Does it? Shit... I need to read the books I own more. I knew it had a lot of fluff and specialized monster stats, but not PC stats. Off I go to check! Thanks!
Keep in mind Tasha's changed a lot of racial stuff in other books officially. Specifically the racial penalties found on some of the races listed no longer exist. I am like 85% sure it is an official errata to the older books at this point.
Hobgolin is an amazing player race because their racial is more powerful the more people are watching you, because you can't tolerate to fuck up in front of people
I miss my hobgoblin artificer, I wish that campaign hadn't fallen apart
I'm slowly working on a homebrew campaign setting wherein my Hobgoblin Empire occupies roughly the same spot the Klingons do in Star Trek: A fully realized and functional global power that just so happens to really like to fight.
Its time to get some of these ideas down on paper because my long-time group is only a campaign and a half (finish CoS and then Frostmaiden) away from my turn to take the DM's chair again...and I'm planning on some new hotness and not just another module.
I've got my other group's SKT campaign to finish first (whether that ends tonight or a few months from now I don't know) and then I'm putting them through Avernus next.
Global pandemic aside, some things about the early 2020's have been great for me! :razz:
I'm slowly working on a homebrew campaign setting wherein my Hobgoblin Empire occupies roughly the same spot the Klingons do in Star Trek: A fully realized and functional global power that just so happens to really like to fight.
Its time to get some of these ideas down on paper because my long-time group is only a campaign and a half (finish CoS and then Frostmaiden) away from my turn to take the DM's chair again...and I'm planning on some new hotness and not just another module.
I've got my other group's SKT campaign to finish first (whether that ends tonight or a few months from now I don't know) and then I'm putting them through Avernus next.
Global pandemic aside, some things about the early 2020's have been great for me! :razz:
I am so excited for my players to visit my NotRome hobgoblin empire, where they see northerners as Barbarians
I've been dropping bits and pieces but so far with their rolls the party is still expecting a dark and primitive nation and not a fairly orderly but still wholly imperfect military republic (Service Guarantees Citizenship!)
The Klauth illusion only lasted two rounds, and didn't even save the cleric from being put down again. So the party was a little dissapointed thier last ditch attempt didn't work out. So I threw them a bone by having Cinderhild, the goth teenage daughter of the Duke, come out and try to make her escape in the middle of the battle, but it worked! She used the distraction of the big fight to enact her Chris Perkins written motivation to run away from home. He appearance distracted the Duchess more so than the illusory dragon did, and the Barbarian luckily started going HAM on the Duchess with a crit from a giant-slaying greataxe!! That opened a window for the party to convince CInderhild, not to run back to her room and cry, but rather to open the main gates and let them run out with her. I figured that seeing the dead bodies of her parents and uncle Tony and even that Ogre slave who had a crush on her, gave the party Advantage on an intimidation check. They fled back to Felbarr with Zalto's head, but no conch. Raised a statue and drank many a round of ale to thier fallen dwarven cleric friend (Even a Rockseeker from Phandalin gets props from Felbarr when she dies taking the head of a Fire Giant Duke!) and met a friendly new human Druid who wandered into the tavern and asked to join the party!
About a week's in-game time later, they'll take another run at Ironslag to clean it out and loot it proper. I think the "new" Boss fight will be a revised Zaltember and his Fire Giant Dreadnought bodyguards!!
After killing the vampire spawn in the abandoned house outside Vallaki, we headed up to the front gates where we found a bunch more wolf heads on pikes, so perhaps they were somewhat more successful with their wolf hunting than I had first assumed. We approached the gates, but the guards had heard the commotion of us fighting and reasoned out that we'd broken into a house. They were disinclined to allow us in the gates, so we did some smooth talking. They agreed to let us in as long as we agreed to give them our names and descriptions so that the guards could keep an eye on us.
To understand what happened next, I have to explain a bit about my Warlock. His name is Leopold Tertius Alcott of Waterdeep, a Tiefling and third son of the noble Alcott family. He came here trying to find his older sister Cecilia (who is human in appearance thanks to the fiendish blood wearing rather thin in the family), a student of magic who disappeared in a teleportation accident at her wizard college. He called in an old family favor with a Noble Djinn, originally wishing her back to life or back to the plane, but both wishes failed. Instead, the Djinn offered to grant him power and send him after her, with the caveat that, if the Djinn can't pull Cecilia free from whatever's holding her, he probably can't pull Leo either, but at least she'd have help coming up with an escape plan. As a result, Leo a) believes he may be operating without Strahd's awareness, and b) is primarily concerned with locating his sister before we start trying to figure a way out of here. I have built him as an infiltrator, with Mask of Many Faces and tons of illusion magic, and I plan to pick up a familiar with the Tome of Secrets invocation to maximize his covert surveillance capabilities.
All of this is to say that Leo has been passing as a typical nondescript Human most of the time he's here, although the party knows what he really is. He figures this place is awful enough that a devil-looking dude showing up might get a lynch mob started. But he's been Hugh Mann for a while, and he's thinking it's about time to swap out. So he agrees to the conditions (giving the guards the name Gus T.T. Showbiz), and I say that, as soon as we're out of earshot and eyeshot of the guards, Leo will duck down an alley and re-disguise himself. Sadly, the Stealth check I roll is only a 4, and a guard catches him. Long story short, we all get arrested and brought to the Burgomeister Vargus Vallikovich.
The Burgomeister confiscates our weapons and tells us to stay here until his Festival of the Blazing Sun or whatever in three days, and furthermore bans Leo from using any magic. During our discussion with him, however, we mention that we'd met with his nephew Tarric, to which the Burgomeister replies that he has no nephew. With Vargus's permission, Leo conjures an image of the person we met, and lo and behold, it's actually Strahd.
(For those paying attention at home, that means that our Bard didn't just tell some powerful stranger about a magic sword in the hag's hut, he told Strahd himself. So yeah, I'm putting money on that thing being gone when we get back there.)
So Strahd definitely knows about the party, which... I was really hoping Leo'd stay under the radar a bit longer than one day after the group arrived, but oh well. We were given suggestions to go to both the orphanage and the church, so after securing lodgings at the Blue Waterfall Inn (IIRC? I didn't write down the name) we split up. Turns out the Father Lucien of the Church of St Andral is the brother-in-law of the burgomeister, and the two of them came up with this festival together to celebrate the Morninglord. Apparently they have festivals like this almost every week, and they all sound pretty dumb. Vallikovich thinks that by forcing his people to try and be happy that he's somehow fighting the Baron's oppression, which sounds quite silly but whatever. At least the people here seem somewhat more friendly than the ones in Barovia. Lucien mentioned that their gravedigger had been feeling ill and couldn't even get out of bed this morning, and when we inquired further he informed us that the man is currently at the orphanage. Turns out our Monk (Way of Mercy) is a doctor and he was part of the group to go to the orphanage, but we were out of time so we'll get to that next session.
the party spent 2 hours helping the ranger prepare the perfect date for Valindra Shadowmantle, who agreed to come with them to the tomb (on previous shenanigans: the party befriended an undead little girl so I gave them an item that would restore one intelligent undead to life - the ranger fuckin used it on Valindra and gave her a speech about how she was the pinnacle of elf-kind and he wanted to learn from her and be with her, and rolled a nat 20 on persuasion - so how could this go any other way?)
She even told them about how she was insane for a while after her husband was lost during the spell plague, but an Aboleth repaired her psyche
My COS players really seem to like my interpretation of Immol
On the surface you have a surviving fishing town, mostly human, and this is what Strahd cares about. Whatever is underneath the surface of Barovia mostly escapes his notice, because why does he care?
Underneath the surface is a dwarven city of many thousands, a bastion against the darkness of the plane of dread. Very suspicious of letting too many Barovians in.
The city is made up of Dwarves, Elves (even dusk elves who Rahadin missed in his purge), Drow whos villages and towns were cut off from Menzoberranzan when the mists came and who have, over time, found a place in this city out of safety and largely abandoned their evil ways. Duergar living alongside shield Dwarves and somehow getting along. It's in many ways the inverse to the rest of Barovia, where their traditions have been made darker and crueler, and the people intolerant and ready to beat their neighbor to death out of abject terror for their own safety - traditionally evil races who found themselves little more than food for something much more powerful in this realm banded together and made common cause with the dwarves (over centuries, it didnt happen Day 1) to create new traditions and families out of necessity
They aren't like, super altruistic, after all none of their leaders will lift a finger against Strahd (he's a scary dude!), but nonetheless the fact that something as evil as the dark powers have led to a city where drow and dwarves and duergar can sit in a tavern and talk about their day together is something novel to the player's character's and they like it
It's going well!
(I mean it was, all but one party member was turned to stone in the last fight and the remaining one + NPCs are going to have to do some statue dragging to get the drow priestesses to unstone them, because Barovia is the kind of place you go to turn to followers of Lolth for help)
In my CoS campaign this weekend, the party decided to deal with Doru. Their plan was to have the fighter and bard distract Father Donavich while the rest of the party looked for a way down into the undercroft. It... did not go well. It ended with the fighter and bard tying up Father Donavich and leaving him in the church, screaming and crying and begging them to not hurt his son, and descending into the undercroft to fight Doru. We only got one round in before we had to call the session. They are dead set on destroying him. I cannot wait until the dinner with Strahd when he turns over his spawn that killed Ireena's dad to do with as they please, as a gesture of good will, only to discover the spawn is the fighter's friend that disappeared into Barovia a few months before them...
Party art that got commissioned of Tatyana's sister, the party bard
Most morally upright player character in the party, which is a bad situation, because she's not particularly moral. A bit of a crazy person, has a complex that Strahd picked her sister instead of her, because *she* would totally have married Strahd. Nonetheless, one of the only ones that's like "hey maybe we should save Tatyana from Strahd?". She convinced me to allow Shillelagh to be cast on the instrument of the bards that can cast it so it can be used as a club
(I've siad it before but the party was there at the start when Strahd conquered barovia, and spend hundreds of years being dead prior to campaign start after the night of the wedding)
edit: I've put in a running joke that Strahd never remembers her name, in the Tome of Strahd he referred to her as 3 different names in just a few paragraphs, praising her for sacrificing her life to save the noble children of Barovia the night of the coup/night of the wedding.
How she saved the noble children: she got into a fight with the kids at the wedding party and ate all of the desserts so they didn't get any. The desserts were poisoned.
So my SKT game recently lost its cleric, and the player rolled up a Land (Desert) Druid replacement. Apparently that's the class that relies the least on die rolling? My friend has had very consistent BAD luck on his rolls. So much so that he did internet research on what class to play to leave your fate upto the dice the least.
Anyhow... I'd like to give him 3 magic items to start out with. His request list was as follows:
1) Some kind of thing I can activate to avoid damage. I get blur as a desert druid by default, but it'd be cool have an option for avoidance that doesn't require a spellcast. I'm going to be lacking for non-spell combat actions.
2) Something to mitigate the occasional bad roll. Not sure what you could give that could be fair.
3) Some kind of charmed snake companion could be cool. Jafar's staff type thing?
#3 was easy.... Staff of the Adder.
Any ideas for #1 or #2? Aside from heavy, adamantine armor I'm stumped. Please and thank you for your suggestions.
Any ideas for #1 or #2? Aside from heavy, adamantine armor I'm stumped. Please and thank you for your suggestions.
1) Bracelet of Shield- Three Charges. As a reaction, you may spend a charge to cast Shield with no components required. Regains 1d3 charges at dawn. Edit: I'd probably make this require attunement too.
2) Chaos Stone: Ten Charges, You may spend a charge to reroll one attack, save, or ability check. Once all ten charges are used, the stone loses all traces of magic and becomes a diamond worth 100gp. (And I would buy the player a fancy/weird d10 to have as a token/prop.)
nah the class that says "fuck dice rolls" is the Divination Wizard
yeah I want this thing to fail its save so it does
My wife plays a divination wizard. Last long rest she got a 20 and a 1. She gave the 20 to our paladin to crit with a smite and saved the 1 for a disintegrate.
I abuse the shit out my divination rolls. Its such a fun class to play.
A couple sessions back I auto passed talking my way into the close ally of a man we were hired to sabotage his run for the Doge of the city. Then had my target autofail the suggestion save so she spent the rest of day writing letters bad mouthing her closest ally and telling his secrets in public.
I am running a ToA game for some peeps from my wow guild, I was wondering if there are any rough edges in the game or if, in general, there's stuff I should know about. You know, the type of thing where after finishing it you go "man I wish I had known this earlier"!
thanks a bunch.
make the timer longer than 2 weeks, that's my best advice for TOA, theres lots of stuff to see
If your players don't like playing hardcore, let the Soul monger take some time to steal the soul - so if they're within the Revivify window they can still save the person
Fairly early on (around level 5ish) start letting magical survival items trivialize the hexcrawl -"But that's the point!" - in my experience 5e does not a good survival hexcrawl experience make
PREROLL random encounters! Some of them suck, some of them will TPK your party, some of them are wonderful!
make the timer longer than 2 weeks, that's my best advice for TOA, theres lots of stuff to see
If your players don't like playing hardcore, let the Soul monger take some time to steal the soul - so if they're within the Revivify window they can still save the person
Fairly early on (around level 5ish) start letting magical survival items trivialize the hexcrawl -"But that's the point!" - in my experience 5e does not a good survival hexcrawl experience make
PREROLL random encounters! Some of them suck, some of them will TPK your party, some of them are wonderful!
Agreed on most of these points. Don't let the Death Curse timeline weigh down your story. Chult is big and full of awesome. Don't rush past it!
Use the travel constraints of jungle humping more to set the scene rather than as a mechanical obstacle for the players to tackle.
Don't get bogged down with the random encounters. Pick and choose the ones you find interesting and use them to drive the story of your jungle humping sessions. I had fun pairing up encounters but not letting woefully underpowered PCs fight them. As in they spotted a T-Rex moving though the jungle at the edge of the river while the party was in a canoe, but instead of attacking the PCs they got front row seats to an awesome T-Rex vs. Triceratops battle.
Try and sprinkle in Yuan Ti info and/or knowledge of Ras Nsi early and every so often. I found the drama of Omu landed better if there was a good amount of foreshadowing beforehand.
However, I say lean into the brutality of the adventure! Tell your players to have multiple PCs ready to go when needed and have a good laugh together when one of them bites it. I really enjoyed having a four armed gorilla pulping the KO'd monk in Kong-esque fit of rage when in any other game I'd have that ape move on to another threat.
The Dungeon itself is mean. The traps are not overly difficult to surpass or solve.... but some of them are just mean. The test-dungeon trap comes to mind immediately. That one I nixed entirely and even told the group about. It was awesome, but just WAY to mean.
my party found out a lot about the yuan-ti immediately because Salida stayed over at their manor, and the fucking bard when snooping while she was taking a bath including getting a good look at her and seeing the scales (I really hope to this day she wasn't just meta-gaming, but she was playing a horny bard so, eh)
after an exchange of information in a threatening interrogation they realized they weren't exactly on opposite sides in this, since I had Salida be loyal to Ras-Nsi but HATE Fenthaza, had Salida contact Ras-Nsi and arrange an alliance
but yeah, I was doing full survivalist, I had spreadsheets about supplies on each party member and their dinosaur, but just ended up axing all of it, fuckkk that, it wasn't fun because it ate up literally about 30% of the session time
I set the Death Curse at a year so they could relax in nyanzaru and explore the place
I did the rule on Revivify improptu when a player died by a cloud of poison gas and another player was like "if they haven't been dead that long is their body *really* dead? like, if their heart's just been stopped for a minute..." and I'm like, sure, fine, Revivify is just the magical equivilent of modern medicine resuscitating someone. Sure.
thats going to depend how much your table tolerates permanent player character death
I'm currently DMing a group of new players through Dragon of Icespire Peak (from the Essentials Kit). Any suggestions for which adventure is a good follow-up? They should end at 6th level.
When I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge:
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
Yikes I had a long Curse of Strahd session, the party killed The Hags finally, I was using a Night Hag Elder statblock from Monster Manual Expanded on DMsguild (with some added legendary actions) for the ruler of the night hags, gave her a 7th and 8th level spell slot
party plan:
1. use potion of youth previously stolen from night hags on youngest party member, turning her into a child
2. have rogue, who the hags are cool with, sell her to the hags to split them up
3. wizard curled up inside girl sorcerer's bag of holding, when the hag starts taking her stuff and moving it somewhere else, wizard hops out, bag of holding is also BESTOW CURSED to activated when the hag touches it
4. Stealth private sanctum deployed by bard on invisible recon mission
5. Warlock up on flying carpet with Arabelle and two borrowed drow elite warriors (mercenaries hired in Immol). Arabelle has featherfall ready to go and Warlock eldritch spear for AC-130 gunship support
go time!:
Hag resists curse, everyone hops into action at the wrong time, but one hag is separated trying to deposit the "little girl" in the cage upstairs, gets Telekinesis'd out the window
Chain lightning rips across the party, Rogue does the splits and avoids it as per usual
Arabelle featherfall drop fist bumps Rogue, applying Haste and using a N A T 2 0 portent dice to turn crossbow sneak attack into a railgun shot
Sorceress downed, picked off to death by magic missile legendary action
In one round a counterspell pinball between all 3 hags, wizard, bard, and arabelle to stop a Big Spell from mama Morgantha, failure! reversing gravity and sending everyone up into the air
Bard, standing on the ceiling of the first floor of the tower with Ophelia adjacent turns into a T-Rex with polymorph, gravity still reversed, and destroys the entire tower
Reverse gravity broken, featherfall catching the T-rex and Ophelia smashing into the rubble and dying, the party suffers the brunt of the fall damage (as morgantha planned)
Arabelle taken out by a line of lightning from Bella and bisected with a legendary action claws attack from Morgantha
Warlock hit by a Ground to Warlock AA attack from Morgantha with an 8th level Scorching Ray (the party is 10th level, I dont break the hag coven the instant one of them dies, they get a few rounds of juice)
Hags give villain speech and realize they can't ethereal plane away, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck
Bella dusted by Disintegrate scroll from Wizard
Bard turned to stone by Morgantha
Drow angrily relegated to running around feeding people healing potions off their belt entire battle
Rogue FUCKS Morgantha up
Bardstatue pushed off cliff and shattered
Badly wounded but still living warlock Eldritch Smites Morgantha out of existence
Sorceress brought back with Revivify scroll by Rogue (he's a third caster cleric rogue homebrew, so its on his spell list)
Sorceress (divine soul) stitches Arabelle back together and Revivifies her
Party spends the rest of the day arts & crafts project putting Bard back together before using some much earlier acquired basilisk oil to de-stone her, missing several pieces, bard immediately starts dying from internal bleeding - massive amount of healing magic fixed her
Tiny Hut prepared adjacent to rubble
Sign hammered up:
"Attention Citizens of Barovia:
Dream Pastries are no longer available"
Yikes I had a long Curse of Strahd session, the party killed The Hags finally, I was using a Night Hag Elder statblock from Monster Manual Expanded on DMsguild (with some added legendary actions) for the ruler of the night hags, gave her a 7th and 8th level spell slot
party plan:
1. use potion of youth previously stolen from night hags on youngest party member, turning her into a child
2. have rogue, who the hags are cool with, sell her to the hags to split them up
3. wizard curled up inside girl sorcerer's bag of holding, when the hag starts taking her stuff and moving it somewhere else, wizard hops out, bag of holding is also BESTOW CURSED to activated when the hag touches it
4. Stealth private sanctum deployed by bard on invisible recon mission
5. Warlock up on flying carpet with Arabelle and two borrowed drow elite warriors (mercenaries hired in Immol). Arabelle has featherfall ready to go and Warlock eldritch spear for AC-130 gunship support
go time!:
Hag resists curse, everyone hops into action at the wrong time, but one hag is separated trying to deposit the "little girl" in the cage upstairs, gets Telekinesis'd out the window
Chain lightning rips across the party, Rogue does the splits and avoids it as per usual
Arabelle featherfall drop fist bumps Rogue, applying Haste and using a N A T 2 0 portent dice to turn crossbow sneak attack into a railgun shot
Sorceress downed, picked off to death by magic missile legendary action
In one round a counterspell pinball between all 3 hags, wizard, bard, and arabelle to stop a Big Spell from mama Morgantha, failure! reversing gravity and sending everyone up into the air
Bard, standing on the ceiling of the first floor of the tower with Ophelia adjacent turns into a T-Rex with polymorph, gravity still reversed, and destroys the entire tower
Reverse gravity broken, featherfall catching the T-rex and Ophelia smashing into the rubble and dying, the party suffers the brunt of the fall damage (as morgantha planned)
Arabelle taken out by a line of lightning from Bella and bisected with a legendary action claws attack from Morgantha
Warlock hit by a Ground to Warlock AA attack from Morgantha with an 8th level Scorching Ray (the party is 10th level, I dont break the hag coven the instant one of them dies, they get a few rounds of juice)
Hags give villain speech and realize they can't ethereal plane away, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck
Bella dusted by Disintegrate scroll from Wizard
Bard turned to stone by Morgantha
Drow angrily relegated to running around feeding people healing potions off their belt entire battle
Rogue FUCKS Morgantha up
Bardstatue pushed off cliff and shattered
Badly wounded but still living warlock Eldritch Smites Morgantha out of existence
Sorceress brought back with Revivify scroll by Rogue (he's a third caster cleric rogue homebrew, so its on his spell list)
Sorceress (divine soul) stitches Arabelle back together and Revivifies her
Party spends the rest of the day arts & crafts project putting Bard back together before using some much earlier acquired basilisk oil to de-stone her, missing several pieces, bard immediately starts dying from internal bleeding - massive amount of healing magic fixed her
Tiny Hut prepared adjacent to rubble
Sign hammered up:
"Attention Citizens of Barovia:
Dream Pastries are no longer available"
So, I'm assuming this is your party returning to the hags to finally finish them off? How did the party deal with/react to them when they first encountered the windmill?
Yikes I had a long Curse of Strahd session, the party killed The Hags finally, I was using a Night Hag Elder statblock from Monster Manual Expanded on DMsguild (with some added legendary actions) for the ruler of the night hags, gave her a 7th and 8th level spell slot
party plan:
1. use potion of youth previously stolen from night hags on youngest party member, turning her into a child
2. have rogue, who the hags are cool with, sell her to the hags to split them up
3. wizard curled up inside girl sorcerer's bag of holding, when the hag starts taking her stuff and moving it somewhere else, wizard hops out, bag of holding is also BESTOW CURSED to activated when the hag touches it
4. Stealth private sanctum deployed by bard on invisible recon mission
5. Warlock up on flying carpet with Arabelle and two borrowed drow elite warriors (mercenaries hired in Immol). Arabelle has featherfall ready to go and Warlock eldritch spear for AC-130 gunship support
go time!:
Hag resists curse, everyone hops into action at the wrong time, but one hag is separated trying to deposit the "little girl" in the cage upstairs, gets Telekinesis'd out the window
Chain lightning rips across the party, Rogue does the splits and avoids it as per usual
Arabelle featherfall drop fist bumps Rogue, applying Haste and using a N A T 2 0 portent dice to turn crossbow sneak attack into a railgun shot
Sorceress downed, picked off to death by magic missile legendary action
In one round a counterspell pinball between all 3 hags, wizard, bard, and arabelle to stop a Big Spell from mama Morgantha, failure! reversing gravity and sending everyone up into the air
Bard, standing on the ceiling of the first floor of the tower with Ophelia adjacent turns into a T-Rex with polymorph, gravity still reversed, and destroys the entire tower
Reverse gravity broken, featherfall catching the T-rex and Ophelia smashing into the rubble and dying, the party suffers the brunt of the fall damage (as morgantha planned)
Arabelle taken out by a line of lightning from Bella and bisected with a legendary action claws attack from Morgantha
Warlock hit by a Ground to Warlock AA attack from Morgantha with an 8th level Scorching Ray (the party is 10th level, I dont break the hag coven the instant one of them dies, they get a few rounds of juice)
Hags give villain speech and realize they can't ethereal plane away, ahhhhhhhhhhhhh fuck
Bella dusted by Disintegrate scroll from Wizard
Bard turned to stone by Morgantha
Drow angrily relegated to running around feeding people healing potions off their belt entire battle
Rogue FUCKS Morgantha up
Bardstatue pushed off cliff and shattered
Badly wounded but still living warlock Eldritch Smites Morgantha out of existence
Sorceress brought back with Revivify scroll by Rogue (he's a third caster cleric rogue homebrew, so its on his spell list)
Sorceress (divine soul) stitches Arabelle back together and Revivifies her
Party spends the rest of the day arts & crafts project putting Bard back together before using some much earlier acquired basilisk oil to de-stone her, missing several pieces, bard immediately starts dying from internal bleeding - massive amount of healing magic fixed her
Tiny Hut prepared adjacent to rubble
Sign hammered up:
"Attention Citizens of Barovia:
Dream Pastries are no longer available"
So, I'm assuming this is your party returning to the hags to finally finish them off? How did the party deal with/react to them when they first encountered the windmill?
They picked a fight, got clobbered soundly, put in cages, and had to watch the hags butcher the boy, fed his remains (as dream pastries), and the hags used bits of him to repair the wizard's body since they didn't want to actually kill any of the party
One of them died and ended up stuck inside of the surviving child (who was soulless), this was the Bard (Tatyana's sister), so they had to drag her ravaged body with them all for quite a few sessions until they met the abbot, who raised her (they got a Repose at the church of st. andral). Yay abbot good guy, the abbot took the now free soulless teenage girl away somewhere, nothing fishy there...
They ended up using a one time Sending item they had to tell strahd about Tatyana's injuries, blamed on on the hags, Strahd caught them what looked like red handed hurting his beloved so he fucked them up and they had to flee to the ethereal while strahd destroyed the windmill, but they've since rebuilt it (this was when Strahd apologized for how uncivilized Barovia has become during his torpor, and extended a dinner invitation)
Edit: I had to check my notes I remembered some details wrong
So the way I see it the start of ToA is get them to the island, have them talk with a merchant prince or two, hire a guide and use said guide or one of the side quest NPCs to breadcrumb them towards a location in the jungle.
1) HOW though? they land in PN with little gold. canoes are 50g a go, guides 150g, bug spray and rain catchers also cost a bit .. I suppose they could sell their map to Jobal but then how do they navigate the jungle?!
2) Is there any point into nudging them towards Fort Bellurian? It feels like its only something for people with an affinity for BG or the FF, otherwise they seem antagonistic towards PN.
Yes, getting kitted out for a proper Chultan jungle hump is a little expensive. Is your party 1st level? Maybe have them do a couple of local jobs in PN to earn some scratch? Maybe the merchant prince had a specific job for them to do right at the hop to put some of thise resouces into thier hands for them? Win big at the dinosaur races? Have the party sign on to a larger expedition already heading into the jungle...eventually every other chump gets eaten by dinosaurs, leaving the party flush with a few canoes, a bunch of water and bug juice thats theirs to keep?
A couple of the guides can be negotiated with, IIRC, especially the ones who have their own motivations.
Fort Belurian is home base for the would-be colonizers of Chult, so you are not wrong there. They are jerks. But they could also serve as a source of early adventures. Escorting merchants back and forth overland, for example?
This combines two sessions because we did a lot of faffing about and not much else. At the orphanage, the doctor and the remaining half of the party that didn't go to the church arrive, meet Claudia the matron, and tend to any children's' wounds. They are told that Millovoj the gravedigger is badly ill and needs medical attention. The Monk and Cleric make a quick examination, try a Lesser Restoration, and discern that this looks like a curse more than a typical disease. The Cleric thinks Protection from Good and Evil might help, but doesn't have it prepped. The other half of the party shows up shortly thereafter and we all learn that basically everyone's been having nightmares and some of the children have mysterious bruises and injuries that aren't healing like they should. We examine the wounded children but are unable to discern a cause, though we do discover that the child's bedpost has a small rune carved on it, that my Warlock is able to translate to "dark dreams." Sure enough, a closer examination reveals this rune is on just about every bedpost in the orphanage, but fortunately it's easy enough to scratch them out which seems to break the magic. We also learned that a boy from the orphanage, Cedrik, fell out of a window and died recently, and three of his friends ran away from the orphanage shortly thereafter. Cedrik had been fighting with the new kid, Felix, who has been acting strange ever since he arrived, Claudia presumes because he witnessed his parent's rather gruesome murder. We question him in the attic and he's clearly disturbed, but we're unable to glean anything further from him. Despite spending most of his time in the attic since arriving, a thorough search therein revealed nothing out of the ordinary, so even though we suspect he's the one who carved the runes on the bedposts, he doesn't appear to be summoning demons in circles or anything up there. He does mention a necklace that Cedrik took from him, and when we question Claudia she brings it out, saying she found it on Cedrik's body. The Paladin uses Detect Magic and the necklace is glowing with necromantic magic, so we tell her it's probably best if she doesn't keep it around and let us handle it, which she does.
We decide to return tomorrow after the Cleric resets her spells to give it another shot, but in the meantime head back to the church graveyard to see if we might be able to track down the source. We have to go through the church and get permission from the father, but he doesn't seem to mind, and he's about to start his vigil with the townsfolk anyway. We explore the graveyard a bit, find a fresh grave where Cedrik is buried and not much else. On our way back, however, we are swarmed by crows. In the church, the father is wrapping up his vigil but nobody's leaving. We learn why a minute later, as we start hearing the thud of bats hitting the glass windows and screeching, as though they're trying to break in, but Lucien reassures us that they're protected by the bones of St Andral which are beneath the altar, and this is consecrated ground so nothing evil can get in. The Paladin uses his Divine Sense but does not find that this church is in any way consecrated, though he declines to mention this to anyone. The bats stop their attack after a little while, but everyone there seems to be staying the night. As we ready to leave, we meet one more woman, who is praying for the Baron to forgive her son who is currently being punished in the stocks. The Paladin decides to stay in the church for the evening, and the rest of us head out to the town square to see this fellow. We arrive there, but are spotted by guards and told we should be getting indoors. The Cleric has a brief word with one of the folks in the stocks before getting scared off by a creepy dude with some kinda demon arm thing.
We get back to the inn, and in discussion with the innkeeper, we learn Millovoj had hired a pair of men to help him track down the 3 boys who had fled the orphanage. They followed the tracks out of town until they crossed with wolf tracks, but pursued no further. My Warlock offered to bankroll them to assist us in tracking the boys down, so that will presumably be our first priority next session after we cast a few spells in the orphanage to see if we can't cure Millovoj.
So the way I see it the start of ToA is get them to the island, have them talk with a merchant prince or two, hire a guide and use said guide or one of the side quest NPCs to breadcrumb them towards a location in the jungle.
1) HOW though? they land in PN with little gold. canoes are 50g a go, guides 150g, bug spray and rain catchers also cost a bit .. I suppose they could sell their map to Jobal but then how do they navigate the jungle?!
2) Is there any point into nudging them towards Fort Bellurian? It feels like its only something for people with an affinity for BG or the FF, otherwise they seem antagonistic towards PN.
use some of the sidequests in Nyanzaru first, maybe have Salida offer to guide them for free (since she has an ulterior motive), maybe have an unassuming elf wizard lady that dresses like a college student with no time to wash her hair in a red robe offer* them money on the condition that they share what they find?
IIRC there's some fun sidequests in Nyanzaru that can easily have monetary reward
*The book says Valindra is going to the trouble to turn herself into an apparently living elf but does nothing about her unwashed lich smell, I straight up made this a result of her not having a sense of smell and her minions being too scared to tell her she stinks, so when the party told her she smelled bad she murdered her wizard attendant for not having told her
So the way I see it the start of ToA is get them to the island, have them talk with a merchant prince or two, hire a guide and use said guide or one of the side quest NPCs to breadcrumb them towards a location in the jungle.
1) HOW though? they land in PN with little gold. canoes are 50g a go, guides 150g, bug spray and rain catchers also cost a bit .. I suppose they could sell their map to Jobal but then how do they navigate the jungle?!
2) Is there any point into nudging them towards Fort Bellurian? It feels like its only something for people with an affinity for BG or the FF, otherwise they seem antagonistic towards PN.
Instead of teleporting the party there i had whatsherface rent them a boat and she told them she'll meet them in PN when she comes over on a later boat after she settles her affairs. Then as they got close to Chult they're boat was wrecked in the Bay by the big turtle. They swam to shore while sharks are the crew.
This got me as DM two things:
1) intro to the cool dragon turtle that can otherwise be completely missed if the party doesn't partake in the side quest about it. And also a reason to take said quest on one they have some levels under their belt.
2) a few days of travel in the jungle with no special jungle supplies during which i could introduce them to things like disease and thirst knowing that they are close enough to PN that they'll still make it hit far enough away to be stung enough by those things that they'll want to supply better before going on jungle again. They also got to level 2 this way, and found a random wedding ring on a corpse for a bit if extra funds when they sold it in PN.
In PN they kind of faffed around a bit doing a couple of side quests before paying for a divination of the location of the robot (they talked to the merchant prince that's friend to starting adventure lady patron) and that's what sets then out into the jungle. They also hire one of the dwarf guides who will work for free if they promise to help him free Hrakkmar. What is it? Who cares, this guy is free. They also bump into the half orc priest lady who wants wants an escort to a camp and they figure it's on the way to the general area where they think the robot is, so they tell she she can come with them. At this point they had enough pooled hold for a canoe, a bunch of insect repelent, a rain catcher, and.. thats it. I dinged them to level 3 as they left.
Many sessions later and they're actually in Hrakkmar now, having never returned to PN since they left.
Everything is just so grim and dour and nothing we seem to do makes the Realm a better place. There are no shenanigans to be had. No silliness. When we save a town from some threat or kill an evil hag terrorizing the land its always, "Yeah, so? Strahd is still there."
Gothic Horror just is not my jam. The DM and one other love it, the other two abide it more readily that I do and we already lost our 6th group member a few weeks ago when he got fed up with the same things I am frustrated with.
I'm the one who keeps trying to interject some *real talk* about it, as we like to advocate here.... and today it blew up in my face.
Its like half an hour fresh.... so I'm feeling pretty shitty about it right now since this was the group that I've been gaming with for 20 years. No idea whats going to happen. Not guilty, mind you, just shitty. I wasn't having fun in this campaign and explaining why (admittedly for the 7th time) and the other player who loves the setting was tired of my bullshit and quit the group chat. He's got one of those prickly, outwardly aggressive personalities that is 98% bluster and I am not in the mood to placate or mollify or let it blow over. So I wished everyone well and also quit the group chat. (Our game related chat. We have another general talk chat too.)
Posts
Cool now I can play a none gimped tiny dragon person. I mean the PF 2e Kobold is pretty good.
Volo's had it officially for all 3.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volo's_Guide_to_Monsters
Does it? Shit... I need to read the books I own more. I knew it had a lot of fluff and specialized monster stats, but not PC stats. Off I go to check! Thanks!
Edit: It does!!
I miss my hobgoblin artificer, I wish that campaign hadn't fallen apart
Draconic Resistance.You have resistance to the damage type associated with your GemAncestry.
Plus Bear Barbarian
Its time to get some of these ideas down on paper because my long-time group is only a campaign and a half (finish CoS and then Frostmaiden) away from my turn to take the DM's chair again...and I'm planning on some new hotness and not just another module.
I've got my other group's SKT campaign to finish first (whether that ends tonight or a few months from now I don't know) and then I'm putting them through Avernus next.
Global pandemic aside, some things about the early 2020's have been great for me! :razz:
I am so excited for my players to visit my NotRome hobgoblin empire, where they see northerners as Barbarians
I've been dropping bits and pieces but so far with their rolls the party is still expecting a dark and primitive nation and not a fairly orderly but still wholly imperfect military republic (Service Guarantees Citizenship!)
The Klauth illusion only lasted two rounds, and didn't even save the cleric from being put down again. So the party was a little dissapointed thier last ditch attempt didn't work out. So I threw them a bone by having Cinderhild, the goth teenage daughter of the Duke, come out and try to make her escape in the middle of the battle, but it worked! She used the distraction of the big fight to enact her Chris Perkins written motivation to run away from home. He appearance distracted the Duchess more so than the illusory dragon did, and the Barbarian luckily started going HAM on the Duchess with a crit from a giant-slaying greataxe!! That opened a window for the party to convince CInderhild, not to run back to her room and cry, but rather to open the main gates and let them run out with her. I figured that seeing the dead bodies of her parents and uncle Tony and even that Ogre slave who had a crush on her, gave the party Advantage on an intimidation check. They fled back to Felbarr with Zalto's head, but no conch. Raised a statue and drank many a round of ale to thier fallen dwarven cleric friend (Even a Rockseeker from Phandalin gets props from Felbarr when she dies taking the head of a Fire Giant Duke!) and met a friendly new human Druid who wandered into the tavern and asked to join the party!
About a week's in-game time later, they'll take another run at Ironslag to clean it out and loot it proper. I think the "new" Boss fight will be a revised Zaltember and his Fire Giant Dreadnought bodyguards!!
I have 2 hours to get the gears of hate into Foundry, gogogo
To understand what happened next, I have to explain a bit about my Warlock. His name is Leopold Tertius Alcott of Waterdeep, a Tiefling and third son of the noble Alcott family. He came here trying to find his older sister Cecilia (who is human in appearance thanks to the fiendish blood wearing rather thin in the family), a student of magic who disappeared in a teleportation accident at her wizard college. He called in an old family favor with a Noble Djinn, originally wishing her back to life or back to the plane, but both wishes failed. Instead, the Djinn offered to grant him power and send him after her, with the caveat that, if the Djinn can't pull Cecilia free from whatever's holding her, he probably can't pull Leo either, but at least she'd have help coming up with an escape plan. As a result, Leo a) believes he may be operating without Strahd's awareness, and b) is primarily concerned with locating his sister before we start trying to figure a way out of here. I have built him as an infiltrator, with Mask of Many Faces and tons of illusion magic, and I plan to pick up a familiar with the Tome of Secrets invocation to maximize his covert surveillance capabilities.
All of this is to say that Leo has been passing as a typical nondescript Human most of the time he's here, although the party knows what he really is. He figures this place is awful enough that a devil-looking dude showing up might get a lynch mob started. But he's been Hugh Mann for a while, and he's thinking it's about time to swap out. So he agrees to the conditions (giving the guards the name Gus T.T. Showbiz), and I say that, as soon as we're out of earshot and eyeshot of the guards, Leo will duck down an alley and re-disguise himself. Sadly, the Stealth check I roll is only a 4, and a guard catches him. Long story short, we all get arrested and brought to the Burgomeister Vargus Vallikovich.
The Burgomeister confiscates our weapons and tells us to stay here until his Festival of the Blazing Sun or whatever in three days, and furthermore bans Leo from using any magic. During our discussion with him, however, we mention that we'd met with his nephew Tarric, to which the Burgomeister replies that he has no nephew. With Vargus's permission, Leo conjures an image of the person we met, and lo and behold, it's actually Strahd.
(For those paying attention at home, that means that our Bard didn't just tell some powerful stranger about a magic sword in the hag's hut, he told Strahd himself. So yeah, I'm putting money on that thing being gone when we get back there.)
So Strahd definitely knows about the party, which... I was really hoping Leo'd stay under the radar a bit longer than one day after the group arrived, but oh well. We were given suggestions to go to both the orphanage and the church, so after securing lodgings at the Blue Waterfall Inn (IIRC? I didn't write down the name) we split up. Turns out the Father Lucien of the Church of St Andral is the brother-in-law of the burgomeister, and the two of them came up with this festival together to celebrate the Morninglord. Apparently they have festivals like this almost every week, and they all sound pretty dumb. Vallikovich thinks that by forcing his people to try and be happy that he's somehow fighting the Baron's oppression, which sounds quite silly but whatever. At least the people here seem somewhat more friendly than the ones in Barovia. Lucien mentioned that their gravedigger had been feeling ill and couldn't even get out of bed this morning, and when we inquired further he informed us that the man is currently at the orphanage. Turns out our Monk (Way of Mercy) is a doctor and he was part of the group to go to the orphanage, but we were out of time so we'll get to that next session.
the party spent 2 hours helping the ranger prepare the perfect date for Valindra Shadowmantle, who agreed to come with them to the tomb (on previous shenanigans: the party befriended an undead little girl so I gave them an item that would restore one intelligent undead to life - the ranger fuckin used it on Valindra and gave her a speech about how she was the pinnacle of elf-kind and he wanted to learn from her and be with her, and rolled a nat 20 on persuasion - so how could this go any other way?)
She even told them about how she was insane for a while after her husband was lost during the spell plague, but an Aboleth repaired her psyche
boy it would sure be a shame
if there was a hostile aboleth in the dungeon
you know
who could
undo that
On the surface you have a surviving fishing town, mostly human, and this is what Strahd cares about. Whatever is underneath the surface of Barovia mostly escapes his notice, because why does he care?
Underneath the surface is a dwarven city of many thousands, a bastion against the darkness of the plane of dread. Very suspicious of letting too many Barovians in.
The city is made up of Dwarves, Elves (even dusk elves who Rahadin missed in his purge), Drow whos villages and towns were cut off from Menzoberranzan when the mists came and who have, over time, found a place in this city out of safety and largely abandoned their evil ways. Duergar living alongside shield Dwarves and somehow getting along. It's in many ways the inverse to the rest of Barovia, where their traditions have been made darker and crueler, and the people intolerant and ready to beat their neighbor to death out of abject terror for their own safety - traditionally evil races who found themselves little more than food for something much more powerful in this realm banded together and made common cause with the dwarves (over centuries, it didnt happen Day 1) to create new traditions and families out of necessity
They aren't like, super altruistic, after all none of their leaders will lift a finger against Strahd (he's a scary dude!), but nonetheless the fact that something as evil as the dark powers have led to a city where drow and dwarves and duergar can sit in a tavern and talk about their day together is something novel to the player's character's and they like it
It's going well!
(I mean it was, all but one party member was turned to stone in the last fight and the remaining one + NPCs are going to have to do some statue dragging to get the drow priestesses to unstone them, because Barovia is the kind of place you go to turn to followers of Lolth for help)
Most morally upright player character in the party, which is a bad situation, because she's not particularly moral. A bit of a crazy person, has a complex that Strahd picked her sister instead of her, because *she* would totally have married Strahd. Nonetheless, one of the only ones that's like "hey maybe we should save Tatyana from Strahd?". She convinced me to allow Shillelagh to be cast on the instrument of the bards that can cast it so it can be used as a club
(I've siad it before but the party was there at the start when Strahd conquered barovia, and spend hundreds of years being dead prior to campaign start after the night of the wedding)
edit: I've put in a running joke that Strahd never remembers her name, in the Tome of Strahd he referred to her as 3 different names in just a few paragraphs, praising her for sacrificing her life to save the noble children of Barovia the night of the coup/night of the wedding.
How she saved the noble children: she got into a fight with the kids at the wedding party and ate all of the desserts so they didn't get any. The desserts were poisoned.
Anyhow... I'd like to give him 3 magic items to start out with. His request list was as follows:
#3 was easy.... Staff of the Adder.
Any ideas for #1 or #2? Aside from heavy, adamantine armor I'm stumped. Please and thank you for your suggestions.
yeah I want this thing to fail its save so it does
1) Bracelet of Shield- Three Charges. As a reaction, you may spend a charge to cast Shield with no components required. Regains 1d3 charges at dawn. Edit: I'd probably make this require attunement too.
2) Chaos Stone: Ten Charges, You may spend a charge to reroll one attack, save, or ability check. Once all ten charges are used, the stone loses all traces of magic and becomes a diamond worth 100gp. (And I would buy the player a fancy/weird d10 to have as a token/prop.)
Edit: Actually.... the more I think about it, I really like something that pops up a Shield spell. Thanks!
you could make it have 3 charges and be uncommon or something
My wife plays a divination wizard. Last long rest she got a 20 and a 1. She gave the 20 to our paladin to crit with a smite and saved the 1 for a disintegrate.
A couple sessions back I auto passed talking my way into the close ally of a man we were hired to sabotage his run for the Doge of the city. Then had my target autofail the suggestion save so she spent the rest of day writing letters bad mouthing her closest ally and telling his secrets in public.
It was excellent.
I am running a ToA game for some peeps from my wow guild, I was wondering if there are any rough edges in the game or if, in general, there's stuff I should know about. You know, the type of thing where after finishing it you go "man I wish I had known this earlier"!
thanks a bunch.
If your players don't like playing hardcore, let the Soul monger take some time to steal the soul - so if they're within the Revivify window they can still save the person
Fairly early on (around level 5ish) start letting magical survival items trivialize the hexcrawl -"But that's the point!" - in my experience 5e does not a good survival hexcrawl experience make
PREROLL random encounters! Some of them suck, some of them will TPK your party, some of them are wonderful!
Agreed on most of these points. Don't let the Death Curse timeline weigh down your story. Chult is big and full of awesome. Don't rush past it!
Use the travel constraints of jungle humping more to set the scene rather than as a mechanical obstacle for the players to tackle.
Don't get bogged down with the random encounters. Pick and choose the ones you find interesting and use them to drive the story of your jungle humping sessions. I had fun pairing up encounters but not letting woefully underpowered PCs fight them. As in they spotted a T-Rex moving though the jungle at the edge of the river while the party was in a canoe, but instead of attacking the PCs they got front row seats to an awesome T-Rex vs. Triceratops battle.
Try and sprinkle in Yuan Ti info and/or knowledge of Ras Nsi early and every so often. I found the drama of Omu landed better if there was a good amount of foreshadowing beforehand.
However, I say lean into the brutality of the adventure! Tell your players to have multiple PCs ready to go when needed and have a good laugh together when one of them bites it. I really enjoyed having a four armed gorilla pulping the KO'd monk in Kong-esque fit of rage when in any other game I'd have that ape move on to another threat.
The Dungeon itself is mean. The traps are not overly difficult to surpass or solve.... but some of them are just mean. The test-dungeon trap comes to mind immediately. That one I nixed entirely and even told the group about. It was awesome, but just WAY to mean.
I loved ToA. Enjoy!!
after an exchange of information in a threatening interrogation they realized they weren't exactly on opposite sides in this, since I had Salida be loyal to Ras-Nsi but HATE Fenthaza, had Salida contact Ras-Nsi and arrange an alliance
but yeah, I was doing full survivalist, I had spreadsheets about supplies on each party member and their dinosaur, but just ended up axing all of it, fuckkk that, it wasn't fun because it ate up literally about 30% of the session time
I set the Death Curse at a year so they could relax in nyanzaru and explore the place
I did the rule on Revivify improptu when a player died by a cloud of poison gas and another player was like "if they haven't been dead that long is their body *really* dead? like, if their heart's just been stopped for a minute..." and I'm like, sure, fine, Revivify is just the magical equivilent of modern medicine resuscitating someone. Sure.
thats going to depend how much your table tolerates permanent player character death
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
party plan:
1. use potion of youth previously stolen from night hags on youngest party member, turning her into a child
2. have rogue, who the hags are cool with, sell her to the hags to split them up
3. wizard curled up inside girl sorcerer's bag of holding, when the hag starts taking her stuff and moving it somewhere else, wizard hops out, bag of holding is also BESTOW CURSED to activated when the hag touches it
4. Stealth private sanctum deployed by bard on invisible recon mission
5. Warlock up on flying carpet with Arabelle and two borrowed drow elite warriors (mercenaries hired in Immol). Arabelle has featherfall ready to go and Warlock eldritch spear for AC-130 gunship support
go time!:
Sorceress brought back with Revivify scroll by Rogue (he's a third caster cleric rogue homebrew, so its on his spell list)
Sorceress (divine soul) stitches Arabelle back together and Revivifies her
Party spends the rest of the day arts & crafts project putting Bard back together before using some much earlier acquired basilisk oil to de-stone her, missing several pieces, bard immediately starts dying from internal bleeding - massive amount of healing magic fixed her
Tiny Hut prepared adjacent to rubble
Sign hammered up:
"Attention Citizens of Barovia:
Dream Pastries are no longer available"
So, I'm assuming this is your party returning to the hags to finally finish them off? How did the party deal with/react to them when they first encountered the windmill?
They picked a fight, got clobbered soundly, put in cages, and had to watch the hags butcher the boy, fed his remains (as dream pastries), and the hags used bits of him to repair the wizard's body since they didn't want to actually kill any of the party
One of them died and ended up stuck inside of the surviving child (who was soulless), this was the Bard (Tatyana's sister), so they had to drag her ravaged body with them all for quite a few sessions until they met the abbot, who raised her (they got a Repose at the church of st. andral). Yay abbot good guy, the abbot took the now free soulless teenage girl away somewhere, nothing fishy there...
They ended up using a one time Sending item they had to tell strahd about Tatyana's injuries, blamed on on the hags, Strahd caught them what looked like red handed hurting his beloved so he fucked them up and they had to flee to the ethereal while strahd destroyed the windmill, but they've since rebuilt it (this was when Strahd apologized for how uncivilized Barovia has become during his torpor, and extended a dinner invitation)
Edit: I had to check my notes I remembered some details wrong
So the way I see it the start of ToA is get them to the island, have them talk with a merchant prince or two, hire a guide and use said guide or one of the side quest NPCs to breadcrumb them towards a location in the jungle.
1) HOW though? they land in PN with little gold. canoes are 50g a go, guides 150g, bug spray and rain catchers also cost a bit .. I suppose they could sell their map to Jobal but then how do they navigate the jungle?!
2) Is there any point into nudging them towards Fort Bellurian? It feels like its only something for people with an affinity for BG or the FF, otherwise they seem antagonistic towards PN.
A couple of the guides can be negotiated with, IIRC, especially the ones who have their own motivations.
Fort Belurian is home base for the would-be colonizers of Chult, so you are not wrong there. They are jerks. But they could also serve as a source of early adventures. Escorting merchants back and forth overland, for example?
We decide to return tomorrow after the Cleric resets her spells to give it another shot, but in the meantime head back to the church graveyard to see if we might be able to track down the source. We have to go through the church and get permission from the father, but he doesn't seem to mind, and he's about to start his vigil with the townsfolk anyway. We explore the graveyard a bit, find a fresh grave where Cedrik is buried and not much else. On our way back, however, we are swarmed by crows. In the church, the father is wrapping up his vigil but nobody's leaving. We learn why a minute later, as we start hearing the thud of bats hitting the glass windows and screeching, as though they're trying to break in, but Lucien reassures us that they're protected by the bones of St Andral which are beneath the altar, and this is consecrated ground so nothing evil can get in. The Paladin uses his Divine Sense but does not find that this church is in any way consecrated, though he declines to mention this to anyone. The bats stop their attack after a little while, but everyone there seems to be staying the night. As we ready to leave, we meet one more woman, who is praying for the Baron to forgive her son who is currently being punished in the stocks. The Paladin decides to stay in the church for the evening, and the rest of us head out to the town square to see this fellow. We arrive there, but are spotted by guards and told we should be getting indoors. The Cleric has a brief word with one of the folks in the stocks before getting scared off by a creepy dude with some kinda demon arm thing.
We get back to the inn, and in discussion with the innkeeper, we learn Millovoj had hired a pair of men to help him track down the 3 boys who had fled the orphanage. They followed the tracks out of town until they crossed with wolf tracks, but pursued no further. My Warlock offered to bankroll them to assist us in tracking the boys down, so that will presumably be our first priority next session after we cast a few spells in the orphanage to see if we can't cure Millovoj.
use some of the sidequests in Nyanzaru first, maybe have Salida offer to guide them for free (since she has an ulterior motive), maybe have an unassuming elf wizard lady that dresses like a college student with no time to wash her hair in a red robe offer* them money on the condition that they share what they find?
IIRC there's some fun sidequests in Nyanzaru that can easily have monetary reward
*The book says Valindra is going to the trouble to turn herself into an apparently living elf but does nothing about her unwashed lich smell, I straight up made this a result of her not having a sense of smell and her minions being too scared to tell her she stinks, so when the party told her she smelled bad she murdered her wizard attendant for not having told her
Instead of teleporting the party there i had whatsherface rent them a boat and she told them she'll meet them in PN when she comes over on a later boat after she settles her affairs. Then as they got close to Chult they're boat was wrecked in the Bay by the big turtle. They swam to shore while sharks are the crew.
This got me as DM two things:
1) intro to the cool dragon turtle that can otherwise be completely missed if the party doesn't partake in the side quest about it. And also a reason to take said quest on one they have some levels under their belt.
2) a few days of travel in the jungle with no special jungle supplies during which i could introduce them to things like disease and thirst knowing that they are close enough to PN that they'll still make it hit far enough away to be stung enough by those things that they'll want to supply better before going on jungle again. They also got to level 2 this way, and found a random wedding ring on a corpse for a bit if extra funds when they sold it in PN.
In PN they kind of faffed around a bit doing a couple of side quests before paying for a divination of the location of the robot (they talked to the merchant prince that's friend to starting adventure lady patron) and that's what sets then out into the jungle. They also hire one of the dwarf guides who will work for free if they promise to help him free Hrakkmar. What is it? Who cares, this guy is free. They also bump into the half orc priest lady who wants wants an escort to a camp and they figure it's on the way to the general area where they think the robot is, so they tell she she can come with them. At this point they had enough pooled hold for a canoe, a bunch of insect repelent, a rain catcher, and.. thats it. I dinged them to level 3 as they left.
Many sessions later and they're actually in Hrakkmar now, having never returned to PN since they left.
I think I just blew up my Curse of Strahd group.
Everything is just so grim and dour and nothing we seem to do makes the Realm a better place. There are no shenanigans to be had. No silliness. When we save a town from some threat or kill an evil hag terrorizing the land its always, "Yeah, so? Strahd is still there."
Gothic Horror just is not my jam. The DM and one other love it, the other two abide it more readily that I do and we already lost our 6th group member a few weeks ago when he got fed up with the same things I am frustrated with.
I'm the one who keeps trying to interject some *real talk* about it, as we like to advocate here.... and today it blew up in my face.
Its like half an hour fresh.... so I'm feeling pretty shitty about it right now since this was the group that I've been gaming with for 20 years. No idea whats going to happen. Not guilty, mind you, just shitty. I wasn't having fun in this campaign and explaining why (admittedly for the 7th time) and the other player who loves the setting was tired of my bullshit and quit the group chat. He's got one of those prickly, outwardly aggressive personalities that is 98% bluster and I am not in the mood to placate or mollify or let it blow over. So I wished everyone well and also quit the group chat. (Our game related chat. We have another general talk chat too.)
Sorry for the vent.