Help expand my sandbox

marksable

*eyeroll*
So, I've been running a campaign for around 10 sessions now using Five Torches Deep, the simplified 5E hack. I have some session reports (that I'm behind on, sorry) in the Actual Play forum, and many of you were helpful in getting it started.

The party started in the Forbidden Caverns of Archaia, where they spent 1/2 to 2/3rds of the sessions so far. 2 dungeons in I'd say it's good not great but it's early.

I seeded Barrowmaze into the campaign although they haven't been there yet, mostly do to me having problems getting maps to copy from the PDF to Roll20.

The party has since moved on to Tomb of the Serpent Kings, which is great...but the party has gotten to the Basilisk so I don't imagine we'll get more than 1 or 2 more sessions max.

I'm not sure how psyched they'll be to return to Archaia. If they do, I feel like it will be much the same as TOTSK in content if not in quality - dungeon exploration, combat and traps. There's nothing wrong with that but I'd love to add some options for more varied play so they don't get burned out.

I'd like to expand the sandbox but adding some more adventures/locations. Requirements would be:
-Something more than JUST dungeon crawling (although it can have that as well)
-It needs to exist in PDF form so I can import maps. I'd love to do Castle Xyntillan, for example, but as I only have a hard copy I can't see how I can make it work with maps (I don't think my party would enjoy mapping, and I honestly don't have the patience for it as a DM). If Melan/Gabor Lux is reading this, maybe just release digital versions of the maps to those of us who bought your lovely book?:)
-It needs to be able to accommodate players of 2nd level to start.
-5E compatible would be easiest to convert to Five Torches Deep but I'm getting more comfortable with the system so not a necessity.
-low prep would be nice, especially if I seed more than one of these into it.

Thoughts so far:
-Keep on the Borderlands. Not sure how much different it will be than the Caverns, seems like a smaller version. But there's at least factions, and it's on my to-do list of things to run. I have the Goodman 5E version but could use the maps from an older PDF, I think
-Magical Murder Mansion - ran Kidnap the Archpriest with this group in the previous game, and we are enjoying TOTSK. Not sure if would be different than explore/fight/avoid traps but at least it's got a different flavor
-Ironwood Gorge - Bryce said it was better than B2 "despite what Benoist says", and flipping through it it seems fun
-Shadowbrook Manor - part of Bryce's "starter kit" with Tower of the Stargazer (which doesn't interest me very much) and Tomb of the Iron God (which I ran for these players last campaign)
-T1 Village of Hommlet - also on my bucket list but worried it's anti-climactic b/c there's no good Temple of Elemental evil
-Cult of the Reptile God - consistently hear good things about it, lots of roleplay opportunies I believe
-Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - again, comes up as one of the best modules, more roleplay, option to use the other 2 in the trilogy plus the 5E maps from Roll20 would make things easy

As always your thoughts are welcome and very much appreciated.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
What is TOTSK?

Also, I vote for adding Villiage of Hommlet to your campaign. It's got a wonderful vibe and the Moathouse is creepy fun. Pick something else to be the Temple of Elemental Evil (or just ignore it, and make Lareth a free agent of a hidden power).

Another personal favorite of mine is Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom. Again, the vibe is great. I have a print copy, and am not sure about PDF availability.

Check out Bryce's The Best list. You can't really go wrong there.

Lastly, I will (against the grain on a site dedicated to reviewing pre-generated adventures) advocate again for you writing your own content. I believe it was the original (and best) intended way to play D&D---what I call the Greater D&D. It's not as impossible as you may think---just stay a bit ahead of the party each week and improvise (using random table supplements) when necessary. IMO it's the only way to build a long-term campaign with continuity and get real player buy-in about bigger events. It will ultimately be the most rewarding to you as well, as your creativity and imagination comes alive.

My $0.02.
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
-T1 Village of Hommlet - also on my bucket list but worried it's anti-climactic b/c there's no good Temple of Elemental evil
+1 for this. It helps with the anticlimax if you introduce Lareth early. I had "Lord Lareth" stop in at the Welcome Wench. I make him mildly condescending, not enough for even the most obnoxious players to kill him in the pub (besides which he had lakeys, and the militia would jump in); but what made the players hate him was that the villagers all fawned over him, to the point of the PCs getting crappy service when he was around.

Also, Greyhawk Grognard has a good series for inspiration in making ToEE more interesting. His ties ins to other modules are also worth a look.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
I totally agree with Beoric on all counts (yeah, PCs hate when a slightly arrogant NPC gets all the attention from the locals). Lareth escaped the confrontation with our party in the Moathouse and went on to become a major nemesis. It is particularly unerving that a charismatic villian can follow the PCs back to their "safe zone" without arousing suspicion. It's the antithesis of "orcs waiting in a room for the party to open the door", and adds a whole new dimension to the campaign.

Greyhawk Grognardia ToEE stuff is fascinating. Reading it always feels to me like the X-files---not something made up, but uncovering a hidden truth!

You should also look at the Mystical Trash Heap. Trent's got some good T1-T4 ideas there too. Some insightful suggestions on how to flesh out the environment between Hommlet and Nulb/Temple better. You'll need to dig into the comments---he's got some good tables in there IIRC.
 

Ice

*eyeroll*
So, I've been running a campaign for around 10 sessions now using Five Torches Deep, the simplified 5E hack. I have some session reports (that I'm behind on, sorry) in the Actual Play forum, and many of you were helpful in getting it started.

The party started in the Forbidden Caverns of Archaia, where they spent 1/2 to 2/3rds of the sessions so far. 2 dungeons in I'd say it's good not great but it's early.

I seeded Barrowmaze into the campaign although they haven't been there yet, mostly do to me having problems getting maps to copy from the PDF to Roll20.

The party has since moved on to Tomb of the Serpent Kings, which is great...but the party has gotten to the Basilisk so I don't imagine we'll get more than 1 or 2 more sessions max.

I'm not sure how psyched they'll be to return to Archaia. If they do, I feel like it will be much the same as TOTSK in content if not in quality - dungeon exploration, combat and traps. There's nothing wrong with that but I'd love to add some options for more varied play so they don't get burned out.

I'd like to expand the sandbox but adding some more adventures/locations. Requirements would be:
-Something more than JUST dungeon crawling (although it can have that as well)
-It needs to exist in PDF form so I can import maps. I'd love to do Castle Xyntillan, for example, but as I only have a hard copy I can't see how I can make it work with maps (I don't think my party would enjoy mapping, and I honestly don't have the patience for it as a DM). If Melan/Gabor Lux is reading this, maybe just release digital versions of the maps to those of us who bought your lovely book?:)
-It needs to be able to accommodate players of 2nd level to start.
-5E compatible would be easiest to convert to Five Torches Deep but I'm getting more comfortable with the system so not a necessity.
-low prep would be nice, especially if I seed more than one of these into it.

Thoughts so far:
-Keep on the Borderlands. Not sure how much different it will be than the Caverns, seems like a smaller version. But there's at least factions, and it's on my to-do list of things to run. I have the Goodman 5E version but could use the maps from an older PDF, I think
-Magical Murder Mansion - ran Kidnap the Archpriest with this group in the previous game, and we are enjoying TOTSK. Not sure if would be different than explore/fight/avoid traps but at least it's got a different flavor
-Ironwood Gorge - Bryce said it was better than B2 "despite what Benoist says", and flipping through it it seems fun
-Shadowbrook Manor - part of Bryce's "starter kit" with Tower of the Stargazer (which doesn't interest me very much) and Tomb of the Iron God (which I ran for these players last campaign)
-T1 Village of Hommlet - also on my bucket list but worried it's anti-climactic b/c there's no good Temple of Elemental evil
-Cult of the Reptile God - consistently hear good things about it, lots of roleplay opportunies I believe
-Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh - again, comes up as one of the best modules, more roleplay, option to use the other 2 in the trilogy plus the 5E maps from Roll20 would make things easy

As always your thoughts are welcome and very much appreciated.

I've run both Cult of the Reptile God and Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. Both have very good 5e conversion available for free.

Cult of the Reptile God is great. I have run it twice, and both times the events played out completely differently. I'd run it again for sure. It hits all of the sweet spots for me. It's got a very well designed town with lots of weird stuff going on, a fun mystery to solve, and a great dungeon at the end. The players can show up in town for any reason and become immediately enveloped in what is happening there. Everything hangs together really well, and it ends up feeling like more than the sum of it's parts. It also has got good maps that would work well with Roll20.

The main things I would change about it are are some of the NPCs in town. Ramne is a dumb, hamfisted NPC and should just be replaced with an item that helps you kill the boss (either an item that counters fireball, or a reptile-bane weapon). There are also two elves in town that tie into the dumbass Greyhawk lore. They suck. I just replaced them with something campaign specific. The second time I ran this adventure, my players decided that they were the survivors of an orc clan that was decimated in a recent battle, so I just changed the elves to be other orcs from the clan. Just change these elves to fit your campaign better.

Cult of the Reptile God would pair particularly well with Fever Swamp too, so that's cool.

Overall very good, low prep adventure.

The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is less wonderful and actually quite overrated in my opinion. It's not terrible, but it requires a lot of work. There is no actual town (they expect you to make it yourself), the clues are hard to follow and not very interesting, a few of the encounters are mindbogglingly stupid (see Ned in the mansion). I ran a campaign using U1,U2 and U3 as the base, but nearly everything that was memorable about it was scaffolding that I designed myself, rather than the actual U adventures. The 'arc' of U1, U2 and U3 assume the players will do some pretty weird things that none of my players would ever do, and untangling U2 and U3 from this 'arc' was a pain in the ass. I had to do far more prep work for these adventures than other modules I have run. I'd even say I did more prep work for them than adventures that I made up completely on my own. I was still a super novice DM when I ran these though, so take it with a grain of salt.

U1 does have a well designed pirate ship and crew you could drop into anything, though, so that might be worth a look if you are running a seafaring campaign. The map of both the ship and the mansion are pretty decent. If you are not running a seafaring campaign, I'd say stay away.

If I was going to run U1 again, I'd do it as a funnel for DCC and have the players design the town themselves (as quickly as possible, with funny parameters) and tell them that they are locals who are sick and tired of the creepy ghosts in the mansion ruining their lives, cursing their good fortunes, and scaring their wives and children, so they all decided to get their pitchforks and show those ghosts who is boss (hint: there are not actually any ghosts in U1, it's Scooby-Doo in Dnd). I'd also give one of players the deed to the mansion to create some funny inter-party tension if someone suggested burning the place down.

Overall, U1 is ok. It seems like it does a lot of things right but it does not hang together very well. It feels like less than the sum of its parts.
 

Beoric

8, 8, I forget what is for
You should also look at the Mystical Trash Heap. Trent's got some good T1-T4 ideas there too. Some insightful suggestions on how to flesh out the environment between Hommlet and Nulb/Temple better. You'll need to dig into the comments---he's got some good tables in there IIRC.
This does look good, but I am going to have to wait till I have a significant block of free time to read it because some unknown person made excruciatingly long posts in the comment section...
 

marksable

*eyeroll*
Thanks everyone for your replies, they were super helpful as always.

@squeen - TOTSK is Tomb of the Serpent Kings. I hear you on writing my own adventures. The issue for me is that my day job is writing comic books/graphic novels (I actually have a new book out today, which I'll post about on another thread if that's cool...). While I probably have the same lack of prep time, I find that writing my own content draws from that same well of creativity in a way that running adventures doesn't. Some of it becomes a thing in my head about, well, if I'm writing creatively I should be spending my time on my actual writing work with deadlines. AND I think I tend to be a perfectionist about it too. I did write an adventure for Lamentations of the Flame Princess a couple years ago that's supposed to be in the referee book if that ever comes out. Good or bad it taught be a lot about writing and the game and writing an adventure is something I'd recommend to anyone if they have the time.

Thanks also for the Mystical Trashe Hep Hommlet stuff.

@Ice - I think you've convinced me to add Orlane from Reptile God to the campaign. Good idea about Lamne. Might just replace him with scrolls (one shot items that won't unbalance the campaign), or have them on his body if he dies.
 

grodog

*eyeroll*
I also liked Orlane, but tweaked it for a more Lovecraftian flavor: replace trogs with deep ones, add shoggoth to dungeon, change cultsts in town to chaotic monks.

Allan.
 
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