Imagine having 2 parties of players that had consistent schedules that they would arrive at the finale at the same time and then scheduling both groups where at least one of them would be meeting on a day other than the normal meet up day and no one canceling last minute. “Not everyone can meet this week” everyone in the group “yes we can?” “Anyway we need to reschedule 😂” would be cool if it pans out though
@@musicguy8912 have the finale during a convention where both groups need to go through the adventure to reach the starting point for the convention session
Our current group actually started with a similar concept but in tomb. 3 dms, starting on slightly different places and if we run into each other, we fight. But if course it fell apart and now only our group stayed in it.
That's what I'm doing right now. I have a party who's running Dragon Heist as written and another party who's doing other things in the shadows. They are both followin their ideas and ideals. They are going to meet at the end of our homebrew plot after the conclusion of Dragon Heist. That's going to be the real epilogue for me as a Dm, even if the survivors will have to face one final fight after that. I honestly don't know which ideal is going to win and what will happen hahah
I always found the idea of running Candlekeep Mysteries with the players playing as novice scholars in training to be pretty cute. Probably couldn't extend that "campaign" beyond the book but it'd be a quaint framing device for a "mystery of the week" type series of adventures. Hell, maybe it could even be combined with Strixhaven somehow.
My group is playing a variation on that. We all came to Candlekeep in search of some sort of knowledge (different for each character) and we all have to work for the library doing special missions (the adventures). We are rotating who is DM for each adventure and are now on number 6. While it doesn't have an over arching story built in, it has really highlighted the downtime activities between adventures for us to create our own big story arcs. Everyone is pursing their own research projects. We are having a ton of fun. I also have the Strixhaven book and could definitely see the two combined, but I think it would be better to use the Candlekeep adventures as side quests in the Strixhaven "main quest".
Yep, definitely combine Strixhaven with Candlekeep Mysteries. You could frame it so that characters are trying to earn their scholarship into Strixhaven while studying in Candlekeep.
my group actually played it a bit meta, we were bunch of young wizards using a special kind of dream spell to play a game called castles and casters where we can pretend to be different kinds of adventurers from the books we've read.
My idea for a full Candlekeep campaign would be that the PCs are contractors that Candlekeep itself employs to deal with the sorts of problems that pop up from having that many magical books around. ("One of our scholars has gone missing" "People keep getting attacked by books" "This book has a ghost in it that keeps annoying people") Stylized with a mix of SCP Foundation/Men in Black (Candlekeep intentionally sequesters huge amounts of dangerous stuff) and crushingly soulless bureaucracy. From what I understand of Strixhaven, it should be pretty easy to slip one or two Candlekeep scenarios into a semester, whether as school assignments or extracurricular projects. Especially the lower-level ones (the high-level Candlekeeps tend to be less true mysteries and more "find this person and kill them").
I've been a DM for almost 30 years. I'm not some prodigy but I am experienced. I still love running the two Phandalin adventures. Their structure is quite brilliant, in that they are simple enough for a new DM to run out of the box, and in that their simplicity offers lots of "white space" for experienced DMs to fill with their own flavor. The real genius is that, somehow, the "white space" makes room for the old DM without making "plot holes" that might trip up the new DM.
Running my personal Ghosts of Saltmarsh game for the past year now, I keep thinking "have I gone too far with new stuff trying to tie it all together?" and the way you guys described it really validated my experience with the adventure as a DM. I added in an ancient kraken as the BBEG, and he cursed the players with an eldritch curse where he comes to claim their body (and the surrounding settlement if they are in town), when they die. I turned the Scarlet Brotherhood into a secretive cult trying to overturn the world order and resurrect their lost ancient empire. I added in a lot of scenarios that really drive home the fact that these events are bigger than the characters, and that they can't save everyone. Eldritch horror, indeed.
I loved the sourcebook at the beginning talking about the surrounding swamps and forest. But I was really disappointed that the adventures do very little using the surrounding area, and the late adventures have nothing to do with Saltmarsh at all, and don't even have locations on the map. I will have to check out Sly's guide. Thanks!
@Brian Cherry it is requiring a lot more forethought to make it all come alive for sure. I set mine in the Moonshaes to help fill out the political conflict as well as bring in a lot of fae and giants into the mix (a far cry from my last campaign as a first time DM, ToA). And while I'm not using it, there's a very well regarded 3rd party campaign called Call From the Deep that numerous folks have combined with Saltmarsh (lots of sailing and pirates and mind flayers!). A lot of stuff worth pulling from it.
I've been running Dragon Heist for almost a year now with 3 of the 4 villians; my players have really sunk their teeth into spending a ton of time with the factions. It reminds me of Skyrim; the main plot is super short and kinda meh, but all the OTHER stuff is where the real fun is.
@@Gears-rb2ox they are all great. Manshoon might be the least fun. Xanthar is a wild megalomaniac, the Cassalanters are nuanced and subtly evil, and Jaraxle is a wild card with buckets of Charisma
@@Gears-rb2ox I personally love RPing as the Cassalanters; noses-up nobility that act a little too squeaky clean. I had them be nothing but passively-friendly to the PCs at first, but as they started to find cracks in their facade, they got more stand-offish.
Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus was actually the first campaign I have run! Our group went 60 sessions deep on this bad boy and man was it a *LOT* of work for me but at the end it was 100% worth it. I'll tell you what I did with the adventure and then offer my own review at the end: ACT 1- I turned the Baldur's Gate section into a 20 session intrigue conspiracy plot and I really had to build up and expand the plot with local politics, Guild kingpins, and a deep conspiracy with an Elder Brain controlling Duke Bellyne Stelmane trying to take over the city with a coup. I really wanted to explore this famous city and, as written, chapter 1 has very little to do with the rest of the campaign and is really just a reason to get your party to level 5 and send them packing. Which is a shame, because I ran an entire 20 session conspiracy plot based on the material in the Gazetteer. The material is literally in the book, they just didn't USE any of it. ACT 2- Then, I turned the Elturel section into a 20 session arc to save civilians, introduce the Blood War, and help turn the tides of the invasion of the city back in the favor of the defenders. "Hellturel" is a great resource for this section. As written, the party just crosses the city and maybe goes to save Ulder Ravengard. I wrote up an entire war campaign between the demons, devils, surviving hellriders, and even a Nemesis-like villain that was an Adult Red Dragon named Balthurax that dogged the party. I wrote up an entire subplot for Reya Mantlemorn to be a descendent of the "Unknown Heroine" that fought off a great red dragon when the city was young. The Unknown Heroine's statue is referenced in the crypt of the High Hall, and I used that as a vehicle to build a plot about the party helping Reya realize that she has to become a leader for her people and help her find her ancestor's dragonslaying sword so the party could take out the dragon for good. Everyone likes a plan to take on a big red dragon. The book doesn't really give you a reason to care about the people of Elturel, so I really built upon getting to know these NPCs and the party becoming invested with them and their story. ACT 3- Lastly, I reformed the locations and events in Avernus entirely into more of a 20 session expedition across the hell blasted planes of Avernus as the party gained allies, survived intense exploration hazards, and slowly put together a vision of Zariel's empire and how to bring it down if they so wished. The book does a decent job of introducing devil deals and representing the various factions vying for control, so I spent some time writing ways to really challenge the morality of the party with tough decisions for both survival and campaign success. No one came out the other side without scars. The biggest change was that I brought on a dragonborn player that was interested in Arkhan the Cruel and ran a subplot where the players take out Arkhan's generals one by one in an effort to depose Arkhan the Cruel and become the next Chosen of Tiamat with the goal of reforming her dragon armies to defeat Zariel and make Tiamat the next Archdevil of Avernus. It was a smashing success that ended in a massive Lord of the Rings style climactic war and the players redeemed Zariel and returned the city to the Forgotten Realms before the dragonborn player turned against the party in a surprise twist and moved to kill her while she was weak (so everyone more or less got what they wanted to achieve). It was an adventure that I will never forget. My Review: Avernus is a wonderful setting with interesting hell tech and a Mad Max vibe to play with and we even ran a Redline type of deathmatch race. If you are willing to put in the work as a DM, Descent Into Avernus has all the material you need to run one of the most epic campaigns your players will ever take part in with countless ways to end it and endless player choice. It really should be considered a SETTING book with lots of suggested play material and only the spine of an adventure path and a catalogue of NPCs for ready use. To run this adventure as I did, you need to have a total mastery of the book and then when each chapter ends you really need to consider rewriting/reorganizing each chapter around what your party wants to accomplish and how best to do that. All said and done, my campaign was about 40% as written and 60% homebrew.. I think my group spent 180 hours at the table and my Roll20 said I had about 500 hours of time spent on site. Some of that is just having the webpage up but I think I could fairly conclude that I averaged about 2 hours of prep for each hour of play. What that actually looked like was 40 hour planning sessions between each chapter and about 1-2 hours planning each individual session. Granted, I run a high production value game and rewrote/reorganized most of the book. It is feasible to run the campaign out of the book but as many others have said, it will still be a slog to manage. What I did was a part time job. I agree with the Dungeon Dudes, this is an Expert level book and a total Fixer Upper. One thing the Dudes said which caught my attention: "The players have to save Elturel to stop the refugee crisis." That is decidedly not really the plot of the adventure, but illustrates exactly the shortcoming of this book. As written, players throughout Chapter 1 almost never understood WHAT they are doing or WHY. For this reason alone I found myself needing to make significant rewrites and really straining to find ways to better tell the story. Its quite clear that the reason the party SHOULD be saving Elturel is because they fear that Baldur's Gate will be the next city to be claimed, (e.g. you are next!). But the book fails miserably to clearly impress this and it is why many party's don't make it very far in this adventure, they are just lost as hell and are working for the Flaming Fist "OR ELSE". At several points throughout Chapter 1, the plot is carried along by a number of arbitrary or illogical leaps that require a lot of work on behalf of the DM to get their party through it all in a sensible manner. But that's a lot of words to say simply this: Chapter 1 is the worst offender, the rest of the book gets way better if your players can stick it out. And that's a real shame, because Baldur's Gate is a legendary location in D&D and this adventure just does not do it justice. It really does feel like the Baldur's Gate section was ham-fisted in at the last minute when they found out that Larian would be making a Baldur's Gate 3 video game. My Recommendation: If you intend to run this adventure from the beginning at Baldur's Gate, be prepared to spend a lot of time considering how best to present the content, the agendas of the NPCs, and how to advance the plot in a way that is organic and makes sense so that the players have clear understandable motivations and achievable goals. Absolutely do not start the adventure with "you now work for the Flaming Fist, "OR ELSE". Or just skip the city entirely and have your players in Elturel when it descends and save yourself tons of headache and work. Having said all that, I learned so much about writing, game design, and DMing with this as my first book that literally any other module now looks like a cakewalk in comparison and absolutely makes me realize how far I have evolved as a DM. To the Player's out there: If your DM runs this and does a good job then you know that they are S class and you should never let them go. I should have charged, lol.
I tried really hard to run Descent into Avernus but my players hated it. They didnt care about anything happening in Baldur's Gate, they just wanted to get to Avernus. By the time they finally get to Avernus, they were just so bored that the campaign died.
Agreed, it really fits into the "Fixer Upper" category, but my god what can be forged out of this campaign is so epic in scope. Our finale had the player's hurtling through clashing armies of demons and devils below Elturel on their tricked out vehicles only to reach the top and face an angry Zariel flanked by Pit Fiends and Erinyes. One of them teleported into a pocket dimension where I had Zariel keep her copy of the all important Contract.
I tried to run that module, but scheduling killed the game. Currently in a game about it and actually enjoying how the DM is changing the beginning. I'm invested in how it evolves.
@@smashbrandiscootch719 I wonder if you just ran the campaign the way it is. Beucase I had to start all my PC's at Elturel first, so they could care for the city and the people in there. They had family members, friends, patrons. So now they want to find out how it happened and how they can bring it back.
I did exactly that. Ran dragon heist into dungeon of the mad mage as my first ever campaigns... It worked out pretty good. I will admit that my players were experienced, superb and very patient with me. I should add that they did all die at the end but we all had fun
My group and I are playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and we really enjoy it! It's my first time DM'ing, but I've been a player for many years. Very happy to have this RP-heavy adventure!
This series was so well done! I appreciate that you didn’t attempt to rank them against each other, as that’s not productive when they’re all so different, but gave objective analysis of who the target DM/group is for each.
Please do a series on your favorite 3rd party adventure modules and/or one-shots! especially for a novice DM. Love this video series. ive DM'd very little and i hope to run a full adventure, so i've been looking for Novice/Beginner level adventures to consider.
Absolutely agree about the WDH assessment. I would say, though you are definitely better if you are higher experienced as a DM. I used it as an Eberron adventure set in Sharn and used the Alexandrian conversion, which made it more of a heist and fun.
I completely altered it myself. In my version Xanathar's and Manshoon's gangs were at war and Jarlaxle was pulling the strings behind the scenes. My players (with help from NPC's) took down Manshoon, killed Xanathar and never knowingly met Jarlaxle.
As DM I made Dragon of Icespire peak my starting point for Dm'ing, we ran the core story 1-6 as a One on One and honestly one of the best D&D experiences I have ever had. was able to get though what would take a 4 player party a full 4-5hr session in under 2, scheduling was almost a nonfactor and way more freedom to let a player really feel like a hero since the spotlight isn't shared.
@Video Unavailable Films it's a good structure for throwing your own encounters and storyline onto because you can just put your own encounters up on the mission board and the main plot isnt so heavy that you dont need to worry changing any of it out or adding your own flair will create gaping plotholes.
I run Dragon Hiest with a limited number of sessions with a single villian and it worked very well. If you need a short campaign between larger ones the single villian approach is great.
As a player going through Avernus felt like getting the Biggoron Sword in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Go here, get a thing, that you need to get another thing, that you need to get another thing.... The setting was cool and there were some great moments sprinkled throughout, but only the flimsiest connections taking us from point A to point B.
My DM used the end part of Decent into Avernus when we went to hell to retrieve a soul that our Rogue had sent there when we were meant to collect it for our Warlock who has a contract with the Raven Queen... it was so much fun to fight demons and devils as part of essentially a side quest that our Rogue forced us into
DoIP goes from 1 - 7, with the Beyond Icespire Peak "trilogy" ending at 13th but they're really one three part adventure. Super easy to run LMoP simultaneously totally RAW but can be very fun to twist it a bit. My fav is to kill the townmaster and have a Black Spider doppel take his place "hiding from the dragon" while giving the party quests far the f away from the Black Spider. The only quest you get from Harbin in LMoP is Wyvern Tor iirc, miles away and unrelated to anything Black Spider. When LMoP is done and doppel out of a job he just leaves and can run an election in the town with someone like Sildar taking over writing jobs for the board.
Right now I'm running Candlekeep Mysteries for two diffrent groups at the same time. One group definitely loves it most for the episodic nature of the story, they recently said that it's similarly satisfying to their brains as watching TikTok videos: they are easily digestible chunks of self-contained stories that give them a nice opportunity to relax in the breaks of our long-form campaign. The other group is more invested in making this a long-format campaign as well and tying up the loose ends between adventures. For both groups, we are going with the same team to every adventure, and sometimes the explanation of why they go there is a little convoluted, but overall it works fine imo. I usually pick one character to claim a certain adventure as their own, and I tie the motivations to their backstories. Also, we just really enjoy the giant library as a setting as the bunch of bibliophile nerds we are. I'm planning on bookending the story after Chapter 17 with a homebrew chapter that focuses on Candlekeep itself and the lore of the library. (Although I have to acknowledge that I do not exclusively work from the book, I let them choose 2 adventures for each level from my growing collection of one-shots. But, for the majority of the time so far, they chose the Candlekeep Mysteries chapter as one of them.)
Over the years, I've Dmed or played in most of the official published adventures. Oftentimes, I find that they can be splitted in two without it affecting the plot in any way. It is as if the beginning and the end are note related at all. Some examples: - Out of the Abyss could end when the PC get out of the Underdark or begin when they are summoned to Gauntlgrym - In Avernus you could begin the adventure when the character arrive in Elturiel without them missing any informations or have they begin as usual but never send them to Hell and have them deal with local politics and factions. - Against the Giant first 5 lvl are badly written and can be completely skipped, making them useless to the plot. I understand it is not easy to create an adventure, but it would be great to have one published adventure going from Lvl 1 to 20 with a good story that holds up for the whole book. Sure, Mad Mage technically goes up to lvl 20, but it is more a dungeon crawl than anything else.
(Contains spoilers for The Lost Mine of Phandelver and Out of The Abyss) I completely agree. I know that a lot of players are not very interested in high-level campaigns, but I just can't help but feel that we miss out on those awesome high level features and spells if we never have a campaign that actually goes lvl 1-20. Right now, I'm working on rewriting Out of The Abyss so that I can run from lvl 5 to 20 and make it a continuation for The Lost Mine of Phandelver for my group. (The main villain of LMOP is a drow, so it makes a lot of sense for me to tie theese together... plus, they are really excited about the Underdark I think that the original ending of the campaign is a little bit lackluster, if my players invested this much time into this adventure, they deserve to have epic boss fights with full-health demon lords in the end.
Our DM ran our group through "Rime of The Frostmailing" prior to IDROTFM, mostly because the full module hadn't been released at the time he started the campaign. (He actually got the very last copy of the deluxe edition!) As a result, we spent a long time at level 4... but the tradeoff was that our characters already knew each other from our prior courier jobs.
I did your "lego" analogy for "Waterdeep Dragon Heist" and sent my players through the whole thing. It was very good, an amazingly well prepared scenario. Good video, thanks.
Dragon of icespire peaks is one of my favorites. And there are 3 additional adventures on DnD beyond that adds to it. Three Awesome adventures, by the way..
@@nomad2659 let me check real quick. -grabs laptop and jumps on DnDBeyond- ummmm.. Storm Lord’s Wrath, Sleeping Dragon’s Wake, and Divine contention. Storm lord’s wrath starts for a party of 7th level. Sleeping dragon’s wake is for a party of 9th-10th level. Divine Contention is for a party of 11th-12th level. Reaching level 13 by the end of the 3 adventures. It’s designed for up to 6 players. But can be played by a single player, using the sidekick rules.
@@nomad2659 My players have just wrapped up some home brew stuff after DoIP and will be getting back onto Storm Lord’s Wrath next. The series looks like it plays out in a really fun way, lots of action and a couple evil cults to take down
As the party face in a Mad Mage campaign, I can assure you that you can definitely get your mileage out of being infiltrator/political types that make allegiances with factions in the dungeon, and in fact the fifth floor by itself practically makes this approach mandatory. By level 5, even a diplomatic party should be competent enough combatants to survive random encounters, but you can definitely talk your way through certain encounters as well to gather allies and informants that can give you more info on the dungeon and what if any changes have occurred. That said, it's definitely DM-intensive to keep track of everyone that the party has come across and kept alive, on top of the various NPC schedules, questlines, and factions. Not even mentioning the hallways that exist solely for a DM to slot in their own encounters, as well as the many shortcuts throughout the dungeon that can completely make or break a session's planning because the players decided to skip THREE WHOLE FLOORS instead of taking the stairs like normal people. Floors repopulate at the whims of Halaster, and sometimes you get desperate players like me that will ally the party with the Drow to save their skin and accidentally threaten the entire module. Relatively basic floors are occupied by organizations and creatures that are way above the party's weight class, which can really snowball if the DM decides to act on these groups organizing to confront the party.
I do feel like most people open the book up, see the massive dungeons and go "Yup this is a big dumb megadungeon" without properly reading the module. Having read most of it I agree it can get seriously political and roleplay heavy.
Getting ready to run The Wild Beyond the Witchlight myself, so good to know that I'll to read the book cover to cover before we start instead of jumping into it.
I'm running it right now and I absolutely love it, but yes. If I hadn't read it cover to cover, I think I would end up accidentally breaking later plot points on accident without the full picture to fall back on.
The dudes mentioned it in their review but reading this is rough. I mean, really, read the last chapter first. I wish they’d done a better synopsis at the start of the book so I could at least be aware of key plot points without having to jump to the end. For real, I read the first few chapters, thought I’d missed something, read it again, still missed something, finally found it at the end. Maybe it’s a good adventure but I was so pissed at that point that it went on my shelf and hasn’t come back since.
While I completely agree that you should read an adventure module cover to cover, just to get the lay of the land and to know what's expected of me, I think designing the adventure modules that way is not user friendly for a DM. You should be able to open the cover, get an idea of the plot, major characters, the twists and turns and the big set pieces without having to read 400 pages and making bookmarks all over the joint. Curse of Strahd was really bad for this: things should be easily summarised, you should give overviews at the start of the chapters as to what is going to happen, who is involved, etc, you could use flowcharts to indicate ideal paths through the module and information shouldn't be spread across a giant book the way WOTC still do. Winter's Daughter from the OSR/OSE is an amazingly laid out adventure simply because it knows what DMs need to see - these books are for DMs, not players. Like why would you put plot twists at the end or in the middle of text - this isn't a book, it's an instruction manual, I should know this at the start so it informs my reading.
Dungeon of the Mad Mage provided rules for Spelljammer Helms - what you need to bring Spelljamming in a basic sense to your game. For that alone this is a tremendous book. Plus, Halaster's actual flying saucer!
Dragon of Icespire Peak was my first adventure as a DM and my players first adventure. It went great and I even expanded it up to 10th level by using the Orcs and a little bit of homebrew. It was perfect and I only hope that other adventures I run go as smoothly.
I recently started DMing with a brand with my friend group. None of us played DND before. I just chose the first campaign I saw, which was Dungeon of The Mad Mage. It is so fun, but so much work. Really worth it so far, we just reached level 2!
I ran Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus with my two regular RPG players and had a blast! It was a big campaign - spread over two years of playtime for the main content. I didn't realize how much work this required but for me as the DM I approached the module differently - Instead of creating big storylines around the NPCs I built ties to the Player Characters. What I found really helped was having a player that really leaned into the "Saving the helpless" concept, so his Character was eager to pick up on story threads and dive into fights. My other player was relatively new to playing in a big campaign and designed a flexible druid that wanted to explore the city and experience a journey where everything is new. I introduced a DM-run character which provided interesting role-playing experiences for the players to build a "we're in this together" vibe. Knowing what the players wanted (Save-the-day combat and exploration of the locations) really helped deliver the adventure. I was very lenient on character design rules, let each of the characters gain items and ability well past normal means. I let the characters help direct me (as the DM) in what they wanted to do. When I found gaps in the story, I introduced simple D&D trope scenarios such as "Save the civilians being beaten" and "Rescue your fallen comrade" to drive up the stakes in the adventure while keeping it interesting. Having the DM-character that died more than once, transformed race more than once during this story (*directly caused by the players events) really cemented to my players a big adventuring hook and opportunity for them to explore as a team and keep each other alive. That quickly also reflected back on the NPCs as the party sometimes decide to take alternative paths rather than "kill every bad guy we find." As a DM I occasionally dropped hints to foreshadow NPCs they may meet in the future so they could each build their own opinion of them - which made the NPCs come to life. It was a lot of reading and a lot of work to put together. I did the work as I went for the most-part, not all in one shot before-hand. Some custom rules and scenes took hours of work each. Having a lot of improv skills really can help the early and middle game story when the majority of events are not directly tied together in a follow-the-ball story for the party. In this story I let the characters explore and complete a few challenges along the way, granting them funds that they could spend building equipment they thought they would need for the fights ahead. Roleplaying out the "shopping" scenarios really added to Baldur's Gate being a living city. We still play the adventure with those characters after the events of the story from time to time. I prepared a "afterwards" scenario that allows the players to co-build what happens next. They have revisited past NPCs, righting past wrongs. They tracked down other evil elements and put them to rest. The party have ownership of things that are important to them. The now powerful Characters can make substantial change and are ready for a bigger, realm-sized challenge. Those characters have become our most memorable ones - even for myself as the DM.
I am DMing Wild Beyond the Witchlight right now (DDAL). When it was first introduced by D&D, their selling point was "hey, maybe you DON'T want combat!", and that was a big turn off to me. A whole hardcover with no combat? No thank you. But it looked like my game store that I play at was going to be running it, so I tried to withhold contempt prior to investigation. Then, I played the "Lost Things" adventure during the D&D Celebration weekend and...I had fun. Then I ran "Lost Things" adventure at the game store and...I had fun. Now I'm running Witchlight for the past couple months and I can say that it's a really good hardcover adventure. (A little light on magic items) So many nods to pop culture and lil' easter eggs. And there is PLENTY of combat, or, as much as you want. Most of the combat can be done without battle maps. One thing I like as a DM is that there is boxed text for almost every room or area. This is great for me because describing a scene is not my strong suit. And there are no plot holes (almost)! Everything in the story is connected and there's a good flow to it. Very well done.
My group is running through Descent into Avernus right now and our DM had a more interesting hook to start off the whole adventure. Namely; we started off in Elturel being hired by the Order of the Gauntlet to investigate some cult activity (our introduction to the Dead Three and one agent of Zariel's cult) and on our way back to town we saw the disaster unfold in Elturel first hand.
I actually know that story. One of the problems with the main story is that the characters have no real reason to rescue Elturel, so why would risk their necks for it in the first place? By running at module, It gives you a tangible connection to Elturel and invests you in its fate more.
My players have been working through DiA lately. They started with WDH, and at the end, I gave them a plot hook through one of their faction contacts that would get them to Baldur's Gate. We played the trek as the Road To Avernus collection of adventures that were published on D&D Beyond a while back, and I had them witness the disaster in Elturel along the way, allowing them to skip most of the spaghetti intrigue of the first chapter of DiA, arriving in Hell as a level 6 party. I felt it was a MUCH more smooth setup than what was presented in the book.
The intro into DiA sucks. Plain and simple. As I first read thru it I kept asking myself "Why would any of the player characters care about any of this?" I ended up using the Adventurers League DiA modules and blending them into the beginning of the adventure until leaving Baldur's Gate for Candlekeep where I went into using just the DiA adventure.
When my group and I played Descent into Avernus, we accidentally broke Zariel's sword, so our DM pulled out his old AD&D books and sent us off to Mount Celestia to fix the sword. It was off the beaten path, and it was kinda fun.
@@ddrew1973 We didn't have a Cleric or Paladin, so our Divine Soul Sorcerer was the one who attuned to it. Said sorcerer than proceeded to try to use it for something only Zariel, a Paladin, or a Cleric could do (As written in the module) so our DM decided it would break in that instance.
Descent into Avernus luckily has an Alexandrian edition written where a lot of the issues are remedied. With this tool, I’d knock the difficulty run to intermediate, with the main issue being that you have to read the module and then the big ass revision doc. I’ve been reading it to run my own campaign of it and like a lot of the suggestions. He even adds in free maps with his revised changes to the dungeons you can access. He also offers several alternatives if you don’t like his take on one area. Also, it is HIGHLY recommended that you run the One-Shot, the Fall of Elturel beforehand. It’s also free and downloaded with the maps used.
The Alexandrian remix is fantastic for more campaign ideas. The big downside, besides the length, is that, much like the module itself, DMs will need to pick parts of the remix to fit the campaign, as simple fixes to the module are sometimes buried beneath several layers of overcomplication. Another great resource is Aventir games Avernus As A Sandbox three part fix article for Chapter 3. It is generally more straightforward conceptually than the remix in the way it fixes the railroading. The main downside is that sandboxes can be tricky to prepare for with new DMs.
As a beginner DM, the Alexandrian Remix for Waterdeep has made it much more fun and easier to plan out sessions. Takes all the best parts of the module and fleshes them out for the players while also drastically improving the story.
I have been running dragon heist for about a year and a half, my characters are now level 15. It has been a lot of work, but the adventure is awesome! The analogy of Lego blocks is dead on. With Mad Mage as an additional source book, you really can make the campaign sing
That caveat about Witchlight is so on point. I'm midway through running it, and just knowing what happens at the end has changed the kind of things I emphasize in the sub realms.
I decided to run Descent into Avernus a little different. I had an old unfinished campaign. So on a whim one night when we had some player not show up, I had two of the players find their characters waking up at level 10 to find another one of their old party making a deal with Asmodeus himself for their lives. The woke up naked, scared and with only the sparse equipment of their companion. The next three months were their quest to escape hell, save Elturel, and return to their original quest in Faerun and and save the world. It was freaking epic having them fighting scrounging to survive with no clothes, no food, no weapons and only their wits. Fantastic!!!! I think Avernus is a great playground for a DM wanting to incorporate hell into an ongoing campaign.
Candlekeep is a really good secondary adventure. We did it as a group of forever DMs and it was great to stretch our player legs while giving great inspiration for our other games. Not too intense workload and the type of thing you can step away for for a few months and jump back in easily.
Thank you Dudes! My last completed campaign was Curse of Strahd. 2 of my players moved away afterwards. So I used the breaking down of Barovia’s barriers to cause a huge flux in the time continuum. While my remaining players are starting in Waterdeep, characters from previous campaigns (from back in our AD&D 2nd edition days!) are going to join the battle!
When i stared DMing i used the Essentials and lost mine together. I just moved the mine into the mountain and had it fall to the dragon instead. Moved some clues around and added some different enemies. Made for a fun 1 to about 7 campaign that was as straight or open as my players wanted.
Since I tend to overbuy books, I found a way in-game to float all of the campaign hooks that were available to my group at level one. I let them know we'd be running LMoP first, then moving on to another longer adventure. They voted overwhelmingly to head to Waterdeep to investigate the guild war, so I'll be running them through Dragon Heist at like level 4 or 5 and bumping all of the encounters. Thanks for sharing the tools for DH! I def want to tie in more of the villains and their lairs since my party will be higher level. I might nerf the Cassalanters a bit and write them to be initial protagonists while the conflict with the more powerful foes simmers, we'll see. I'm just hoping everyone will rise to the occasion when it comes time for roleplay and the intrigue!
Dudes, I really would like to commend you for the approach you chose to review these modules. This is super useful, especially your keen eye for the tone and inspiration for each of the adventures, that is exactly what I want to know before running an adventure, and your comments are spot on. For example, I own the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure and I really like it, but it is true that it leans more "Misty coastal mystery with Lovecraft vibes' than 'Pirates of the Caribbean', and lacks opportunities for naval combat. I really appreciated your advice on how to use the material in the books and what to look out for. This series is one of your best made videos since I follow the channel!
Started a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign but had to stop when 2 players moved. I've purchased 11 of the 14 adventures. Currently using Tales and a couple other modules to craft a campaign from. I'll probably add at least one Candlekeep adventure to mix up the dungeon crawls and wilderness adventures we've been through. Great video.
Recently discovered the very title "ghosts of saltmarsh" is very likely a Lovecraft quote in the first place, so it makes a sort of sense that's more the tone they went with
Guessing this was written/recorded before Strixhaven dropped. Either way, another fantastic video you guys. I'd really be curious to see a similar treatment for some of the adventures from DM's Guild. See what stands out to you guys and what you'd be excited to talk about. I'm also curious, regarding your difficulty/workload assessments where you feel your own Dungeons of Drakkenheim book would fall (beginner to experienced player groups, perhaps versus what you originally intended).
Rime was the first campaign I played and the first campaign I DM'd. I will say the nice thing about the opening chapters of the module is that if you're running it for new players the adventures in ten towns are easily railroaded together until your players are more experienced and less squishy. This makes them more confident to continue exploring in ten towns before leaving. Spending a lot of time in ten towns and building the players reputation makes the consequences of those later chapters more real since by this point the players are very emotionally invested in the ten towns.
I've been running Mad Mage for about a year and a half, second adventure I've ever run after Lost Mines, and honestly while I have a lot of gripes about its structure I think overall it's improved me as a DM by a lot. It's great if you want something you can use as a skeleton of a campaign, but that is easy to modify and twist into whatever you want. When I was first reading through some of the levels, I was confused and frustrated about what exactly the point of the level was supposed to be. I was so used to Lost Mines giving me step by step instructions explaining exactly how everything was supposed to work, and the idea of adding or changing things honestly didn't even occur to me. Now when I look at those levels I see countless opportunities, I can run them however I want. But yeah, if you're looking for a book that just says "do this" and you don't want a campaign you have to put work into, Mad Mage is one to avoid. Personally it's made me way more comfortable with the idea of creating my own adventures, while taking a lot of work away for making maps, deciding what to populate those maps with, etc.
It's always a treat when I find a DD video I missed seeing the first time around. I did run WBTW and I will say it was pretty easy to run and roleplay, but the final scenario was more frustrating with how much filler the castle contains.
I did Dragon of Ice Spire as a first time DM and loved it. I grabbed some tips from Matt Colville on overlanding and it made even that a lot of fun. It was very easy to run...but I also had a great group of veteran players who also DM.
yay - thank you for guiding through all of these adventure modules! i especially like how you assessed the workload amount of input, investment, and modifications by a DM . sure, you could manage a module as written, but you could do so much more if you add your own ideas. even more fun = you can develop opportunities that interface with the PCs
I’m running Icewind Dale: RotFM now, and to deal with the issue of the parts of the book not cleanly fitting together, I inserted a different overarching plot line which tied things together. The party came to the Dale pursuing a completely different antagonist, who is searching for the Crystal Shard (from the Salvatore novels) and they are trying to beat the villain to it. Half the party started out in Revel’s End, the Lord’s Alliance prison (which otherwise goes underutilized in the book), framed by the antagonist for his own crimes, but they are in possession of a clue which is needed to learn more about the Crystal Shard. The other half of the party comes to the prison in hopes of getting them out (either through offical channels or though assisting with a prison break) in hopes of gaining this information, due to their own grievances with the villain. (Minor Spoilers: you can also have Sephek Kaltro and other potential villains, including Vaelish Gant, escape at the same time the party do, if they stage a breakout, to give the party some history with those characters). Once they are out of the prison, they have reason to head to Ten Towns to avoid needlessly camping in the harsh wastes (Spoilers: so you can run the Black Cabin - an interesting set piece and good intro to the themes of the adventure), then Lonelywood (which is one of the more interesting starting towns imo), and finally to whichever interesting adventure location you gave them hooks to checkout for their main quest. You can have them encounter the problems of the Ten Towns along the way, gradually learning about the everlasting winter, the sacrifices, etc., as they are passing through on their own quest. This will let players drink in the setting while still feeling like they have clear direction (and tying the Crystal Shard more directly into the story gives you even more to work with for worldbuilding, with surprisingly little additional effort needed). It could be a very linear adventure if that’s what your players want, but they’ll have plenty of opportunities to organically branch off on side quests as they come to sympathize with the plights of the Ten Towners. (Spoilers: For those of you who have read the book, I put Dzaan’s shield guardian amulet on the summit of Kelvin’s Cairn, and had at least one party member know its location. The amulet can lead the party to Karkolohk following the signal of the broken guardian, then the reactivated guardian leads the party to Dzaan just as he’s being burned at the stake in Easthaven, and ultimately to the sunken Netherese Spire, where they will learn more about the Crystal Shard, that its pieces are scattered around the Dale, that someone (the Duergar) is gathering pieces of it. This gives the party reason to try to track down large concentrations of the Shard’s pieces around the Dale (which can make things more non-linear for a time as they have reason to explore more of the Dale), before they are ultimately led back to Easthaven and then Sunblight. After the dragon encounter, which you can hint was playing into the villain’s plans to weaken Ten Towns, either the villain themselves or the Arcane Brotherhood can drop hints that the Crystal Shard may lie in the buried netherese city, along with a way to fix the winter issue, so these both become intertwined. They’ll have reason to stop Auril but also the Arcane Brotherhood members and the villain.) I let the players decide as they went who exactly the villain was, what past history they had with him, how they came to know the secrets they did, etc. All I had to do was use their feedback to create the villain (and really, it could just be a character already in the book if you want, like one of the Arcane Brotherhood members), and figure out what the villain’s goals and gameplan were. (Spoilers: in my game, the villain was a death knight already being manipulated by the Crystal Shard to help it reach Ythryn so it could increase its own power by absorbing/merging with the magical artifacts hidden there. The Shard wants the party to pass Auril’s trials and open the glacier for them to reach Ythryn, while letting the Duergar and winter weaken Ten Towns in the meantime so they can easily use the power hidden underground - by returning the city to the air, for starters - to conquer what’s left and turn the survivors into an undead or chardalyn slave army for further conquest, or to defend the city as the Shard finds a way to use the city's artifacts to go back in time and achieve pre-spell-plague levels of magical power so that it can attempt to ascend to godhood. It might also take the floating city over the ocean, use its weather control systems to create a storm or fog around itself for miles to remain hidden, transitioning into a sea-faring campaign.) Move 1 item, tied into the characters’ hooks, to a different location, and drop a few extra rumors here or there, and you're pretty well set. Overall, this approach I think will help me get the most out of the module for minimal effort, and I’m excited about it.
I just got into 5e a few years ago and Ghosts of Saltmarsh was the first campaign I ran. I liked how there was just enough structure to hold it together, but enough room for me to expand as much as I want. It's a coastal sandbox and I think my players had a lot of fun. There is plenty in the book to keep running after the last chapter to epic levels or to add side quests or even plop locations, quests and characters from Saltmarsh into other games. My players are veterans from the 70s and they said I did a good job DMing! Never one to do things easy, I just settled on running Dungeon of the Mad Mage next. I see the expert level planning just to keep everything cohesive and flowing, but if you plan ahead several levels you should be okay running straight from the book! We've been playing online with Roll20 and there are great maps for the first four levels, but unfortunately it seems nobody has gone beyond that. I'll likely have to either make my own with Inkarnate or just use the black and white maps provided in the book. Kind of a bummer because I love a good visual aesthetic with maps and tokens when playing online.
im planning a descent into avernus game for a group of friends and found the challenge of fixing this game up to be fairly challenging. as mentioned, the beginning questline seems extremely linear and railroad-y and the idea that the dm is threatning the players to join a mercenary group with death seems so limiting. however, i do plan to incorporate elements of candlekeep mysteries into the campaign when the players get to that point. so while it is a lot of work, im excited to get it started!
Would be interested to hear their thoughts on Mythic Odyssey of theros, I know its not really got a campaign just a bit of a starter thing but the deitys and bonus's u get from them has always intrigued me. Of course this is from someone whos first 5e campaign was ToA with a first time dungeon master so u know dont always do what they suggest 😅
In descent into avernus the group briefly goes to candlekeep to have an artifact inspected. Perfect time to use an adventure from candlekeep mysteries before the librarians unlock the puzzle box and the players then continue to avernus.
I dont do a lot of modules, but I did do the ghost of saltmarsh for 5e. I had a lot of fun as a DM tinkering with the various aspect and links to the story and incorporating the location to one of my worlds
Currently doing a big seafaring/pirate campaign. Was easier to take bits of inspiration from Ghosts of Salt Marsh than actually trying to change it 🤷♂️
I'm also running a seafaring campaign and I started using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as adventures when they needed to go into town and it seems to work pretty well for that.
Dragon Heist: Forgotten Tales on the Dm's Guild builds up Jarlaxle and the Cassalnter's instead of Xanathar and the Zhents. I really enjoyed it and you could very much use the two parts to mix and match any combinations. And if you want to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage afterwards, grab the Adventure League stuff. It adds plot threads and intrigue that can follow from Chapter 2 on Dragon Heist deep into Skull Port.
I would like you to do more content like this but about unofficial campaigns, considering you guys have participated in that space I think it would be cool to know which other works you enjoy that aren't published the WotC team, plus I feel that since your content primarily centers on official material up until now (And it's great content) it would be a great way to introduce people that aren't as familiar with the homebrew scene to some of the absolutely fantastic stuff that is out there.
A *lot* of the Candlekeep adventures/books have threads linking to stories and/or NPCs outside the story that can easily be repurposed to fit into another campaign (homebrew or official). That's always handy to have on hand.
I love that you talk about level of DM prep. I think there is a prevailing opinion in DnD circles that modules are easier to run than homebrew campaigns. I think that this is only sometimes true, different DMs prepare differently. For me the one module I've ever run was loads more work than my multiple homebrew games, probably going to try running one at some point, probably Strahd because it's a stone cold classic. And taking a module and assuming you can run it by skimming the book for 5 mins before the game session is a recipe for a shit time.
I ran both Waterdeep campaigns back to back and it worked well. By the time they were done with the heavy roleplay and intrigue of the Heist, they loved going down with now second-tier characters and just kicking butt. I will admit I have to do a lot of modifications to the interaction to keep it from just being a murder fest but it works and is fun. I also appreciate it is set up to take a campaign all the way to level 20, which we haven't done yet.
I have used Candlekeep Mysteries in my home games. I have a current game set in Wildemount region and the various libraries of the Cobalt Soul align themselves very well to using these type of one-shot type of adventures where the players who either work for the Cobalt Soul or just need some information need to do a favor or something like that.
Hi again! I am currently playing Saltmarsh and Rime of the Frostmaiden, and then I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight (yep, I'm pretty busy, D&D-wise right now!). The former two campaigns are the reasons I cannot watch Drakkenheim on Tuesdays anymore. Anyway, Saltmarsh does a great job of instilling that seaside flavor, and either nautical or swamp challenges. Definitely agree that there's little to no nautical combat, as you'd expect from a pirate-y theme. Almost all the action is based on land/swamp/underground, and water is just the avenue that links encounter locations. But it's so flavor-filled. Again, I played the frist couple of original modules (products of the UK) back in my AD&D days. Rime of the Frostmaiden is also very flavor-filled, but in the arctic-wilderness kind of way. Both Saltmarsh and RotFM need a strong DM to tie things together and spur on the players, but both provide excellent ways for the DM to sink their teeth into creating a mood. I LOVE Wild Beyond the Witchlight as a DM, since it affords the opportunity to do a ton of roleplaying (I think it was Jeremy Crawford who called it a "roleplay sandbox"), and motivating your players to solve challenges without combat. In other words, it is the best adventure path to get the plaeyrs to be creative, to dive into the world, and to use their brains/investigative and interactive skills and not their weapons. I did have to warn this particular group of players about that dynamic, as they tend to just kill kill kill. But it's proven to be such a multi-dimensional campaign...the richest experience yet that I've either ran or played. I kind of disagree a bit with a comment by Kelly (which I think Monty tried to reel back a bit) in that this could be a good campaign for beginner or low-experience DMs. I think the opposite, since this requires someone to step away from the mechanics and focus on building an experience through roleplay, NPC interaction, and such (which I think is a bit more advanced for DMing). But the structure is well defined, so in that way most DMs can run it fairly easily.
I decided to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage as my first campaign as a DM and you are 100% correct, it is VERY difficult to run. That being said, my players are about halfway through level 2 and we are loving it. I love the challenge and my players are loving the fast paced action that can come from it
I am running a group of players through the Candlekeep Mysteries as a campaign unto itself. It's my first time DM'ing, and the episodic idea really appealed to me as a first foray into DM'ing. However, the dynamics between the player characters almost instantly made it a case where tying it all together was something that needed to happen. So I applied the Group Patron rules from Tasha's and have cast the party as one of several adventurer groups hired by the library to look into unusual acquisitions. So yes, I agree that is is fairly easy for a DM to pick up and run as an episodic thing, but you can convert it to a campaign style setting with just a little bit of thought and work.
For the "fixer-upper" adventures, it's also worth checking out Sean McGovern's guides at Power Score RPG. He has some in-depth guides that point out rough spots in the adventures and suggest fixes for them.
I'm a brand new dm and really havnt played 5e ive had the rulebooks and the starter kit but i just got the essentials not long ago I'm planning on running that module your video has made me more confident in running it as my first campaign
I'm a new DM running DoIP and I feel there are 2 ways to go with it. You can run it as written but be prepared for players going off script. However, the book does not even offer the flavour text for each noticeboard quest, which I think is major oversight for a beginner DM sandbox style module. The other way to run it is to incorporate your own story to link the quests together. This is the way I have chosen to run it and so far it has kept the party on track and built up a little bit of anticipation for both the final Orc and Dragon encounter, here's hoping it will all come to a satisfying conclusion.
Descent Into Avernus is the module I'm running as my first full campaign, and I'm going to be honest, yeah. You're right. It's been enormously rewarding to be able to homebrew in more encounters, flesh out a great setting into an actual story, and finally make it into Hell, but... were I not the type to put my own spins and tweaks on things already, as a new DM, I'd be struggling much harder. The Reddit BG:DIA community is a wonderful resource of things people have added, tried, and reported back on, though, and that alongside my party being a bunch of creative roleplayers has been my saving grace. Is it a fun, amazing source book for Baldur's Gate and Avernus? Yes. But definitely don't plan to play it as written.
As someone who is currently running Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a full campaign up to lvl 13, I agree that is a huge workload. There are a lot of gaps in terms of story and just in terms of character levels, so I had to fill in with alot of side adventures from DMs Guild and my own homebrew. I've probably written at least 20,000 words to get this up to my standards. having said that alot of the adventures are great in theme and present a good variety of challenge types. Get your players to make characters invested in Saltmarsh (mine now own and renovated the mystery mansion in the first chapter) and it'll be easier to hook them into the next quest. The biggest flaws ive noticed is the ship combat (not required for the adventures at all) and a general perception of where the quests take place. Everything seems to be "just off the coastline"
I think these are really good synopsis about the game, and is really informative about how hard the game is to run, prepare, and difficulty for the players. Outside of that though I would like to know what people recommend, if I am to start by recommending I would say curse of strahd hands down. I have run it twice and its always been the most fun module I have ran and has had some of the best roleplaying moments amongst anyone I have played with, this is said even though players lost the campaign both times because they split the party and got picked off one by one, and is still their favorite game.
I like to take sections of the compilation books and incorporate them into other campaigns. We had a lot of fun exploring the hidden shrine of Tamoachan in Chult while exploring Tomb of annihilation. I just reflavored as the temple of light and the creatures in there were prisoners from before the spellplague that had been forgotten to time.
Currently running The Wild Beyond the Witch Light and my players love it. The fey adventure is quite different than anything else I've run before. Highly recommend giving it a read.
Im currently running Wild Beyond the Witchlight but ive fine tuned it for my homebrewed campaign. The players had to goto the feywild because one of them was cursed by a hag and one of the hourglass coven hags could remove it, which they succeeded by diplomacy and trade, but also the hag tricked them and nearly killed the PC when the curse was removed. Then I had the various NPCs plot hook the main story and they just got to Yon. The end of the story will weave my BBEG who wanted the Fairy Queen out of the picture and used the Hourglass Coven and the evil adventuring group as pawns.
I'm doing the wrapup sessions for dragon heist with my party. I modified some of the backstory to make things more morally grey, and I made Manshoon and Vajra's backstory more intertwined. I actually changed a bit of the backstory. I've had a blast with this so far.
I am that first time DM running Rime with a bunch of first time players. It's certainly a ride so far with a lot of room to homebrew a lot of connective tissue. Of the reviews I've read / watched you Dudes are more fair? on Rime. Several posts seem to say it's awful for a first time DM, but I'm surviving, and learning :D Appreciate all your videos - they've been great resources over the last year!
I can't wait to take the concept of Candlekeep Mysteries to a Magnus Archives-inspired campaign, with players getting sucked into the statements! Also I recently got ToA, will be running it for my school D&D Club. It looks really fun!
Imagine running Dragon Heist with two separate groups who don't know about each other and bringing them together for a surprise finale.
Imagine having 2 parties of players that had consistent schedules that they would arrive at the finale at the same time and then scheduling both groups where at least one of them would be meeting on a day other than the normal meet up day and no one canceling last minute. “Not everyone can meet this week” everyone in the group “yes we can?” “Anyway we need to reschedule 😂” would be cool if it pans out though
@@musicguy8912 have the finale during a convention where both groups need to go through the adventure to reach the starting point for the convention session
Our current group actually started with a similar concept but in tomb. 3 dms, starting on slightly different places and if we run into each other, we fight. But if course it fell apart and now only our group stayed in it.
That's what I'm doing right now. I have a party who's running Dragon Heist as written and another party who's doing other things in the shadows. They are both followin their ideas and ideals. They are going to meet at the end of our homebrew plot after the conclusion of Dragon Heist. That's going to be the real epilogue for me as a Dm, even if the survivors will have to face one final fight after that. I honestly don't know which ideal is going to win and what will happen hahah
I always found the idea of running Candlekeep Mysteries with the players playing as novice scholars in training to be pretty cute. Probably couldn't extend that "campaign" beyond the book but it'd be a quaint framing device for a "mystery of the week" type series of adventures. Hell, maybe it could even be combined with Strixhaven somehow.
My group is playing a variation on that. We all came to Candlekeep in search of some sort of knowledge (different for each character) and we all have to work for the library doing special missions (the adventures). We are rotating who is DM for each adventure and are now on number 6. While it doesn't have an over arching story built in, it has really highlighted the downtime activities between adventures for us to create our own big story arcs. Everyone is pursing their own research projects. We are having a ton of fun. I also have the Strixhaven book and could definitely see the two combined, but I think it would be better to use the Candlekeep adventures as side quests in the Strixhaven "main quest".
Combined with Strixhaven, that'd make for a hell of a practical history class😂
Yep, definitely combine Strixhaven with Candlekeep Mysteries. You could frame it so that characters are trying to earn their scholarship into Strixhaven while studying in Candlekeep.
my group actually played it a bit meta, we were bunch of young wizards using a special kind of dream spell to play a game called castles and casters where we can pretend to be different kinds of adventurers from the books we've read.
My idea for a full Candlekeep campaign would be that the PCs are contractors that Candlekeep itself employs to deal with the sorts of problems that pop up from having that many magical books around. ("One of our scholars has gone missing" "People keep getting attacked by books" "This book has a ghost in it that keeps annoying people") Stylized with a mix of SCP Foundation/Men in Black (Candlekeep intentionally sequesters huge amounts of dangerous stuff) and crushingly soulless bureaucracy.
From what I understand of Strixhaven, it should be pretty easy to slip one or two Candlekeep scenarios into a semester, whether as school assignments or extracurricular projects. Especially the lower-level ones (the high-level Candlekeeps tend to be less true mysteries and more "find this person and kill them").
I've been a DM for almost 30 years. I'm not some prodigy but I am experienced. I still love running the two Phandalin adventures. Their structure is quite brilliant, in that they are simple enough for a new DM to run out of the box, and in that their simplicity offers lots of "white space" for experienced DMs to fill with their own flavor. The real genius is that, somehow, the "white space" makes room for the old DM without making "plot holes" that might trip up the new DM.
Running my personal Ghosts of Saltmarsh game for the past year now, I keep thinking "have I gone too far with new stuff trying to tie it all together?" and the way you guys described it really validated my experience with the adventure as a DM. I added in an ancient kraken as the BBEG, and he cursed the players with an eldritch curse where he comes to claim their body (and the surrounding settlement if they are in town), when they die. I turned the Scarlet Brotherhood into a secretive cult trying to overturn the world order and resurrect their lost ancient empire. I added in a lot of scenarios that really drive home the fact that these events are bigger than the characters, and that they can't save everyone. Eldritch horror, indeed.
As a note on Saltmarsh, Sly Flourish did an interesting set of articles on how to structure it as a campaign.
Starting Session Zero this weekend for it, but his articles are making the backbone of my own campaign, so looking forward to running it!
@@bifflechips-t5r Hell yeah! Good luck!!
I loved the sourcebook at the beginning talking about the surrounding swamps and forest. But I was really disappointed that the adventures do very little using the surrounding area, and the late adventures have nothing to do with Saltmarsh at all, and don't even have locations on the map. I will have to check out Sly's guide. Thanks!
@Brian Cherry it is requiring a lot more forethought to make it all come alive for sure. I set mine in the Moonshaes to help fill out the political conflict as well as bring in a lot of fae and giants into the mix (a far cry from my last campaign as a first time DM, ToA). And while I'm not using it, there's a very well regarded 3rd party campaign called Call From the Deep that numerous folks have combined with Saltmarsh (lots of sailing and pirates and mind flayers!). A lot of stuff worth pulling from it.
Where can these articles be found?
I've been running Dragon Heist for almost a year now with 3 of the 4 villians; my players have really sunk their teeth into spending a ton of time with the factions. It reminds me of Skyrim; the main plot is super short and kinda meh, but all the OTHER stuff is where the real fun is.
How would you rank the villains? Which ones are the most fun to roleplay?
My group just hit session 72. I fully agree with you.
I'm running an extended Alexandrian
@@Gears-rb2ox they are all great. Manshoon might be the least fun.
Xanthar is a wild megalomaniac, the Cassalanters are nuanced and subtly evil, and Jaraxle is a wild card with buckets of Charisma
It's good to see people using the whole book. There's so much in there.
@@Gears-rb2ox I personally love RPing as the Cassalanters; noses-up nobility that act a little too squeaky clean. I had them be nothing but passively-friendly to the PCs at first, but as they started to find cracks in their facade, they got more stand-offish.
Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus was actually the first campaign I have run! Our group went 60 sessions deep on this bad boy and man was it a *LOT* of work for me but at the end it was 100% worth it. I'll tell you what I did with the adventure and then offer my own review at the end:
ACT 1- I turned the Baldur's Gate section into a 20 session intrigue conspiracy plot and I really had to build up and expand the plot with local politics, Guild kingpins, and a deep conspiracy with an Elder Brain controlling Duke Bellyne Stelmane trying to take over the city with a coup. I really wanted to explore this famous city and, as written, chapter 1 has very little to do with the rest of the campaign and is really just a reason to get your party to level 5 and send them packing. Which is a shame, because I ran an entire 20 session conspiracy plot based on the material in the Gazetteer. The material is literally in the book, they just didn't USE any of it.
ACT 2- Then, I turned the Elturel section into a 20 session arc to save civilians, introduce the Blood War, and help turn the tides of the invasion of the city back in the favor of the defenders. "Hellturel" is a great resource for this section. As written, the party just crosses the city and maybe goes to save Ulder Ravengard. I wrote up an entire war campaign between the demons, devils, surviving hellriders, and even a Nemesis-like villain that was an Adult Red Dragon named Balthurax that dogged the party. I wrote up an entire subplot for Reya Mantlemorn to be a descendent of the "Unknown Heroine" that fought off a great red dragon when the city was young. The Unknown Heroine's statue is referenced in the crypt of the High Hall, and I used that as a vehicle to build a plot about the party helping Reya realize that she has to become a leader for her people and help her find her ancestor's dragonslaying sword so the party could take out the dragon for good. Everyone likes a plan to take on a big red dragon. The book doesn't really give you a reason to care about the people of Elturel, so I really built upon getting to know these NPCs and the party becoming invested with them and their story.
ACT 3- Lastly, I reformed the locations and events in Avernus entirely into more of a 20 session expedition across the hell blasted planes of Avernus as the party gained allies, survived intense exploration hazards, and slowly put together a vision of Zariel's empire and how to bring it down if they so wished. The book does a decent job of introducing devil deals and representing the various factions vying for control, so I spent some time writing ways to really challenge the morality of the party with tough decisions for both survival and campaign success. No one came out the other side without scars. The biggest change was that I brought on a dragonborn player that was interested in Arkhan the Cruel and ran a subplot where the players take out Arkhan's generals one by one in an effort to depose Arkhan the Cruel and become the next Chosen of Tiamat with the goal of reforming her dragon armies to defeat Zariel and make Tiamat the next Archdevil of Avernus. It was a smashing success that ended in a massive Lord of the Rings style climactic war and the players redeemed Zariel and returned the city to the Forgotten Realms before the dragonborn player turned against the party in a surprise twist and moved to kill her while she was weak (so everyone more or less got what they wanted to achieve). It was an adventure that I will never forget.
My Review:
Avernus is a wonderful setting with interesting hell tech and a Mad Max vibe to play with and we even ran a Redline type of deathmatch race. If you are willing to put in the work as a DM, Descent Into Avernus has all the material you need to run one of the most epic campaigns your players will ever take part in with countless ways to end it and endless player choice. It really should be considered a SETTING book with lots of suggested play material and only the spine of an adventure path and a catalogue of NPCs for ready use. To run this adventure as I did, you need to have a total mastery of the book and then when each chapter ends you really need to consider rewriting/reorganizing each chapter around what your party wants to accomplish and how best to do that. All said and done, my campaign was about 40% as written and 60% homebrew.. I think my group spent 180 hours at the table and my Roll20 said I had about 500 hours of time spent on site. Some of that is just having the webpage up but I think I could fairly conclude that I averaged about 2 hours of prep for each hour of play. What that actually looked like was 40 hour planning sessions between each chapter and about 1-2 hours planning each individual session. Granted, I run a high production value game and rewrote/reorganized most of the book. It is feasible to run the campaign out of the book but as many others have said, it will still be a slog to manage. What I did was a part time job.
I agree with the Dungeon Dudes, this is an Expert level book and a total Fixer Upper. One thing the Dudes said which caught my attention: "The players have to save Elturel to stop the refugee crisis." That is decidedly not really the plot of the adventure, but illustrates exactly the shortcoming of this book. As written, players throughout Chapter 1 almost never understood WHAT they are doing or WHY. For this reason alone I found myself needing to make significant rewrites and really straining to find ways to better tell the story. Its quite clear that the reason the party SHOULD be saving Elturel is because they fear that Baldur's Gate will be the next city to be claimed, (e.g. you are next!). But the book fails miserably to clearly impress this and it is why many party's don't make it very far in this adventure, they are just lost as hell and are working for the Flaming Fist "OR ELSE". At several points throughout Chapter 1, the plot is carried along by a number of arbitrary or illogical leaps that require a lot of work on behalf of the DM to get their party through it all in a sensible manner. But that's a lot of words to say simply this: Chapter 1 is the worst offender, the rest of the book gets way better if your players can stick it out. And that's a real shame, because Baldur's Gate is a legendary location in D&D and this adventure just does not do it justice. It really does feel like the Baldur's Gate section was ham-fisted in at the last minute when they found out that Larian would be making a Baldur's Gate 3 video game.
My Recommendation:
If you intend to run this adventure from the beginning at Baldur's Gate, be prepared to spend a lot of time considering how best to present the content, the agendas of the NPCs, and how to advance the plot in a way that is organic and makes sense so that the players have clear understandable motivations and achievable goals. Absolutely do not start the adventure with "you now work for the Flaming Fist, "OR ELSE". Or just skip the city entirely and have your players in Elturel when it descends and save yourself tons of headache and work. Having said all that, I learned so much about writing, game design, and DMing with this as my first book that literally any other module now looks like a cakewalk in comparison and absolutely makes me realize how far I have evolved as a DM. To the Player's out there: If your DM runs this and does a good job then you know that they are S class and you should never let them go. I should have charged, lol.
I tried really hard to run Descent into Avernus but my players hated it. They didnt care about anything happening in Baldur's Gate, they just wanted to get to Avernus. By the time they finally get to Avernus, they were just so bored that the campaign died.
Agreed, it really fits into the "Fixer Upper" category, but my god what can be forged out of this campaign is so epic in scope. Our finale had the player's hurtling through clashing armies of demons and devils below Elturel on their tricked out vehicles only to reach the top and face an angry Zariel flanked by Pit Fiends and Erinyes. One of them teleported into a pocket dimension where I had Zariel keep her copy of the all important Contract.
I tried to run that module, but scheduling killed the game. Currently in a game about it and actually enjoying how the DM is changing the beginning. I'm invested in how it evolves.
@@smashbrandiscootch719 I wonder if you just ran the campaign the way it is. Beucase I had to start all my PC's at Elturel first, so they could care for the city and the people in there. They had family members, friends, patrons. So now they want to find out how it happened and how they can bring it back.
@@Makenai_ Yeah, I did just run the campaign as it is. Which is exactly the point. It's an incredibly poorly written module.
I did exactly that. Ran dragon heist into dungeon of the mad mage as my first ever campaigns... It worked out pretty good. I will admit that my players were experienced, superb and very patient with me. I should add that they did all die at the end but we all had fun
My group and I are playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and we really enjoy it! It's my first time DM'ing, but I've been a player for many years. Very happy to have this RP-heavy adventure!
This series was so well done! I appreciate that you didn’t attempt to rank them against each other, as that’s not productive when they’re all so different, but gave objective analysis of who the target DM/group is for each.
Part 3…..👀?
Please do a series on your favorite 3rd party adventure modules and/or one-shots! especially for a novice DM. Love this video series. ive DM'd very little and i hope to run a full adventure, so i've been looking for Novice/Beginner level adventures to consider.
Absolutely agree about the WDH assessment. I would say, though you are definitely better if you are higher experienced as a DM. I used it as an Eberron adventure set in Sharn and used the Alexandrian conversion, which made it more of a heist and fun.
Loved that remix!
I completely altered it myself. In my version Xanathar's and Manshoon's gangs were at war and Jarlaxle was pulling the strings behind the scenes. My players (with help from NPC's) took down Manshoon, killed Xanathar and never knowingly met Jarlaxle.
@@mve0172 sounds cool. Nice job!👍
@@cdfreester thanks. It was a lot of work as a first time DM though :D
Im setting up that conversion right now! Alexandrian remix + Eberron conversion is a lot of work, but man, Sharn just makes sense for this 100%.
As DM I made Dragon of Icespire peak my starting point for Dm'ing, we ran the core story 1-6 as a One on One and honestly one of the best D&D experiences I have ever had. was able to get though what would take a 4 player party a full 4-5hr session in under 2, scheduling was almost a nonfactor and way more freedom to let a player really feel like a hero since the spotlight isn't shared.
I'm doing my first rn. Icespire is my first but I'm setting up different story stuff, twist and encounters than what they say because it's more fun
@Video Unavailable Films it's a good structure for throwing your own encounters and storyline onto because you can just put your own encounters up on the mission board and the main plot isnt so heavy that you dont need to worry changing any of it out or adding your own flair will create gaping plotholes.
I run Dragon Hiest with a limited number of sessions with a single villian and it worked very well. If you need a short campaign between larger ones the single villian approach is great.
As a player going through Avernus felt like getting the Biggoron Sword in Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Go here, get a thing, that you need to get another thing, that you need to get another thing....
The setting was cool and there were some great moments sprinkled throughout, but only the flimsiest connections taking us from point A to point B.
Also, vis-a-vis Avernus, highly recommend Justin Alexander's epic remix. Makes it a LOT easier to run.
My DM used the end part of Decent into Avernus when we went to hell to retrieve a soul that our Rogue had sent there when we were meant to collect it for our Warlock who has a contract with the Raven Queen... it was so much fun to fight demons and devils as part of essentially a side quest that our Rogue forced us into
DoIP goes from 1 - 7, with the Beyond Icespire Peak "trilogy" ending at 13th but they're really one three part adventure. Super easy to run LMoP simultaneously totally RAW but can be very fun to twist it a bit.
My fav is to kill the townmaster and have a Black Spider doppel take his place "hiding from the dragon" while giving the party quests far the f away from the Black Spider. The only quest you get from Harbin in LMoP is Wyvern Tor iirc, miles away and unrelated to anything Black Spider. When LMoP is done and doppel out of a job he just leaves and can run an election in the town with someone like Sildar taking over writing jobs for the board.
Wild beyond the witchlight is really close to Something wicked this way comes, from the carnival to the fey but way more whimsy
Right now I'm running Candlekeep Mysteries for two diffrent groups at the same time. One group definitely loves it most for the episodic nature of the story, they recently said that it's similarly satisfying to their brains as watching TikTok videos: they are easily digestible chunks of self-contained stories that give them a nice opportunity to relax in the breaks of our long-form campaign. The other group is more invested in making this a long-format campaign as well and tying up the loose ends between adventures. For both groups, we are going with the same team to every adventure, and sometimes the explanation of why they go there is a little convoluted, but overall it works fine imo. I usually pick one character to claim a certain adventure as their own, and I tie the motivations to their backstories. Also, we just really enjoy the giant library as a setting as the bunch of bibliophile nerds we are. I'm planning on bookending the story after Chapter 17 with a homebrew chapter that focuses on Candlekeep itself and the lore of the library. (Although I have to acknowledge that I do not exclusively work from the book, I let them choose 2 adventures for each level from my growing collection of one-shots. But, for the majority of the time so far, they chose the Candlekeep Mysteries chapter as one of them.)
Would love to see a video ranking/reviewing each Candlekeep one shot!
Over the years, I've Dmed or played in most of the official published adventures. Oftentimes, I find that they can be splitted in two without it affecting the plot in any way. It is as if the beginning and the end are note related at all.
Some examples:
- Out of the Abyss could end when the PC get out of the Underdark or begin when they are summoned to Gauntlgrym
- In Avernus you could begin the adventure when the character arrive in Elturiel without them missing any informations or have they begin as usual but never send them to Hell and have them deal with local politics and factions.
- Against the Giant first 5 lvl are badly written and can be completely skipped, making them useless to the plot.
I understand it is not easy to create an adventure, but it would be great to have one published adventure going from Lvl 1 to 20 with a good story that holds up for the whole book. Sure, Mad Mage technically goes up to lvl 20, but it is more a dungeon crawl than anything else.
(Contains spoilers for The Lost Mine of Phandelver and Out of The Abyss) I completely agree. I know that a lot of players are not very interested in high-level campaigns, but I just can't help but feel that we miss out on those awesome high level features and spells if we never have a campaign that actually goes lvl 1-20. Right now, I'm working on rewriting Out of The Abyss so that I can run from lvl 5 to 20 and make it a continuation for The Lost Mine of Phandelver for my group. (The main villain of LMOP is a drow, so it makes a lot of sense for me to tie theese together... plus, they are really excited about the Underdark I think that the original ending of the campaign is a little bit lackluster, if my players invested this much time into this adventure, they deserve to have epic boss fights with full-health demon lords in the end.
Our DM ran our group through "Rime of The Frostmailing" prior to IDROTFM, mostly because the full module hadn't been released at the time he started the campaign. (He actually got the very last copy of the deluxe edition!) As a result, we spent a long time at level 4... but the tradeoff was that our characters already knew each other from our prior courier jobs.
Loved this 2-parter guys, really good info for DM's new and old. AND no major spoilers!
I did your "lego" analogy for "Waterdeep Dragon Heist" and sent my players through the whole thing. It was very good, an amazingly well prepared scenario. Good video, thanks.
Hope you make a part 3 with the moduls that arrived since Wild Beyond the Witchlight.
Because you guys(dudes) Rock at this stuff:)
Dragon of icespire peaks is one of my favorites. And there are 3 additional adventures on DnD beyond that adds to it. Three Awesome adventures, by the way..
Hopefully they'll touch on them along with the other small modules from WOTC.
Cool!
I was planning on running DoiP in combination with LMoP. Can you tell me what these three adventures are?
@@nomad2659 let me check real quick. -grabs laptop and jumps on DnDBeyond- ummmm.. Storm Lord’s Wrath, Sleeping Dragon’s Wake, and Divine contention. Storm lord’s wrath starts for a party of 7th level. Sleeping dragon’s wake is for a party of 9th-10th level. Divine Contention is for a party of 11th-12th level. Reaching level 13 by the end of the 3 adventures. It’s designed for up to 6 players. But can be played by a single player, using the sidekick rules.
@@nightflame69 sweet! That helps a lot! Thanks so much :-)
@@nomad2659 My players have just wrapped up some home brew stuff after DoIP and will be getting back onto Storm Lord’s Wrath next. The series looks like it plays out in a really fun way, lots of action and a couple evil cults to take down
As the party face in a Mad Mage campaign, I can assure you that you can definitely get your mileage out of being infiltrator/political types that make allegiances with factions in the dungeon, and in fact the fifth floor by itself practically makes this approach mandatory. By level 5, even a diplomatic party should be competent enough combatants to survive random encounters, but you can definitely talk your way through certain encounters as well to gather allies and informants that can give you more info on the dungeon and what if any changes have occurred.
That said, it's definitely DM-intensive to keep track of everyone that the party has come across and kept alive, on top of the various NPC schedules, questlines, and factions. Not even mentioning the hallways that exist solely for a DM to slot in their own encounters, as well as the many shortcuts throughout the dungeon that can completely make or break a session's planning because the players decided to skip THREE WHOLE FLOORS instead of taking the stairs like normal people. Floors repopulate at the whims of Halaster, and sometimes you get desperate players like me that will ally the party with the Drow to save their skin and accidentally threaten the entire module. Relatively basic floors are occupied by organizations and creatures that are way above the party's weight class, which can really snowball if the DM decides to act on these groups organizing to confront the party.
I do feel like most people open the book up, see the massive dungeons and go "Yup this is a big dumb megadungeon" without properly reading the module. Having read most of it I agree it can get seriously political and roleplay heavy.
Getting ready to run The Wild Beyond the Witchlight myself, so good to know that I'll to read the book cover to cover before we start instead of jumping into it.
I am running it right now, and everything is connected. You'll thank yourself later for pre-reading it.
I'm running it right now and I absolutely love it, but yes. If I hadn't read it cover to cover, I think I would end up accidentally breaking later plot points on accident without the full picture to fall back on.
The dudes mentioned it in their review but reading this is rough. I mean, really, read the last chapter first. I wish they’d done a better synopsis at the start of the book so I could at least be aware of key plot points without having to jump to the end. For real, I read the first few chapters, thought I’d missed something, read it again, still missed something, finally found it at the end. Maybe it’s a good adventure but I was so pissed at that point that it went on my shelf and hasn’t come back since.
While I completely agree that you should read an adventure module cover to cover, just to get the lay of the land and to know what's expected of me, I think designing the adventure modules that way is not user friendly for a DM. You should be able to open the cover, get an idea of the plot, major characters, the twists and turns and the big set pieces without having to read 400 pages and making bookmarks all over the joint. Curse of Strahd was really bad for this: things should be easily summarised, you should give overviews at the start of the chapters as to what is going to happen, who is involved, etc, you could use flowcharts to indicate ideal paths through the module and information shouldn't be spread across a giant book the way WOTC still do. Winter's Daughter from the OSR/OSE is an amazingly laid out adventure simply because it knows what DMs need to see - these books are for DMs, not players. Like why would you put plot twists at the end or in the middle of text - this isn't a book, it's an instruction manual, I should know this at the start so it informs my reading.
Dungeon of the Mad Mage provided rules for Spelljammer Helms - what you need to bring Spelljamming in a basic sense to your game. For that alone this is a tremendous book. Plus, Halaster's actual flying saucer!
Dragon of Icespire Peak was my first adventure as a DM and my players first adventure. It went great and I even expanded it up to 10th level by using the Orcs and a little bit of homebrew. It was perfect and I only hope that other adventures I run go as smoothly.
I recently started DMing with a brand with my friend group. None of us played DND before. I just chose the first campaign I saw, which was Dungeon of The Mad Mage. It is so fun, but so much work. Really worth it so far, we just reached level 2!
I ran Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus with my two regular RPG players and had a blast! It was a big campaign - spread over two years of playtime for the main content. I didn't realize how much work this required but for me as the DM I approached the module differently - Instead of creating big storylines around the NPCs I built ties to the Player Characters. What I found really helped was having a player that really leaned into the "Saving the helpless" concept, so his Character was eager to pick up on story threads and dive into fights. My other player was relatively new to playing in a big campaign and designed a flexible druid that wanted to explore the city and experience a journey where everything is new. I introduced a DM-run character which provided interesting role-playing experiences for the players to build a "we're in this together" vibe. Knowing what the players wanted (Save-the-day combat and exploration of the locations) really helped deliver the adventure.
I was very lenient on character design rules, let each of the characters gain items and ability well past normal means. I let the characters help direct me (as the DM) in what they wanted to do. When I found gaps in the story, I introduced simple D&D trope scenarios such as "Save the civilians being beaten" and "Rescue your fallen comrade" to drive up the stakes in the adventure while keeping it interesting. Having the DM-character that died more than once, transformed race more than once during this story (*directly caused by the players events) really cemented to my players a big adventuring hook and opportunity for them to explore as a team and keep each other alive. That quickly also reflected back on the NPCs as the party sometimes decide to take alternative paths rather than "kill every bad guy we find." As a DM I occasionally dropped hints to foreshadow NPCs they may meet in the future so they could each build their own opinion of them - which made the NPCs come to life.
It was a lot of reading and a lot of work to put together. I did the work as I went for the most-part, not all in one shot before-hand. Some custom rules and scenes took hours of work each. Having a lot of improv skills really can help the early and middle game story when the majority of events are not directly tied together in a follow-the-ball story for the party. In this story I let the characters explore and complete a few challenges along the way, granting them funds that they could spend building equipment they thought they would need for the fights ahead. Roleplaying out the "shopping" scenarios really added to Baldur's Gate being a living city.
We still play the adventure with those characters after the events of the story from time to time. I prepared a "afterwards" scenario that allows the players to co-build what happens next. They have revisited past NPCs, righting past wrongs. They tracked down other evil elements and put them to rest. The party have ownership of things that are important to them. The now powerful Characters can make substantial change and are ready for a bigger, realm-sized challenge. Those characters have become our most memorable ones - even for myself as the DM.
I am DMing Wild Beyond the Witchlight right now (DDAL). When it was first introduced by D&D, their selling point was "hey, maybe you DON'T want combat!", and that was a big turn off to me. A whole hardcover with no combat? No thank you. But it looked like my game store that I play at was going to be running it, so I tried to withhold contempt prior to investigation.
Then, I played the "Lost Things" adventure during the D&D Celebration weekend and...I had fun. Then I ran "Lost Things" adventure at the game store and...I had fun. Now I'm running Witchlight for the past couple months and I can say that it's a really good hardcover adventure. (A little light on magic items)
So many nods to pop culture and lil' easter eggs. And there is PLENTY of combat, or, as much as you want. Most of the combat can be done without battle maps. One thing I like as a DM is that there is boxed text for almost every room or area. This is great for me because describing a scene is not my strong suit.
And there are no plot holes (almost)! Everything in the story is connected and there's a good flow to it. Very well done.
Nice! I hope to hear what you guys have to say about the Strixhaven adventure too!
They have a separate video on Strixhaven if you haven't seen it already. Although, I think they'd have to include it in this series too.
We don't talk about Strixhaven.
I was just thinking about what module to run thanks for the helpful insights on each of these 👍🏻
I recommend The Wild Beyond the Witch Light
My group is running through Descent into Avernus right now and our DM had a more interesting hook to start off the whole adventure. Namely; we started off in Elturel being hired by the Order of the Gauntlet to investigate some cult activity (our introduction to the Dead Three and one agent of Zariel's cult) and on our way back to town we saw the disaster unfold in Elturel first hand.
I actually know that story. One of the problems with the main story is that the characters have no real reason to rescue Elturel, so why would risk their necks for it in the first place? By running at module, It gives you a tangible connection to Elturel and invests you in its fate more.
My players have been working through DiA lately. They started with WDH, and at the end, I gave them a plot hook through one of their faction contacts that would get them to Baldur's Gate. We played the trek as the Road To Avernus collection of adventures that were published on D&D Beyond a while back, and I had them witness the disaster in Elturel along the way, allowing them to skip most of the spaghetti intrigue of the first chapter of DiA, arriving in Hell as a level 6 party. I felt it was a MUCH more smooth setup than what was presented in the book.
The intro into DiA sucks. Plain and simple. As I first read thru it I kept asking myself "Why would any of the player characters care about any of this?" I ended up using the Adventurers League DiA modules and blending them into the beginning of the adventure until leaving Baldur's Gate for Candlekeep where I went into using just the DiA adventure.
@@KyleKoz13 This is precisely what I did as well ... stitched in DDAL09 stuff through 09-04 and used aspects of the Alexandrian Remix ...
When my group and I played Descent into Avernus, we accidentally broke Zariel's sword, so our DM pulled out his old AD&D books and sent us off to Mount Celestia to fix the sword. It was off the beaten path, and it was kinda fun.
How did you guys break the sword?
@@ddrew1973 We didn't have a Cleric or Paladin, so our Divine Soul Sorcerer was the one who attuned to it. Said sorcerer than proceeded to try to use it for something only Zariel, a Paladin, or a Cleric could do (As written in the module) so our DM decided it would break in that instance.
Descent into Avernus luckily has an Alexandrian edition written where a lot of the issues are remedied. With this tool, I’d knock the difficulty run to intermediate, with the main issue being that you have to read the module and then the big ass revision doc.
I’ve been reading it to run my own campaign of it and like a lot of the suggestions. He even adds in free maps with his revised changes to the dungeons you can access. He also offers several alternatives if you don’t like his take on one area.
Also, it is HIGHLY recommended that you run the One-Shot, the Fall of Elturel beforehand. It’s also free and downloaded with the maps used.
The Alexandrian remix is fantastic for more campaign ideas. The big downside, besides the length, is that, much like the module itself, DMs will need to pick parts of the remix to fit the campaign, as simple fixes to the module are sometimes buried beneath several layers of overcomplication.
Another great resource is Aventir games Avernus As A Sandbox three part fix article for Chapter 3. It is generally more straightforward conceptually than the remix in the way it fixes the railroading. The main downside is that sandboxes can be tricky to prepare for with new DMs.
As a beginner DM, the Alexandrian Remix for Waterdeep has made it much more fun and easier to plan out sessions. Takes all the best parts of the module and fleshes them out for the players while also drastically improving the story.
I have been running dragon heist for about a year and a half, my characters are now level 15. It has been a lot of work, but the adventure is awesome! The analogy of Lego blocks is dead on. With Mad Mage as an additional source book, you really can make the campaign sing
That caveat about Witchlight is so on point. I'm midway through running it, and just knowing what happens at the end has changed the kind of things I emphasize in the sub realms.
I decided to run Descent into Avernus a little different. I had an old unfinished campaign. So on a whim one night when we had some player not show up, I had two of the players find their characters waking up at level 10 to find another one of their old party making a deal with Asmodeus himself for their lives. The woke up naked, scared and with only the sparse equipment of their companion. The next three months were their quest to escape hell, save Elturel, and return to their original quest in Faerun and and save the world. It was freaking epic having them fighting scrounging to survive with no clothes, no food, no weapons and only their wits. Fantastic!!!! I think Avernus is a great playground for a DM wanting to incorporate hell into an ongoing campaign.
Congrats on running a survival campaign! I'd love to do one, but my regular group of players I think would rebel.
Candlekeep is a really good secondary adventure. We did it as a group of forever DMs and it was great to stretch our player legs while giving great inspiration for our other games. Not too intense workload and the type of thing you can step away for for a few months and jump back in easily.
These two videos are extremely helpful for me as a DM, so thanks!
I absolutely love and appreciate what you both do for us fellow DMs, thank you so much
Thank you Dudes!
My last completed campaign was Curse of Strahd. 2 of my players moved away afterwards. So I used the breaking down of Barovia’s barriers to cause a huge flux in the time continuum. While my remaining players are starting in Waterdeep, characters from previous campaigns (from back in our AD&D 2nd edition days!) are going to join the battle!
When i stared DMing i used the Essentials and lost mine together. I just moved the mine into the mountain and had it fall to the dragon instead. Moved some clues around and added some different enemies. Made for a fun 1 to about 7 campaign that was as straight or open as my players wanted.
Since I tend to overbuy books, I found a way in-game to float all of the campaign hooks that were available to my group at level one. I let them know we'd be running LMoP first, then moving on to another longer adventure. They voted overwhelmingly to head to Waterdeep to investigate the guild war, so I'll be running them through Dragon Heist at like level 4 or 5 and bumping all of the encounters.
Thanks for sharing the tools for DH! I def want to tie in more of the villains and their lairs since my party will be higher level. I might nerf the Cassalanters a bit and write them to be initial protagonists while the conflict with the more powerful foes simmers, we'll see. I'm just hoping everyone will rise to the occasion when it comes time for roleplay and the intrigue!
Dudes, I really would like to commend you for the approach you chose to review these modules. This is super useful, especially your keen eye for the tone and inspiration for each of the adventures, that is exactly what I want to know before running an adventure, and your comments are spot on. For example, I own the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure and I really like it, but it is true that it leans more "Misty coastal mystery with Lovecraft vibes' than 'Pirates of the Caribbean', and lacks opportunities for naval combat. I really appreciated your advice on how to use the material in the books and what to look out for. This series is one of your best made videos since I follow the channel!
Started a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign but had to stop when 2 players moved. I've purchased 11 of the 14 adventures. Currently using Tales and a couple other modules to craft a campaign from. I'll probably add at least one Candlekeep adventure to mix up the dungeon crawls and wilderness adventures we've been through.
Great video.
Recently discovered the very title "ghosts of saltmarsh" is very likely a Lovecraft quote in the first place, so it makes a sort of sense that's more the tone they went with
Guessing this was written/recorded before Strixhaven dropped. Either way, another fantastic video you guys. I'd really be curious to see a similar treatment for some of the adventures from DM's Guild. See what stands out to you guys and what you'd be excited to talk about. I'm also curious, regarding your difficulty/workload assessments where you feel your own Dungeons of Drakkenheim book would fall (beginner to experienced player groups, perhaps versus what you originally intended).
My favorite game is watching whomever is not talking. You guys are so fun to watch haha!
Rime was the first campaign I played and the first campaign I DM'd. I will say the nice thing about the opening chapters of the module is that if you're running it for new players the adventures in ten towns are easily railroaded together until your players are more experienced and less squishy. This makes them more confident to continue exploring in ten towns before leaving.
Spending a lot of time in ten towns and building the players reputation makes the consequences of those later chapters more real since by this point the players are very emotionally invested in the ten towns.
Thank you for your unbiased insight on these adventures as well as Strixhaven. I really do appreciate this format on evaluation.
I've been running Mad Mage for about a year and a half, second adventure I've ever run after Lost Mines, and honestly while I have a lot of gripes about its structure I think overall it's improved me as a DM by a lot. It's great if you want something you can use as a skeleton of a campaign, but that is easy to modify and twist into whatever you want.
When I was first reading through some of the levels, I was confused and frustrated about what exactly the point of the level was supposed to be. I was so used to Lost Mines giving me step by step instructions explaining exactly how everything was supposed to work, and the idea of adding or changing things honestly didn't even occur to me. Now when I look at those levels I see countless opportunities, I can run them however I want.
But yeah, if you're looking for a book that just says "do this" and you don't want a campaign you have to put work into, Mad Mage is one to avoid. Personally it's made me way more comfortable with the idea of creating my own adventures, while taking a lot of work away for making maps, deciding what to populate those maps with, etc.
It's always a treat when I find a DD video I missed seeing the first time around. I did run WBTW and I will say it was pretty easy to run and roleplay, but the final scenario was more frustrating with how much filler the castle contains.
Thanks for letting me know about Justin Alexander! Their version of Dragon Heist is great
I did Dragon of Ice Spire as a first time DM and loved it. I grabbed some tips from Matt Colville on overlanding and it made even that a lot of fun. It was very easy to run...but I also had a great group of veteran players who also DM.
yay - thank you for guiding through all of these adventure modules! i especially like how you assessed the workload amount of input, investment, and modifications by a DM . sure, you could manage a module as written, but you could do so much more if you add your own ideas. even more fun = you can develop opportunities that interface with the PCs
I’m running Icewind Dale: RotFM now, and to deal with the issue of the parts of the book not cleanly fitting together, I inserted a different overarching plot line which tied things together. The party came to the Dale pursuing a completely different antagonist, who is searching for the Crystal Shard (from the Salvatore novels) and they are trying to beat the villain to it. Half the party started out in Revel’s End, the Lord’s Alliance prison (which otherwise goes underutilized in the book), framed by the antagonist for his own crimes, but they are in possession of a clue which is needed to learn more about the Crystal Shard. The other half of the party comes to the prison in hopes of getting them out (either through offical channels or though assisting with a prison break) in hopes of gaining this information, due to their own grievances with the villain. (Minor Spoilers: you can also have Sephek Kaltro and other potential villains, including Vaelish Gant, escape at the same time the party do, if they stage a breakout, to give the party some history with those characters).
Once they are out of the prison, they have reason to head to Ten Towns to avoid needlessly camping in the harsh wastes (Spoilers: so you can run the Black Cabin - an interesting set piece and good intro to the themes of the adventure), then Lonelywood (which is one of the more interesting starting towns imo), and finally to whichever interesting adventure location you gave them hooks to checkout for their main quest. You can have them encounter the problems of the Ten Towns along the way, gradually learning about the everlasting winter, the sacrifices, etc., as they are passing through on their own quest.
This will let players drink in the setting while still feeling like they have clear direction (and tying the Crystal Shard more directly into the story gives you even more to work with for worldbuilding, with surprisingly little additional effort needed). It could be a very linear adventure if that’s what your players want, but they’ll have plenty of opportunities to organically branch off on side quests as they come to sympathize with the plights of the Ten Towners.
(Spoilers: For those of you who have read the book, I put Dzaan’s shield guardian amulet on the summit of Kelvin’s Cairn, and had at least one party member know its location. The amulet can lead the party to Karkolohk following the signal of the broken guardian, then the reactivated guardian leads the party to Dzaan just as he’s being burned at the stake in Easthaven, and ultimately to the sunken Netherese Spire, where they will learn more about the Crystal Shard, that its pieces are scattered around the Dale, that someone (the Duergar) is gathering pieces of it. This gives the party reason to try to track down large concentrations of the Shard’s pieces around the Dale (which can make things more non-linear for a time as they have reason to explore more of the Dale), before they are ultimately led back to Easthaven and then Sunblight. After the dragon encounter, which you can hint was playing into the villain’s plans to weaken Ten Towns, either the villain themselves or the Arcane Brotherhood can drop hints that the Crystal Shard may lie in the buried netherese city, along with a way to fix the winter issue, so these both become intertwined. They’ll have reason to stop Auril but also the Arcane Brotherhood members and the villain.)
I let the players decide as they went who exactly the villain was, what past history they had with him, how they came to know the secrets they did, etc. All I had to do was use their feedback to create the villain (and really, it could just be a character already in the book if you want, like one of the Arcane Brotherhood members), and figure out what the villain’s goals and gameplan were. (Spoilers: in my game, the villain was a death knight already being manipulated by the Crystal Shard to help it reach Ythryn so it could increase its own power by absorbing/merging with the magical artifacts hidden there. The Shard wants the party to pass Auril’s trials and open the glacier for them to reach Ythryn, while letting the Duergar and winter weaken Ten Towns in the meantime so they can easily use the power hidden underground - by returning the city to the air, for starters - to conquer what’s left and turn the survivors into an undead or chardalyn slave army for further conquest, or to defend the city as the Shard finds a way to use the city's artifacts to go back in time and achieve pre-spell-plague levels of magical power so that it can attempt to ascend to godhood. It might also take the floating city over the ocean, use its weather control systems to create a storm or fog around itself for miles to remain hidden, transitioning into a sea-faring campaign.) Move 1 item, tied into the characters’ hooks, to a different location, and drop a few extra rumors here or there, and you're pretty well set. Overall, this approach I think will help me get the most out of the module for minimal effort, and I’m excited about it.
Love your idea! I try to bring in elements from my past campaigns into current ones and link characters from multiple past campaigns!
Yay! Part 2 is here!
I just got into 5e a few years ago and Ghosts of Saltmarsh was the first campaign I ran. I liked how there was just enough structure to hold it together, but enough room for me to expand as much as I want. It's a coastal sandbox and I think my players had a lot of fun. There is plenty in the book to keep running after the last chapter to epic levels or to add side quests or even plop locations, quests and characters from Saltmarsh into other games. My players are veterans from the 70s and they said I did a good job DMing! Never one to do things easy, I just settled on running Dungeon of the Mad Mage next. I see the expert level planning just to keep everything cohesive and flowing, but if you plan ahead several levels you should be okay running straight from the book! We've been playing online with Roll20 and there are great maps for the first four levels, but unfortunately it seems nobody has gone beyond that. I'll likely have to either make my own with Inkarnate or just use the black and white maps provided in the book. Kind of a bummer because I love a good visual aesthetic with maps and tokens when playing online.
im planning a descent into avernus game for a group of friends and found the challenge of fixing this game up to be fairly challenging. as mentioned, the beginning questline seems extremely linear and railroad-y and the idea that the dm is threatning the players to join a mercenary group with death seems so limiting. however, i do plan to incorporate elements of candlekeep mysteries into the campaign when the players get to that point. so while it is a lot of work, im excited to get it started!
Would be interested to hear their thoughts on Mythic Odyssey of theros, I know its not really got a campaign just a bit of a starter thing but the deitys and bonus's u get from them has always intrigued me. Of course this is from someone whos first 5e campaign was ToA with a first time dungeon master so u know dont always do what they suggest 😅
In descent into avernus the group briefly goes to candlekeep to have an artifact inspected. Perfect time to use an adventure from candlekeep mysteries before the librarians unlock the puzzle box and the players then continue to avernus.
2:50 the version with all four villains is the best rendition of Dragonheist. It makes it so much more compelling and so much more FUN!
I dont do a lot of modules, but I did do the ghost of saltmarsh for 5e. I had a lot of fun as a DM tinkering with the various aspect and links to the story and incorporating the location to one of my worlds
This is the first positive review I hear of Candlekeep Mysteries.
Currently doing a big seafaring/pirate campaign. Was easier to take bits of inspiration from Ghosts of Salt Marsh than actually trying to change it 🤷♂️
I'm also running a seafaring campaign and I started using Ghosts of Saltmarsh as adventures when they needed to go into town and it seems to work pretty well for that.
Dragon Heist: Forgotten Tales on the Dm's Guild builds up Jarlaxle and the Cassalnter's instead of Xanathar and the Zhents. I really enjoyed it and you could very much use the two parts to mix and match any combinations.
And if you want to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage afterwards, grab the Adventure League stuff. It adds plot threads and intrigue that can follow from Chapter 2 on Dragon Heist deep into Skull Port.
I would like you to do more content like this but about unofficial campaigns, considering you guys have participated in that space I think it would be cool to know which other works you enjoy that aren't published the WotC team, plus I feel that since your content primarily centers on official material up until now (And it's great content) it would be a great way to introduce people that aren't as familiar with the homebrew scene to some of the absolutely fantastic stuff that is out there.
Enjoying this series. As a homebrew DM, I'm always looking for inspiration.
A *lot* of the Candlekeep adventures/books have threads linking to stories and/or NPCs outside the story that can easily be repurposed to fit into another campaign (homebrew or official). That's always handy to have on hand.
I love that you talk about level of DM prep. I think there is a prevailing opinion in DnD circles that modules are easier to run than homebrew campaigns. I think that this is only sometimes true, different DMs prepare differently. For me the one module I've ever run was loads more work than my multiple homebrew games, probably going to try running one at some point, probably Strahd because it's a stone cold classic. And taking a module and assuming you can run it by skimming the book for 5 mins before the game session is a recipe for a shit time.
I ran both Waterdeep campaigns back to back and it worked well. By the time they were done with the heavy roleplay and intrigue of the Heist, they loved going down with now second-tier characters and just kicking butt. I will admit I have to do a lot of modifications to the interaction to keep it from just being a murder fest but it works and is fun. I also appreciate it is set up to take a campaign all the way to level 20, which we haven't done yet.
I have used Candlekeep Mysteries in my home games. I have a current game set in Wildemount region and the various libraries of the Cobalt Soul align themselves very well to using these type of one-shot type of adventures where the players who either work for the Cobalt Soul or just need some information need to do a favor or something like that.
Wow! I love the idea of a Jumanji-Esque campaign for Candlekeep!
Hi again! I am currently playing Saltmarsh and Rime of the Frostmaiden, and then I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight (yep, I'm pretty busy, D&D-wise right now!). The former two campaigns are the reasons I cannot watch Drakkenheim on Tuesdays anymore. Anyway, Saltmarsh does a great job of instilling that seaside flavor, and either nautical or swamp challenges. Definitely agree that there's little to no nautical combat, as you'd expect from a pirate-y theme. Almost all the action is based on land/swamp/underground, and water is just the avenue that links encounter locations. But it's so flavor-filled. Again, I played the frist couple of original modules (products of the UK) back in my AD&D days. Rime of the Frostmaiden is also very flavor-filled, but in the arctic-wilderness kind of way. Both Saltmarsh and RotFM need a strong DM to tie things together and spur on the players, but both provide excellent ways for the DM to sink their teeth into creating a mood. I LOVE Wild Beyond the Witchlight as a DM, since it affords the opportunity to do a ton of roleplaying (I think it was Jeremy Crawford who called it a "roleplay sandbox"), and motivating your players to solve challenges without combat. In other words, it is the best adventure path to get the plaeyrs to be creative, to dive into the world, and to use their brains/investigative and interactive skills and not their weapons. I did have to warn this particular group of players about that dynamic, as they tend to just kill kill kill. But it's proven to be such a multi-dimensional campaign...the richest experience yet that I've either ran or played. I kind of disagree a bit with a comment by Kelly (which I think Monty tried to reel back a bit) in that this could be a good campaign for beginner or low-experience DMs. I think the opposite, since this requires someone to step away from the mechanics and focus on building an experience through roleplay, NPC interaction, and such (which I think is a bit more advanced for DMing). But the structure is well defined, so in that way most DMs can run it fairly easily.
I decided to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage as my first campaign as a DM and you are 100% correct, it is VERY difficult to run. That being said, my players are about halfway through level 2 and we are loving it. I love the challenge and my players are loving the fast paced action that can come from it
You guys just inspired me to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage!
An updated version of this video with more recent releases would be great
I am running a group of players through the Candlekeep Mysteries as a campaign unto itself.
It's my first time DM'ing, and the episodic idea really appealed to me as a first foray into DM'ing.
However, the dynamics between the player characters almost instantly made it a case where tying it all together was something that needed to happen. So I applied the Group Patron rules from Tasha's and have cast the party as one of several adventurer groups hired by the library to look into unusual acquisitions.
So yes, I agree that is is fairly easy for a DM to pick up and run as an episodic thing, but you can convert it to a campaign style setting with just a little bit of thought and work.
For the "fixer-upper" adventures, it's also worth checking out Sean McGovern's guides at Power Score RPG. He has some in-depth guides that point out rough spots in the adventures and suggest fixes for them.
I'm a brand new dm and really havnt played 5e ive had the rulebooks and the starter kit but i just got the essentials not long ago I'm planning on running that module your video has made me more confident in running it as my first campaign
I'm a new DM running DoIP and I feel there are 2 ways to go with it. You can run it as written but be prepared for players going off script. However, the book does not even offer the flavour text for each noticeboard quest, which I think is major oversight for a beginner DM sandbox style module. The other way to run it is to incorporate your own story to link the quests together. This is the way I have chosen to run it and so far it has kept the party on track and built up a little bit of anticipation for both the final Orc and Dragon encounter, here's hoping it will all come to a satisfying conclusion.
Descent Into Avernus is the module I'm running as my first full campaign, and I'm going to be honest, yeah. You're right. It's been enormously rewarding to be able to homebrew in more encounters, flesh out a great setting into an actual story, and finally make it into Hell, but... were I not the type to put my own spins and tweaks on things already, as a new DM, I'd be struggling much harder. The Reddit BG:DIA community is a wonderful resource of things people have added, tried, and reported back on, though, and that alongside my party being a bunch of creative roleplayers has been my saving grace.
Is it a fun, amazing source book for Baldur's Gate and Avernus? Yes. But definitely don't plan to play it as written.
Mix the Candlekeep Mysteries with the Academy Tower in Drakkenheim.
As someone who is currently running Ghosts of Saltmarsh as a full campaign up to lvl 13, I agree that is a huge workload. There are a lot of gaps in terms of story and just in terms of character levels, so I had to fill in with alot of side adventures from DMs Guild and my own homebrew. I've probably written at least 20,000 words to get this up to my standards.
having said that alot of the adventures are great in theme and present a good variety of challenge types. Get your players to make characters invested in Saltmarsh (mine now own and renovated the mystery mansion in the first chapter) and it'll be easier to hook them into the next quest.
The biggest flaws ive noticed is the ship combat (not required for the adventures at all) and a general perception of where the quests take place. Everything seems to be "just off the coastline"
I think these are really good synopsis about the game, and is really informative about how hard the game is to run, prepare, and difficulty for the players. Outside of that though I would like to know what people recommend, if I am to start by recommending I would say curse of strahd hands down. I have run it twice and its always been the most fun module I have ran and has had some of the best roleplaying moments amongst anyone I have played with, this is said even though players lost the campaign both times because they split the party and got picked off one by one, and is still their favorite game.
Great stuff, looking forward to the reviews of the companion world building books.
I like to take sections of the compilation books and incorporate them into other campaigns. We had a lot of fun exploring the hidden shrine of Tamoachan in Chult while exploring Tomb of annihilation. I just reflavored as the temple of light and the creatures in there were prisoners from before the spellplague that had been forgotten to time.
Currently running The Wild Beyond the Witch Light and my players love it.
The fey adventure is quite different than anything else I've run before. Highly recommend giving it a read.
After watching the Dungeoncast’s vids on the Fey, I’m tempted.
Im currently running Wild Beyond the Witchlight but ive fine tuned it for my homebrewed campaign. The players had to goto the feywild because one of them was cursed by a hag and one of the hourglass coven hags could remove it, which they succeeded by diplomacy and trade, but also the hag tricked them and nearly killed the PC when the curse was removed. Then I had the various NPCs plot hook the main story and they just got to Yon. The end of the story will weave my BBEG who wanted the Fairy Queen out of the picture and used the Hourglass Coven and the evil adventuring group as pawns.
I'm doing the wrapup sessions for dragon heist with my party. I modified some of the backstory to make things more morally grey, and I made Manshoon and Vajra's backstory more intertwined. I actually changed a bit of the backstory. I've had a blast with this so far.
But long story short, my party may end up overthrowing the government with Manshoon.
I am that first time DM running Rime with a bunch of first time players. It's certainly a ride so far with a lot of room to homebrew a lot of connective tissue. Of the reviews I've read / watched you Dudes are more fair? on Rime. Several posts seem to say it's awful for a first time DM, but I'm surviving, and learning :D
Appreciate all your videos - they've been great resources over the last year!
I can't wait to take the concept of Candlekeep Mysteries to a Magnus Archives-inspired campaign, with players getting sucked into the statements!
Also I recently got ToA, will be running it for my school D&D Club. It looks really fun!