Shape to warp the walls around the main gates and create an entrance point for characters to squeeze one at a time around the edge of the door, and treated it like their own "once more into the breech" moment.

It was quite challenging.  There are pits with snakes right on the other side of the gate the players didn't account for, and not everyone was ready to jump the pits after squeezing around the gate.  There was also a handful of reptilian bruisers on guard duty (Yuan-Ti Brood Guards) and a boss, and a few of the characters that made the jump actually got shoved immediately backwards into the pits as a tactic by the brood guards.  With all of the "Fey Step" spells available to the group, the pits and the door breach didn't delay them too long, but they quickly found themselves pinned down and trying to hold their "beach-head" on the far side of the gates.

In another nod to "old school ways" the Fane has a temple roster that lists how all of the inhabitants respond when the alarm sounds.  It's very reminiscent of the defense roster in WG4 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, a Greyhawk module where the players encounter an all-out defense when they breach the Forgotten Temple.  Those 1E adventures demanded that players be competent war-gamers and tacticians*.  One of the bosses even telegraphed that an alarm would be sounded, literally commanding an underling, "You - go alert the complex!", in Draconic.  For whatever reason, the players didn't prioritize taking out the runner, and a round or two later a gong echoed throughout the underground vaults of the Yuan-Ti.  The fight quickly bogged down into a Tharizdun-like siege as monsters flooded in from different parts of the dungeon.  (Note - the hardback book does not provide how many rounds it takes each group of monsters to respond, so that's a bit of work the referee needs to do to stagger the incoming forces - I used a blend of movement rates, distance from the entrance, and randomization that took into account what they were doing when the alarm was sounded).

My players were mentally unprepared to retreat.  When you've known only victory, you cannot tell you're outmatched until it's too late, like frogs in heating water.  If this were 1E their innate paranoia and fragility would have convinced them to bail a long time ago instead of assuming their plot armor would carry them through.  Instead, the Yuan-Ti "Nightmare Speaker", Fenthaza, the high priestess, joined the fight (with her controlled Air Elemental) as well as the Yuan-Ti champion, a brutal warrior named Sekelok.  By this point the players had defeated 15+ brood guards, probably 6+ Yuan Ti Malisons, a few basiliks, a rampaging triceratops... charred bodies were piled in the halls, smoke stung their eyes.  But resources were dwindling, mistakes were made, and the dwarf cleric went down beneath Sekelok's pounding two-handed sword.  Take out the healer and the 5E elevator stops working.  The players noted the Yuan-Ti were avoiding killing blows.  "Keep them alive", Sekelok was roaring to the others, "their blood will feed Dendar the Night Serpent on the sacrificial stone".

I was able to savor the utter disbelief across my player's faces as more Yuan-Ti descended on the entrance siege and one by one, the player characters fell into unconsciousness beneath the terrible beating.  It was better than a TPK since we don't even have to restart the campaign!  It's okay readers, take a moment and gloat along with me - you can do it.  The characters awoke stripped, manacled, and bruised, in darkened fetid pits looking up at dim grates high above their heads - prisoners of the Yuan-Ti.  I guess that's one way to get into a fortress.

When we regrouped the following week, the players had to deal wtih being in separate pits, with other prisoners of the Yuan-Ti (not altogether stable or sane), and try to piece together what they could learn about the Yuan-Ti's plans.  They'd be given the chance to undergo the Yuan-Ti transformation (if human) and join the monsters as reinforcements, or sacrificed (if non-human) or made into a mindless slave.  This became a fairly roleplay heavy session.  The Yuan-Ti spymaster eventually came to interrogate them, and had one of the mouthy characters, Woodson, dragged before the boss - the ancient undead warlord Ras Nisi.  Stories of Ras Nisi had been circulating in the campaign lore since the beginning, so it was a momentous meeting.  Furthermore, Ras Nisi was rotting away, like a mummy!  Woodson figured out he had the Death Curse, and was dying just like their patron.  If you're unfamiliar - the Death Curse that initiates the campaign is unraveling Raise Dead and Resurrection magics, like a form of magical leprosy, and blocking all future Raise Dead or Resurrection magic across the world.

The players were able to convince Ras Nisi their mission to defeat the Death Curse would fix him, too... They knew he had a harem of Yuan-Ti lovelies, "clearly your concubines find your current state repulsive, when you recover you'd be able to know a gentle touch once more..." that kind of stuff to appeal to his vanity and self-preservation.  Great role-playing, and they were able to cut a deal with the Yuan-Ti boss to take out his rival (the awful Nightmare Speaker, Fenthaza) and continue their mission against the Death Curse.  They also learned a critical piece of in-game lore - Ras Nisi's ally is an ancient lich, Acererak, and the Tomb of Annihilation is one of his legendary death trap dungeons!  Now Ras Nisi believes Acererak betrayed him because of the Death Curse.  The players already knew Acererak was involved somehow - there's literally a "Green Devil Face" on the cover of the book - but now they could port in all their Acererak lore above board at the table.

Ras Nisi's minions arranged a plausible pre-dawn jail-break along with a rough map to Fenthaza's lair, and the players developed a plan to sneak in and kill her.  (Now they finally remembered to use the Invisibility spells, their Silence 15' Radius, their Helm of Telepathy, etc etc).  They took down the Nightmare Speaker and her various bodyguards and warlock attendants in short order, earned back all of their stone cubes (including the precious 9th cube they needed from the Yuan-Ti) and escaped into the grey morning mists of the city, free once more.

Collectively, the players remarked these were the best two game sessions in recent memory - plenty of emotional highs and lows, some hubris was cured, but in the end smart play, good role-playing, and effective tactics got them back on top.  That concluded Sessions 26 and 27 for our Chult game.  Next up - they Tomb of Annihilation itself!


*I've found that G-1-2-3 can also devolve into dungeon sieges, especially the entrance to the Fire Giant dungeon, and some of the Drow and Kuo-Toa locales in the D-series as well.  Very nice that Tomb of Annihilation contemplated a dungeon siege response.

5E's Biggest Fail: Experience and Advancement. (And a Poll)

Character advancement has been an underlying objective in Dungeons & Dragons since the beginning.  The players maneuver their characters on adventures, they accumulate "experience points", and the characters gain levels and become more powerful.  It's a strong incentive model and a big part of D&D's enduring appeal.  Regardless of the "story" elements present in any individual campaign, character advancement is a default goal that informs the action at the table.  Unfortunately, the experience system is the weakest part of Fifth Edition and my least favorite thing in the new edition.

Traditional D&D awarded experience points primarily for treasure, with a fraction of the experience awarded for defeating monsters.  Depending on the edition, 75% or 80% of the player's experience was gained by recovering treasure.  "Treasure as XP" had profound implications for how players and referees approached old school D&D games.  Dungeon Masters established their campaigns to involve significant exploration, with dungeons, lairs, and hex crawls as popular structures for organizing campaign information and presenting challenges to the players.  (We use the term sandbox play to describe this overall method of presenting a ready-made setting seeded with adventure opportunities; in the video game realm I've seen the term "open world").

The sandbox approach has implications for the players.  Information is their currency to proactively plan their adventures, balancing the perceived risk and reward and making choices regarding which opportunities to pursue.  As players cleared lairs and dungeons, their characters earn experience points by successfully returning to town with treasure.  Treasure is an easy-to-use abstraction for keeping score, since it it's assumed the players explored, overcame traps, used their magic, and outsmarted or defeated monsters through combat or stealth in order to win the day.  Treasure provides transparency that enables player planning.  D&D is a game, after all.

Fast forward to 5E.  I've seen it affectionately called a "nostalgia edition", but the experience system actually hinders the type of game play I described.  By the book, 5E only incentives players to fight and kill monsters, gaining experience solely through combat.  Whereas old school D&D rewarded smart play through exploration and planning, 5E rewards killing everything in sight. Sneaking, stealth, and carefully avoiding fights is actively discouraged by the advancement system.  It is not generally in the player's interest to avoid combats.  Why is "kill them all, let god sort them out" style of gaming the default?

Alternatively, many referees have adopted an arbitrary approach called "milestone experience" (and since I've been running some of the official hardcover adventures in Adventurer's League, I've become a reluctant co-conspirator in the milestone travesty).  Milestone experience is somewhere between a "participation award" for showing up, and outright manipulation - do what I want you to do, little puppets, and I'll give you your cookie.

The reason this topic is important is I'm trying to figure out how I want to move forward with developing homebrew adventures in the land of the 5th.  The lure of returning to proper OSR games is strong.  But 5E is the game system my local players enjoy; they play it at conventions, they own the books, they like the powerful PC's and the unusual races.  There's a crazy number of people that play at the local Adventurer's League nights in the area.  I don't know if my readers are OSR people or 5E people or somewhere in between, but the popularity of "New Dungeons & Dragons" is through the roof.  These are all good reasons to stay the course and figure out how to bend, fold, and mutilate 5E to support a more satisfying play experience.  I honestly don't think of myself as one of those "get off my lawn damn kids" grognard types, clinging to the old ways like a reactionary 1950's apologist, but maybe there is an actual generational thing at work regarding my antipathy towards storytelling and milestones - newer gamers may not mind being told what to do and how to conform to someone else's plan.

I've done some poking around, it doesn't look like any internet brethren have made a good way to replicate treasure as experience points and implemented an old school style sandbox with the 5E; there are some tries.  I believe the vitriol driving this screed is that I'm not terribly interested in rewriting the experience system; the game as written should support the styles of play that made D&D amazing.  Complaining and then claiming to be too lazy to do anything about is not a good look, granted.  I own my turpitude.

Of the 10 or so published adventures, a few of them do present open worlds built on a hex crawl or megadungeon premise.  They expect the players to kill everything in sight.  For instance, Dungeon of the Mad Mage provides just enough experience for a party of four (four!) to advance if they clear the entire level.  Picture a group of "heroes" tromping through the dungeon corridors like The Terminator, blasting monsters from behind.  Suffer not an orc to live.  Wipe them out, all of them.  Exterminate.

Nonetheless, in the next post I'll take a look at the 5E sandbox books (Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, Dungeon of the Mad Mage) and discuss their approaches to XP.  Maybe it's not as bleak as I'm presenting and I need to embrace the ultraviolence.  I've been using an unofficial XP system for my Chult game called "Three Pillars" (from Unearthed Arcana), so I'll talk about how that's been going, too.

In the meantime, I am curious - if you stop by the blog from time to time, do you play 5E or older versions of The Game?  I've posted a poll on the right - let me know!

Checking in with Chult

It's been a few months since I mentioned my weekly home game, playing through Tomb of Annihilation with the old guard.  The players are just finishing their exploration of the Forbidden City, Omu, so it's a good time to check in.  By way of reminder, Tomb of Annihilation is loosely divided into 4 exploration arcs.  The first arc is a hex crawl across the continent of Chult, trying to find the Forbidden City.  The second arc is exploring the sprawling, ruined jungle city itself.  The third arc is infiltrating a Yuan-Ti dungeon beneath the city, the Fane of the Night Serpent.  The final arc is the assault on the Tomb of Annihilation, one of Acererak's death trap dungeons.

As the game has shifted to Omu, the danger curve has gotten more intense, and we've lost several player characters and NPC's.  The ruined city sits at the bottom of a rift valley, overgrown with jungle vegetation and partially flooded.  The characters are not the first explorers to find the city; the Red Wizards of Thay have a force there, and the players can discover the remains of an earlier adventuring camp.  Between Red Wizard stragglers, ruined camps, and city graffiti, they learn the "game" of the ruined city is to explore various shrines, survive the gauntlets within, and emerge with puzzle cubes which will ultimately grant access to Acererak's hidden tomb.  There are nine cubes, and it becomes a race between the players and the Red Wizards to collect all of them.  A showdown is inevitable.  Meanwhile, the ruined jungle city is home turf for the Yuan-Ti.  The blend of lush jungle, exotic diseases and giant insects, dinosaurs, murderous Yuan-Ti, and scheming evil wizards has made the Omu chapter great fun.  Plus each shrine contains a small trap or puzzle that's offered different challenges than a wilderness hexcrawl, forcing the players to flex new mental muscles.  Great stuff all around.

One of the party's magic users died during a Yuan-Ti ambush.  A fighter (Josh) was killed in one of the shrines by a clay gladiator in a brutal pit fight.  Their guide was swallowed whole by a Froghemoth and eaten, muhahaha.  Their two NPC sailors, Flotsam and Jetsom, who traveled inland with the party from the coast (acting as porters and camp keepers) were frozen alive by a Cone of Cold when the surviving Red Wizards scryed the party's encampment and attacked. Orvex, a survivor they found in the city, was impaled in a shrine.  With this kind of death toll it's like we're not even playing 5E!

Here are the surviving characters:  Stompy, a forge priest dwarf cleric (level 7); Prism, an evoker wizard (level 6); Osric, a hexblade warlock and their "tank" (level 7); Woodson, an Aasimar sorceror (level 8); Reed, halfling rogue (level 8); Emporo the Mighty, fighter sidekick (level 7).

We've stopped worrying as much about supplies and book-keeping.  The characters and their henchmen hauled enough rations and supplies to the ruined city to last several weeks, and the cleric can generate enough fresh water each day with remaining spell slots to keep everyone hydrated.  Once you get past levels 5-6 the available magic off-sets many logistical issues.  I've had to remind them of time pressure to resist the "five minute workday" syndrome.  The guys have played well, though; they used a Commune with Nature scroll early on to map out several places of interest in the ruins, so they didn't need to slog building by building.  They tried aerial reconaissance but flocks of gargoyles overlooking the rift valley made that a bad idea.  The step increase in difficulty in Omu has forced them to develop cohesive tactics and better planning.

We try to play every Sunday night, 7-10pm, and I keep a notebook for experience totals and a session log - we just finished session 25.  The jungle hex crawl portion of Chult lasted sessions 1 - 17, with several trips back to the port city, tussles with pirates, and a long ocean jaunt to the south of the continent.  Omu has covered sessions 18 to 25.  At this point, the players have vanquished the Red Wizards and hold 8 of the 9 puzzle cubes; they know the Yuan-Ti are holding the last puzzle cube in the Fane of the Night Serpent, so I expect them to plan their assault on the Yuan-Ti next session.  I expect the Yuan-Ti dungeon will only be a few sessions, and then it will be on to the large dungeon that concludes the campaign.

Overall this one's been really good.  Tomb of Annihilation starts a little bumpy in chapter 1; I can see newer players feeling a bit overwhelmed by choice when starting a hex crawl.  For an exotic locale with storied cultures, I would've also liked to see more Chultans involved in the adventure; they're mostly limited to Port Nyanzaru.  There are some "colonization themes" in the setting a referee can emphasize if they want that dynamic in the game; the Flaming Fist make good continental villains and bullies.  But those are quibbles; Tomb of Annihilation has been great fun, and joins Curse of Strahd as an excellent 5E adventure that supports a classic D&D experience.  I'm hoping to start the 5E Undermountain (Dungeon of the Mad Mage) this winter with Adventurer's League to round out the old school homages.  In the meantime, Happy New Year everyone, and feel free to ask me anything.

Dragon Heist Retrospective and Review

A friend of mine is the admin for a local Adventurer's League store, and I've been helping out as a guest DM since this summer.  When the new "season" started in September, I began running a pair of the 5E hardcover books on alternating weeks - Waterdeep: Dragon Heist one week, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus the following week.  Dragon Heist is a compact story and we finished it this week after 6 four hour sessions.  Here's a recap of our experience as well as a capsule review.

The Dragon Heist Experience
With Adventurer's League, a referee needs to anticipate transience with the weekly players.  An ongoing campaign needs to gracefully handle characters coming and going.  For Dragon Heist, the players created an adventuring company called The Misfits; by the second chapter, they owned a tavern in Waterdeep, and any transient characters were heretofore unseen members of The Misfits who helped run the business when not adventuring.  It worked well.

The principal group consisted most nights of Dmitrighor (dragonborn barbarian), Whistler (kenku monk), Kal (tiefling warlock), Trick (human sorceror), Mr Gloom (halfling rogue), Dick (gnome wizard), and Rycroft (human druid).  Misfits indeed.  Dragon Heist provides the opportunity for characters to be approached by factions and form allegiances with them; the Misfits had one member become a Zhentarim, and several members join the Grey Hands, an adjunct to an adventuring company called Force Grey.

The players were all experienced and competent, made good choices, and blazed through the campaign smartly.  We only lost a single player when an encounter with an assassin, Urstul Floxin, went poorly.  (Dick the Gnome Wizard was a replacement character).  However, the campaign didn't lack drama.  There's a tense battle with an intellect devourer at 1st level, and plenty of powerful, high level NPC's throughout the chapters that can lay a smack down (including death by immolation if they run afoul of a 17th level gold dragon).  One of our capstone battles involved the players fighting Meloon Wardragon, a high level fighter possessed by an intellect devourer.  There's a mind flayer and intellect devourer sub-theme in Dragon Heist, since one of the crime syndicates is run by a Beholder and employs a mind flayer and intellect devourers to infiltrate organizations in the city.

The summary of the campaign goes like this:  a previous lord of the city embezzled a half million gold pieces ("gold dragons"), and hid the money in a secret vault in the city.  A magic key to the vault has resurfaced, and the crime syndicates are fighting each other to be the first to secure the key and locate the vault.  The players become embroiled in the gang war, learn about the key, embark on a chase all over the city to claim it, and eventually become the group that discovers the lost vault.  The treasure is ultimately guarded by an adult gold dragon.  There's no chance of winning a combat against the dragon, so the players either need to think quickly and win a high stakes social encounter, or run for their lives.  The Misfits had negotiated events to that point such that they were accompanied by a doppleganger ally; they convinced said doppleganger to assume the form of the original lord's adult son and heir, Renaer Neverember, and used an extremely well-forged document to pass title of the treasure as an inheritance to their fake heir.  It was a classic heist movie moment.  Sidebar:  Heist scenes like "Ocean's 11" can be hard to pull off at the table in real time, so I let the players do flashbacks while in the vault if they think of something they should have planned for - such as the the forged documents, wearing the right uniforms, that kind of stuff.  Here's a good post from DM David that describes the technique of using flashbacks to support a heist session - good stuff!

However, our particular campaign ended with the villains getting the last laugh, and ensuring there will be a future reckoning.  Dragon Heist has four sets of antagonists, determined by the time of year you set the campaign.  The Misfits chose "summer".  Their secret adversaries were powerful devil cultists called the Cassalanters.  When Victoro Cassalanter learned his agents lost the vault key to the players, he ingratiated himself to them, portraying himself as a victim of a diabolical plot; the souls of his innocent children were forfeit to Asmodeus unless he and his wife could produce a million gold pieces by mid-summer.  He needed the gold to ransom his poor children.  The heroic instincts of The Misfits predisposed them to ally with the Cassalenters to "save the children", and they won through to the gold on Victoro's behalf.  The players were later invited to be guests of honor at the Cassalanter's mid-summer gala, rubbing shoulders with well-to-do nobles from Waterdeep's upper crust, while the Cassalanters threw a sumptuous spread for many poorer residents of the city out in the courtyard of the villa.

The Cassalanters and their children

It was a giant trap.  The player characters, along with the stunned noble guests in the main house, watched in horror as the courtyard full of peasants died at midnight to a horrific time-delayed poison, "midnight tears", an exotic toxin.  The players learned, too late, there were two parts to the Cassalanter's bargain with Asmodeus; the Cassalanters needed the gold, but they also needed to sacrifice a hundred souls in order to void their original contract.  Victoro and his wife black-mailed the nobles in attendance as accomplices to the horrific crime, ensuring they'll be able to cover up their misdeeds and continue their social advancement through leverage on several well to-do families.  The Cassalanters also had enough "muscle" present to dissuade the player characters from starting a brawl on the spot.  Victoro reminded the Misfits that they did indeed "save the children", even if it was based on half-truths and deception.  Victoro had bribed the characters with magic items and promises of future payments for their help, and he upheld his side of the deal.  In future games, Victoro will attempt to compel the Misfits to act as agents of the Cassalanters, the way a crime lord will exact service when he has some dirt on a mark.  It's good to have villains the players really despise.

Capsule Review of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
I provided a summary of the campaign up above.  Besides the five chapters covering the main story, Dragon Heist includes a gazetteer of Waterdeep, detailed lairs for the 4 antagonist organizations, the usual appendices of magic items and new monsters, and a pull-out poster map of the city.

Like any plotted adventure, there are connecting points between chapters that can be missed by the players, and the game master needs to be ready to nudge the action if advancing the story line is important.  For instance, our sorcerer had joined a magic guild called the "Watchful Order"; a fellow member of the Order suggested they pursue a Speak with the Dead spell as an option to learn information about a crime, thus revealing a clue to the next adventure site.  Ideally you'd like the players to consider these options themselves, but a plotted story may require the referee to prompt them with a friendly NPC here and there to keep the narrative on track.  Plotted stories are not my favorite style of play, but this one offers several patterns that made it quite memorable.

At the end of the first chapter, the players can take ownership of an abandoned tavern, Trollskull Manor.  Chapter two is all about deciding what to do with the place and exploring the neighborhood.  This was one of my favorite elements in Dragon Heist; I've found through the years many of my player groups have loved establishing a home base, an identity, and a brand for themselves.  The Misfits turned Trollskull Manor into a gambling hall and gin joint, and promoting their business (while adventuring) became a running theme throughout the campaign.  Through research and good play, they befriended the ghost of the deceased owner and own Waterdeep's first "haunted tavern" where a poltergeist helps tend bar.

I mentioned during the recap the players joined "The Grey Hands" and "The Zhentarim".  The factions provide the party with side quests and advancement opportunities that give the campaign a "world in motion" element while advancing the story themes.  The Grey Hand side quests in particular built on themselves nicely.  Dragon Heist provides some replay value because a second group could be presented with different faction choices (as well as picking a different master villain) and the pivotal chase sequence in chapter 4 changes based on the villain.  If my home group wanted to experience Dragon Heist, I wouldn't say no since the experience would vary quite a bit.

Chapter's 5 through 8 detail the lairs and organizations of the 4 principal antagonists of the campaign - the Xanathar Guild, the Cassalanters, a drow mercenary named Jarlaxle, and a Manshoon clone leading a Zhentarim branch.  It's unlikely these secret lairs will matter much during a run-through of the main story line, but I'm sure they'll see use in a long term campaign in Waterdeep - especially if the referee continues on to Dungeon of the Mad Mage, a megadungeon based in Waterdeep that picks up after Dragon Heist when the characters are 5th level.

Overall I liked Dragon Heist.  The home base, the faction missions, the big chase sequence, the "heist", all present interesting urban play patterns that provide a change of pace from exploration-based hex and dungeon crawls.  The plotted scenes weren't hard to keep on track; the Trollskull Manor side business and faction side quests were great fun.  Chapter 4 is a gigantic chase sequence composed of a handful of connected vignettes.  The chapter is okay, and moves along nicely.  There are several breaking and entering "heist" style capers that can devolve into fiascoes - infiltrating Gralhund Villa and breaking into the main vault to confront the dragon.  However, to get full value out of the book, I'd recommend it for referees interested in running a Waterdeep campaign, to take advantage of the full content.  As for my group, we'll be starting Dungeon of the Mad Mage sometime in January and I'd expect the lairs in chapters 5 through 8 to become relevant in a long term campaign.


Artwork copyright Wizards of the Coast

Greyhawk Take the Wheel

Typical Adventurer's League Party, with a Human

The room description had several "death cultists" laying on the floor playing dead as if they were ritually murdered, a single smoldering torch on the ground in the center of a chalk diagram.  The characters entered warily, and weren't surprised as the cultists clumsily got to their feet to attack (roll initiative).  The first player to go used a cantrip to douse the single flame, plunging the room into darkness.  The human cultists were now hopelessly outmatched because the entire player group were dark vision lurkers, and I remembered I was imprisoned in 5E's equivalent of purgatory - the Adventurer's League.

One of my Adventurer's League tables is completely overrun with mutants.  3 Aasimars (angel-blooded humans), a deep gnome, a half-orc, and a shadar-kai.  If you mostly play original D&D, those race names are a bunch of word salad, but I assure you they've been added to the game the past few editions.  My other bi-weekly adventurer's league party includes a Tabaxi (cat-person), a dragonborn, and a turtle-man (plus a few "normal races").  Even my home game has a pair of Aasimar and a deep gnome (recently deceased).  The monsters have become the player characters.

I know any grief I'm feeling due to my time with Adventurer's League (AL) is self-inflicted.  It's meant as no disparagement to the players, they come from a different culture.  I've found the AL players to be funny, sociable, well-versed in rules knowledge, tactical, and gracious to welcome public dungeon masters.  My complaint here, and it's one of subjective taste, is the AL rules encourage players to create adventuring parties full of these mutants and monsters.

I complain about the Forgotten Realms, but I'm not even sure the problem is the Realms as much as it's the Adventurer's League itself.  As a player, your goal is to devise an interesting and effective character, within the rules.  By my count, there are more than 55 legal races in Adventurer's League, including such well known stalwarts as Triton, Kenku, Ghostwise Halfling, Earth Genasi, Deep Gnome, Firbolg, and Scourge Aasimar.  As a dungeon master, when you sit down to run a game for a public table, expect the party to be motley denizens from the Mos Eisley Cantina.

I'm sure this is a knee-jerk get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids moment on my part, I'm willing to own that.  My context for a good D&D game setting is the Village of Hommlet, or the Keep on the Borderlands.  A proper D&D setting is faux-European fantasy, where the forces of civilization, humanity, strive against Chaos.  The home base is a haven of civilization on the edge of more dangerous borderlands or wilds.  Proper D&D settings are human-centric and have a historical texture to them.  Dark Ages or Medieval Europe with a patina of magic and some monsters; non-human races are present but rare.  Many places will view them with suspicion as dangerous outsiders.  Greyhawk is still my platonic ideal for the perfect D&D setting.

When an AL player sits down with a "Shadar-Kai Shadow Sorcerer" there's no point in even asking them what they're doing in a large human city; the players haven't considered it.  (Shadar-Kai are obscure death elves that live in remote corners of a different plane of existence, the Shadowfell.  Apparently also to be found lurking in your local tavern with a sign, "will adventure for gold").  The culture is about players assembling races and classes because the mechanical bits sound cool.

I'm running a lot of 5E to make the game intuitive.  I can sit down with an OSR rules set and natively know if a particular fight or combat is difficult or easy when designing my own stuff.  I've got my 10,000 hours behind the screen with first edition games.  5E manages to be both swingy and grindy at the same time.  Running many games and many combats is helping me internalize encounter design.  I guess at the end of the day I'm interested in working on my own adventures and home-brew, and this is a good way to see a lot of the game system in action.  I've volunteered to run every high level adventure I can (Tier 3 in AL terms).  Despite this tirade it's still great fun.

But I part ways with the 5E aesthetic around race and class.  For Adventurer's League, you have to embrace the silliness and recognize the players are going to be the D&D equivalent of The Munsters or The Addam's Family, two 60's sitcom TV shows.  Actually, The Munsters is a good analogy - if some fool shows up with an actual human character, the "Marilyn Munster" of the table, it's not uncommon for the rest of the group to shake their heads sadly about their poor under-talented compatriot.  "Low end of the gene pool, that one, and no dark vision, either".

My next home campaign needs to be Greyhawk.

Assault on Chult

Note:  the map below has spoilers

My home campaign is 15 sessions into the player's assault on Chult (the Tomb of Annihilation campaign).  I'm estimating we're a third of the way through the campaign, about to finish the first of three campaign arcs.  The first arc is exploring the jungles of Chult, and trying to identify the locale of the Forbidden City.  The second arc is exploration of the Forbidden City itself and learning how to open the lost tomb.  The final arc is exploration of the tomb itself.

I'm not going to do detailed campaign recaps, as we're already 15 sessions in.  I'll do a survey of the player's progress with exposition on tips and referee choices that have worked out well for us.

The most important suggestion I have for starting a new Chult game is to adjust the urgency of the "Death Curse".  By the book, the campaign starts in the Chultan city of Port Nyanzaru under pressure to find a corrupt relic lost in the jungles.  The relic is affecting the whole world; Raise Dead and similar clerical magic has stopped working.  People brought back via Raise Dead or Resurrection are dying.  Both effects together are being labeled "The Death Curse".  The character's patron, a retired adventurer and recipient of a Raise Dead, is dying, and hires the characters to find the source of the Death Curse (quickly).  They are one of several similarly hired adventuring parties.

The problem is that Chult is a sprawling hex crawl with many interesting side quests and adventure opportunities.  Perkins and the WOTC team created a great hex crawl.  But if the players are under too much immediate pressure due to the Death Curse countdown, they'll focus solely on the Forbidden City, missing out on a lot of the fun discovering lost ruins in the jungle.  I bifurcated the effects of the Death Curse; the corrupt relic starts the game blocking souls from Raise Dead and Resurrection.  It's important to find the source of the curse, but the player's patron isn't dying by the minute.  I marked a time on the calendar (60 days) where the corrupt relic has absorbed enough souls from the recently dead that it's ability evolves, and begins to leech once-dead souls brought back via Raise Read or Resurrection.  It gives the players a more relaxed entry point into exploration of Chult, while setting a countdown later when the relic begins unraveling recipients of Raise Dead and providing a time clock when it's appropriate.

Expedition 1 (Right of Map)
The first arc starts in Port Nyanzaru, a frontier city squatting on the edge of the foreboding jungle, nestled between sluggish jungle rivers.  The players hire a guide, buy equipment, and set off on their first forays into the jungles of Chult.

My advice:  first, use the encumbrance rules (a "variant rule" in the player's handbook) and let the players know you'll be enforcing rules around heat exhaustion, daily water intake, and the difficulties of logistics in the jungles.  There is a fair amount of bookkeeping during this phase, creating inventories of food, bug repellent, tents and camping gear, canoes, and developing hex crawl "standard operating procedures" such as how to set up camp, daily jobs, canoe assignments, night watch schedules, etc.  Once they have all of this in place, the hex crawl procedures run smoothly.

I get the sense many modern referees ignore encumbrance and requiring the players to plan.  My players learned to hate and respect the jungle - the storms, the oppressive heat, the difficulty of bushwhacking overland and having to leave behind things like armor because carrying food and water was more important.  Plus the presence of dinosaurs and bands of undead, the remnants of an ancient army.  "I hate the jungle" became a running theme with the party's paladin, forced to leave behind heavy armor in order to hack through vine-choked jungle on 10 mile marches.  5E's encounters typically challenges the characters, but table top planning challenges the players.  Now that the characters are reaching mid-levels, they appreciate the way they can avoid the worst of the jungle because their wealth or class abilities afford them better options.

Their first expeditions (sessions 1-4) took them to a place on the map called Firefinger and then back to the city, moving from levels 1-3.

Expedition 2 (Center)
After their first major expedition, they spent more time in the city looking for rumors and learned about a storied oracle at Orolunga that might provide a clue to the resting place of the corrupt relic.  On this expedition, they went with more canoes and hired local porters, so they'd have hirelings to carry extra food and water (and potentially lug armor and other heavy gear).

I worked in themes from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now on this river trip, with distance equating to regression into horror for those that didn't respect the jungle, culminating in their visit to Camp Vengeance, where the paladins and crusaders of the Order of the Gauntlet were on the verge of madness (and the commander, Niles Breakbone, was my own Colonel Kurtz).  There's also a fine DM's Guild adventure called Hunter, an homage to the Schwarzenegger movie Predator, that I worked in as a side-trek on this expedition.  I'll probably write a review, we enjoyed Hunter quite a bit.

This expedition also took the players on to M'Bala, and then out to Orolunga, where they did get insights on the corrupt relic and a locale for the Forbidden City (Omu).

I'm not a fan of the over-powered NPC characters that traipse around the Forgotten Realms, and Chult has it's own - the immortal Artus Cimber and his holy sword wielding sidekick, Dragonbait.  Artus, who went by the name "Sam", was encountered in Orolunga as a surly adventurer seeking his own answers from the oracle.  He and the players learned they may have a common goal, the defeat of a legendary jungle warlord Ras Nsi, but the two sides parted amidst mutual insults.  Later, the players ran into a hunting party of Zhentarim assassins on the trail of a wanted fugitive, Artus Cimber, and the players connected the dots between "Sam" and Artus.  Artus is now "in the game" in case I need a high level helper NPC at some point during the end game, but there's a bit of a rivalry so I don't feel obligated for them to team up because they're both "good guys".  He can act as a provocateur or rival.

The other recommendation from this arc was to threaten the hired help.  5E characters are notoriously tough to put down; my game still doesn't have a fatality, although we've come close several times.  NPC's don't have plot immunity and the guides and porters are critically important if you're running the hex crawl with encumbrance and logistics.  It's been great fun having monsters choose the easier targets and stressing the players about such important resources.

This expedition covered sessions 5 - 12, and saw most of the party hit levels 4 and 5 before returning to the city.

Expedition 3 (Ocean-based)
By this point, the players knew a lot about Chult and had many targets for their next journey.  However, the jungle ruins don't provide a lot of cash and their pouches were getting light.  They learned about a lucrative pirate hunting opportunity in the city dock ward, and hired a ship to go pirate hunting.  Drink up me hearties yo ho.  This allowed me to introduce the dragon turtle in the Bay of Chult, and we had a great time running an intricate ship-to-ship combat when they intercepted a pirate ship by trailing a loaded merchant vessel - the pirate ship was called "The Stirge" and they ultimately captured it and sailed it back to port to collect a heavy reward.  I also ran a pirate-themed lighthouse encounter from one of the DM's guild supplements, Encounters in Port Nyanzaru.  When all was done, the characters were flush with cash, owned their own sloop, hired a captain and quartermaster, and planned a long voyage to Shilku Bay to begin their trek to Omu, the Forbidden City.

My advice if you try something similar is to leverage the ocean voyage rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh for 5E.  Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a nautical campaign, and the appendices cover detailed vehicle rules for ships, downtime on long voyages, sea hazards, ocean borne encounters, the works.  It's a great resource to put some nautical flair into your Chult game.  One of the Unearthed Arcana articles had additional ships (I think I got "sloop" from the UA article).  I have irrational love for pirate adventures.  The Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign is in my future, along with grog, sea shanties, and a bunch of pirate movies.  (In fact, I'm currently streaming Black Sails with my wife).

Expedition 4 (South)
When the characters set out for the south of Chult, they were loaded up for a long journey.  They used the wealth from pirate hunting to buy some magic items, many potions, and sufficient food and gear to stay in Omu several weeks.  Their patron had been tracking them via Dreams and Sendings magic; now they learned from her the Death Curse has entered a new phase, and recipients of Raise Dead that predated the Death Curse are beginning to unravel.  She's dying.  Suddenly there's a time clock!

Their new guide for the expedition is an albino jungle dwarf named "Musharib"; he waived his fee if the characters would help him explore Hrakhamar first, so they've been clearing that mini-dungeon - a dwarven forge overrun by Fire Newts.  They learned of the dragon in Wyrmheart Mine and plan to assault it next, then head for Omu and the next leg of the campaign.

I'll post another set of observations sometime after they've explored Omu and are entering the final arc, the Tomb of the Nine Gods.  Feel free to generate a discussion in the comments about your own Chult game and how things went by you, I'd love to hear it.

A look at the D&D Essentials Kit

The D&D Essentials Kit is a boxed set published earlier this summer - I picked one up at the local Target.  I didn't need the rules, although the set does come with a sturdy rulebook, a flimsy Dungeon Master's screen, dice, and accouterments.  I picked up it because I was intrigued by the rules for "sidekicks", and I heard good things about the adventure module.

Sidekicks
Sidekicks are non-player characters (NPCs) that accompany player characters - the typical retainers and henchmen of old school games.  They use 5th edition "monster" stat blocks in lieu of a full character sheet, with simplified abilities, making them easy to run at the table as a complement to a player's regular character.  Ostensibly they're in the game to support solo adventuring (one DM and one player, with a few sidekicks) but we immediately started using them for old school style henchmen.  Emporo the Mighty and Josh, both fighters, are accompanying players in my Chult campaign as sidekicks.  There are three flavors - a spellcaster sidekick (clerical or arcane), a warrior sidekick, and an expert (rogue) sidekick.  There are tables for leveling sidekicks so they maintain parity with their patrons.  Sidekicks only take up two pages in the rulebook but were completely worth it.

The Dragon of Icespire Peak
The adventure that comes in the set is "The Dragon of Icespire Peak".  It's 64 pages - 50 pages or so of adventure, the rest is a bestiary.  It describes a sandbox region around the village of Phandalin in the Forgotten Realms, consisting of 14 adventure locales - dungeons, ruins, and other adventure sites, providing enough action for a party to go from level 1 through 6.  It has everything you need to launch a fun campaign - a home base, wilderness locales, dungeons, and even a bit of overarching plot (a dragon recently came to the area, setting things in motion).

A few additional things I really enjoyed about the adventure; first, since there is an actual Dragon of Icespire Peak, it flies around marauding in the background, providing nice verisimilitude before the characters gain enough experience to go confront it.  It can show up early in the campaign as a wandering monster, too, driving home the point that the world is dangerous.

There is progressive quest guidance that provides the players options on where to seek adventure, while ramping up the danger as they range farther from home base or begin to target the dragon; it's a style that appeals to old school gamers.  Phandalin is the same village described in "Lost Mine of Phandelver", the introductory adventure in the first starter set, allowing a DM to combine both adventures into a broader sandbox campaign.  I'm looking forward to starting a new campaign (after Chult) and merging Icespire Peak/Phandelver into a sprawling sandbox game (although I'd 99% ditch the Forgotten Realms and transpose the village and surrounding locales to a homebrew setting or Greyhawk).

Our Amazonian capitalist overlord sells the Essentials Kit for about $15-16, $24 at retail.  I wouldn't normally recommend a starter set (unless you're a boxed set maven) but I've been a fan of this material; I'm making heavy use of the sidekick rules, and Icespire Peak is a fine sandbox adventure to get a new game started the way the founders intended.  (Good job, Wizards).

Character versus Campaign

I'm still trying to get comfortable with the difference between old school characters and the latest edition.  Let's talk generalities - old school characters are quick to generate, somewhat disposable, and they become interesting over time due to emergent stories.  There's not a lot of mechanical difference between various 1st level fighters.  It's the adventures they survive that make them interesting.  Because the characters are disposable, the campaign becomes the constant at the table.  Campaign transcends character.

5E is another animal.  Players come to the table with deeply thought out level 1 characters, taking great care to select race, class, backgrounds, character options, and considering a mechanical arc for the character.  In addition to the player's handbook core rules, there are several other books that expand character options.

I know these topics have been litigated ad nauseum since 3E.  The argument goes there are way more players than game masters, so economically, market forces dictate the company makes lots of player options because it sells books.  Wizards has been fairly disciplined with their publishing schedule, so the market isn't flooded with too many 5E player options like the 3rd or 4th editions, but there's still a good amount out there.

However, I think it's more interesting to reflect on how 5E's approach to the player character affects gameplay.  I've been part of convention games, and running a good amount of Adventurer's League games as a "public DM" for one of my friends (plus a weekly home game).  Every week it's (potentially) a different set of players with different characters.  The public games are single-serving fun-size episodes.  The story and the campaign doesn't provide the continuity for the players, it's the character itself that's the one constant.  (Wherever you go, there you are, or something like it).

The positive for this approach is the amount of creativity manifested in the players.  Character story still emerges through play, the way God and Gary intended, but players show up having given a lot more thought to how they want to portray the character when their time at the table is a single-serving instance.  No one at a public game table wants to hear someone's five page backstory, but the players that get it are very good at using their turns to add some flourish and tell their character's story through brief action choices, mannerisms, or maybe a funny accent or turn of phrase. I'm sure the ever-presence of Twitch gaming and celebrity-table D&D is contributing to player theatrics and a heavier focus on roleplaying through table presence.  (The Matt Mercer effect).  I don't live in a particularly large town, one of many suburbs north of Philadelphia, but it boasts two nights per week of these "Adventurer Leagues", at different stores, running 4-5 full tables of players.  I don't know if Dungeons & Dragon has ever been more popular.  I'm not going to complain.

There are some ramifications to 5E's character emphasis I still don't like.  The characters are extremely powerful, very hard to kill, and all of the game effects that should be permanent and horrifying are typically only temporary (an example would be petrification).  I'm not a killer DM, but the lack of lethality undermines drama at the table - combat is sport instead of war, as we say.  I usually have to discard any game balance "guidelines" and be willing to throw anything and everything at the players to generate a credible threat.  (This is much easier in a home game than the public Adventurer's League setting where you're constrained by an author).  For campaign building, I don't like the limitations high-powered, high-magic characters create for the world at large.  5E D&D doesn't emulate genres well; it's created its own genre of fantasy; at best you can import flavors from other genres and nudge the default 5E assumptions towards the style you want to mirror.

Despite these cranky "get off my lawn with your 5th edition" complaints, I'm having fun.  I appreciate the player creativity I'm seeing.  Running Adventurer's League is meh, but I'm helping a friend out due to the high demand in the area.  Apparently one can run the published hardcover campaigns in lieu of their Adventurer's League modules, so I'm going to try that soon - most of the hardback campaigns are well done, and I've run enough home brew megadungeons to handle a drop in/drop out episodic public game.  The biggest dissonance I have is re-calibrating my expectations of world building, which arcs towards low magic, pseudo-historical settings with a side of horror.  I don't naturally embrace the wahoo high-magic eclectic mash-up embodied by 5E.  Getting there is a work in progress; thus I haven't tried my hand at a homebrew setting in a while.  I'm all ears for advice on how you've done it.

Tomb of Annihilation is an Old School Delight

I'm 12 sessions into running the 5E Tomb of Annihilation campaign and enjoying it greatly.  Depending on the day, I'd place it as the best or second best hardcover campaign published for fifth edition (Curse of Strahd competes with it).  Why do I rate it so highly?  Let's explore.

The campaign is a sprawling jungle hex crawl covering a large island/peninsula, sprinkled with ruined cities and adventure sites, with a capstone consisting of an epic dungeon.  It's an amalgam of several classic adventure modules from the 1st edition days, Tomb of Horrors, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, and perhaps thematic nods towards The Isle of Dread.  There's an overarching plot about discovering the location of a corrupt relic and stopping it's baleful influence.  How the players prosecute the campaign to find the relic is extremely open ended.

As a game master who prefers old school styles of play, Tomb of Annihilation has been very satisfying.  The players have launched multiple excursions by river into the foreboding jungle, deftly guiding canoes up sluggish rivers through the oppressive heat of Chult.  They've had to manage resources (food, tents, insect repellents, and especially clean water) while dealing with hungry predators, packs of undead, and jungle-born disease.  The campaign caters to gaming styles where good planning and time management are important.

The wilderness encounters don't care about character level, nor do I advise scaling them down; it's not uncommon for low-level characters to discover locales or meet creatures that over-match them, shifting it to the players to respond accordingly and play smart - another throwback to earlier styles of gaming that test player skill.  (Though I will say, 5E characters are quite resilient and powerful).

Record-keeping behind the screen has been important.  I've leveraged calendars, procedural generators for encounters and weather, and helper tables to keep the action crisp.  I'll embellish them in a follow up post.  From the player's side, they've created a lot of "standard procedures" to speed play - what a standard camp looks like, what jobs the characters perform to set up camp, how they prepare enough water each day, and the overnight watch schedule.  We've also used the encumbrance rules (laughingly, they are listed as "optional" in the PHB) so that any overland excursion through the jungle drives tough choices.  Food and water is heavy.  Heavy armor is a liability in the jungle.

Wizards published an alternate experience approach called "Three Pillars"; I've been using that exclusively for this campaign.  5E "by the book" rewards combat only, although more and more the game seems to be shifting towards "milestone leveling" which is basically "level up because I said so".  The "Three Pillars" approach rewards exploration and recovering treasure, along with combat and winning important social victories.  It ties in better with a holistic experience.  I'm not deluded into thinking that any experience system isn’t flawed and arbitrary; I just don't think the 5E default assumptions support XP for gold the way I'd like.

I've been doing a ton of game mastering, both for the home campaign and some "Adventurer's League" at a local game store, so I plan to get back to semi-regular blogging. It seems the blogging landscape has changed quite a bit.  No more G+, so it's not clear where old schoolers hang out to discuss games.  Don't I need to turn in my OSR card now that I'm pretty much a 5E gamer, anyway?  Otherwise life has been good, the kids are all teenagers, my career is doing well.  I've missed talking about gaming. 

Illyria Game Two - Against the Cult of the Reptile God!

Illyria Game Two picked up back in the waterside city of Fraus, on the northwest of Lake Laconic.  The players met Nicodemus, the thieves' guild master, at the Flying Trout on the waterfront, and gave over the relics they recovered and claimed their share.  They had also recovered an Olympian shortsword (bronze, magic +1) and gave it to their sword-and-board fighter, Tiberius.

The relics recovered from the Tomb of Gymnos included an Olympian spear and a heroic shield; the buyer was a captain of the grand army of Durus, Nikos, an ambassador to Fraus and collector.  The captain was impressed by the group and told them he could use a party of irregulars to travel south, to Fort Quintus, where an incursion of goblin and dark fey of Arcadia had appeared across the river from the fort.  "The army is occupied with other priorities, while we mobilize for our king's upcoming campaign against those who doubt his right to rule all of Illyria."

The guildmaster was also impressed with the characters, and said he needed someone with a bit of backbone, "unconcerned with getting rough and dirty hands", to go to Castra Lapis and take care of some deadbeats.  "Castra Lapis is a profitable little mining village, off the road to Durus, and I've had a few men there looking out for guild interests, running a gambling den and black market, that kind of stuff.  The guild's share has dried up, so I'm beginning to think they've gone into business for themselves, and need to be reminded who they work for.  But there's also been disturbing news from Castra Lapis.  I've heard of a few families that have recently moved away because folks have gone strange or missing.  So who knows?"

Meanwhile, an intriguing hand-written post had started to appear nailed outside the taverns frequented by mercenaries and adventurers; it read like this:

Men wanted, for hazardous exploration, small wages, terrible foes, long periods of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor, recognition, and wealth in case of success.  Report to the Adventurer's Guild Hall of Lunda to apply.

I wanted to feed the players at least three adventurous opportunities right off the bat and give them something to talk about - a good way to kick off a sandbox.  If they wanted the game to be more political and involve favors with kings and generals, they could pursue the Fort Quintus opportunity.  If they liked their friendship with the guildmaster of thieves and liked being hired muscle, they could go to Castra Lapis.  If they wanted to embark on some epic dungeon crawling, there was Lunda.  (Bonus points if any readers know where I cribbed the call to Lunda, it's really classic).

They chose the Castra Lapis idea and agreed to work for the guildmaster, figuring that Lunda would still be there, and the army story line wasn't interesting to them.

For the readers, I'll point out that I've built Illyria to be fairly generic, where I could dump my favorite adventures and hooks while learning the in's and out's of the 5E system.  Player characters are way overpowered in 5E compared to the games I usually run, and I have to recallibrate my sensitivities to figure out the best way to create adventures and encounters.  It's exacerbated by having a large group (since all of the stock advice and encounter building "advice" in the DMG is targeted at a 4-5 player party, and party size is a major variable).

The plot hook for Fort Quintus was 'Guido's Fort' from Horror on the Hill, and Castra Lapis is the site of the Cult of the Reptile God from the adventure of the same name.  (Lunda has hooks for my homebrew megadungeon, Death Mountain, and also a 3E favorite, The Sunless Citadel).

The road to Castra Lapis took them past fields where slaves toiled on farms under the gaze of mounted overseers; the Celtic war bands north of Illyria sell their defeated enemies to the slavers of Fraus to toil in Illyria's 'bread basket', the vale of Durus.  They had another unsettling encounter on the way to Castra Lapis; an old man walking on the road with a mad gleam to his eyes.  "My daughter has come back!  She visited me last night, and told me to meet her in the city".  As he waved by and walked up the road, he called back, "It destroyed me when she died last year, but now she's back - she just needs to find the right kind of body in the city!"  The players have now encountered two situations where shades have apparently returned from the vaults of Pluto and the underworld.

Since a few players had to miss this game, the group had the missing characters establish a camp outside of town so they'd have an avenue for players to drop in, drop out.  The ones that attended approached town, where they were rebuffed by the constable and his flunkies.  "You've missed the main road to Durus", he pointed out.  "Surely a gang of heavily armed mercenaries have no business in quiet little Castra Lapis?"  Queue some obligatory roleplaying, persuasion, and intimidation attempts.  (Intimidation is the kid's 'go to' skill choice, they love to make bruiser characters and trash talk at the bad guys).

They got information from the constable - the guys they were after worked out of the Golden Grain Inn, and did indeed host gambling and similar activities for the miners.  "Don't cause trouble, as we'll be just up the road and we're not afraid to call out the militia."

After doing their "I'm Batman, Where are They" voices on a few miners at the inn, the players were directed to Decimus (the thieves' guild contact) in an upstairs room.  "Snigrot is my partner, he's not back yet", drawled Decimus.  "Let's meet in an hour, at dinner, and we'll talk all about the missing payments and what's been going on here..."  Decimus was presented as a dangerous scarred loner in a saloon (Clint Eastwood with knives).

A couple of players scouted the village in the meantime while the rest waited for the meeting.  When the time came, drinks were served, and Snigrot and Decimus joined at one end of the table.  None of the players realized the drinks had slow acting sleep poisons in them.  Trash talking started, threats were made, and Mort (the group's reckless hot headed death cleric) ran across the table swinging his maul at Decimus.  Mort's legs got wobbly from the sleep poison, but he made his save.  At this point all the players realized it was a set up!

Furthermore, everyone in the inn was part of the ambush.  The dozen or so miners grabbed clubs, knives, or bottles.  A miner barred the front door so no one could get out.  The bartender swung a bat from behind the bar, clubbing the half orc barbarian.  (It just made the barbarian angry).  The only player that completely missed his poison save was Shae the Gnome Sorceror, so he took a nap.  Mort dueled Decimus, and eventually connected with Inflict Wounds (a hideous damage spell).  Brax cast thunderwave at a bunch of the miners, rocking the inn and shattering glasses and windows.  Rasp dueled with Snigrot.

The miners were basically mooks, easy to take out by player characters, so the fight ended quickly once Decimus and Snigrot fell.  The thunderwave alerted the constable, who was calling for the militia out in the streets.  Baruch, the bartender, was taken prisoner and gagged by the players, while a few characters quickly looted Decimus's room upstairs for ill-gotten gains.  They escaped out the back of the inn before the constable returned, using their druid's skills to cover their tracks and guide them to camp.

Illyria, First Game Session!

I've run four games in my Illyria setting for 5E Dungeons & Dragons.  Illyria is a generic high fantasy setting built to make it easy to plug in any kind of modules or premade adventures I like, while I get more drive time with 5E.  Illyria includes themes from Greco-Roman mythology; the stories of Jupiter and Mars and Saturn form the folklore, nurse tales, and cultural heritage for the peoples of Illyria.

The first game session started in media res to thrust the players right into some action.  They stood around a circular shaft on the wild far shores of Lake Laconic.  The directions from the merchant Nicodemus in Fraus were accurate, and the characters had located the remote site where the tomb entrance lay forgotten and lost.

The players weren't the first adventurers to the site.  A rope stretched over the side of the shaft and dropped into the darkness.  There was an abandoned skiff back on the shore, and the remains of a camp only a few days old.

Here's the cast of characters for the Illyria campaign:

Mort the Death Cleric (Logan)
Xenobrax the Half-Elf Sorcerer (Zach)
Rasp the Elf Rogue (Bo)
Shaenèsi the Deep-Gnome Shadow Sorcerer (Jeff)
Gromorg the Half-Orc Barbarian (Adam)
Caliban, Tiefling Druid (Owen)
Tank Stoneballz, Dwarf Forge-Priest (Mike)

I wrote the tomb adventure (The Tomb of Gymnos) to take about 4 hours and introduce themes of the campaign.  Another adventurer group was hired by Nicodemus (the player's patron) several days ahead of them, but he neglected to tell them about it… and then he hired the players because the first group didn't return!

There was a shaft down into the abandoned tomb, a small shrine to Mars, and a series of catacombs, before reaching the deeper halls.  The entrance areas included a lair with giant spiders that gave the players a chance to battle some monsters and learn how their characters work.  The corpses of the previous adventurers littered the spider lair.

In the halls beyond the shrine to Mars was a pair of grandiose bronze doors leading to the main tomb, and a moss-covered side passage down to some natural caves.  The passage through the bronze doors was trapped with a deadly flame trap, but there was a simple puzzle in the hallway that involved interpreting murals and properly arranging the facings of some pillars to deactivate the trap.  The kids figured that one out quickly.  (Kids play Skyrim, so they had the puzzle solved before the adults started their questions).

The stairs beyond the bronze portals led to a false tomb and a portcullis trap, and a horrible battle involving a handful of "shadows".  5E characters are overpowered compared to earlier editions, and my group is large (8 players) so they were able to defeat the shadows by dipping into their powerful spells (especially something called 'guiding bolt' from the clerics).  With the shadows dispatched, the players returned to the portcullis trap and worked on getting it lifted.

The real tomb was actually down the moss-covered stairs, beyond some natural grottoes and across a bridge.  "Why have you come here", called a young woman from atop a raised platform where the ancient tomb sat.  "HE'S going to come back soon, and I can't stop him…"  The woman was the last survivor of the previous adventurers, a member of the Fraus thieves' guild.  Something changed about her countenance, and she picked up  an ancient bow with deadly determination, firing arrows with terrible accuracy across the grotto at the players.  The voice that rang out from her was no longer her own "You will be punished for violating this house of rest, and are unworthy to plunder my legacy."

The possessed thief pelted the characters with arrows while they ran across harrowing open ground to get to the raised dais where she waited.  As the first characters vaulted the stairs, she switched from bow and arrow to spear and shield, and started dueling with them in melee like some Spartan hoplite.

As the possessed thief got worn down, the sorcerer succeeded with a sleep spell.  The possessing spirt poured out of her mouth, battling them as a specter.  When some powerful blows dispersed the specter, it called out, "The invisible one has let loose the door to his house, and the guests have begun to leave.  What is now but a trickle will overwhelm as a roaring deluge…"

So that was the end of the short adventure I used to kick off the new campaign.  The players looted the tomb, and returned across the lake to the city of Fraus to rendezvous with Nicodemus, their patron.  The possessed thief, Calliope ("Cali") survived the possession, and was brought back to town too.  There was some silliness about returning one of the adventurer's backpacks back to Cali.  They gave the back pack to Cali.

Nicodemus wasn't a merchant after all, but was the leader of the thieves' guild, and happy one of his crew survived.  They worked out  a treasure split, the players were paid a fair share, and Nicodemus offered them another job.  The players knew the army was looking for some adventurers to go the frontier and help the commander of Fort Quintus deal with a goblin incursion from Arcadia; there were also post-bills all over Fraus promising "honor and glory in case of success" to any brave adventurers that went to Lunda (the site of my campaign's megadungeon), but they decided to keep working with Nicodemus, and go to Castra Lapis and take care of some deadbeats behind on payments.  It certainly didn't sound adventurous, but dark rumors swirled about Castra Lapis, and the players suspected there would be a deeper mystery in the small mining village.