Oh good point. I would love for the hags to return or let the party have the opportunity, once they're more powerful, return to take care of the hags. Is there a set time for how long until a hag spawn "grows" into a fully grown hag?
The party, after they killed Duro, kept going on about how he was good practice for when they face Strahd. So, the combination of them getting trounced by the hags AND THEN Strahd dealing with the hags like a pesky fly should reinforce that Strahd is not a force to underestimate.
normally it takes years, but Barovia is a domain of dread, so you could have it be literally any length of time
it's super f'd up, hags eat a girl, re-birth her (ewww) as a hagspawn that looks identical, returns her to the family, lets them raise the hagspawn, and then usually she'll be prodded into killing and eating her parents or something else fucked up when reaching maturity then becoming a full hag
You COULD have Morgantha already planted hagspawns out there in the wild, after all hags can only tolerate each other for so long before seeking to replace one or both coven members, if you want to throw in a foreshadowy sidequest about a weird teenage girl in Vallaki who doesn't fit in or get along with anyone, and much later on when the party comes through town the girl's house is a smoking crater with the parents torn to pieces, all roads leading to the hags
I did this once and the party just could. not. accept. that the hag was no longer the child they met earlier in the campaign and it led to some delicious DMing
but since I'm a softy I let them actually successfully redeem the young hag, who reverted to her pre-hag appearance (and they expended a lot of effort, and had some great rolls so...), that's just me being unable to twist a knife after sticking it in a player's heart :biggrin:
Yeah, I think I'll go with that. I believe as written Morganatha killed her mother, so it would make sense for her to cull her daughters every few years to avoid the same fate and have replacements ready. And I really like the idea of the party seeing Bella's decapitated corpse as they stagger out of the windmill and Offalia rocking back and forth shell-shocked.
it's super f'd up, hags eat a girl, re-birth her (ewww) as a hagspawn that looks identical, returns her to the family, lets them raise the hagspawn, and then usually she'll be prodded into killing and eating her parents or something else fucked up when reaching maturity then becoming a full hag
Wut!?
Thought the DM mind instantly goes towards some kind of reverse Hansel and Gretel. A strange child left to the woods with a lie knowing the wolves will find then, finding
a witch who was going to eat them, but instead offers to transform them (it's lower planer stuff, you have to accept willingly, regardless of outcome) into something that will survive the night. They then become queen of the wolves, and when the season gets cold and stays cold, kills and eats a shepherd who killed a pack member who was picking off the sheep one by one, bringing everything back to the pack to stave off starvation.
That shepherd was the surviving parent, and the wolf goes to sleep as a wolf and wakes as an Anis hag wrapped in a wolf's fur. Her new family survives on what is now her inheritance and the legends that warn of wolves that think and try to talk in these hills continues.
it's super f'd up, hags eat a girl, re-birth her (ewww) as a hagspawn that looks identical, returns her to the family, lets them raise the hagspawn, and then usually she'll be prodded into killing and eating her parents or something else fucked up when reaching maturity then becoming a full hag
Wut!?
Thought the DM mind instantly goes towards some kind of reverse Hansel and Gretel. A strange child left to the woods with a lie knowing the wolves will find then, finding
a witch who was going to eat them, but instead offers to transform them (it's lower planer stuff, you have to accept willingly, regardless of outcome) into something that will survive the night. They then become queen of the wolves, and when the season gets cold and stays cold, kills and eats a shepherd who killed a pack member who was picking off the sheep one by one, bringing everything back to the pack to stave off starvation.
That shepherd was the surviving parent, and the wolf goes to sleep as a wolf and wakes as an Anis hag wrapped in a wolf's fur. Her new family survives on what is now her inheritance and the legends that warn of wolves that think and try to talk in these hills continues.
yep its fucked up, hags are awful
...there is more to creating a night hag then natural reproduction, it includes unnatural elements. The hag must perform a specific rite on the child before its 13th birthday. If the night hag as no child of her own, she will steal one from a nearby village. The night hag will devour the hapless child and in a week produce a new one in its place. The hag may return the child secretly to its parents in the night or hold onto it. Before the child turns 13 it will return for 3 nights an hour at a time to perform vile rituals to transform it. The child who will be unremarkable before this and will be suddenly and irrevocably changed into a new night hag upon completion.
I changed this by giving the party 13 days to kill the mother night hag, and to allow them to undo the transformation by burning the night hag's heart in front of the newly created hag while casting Remove Curse 3 times on her - each cast permanently reducing the hitpoints of the caster unless they are holding a hag's Soul Bag, in which case the soul contained within will be consumed as fuel for the ritual
it's totally made up on my part, by the lore there's nothing to be done - the original child is just gone unless you have a Wish or something - but eh, any time my players want to stray from murder hoboism, and any time I can get my players to do a magical ritual that involves sacrifice I take it
I pretty much always homebrew hag covens and give them weird spells from previous editions or third party supplements like Sticks to Snakes or Isaac's Missile Storm. These spells being available to players if they do things for the hags, since they LOVE to make deals
Do you (or anyone else) have any thoughts on The Complete Hag on DM's Guild? I saw the annex get posted on the CoS subreddit when it came out.
It has a hag potion mutation table and I will buy any supplement with the words "mutation table" in it
the balance is all over the place in it, for example they have a legendary item that does nothing but alter self you into a maiden and you can't remove it, but it has cool ideas in it
like there's a Hag Spell that merges two creatures together to create a mutant of both of them that gets statistical bonuses
Quick DM ruling question: If someone wanted to use Detect Thoughts to take memories of a place they themselves have never been from another individual so that they have a greater chance of Teleport working correctly, would you allow it? If so, would viewing someone else's memories of a place make the roll on the teleportation table "Very Familiar", "Seen Casually", "Viewed Once", or "Description"?
Quick DM ruling question: If someone wanted to use Detect Thoughts to take memories of a place they themselves have never been from another individual so that they have a greater chance of Teleport working correctly, would you allow it? If so, would viewing someone else's memories of a place make the roll on the teleportation table "Very Familiar", "Seen Casually", "Viewed Once", or "Description"?
I'd say that it would work. You'd have to get the target to think about the place, though, and in detail. I'd roll a history check for the target in secret (adv. if it wants to help the players, disadv. if it's trying to foil them) and then, depending on the score, allow the mage to teleport with either the "viewed once" or "description" case.
I'd say that merely talking about the place in passing wouldn't yield enough enough detail for the mage to piece together a picture of it, so maybe get someone with high CHA to pitch in.
Quick DM ruling question: If someone wanted to use Detect Thoughts to take memories of a place they themselves have never been from another individual so that they have a greater chance of Teleport working correctly, would you allow it? If so, would viewing someone else's memories of a place make the roll on the teleportation table "Very Familiar", "Seen Casually", "Viewed Once", or "Description"?
Is the person they're taking memories from willing to share them?
If so, I'd let them teleport. Maybe at a lower level of familiarity than the memory donor would do, but something higher than "Description". The donor is providing as much information as they can with direct mental contact.
The questions start when they're trying to pull them from someone who's not willing, I'd require them to start making some checks.
How do they get the donor to focus on the location? It's not likely to be in their random thoughts letting you grab them without being noticed.
If you delve deeper, the donor is going to notice you're there, but you're still going to have to drag that memory up.
How deep do you go with your mind probe before both people start taking psychic damage from your mind war?
If they succeeded and RP'd it out convincingly, I'd probably let them teleport at a "Viewed Once" level, since the information wasn't willingly provided and is unlikely to be completely accurate.
Maybe the donor makes a deception vs insight check they might be able to provide incorrect information throwing the party off the trail sending them teleporting down that "false destination" option.
Quick DM ruling question: If someone wanted to use Detect Thoughts to take memories of a place they themselves have never been from another individual so that they have a greater chance of Teleport working correctly, would you allow it? If so, would viewing someone else's memories of a place make the roll on the teleportation table "Very Familiar", "Seen Casually", "Viewed Once", or "Description"?
for me they'd have to both force the int save to delve deeper, and get the person to think about the place in detail somehow (without arousing suspicion, because if they did that would loom largest in their mind), but if so then I'd definitely go "viewed once"
Certainly if the creature is willingly cooperating for this purpose
I'm making some 5th level pregens for an upcoming one shot. Do any of the books have advice for crafting higher level PCs? I'm especially wondering about how much equipment and magical items to start them with.
When I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge:
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
I'm making some 5th level pregens for an upcoming one shot. Do any of the books have advice for crafting higher level PCs? I'm especially wondering about how much equipment and magical items to start them with.
One to two uncommon magic items per character and about 2.5k gold
Some people have gone through the treasure tables and figured out the expected amount of useful items you will acquire and it should be available with a google
You could also just take the DMG and then roll all the treasure tables they would have expected to get, then allocate those items afterwards
I think I might be coming to the conclusion that I do not like descent into avernus
it's just
soooooo much combat, so much of a slog, everything is piled with resistances so the casters are pointless except as buff bots, we're 6 sessions into running around elturel fighting devils and it just feels like there's no point because the people of elturel are worthless meat sacks, everywhere we go is basically a dungeon full of elturians on the verge of being slaughtered so we can't ever short rest
and we got a whole campaign of just this endless slog of devil battles
ugh
the campaign equivilent of a battle arena where all the enemies are uninteresting to fight for half the party because its "I do magic missile" since saving throws are right out and they're resistant to fire and cold, the paladin would be having fun but there's about 10 combats per long rest so he runs out of spell slots pretty fast
and I picked a face character for a campaign that ran out of social interactions after we got sent to hell
If you're a face character you should cut a deal, plenty to be had!
face characters are terrible at making deals, my insight sucks, a billion persuasion doesn't help with that
I can't go to the store and buy cheese in this campaign without the merchant trying to screw me over because i only have +3 insight (not that there ARE merchants in this campaign anymore lol)
same vibe I have from out of the abyss, I think I just don't like "megadungeon" campaigns, and Avernus is basically an open air megadungeon
Once you get out of Hellturel there should be plenty of opportunities to use your charisma.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Yea avernus ended up being one of our heavier talky campaigns. Also if you’re still in hellturel theres plenty of time for the magic users to take different spells that aren't fire based, and having plenty of buffs isn't a bad thing.
Yea avernus ended up being one of our heavier talky campaigns. Also if you’re still in hellturel theres plenty of time for the magic users to take different spells that aren't fire based, and having plenty of buffs isn't a bad thing.
We have 2 wizards, 2 artificers, a bard, and a paladin. I'm the bard and I have sharpshooter and use my animated performance friend to give me advantage so I can do a strong arrow shot even though I have one attack, and use all my spells for support. The pie chart of "damage done" in the party is 50% paladin, 25% me, 25% the other 4 party members pretty much
and for 2 of them they're getting just as frustrated with me at this
like Storm Kings Thunder isn't all giants, making an entire campaign one enemy type is.... shit tbh
I did try to warn both wizards that wizards are terrible against devils, they won't keep up with a martial that is 3 levels below them in damage
Yea avernus ended up being one of our heavier talky campaigns. Also if you’re still in hellturel theres plenty of time for the magic users to take different spells that aren't fire based, and having plenty of buffs isn't a bad thing.
We have 2 wizards, 2 artificers, a bard, and a paladin. I'm the bard and I have sharpshooter and use my animated performance friend to give me advantage so I can do a strong arrow shot even though I have one attack, and use all my spells for support. The pie chart of "damage done" in the party is 50% paladin, 25% me, 25% the other 4 party members pretty much
and for 2 of them they're getting just as frustrated with me at this
like Storm Kings Thunder isn't all giants, making an entire campaign one enemy type is.... shit tbh
I did try to warn both wizards that wizards are terrible against devils, they won't keep up with a martial that is 3 levels below them in damage
Yea, a wizard excels at control spells though. A wizard that focuses on damage is going to miss out in general. Being able to banish, wall, farie fire, levitate and a dozen other spells is where its at. I played a wizard in our avernus campaign and I mitigated mountains of damage and was able to consistently keep key enemies from being effective.
In my Acq Inc game we're trying to infiltrate a Duergar fortress and the party has set up a few teams with different goals. One group will disguise themselves, go in the front, look for our enslaved companion but also try to start a revolution by arming prisoners, the second team is airborn. I am a lore bard using conjure animals to summon a quetz that I am saying will be a giant bat and the other member is an artificer with winged boots, invisibility, grenades and a repeating heavy crossbow, he is basically a stealth bomber, and a final team of the party rogue who tried to infiltrate stealthily.
In my Acq Inc game we're trying to infiltrate a Duergar fortress and the party has set up a few teams with different goals. One group will disguise themselves, go in the front, look for our enslaved companion but also try to start a revolution by arming prisoners, the second team is airborn. I am a lore bard using conjure animals to summon a quetz that I am saying will be a giant bat and the other member is an artificer with winged boots, invisibility, grenades and a repeating heavy crossbow, he is basically a stealth bomber, and a final team of the party rogue who tried to infiltrate stealthily.
I was hoping to run Avernus for my "Dad's" group after SKT. Hopefully my party has a more pleasant experience with it.
I'm not going to lie though, all I really want everyone to enjoy is the "Mad Max in Hell" part of the adventure.
The biggest recommendation I have with Avernus, after having played it and discussed it with my DM, is check out some of the re-works online, especially the ones that deal with the beginning of the game and with the vehicles. Stock out of the book the vehicles are a bit of glass cannons and we never really got the mad max feel from it.
Yea avernus ended up being one of our heavier talky campaigns. Also if you’re still in hellturel theres plenty of time for the magic users to take different spells that aren't fire based, and having plenty of buffs isn't a bad thing.
We have 2 wizards, 2 artificers, a bard, and a paladin. I'm the bard and I have sharpshooter and use my animated performance friend to give me advantage so I can do a strong arrow shot even though I have one attack, and use all my spells for support. The pie chart of "damage done" in the party is 50% paladin, 25% me, 25% the other 4 party members pretty much
and for 2 of them they're getting just as frustrated with me at this
like Storm Kings Thunder isn't all giants, making an entire campaign one enemy type is.... shit tbh
I did try to warn both wizards that wizards are terrible against devils, they won't keep up with a martial that is 3 levels below them in damage
Yea, a wizard excels at control spells though. A wizard that focuses on damage is going to miss out in general. Being able to banish, wall, farie fire, levitate and a dozen other spells is where its at. I played a wizard in our avernus campaign and I mitigated mountains of damage and was able to consistently keep key enemies from being effective.
Banish it's good because demons have bad Charisma saving throws, however I am telling you flat out that I have watched our wizards for months flail and flail trying to cast spells with saving throws against creatures with powerful stat blocks and magic resistance
Like our gnome wizard has never landed a cantrip against a devil
He also didn't want to roll a control wizard he wanted to play as a blaster, he just didn't realize that wasn't an option in this campaign thought I was overstating how utter trash wizards are in this campaign, and would be much better off playing a character that has a backup option for doing damage like I do with my bard
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Yea avernus ended up being one of our heavier talky campaigns. Also if you’re still in hellturel theres plenty of time for the magic users to take different spells that aren't fire based, and having plenty of buffs isn't a bad thing.
We have 2 wizards, 2 artificers, a bard, and a paladin. I'm the bard and I have sharpshooter and use my animated performance friend to give me advantage so I can do a strong arrow shot even though I have one attack, and use all my spells for support. The pie chart of "damage done" in the party is 50% paladin, 25% me, 25% the other 4 party members pretty much
and for 2 of them they're getting just as frustrated with me at this
like Storm Kings Thunder isn't all giants, making an entire campaign one enemy type is.... shit tbh
I did try to warn both wizards that wizards are terrible against devils, they won't keep up with a martial that is 3 levels below them in damage
Yea, a wizard excels at control spells though. A wizard that focuses on damage is going to miss out in general. Being able to banish, wall, farie fire, levitate and a dozen other spells is where its at. I played a wizard in our avernus campaign and I mitigated mountains of damage and was able to consistently keep key enemies from being effective.
Banish it's good because demons have bad Charisma saving throws, however I am telling you flat out that I have watched our wizards for months flail and flail trying to cast spells with saving throws against creatures with powerful stat blocks and magic resistance
Like our gnome wizard has never landed a cantrip against a devil
He also didn't want to roll a control wizard he wanted to play as a blaster, he just didn't realize that wasn't an option in this campaign thought I was overstating how utter trash wizards are in this campaign, and would be much better off playing a character that has a backup option for doing damage like I do with my bard
It could be how our DMs ran the game. I never had any extra issues against savings throws when I went through the campaign. Some spells fizzled, some went through just fine. I also played a Divination wizard, so it REALLY helped when I wanted something to fail a roll or me or one of my allies to succeed.
devil's are definitely a bad time for most casters, especially blaster casters and save or suck casters. Your party there is pretty excessively casterish for almost any adventure not tailored to it though. Trying to put it through a pre gen adventure was always gonna need to get weird. Most of the time a party comp like that should house most adventures to the point you need to tailor up the difficulty or have the enemies try to avoid combat at all costs. You've run into the one adventure where that is seemingly not the case cause everything's built as a hard counter to casters.
Yeah at DC 15 (18 int, level 6, where we are), this is the chance to save vs a spellcaster for the types of devils we've fought for common saves:
this feels like being a martial in a campaign where every enemy has platemail and a shield and sometimes also the shield spell
our gnome wizard is a Graviturgist so look at STR and CON saves particularly (but they're all really high), like without an instrument of the bards it wouldn't be worth me trying to cast control spells, more often than not its just a wasted turn
devil's are definitely a bad time for most casters, especially blaster casters and save or suck casters. Your party there is pretty excessively casterish for almost any adventure not tailored to it though. Trying to put it through a pre gen adventure was always gonna need to get weird. Most of the time a party comp like that should house most adventures to the point you need to tailor up the difficulty or have the enemies try to avoid combat at all costs. You've run into the one adventure where that is seemingly not the case cause everything's built as a hard counter to casters.
I mean it's almost better that the whole party is casters because the DM has to tailor it appropriately, if we had one caster it would just be one dead weight party member and everyone else contributing a shit ton, entire campaigns of one enemy type is ... poor design imo. SKT isn't all giants, COS isn't all vampires, Avernus, so far, since leaving the Prime Material Plane, has been literally nothing but devils (around 10 to 15 combats I'd say)
I think I'll stick with it a bit longer at least but, yikes this thing sucks, and going by what the DM has said it's written terribly without all the changes he's made (it just drags the party around by a leash, essentially)
everything about this adventure screams that it was written for a higher level party (like, level ~7-9 start) and then they ended up saying "nuh actually level 1", because a party where the casters have 20 main stat and a +4 prof do much better against devils with saving throws
and narratively the idea of sending a group of level 4 to 5 adventurers (local heroes) to hell to fight an archangeldevil is absurd on its face'
I am having fun, but it's all with yucking with the party, mechanically it's an absolute drag and every fight is a resource intensive slog against buckets of hitpoints that only the paladin can easily reach
I think it's fine to do adventure's where everything is a specific monster type so long as you warn your party that will be the case, and warn them what that means mechanically if they aren't already aware.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think it's fine to do adventure's where everything is a specific monster type so long as you warn your party that will be the case, and warn them what that means mechanically if they aren't already aware.
Yea, we had a good idea so our sorcerer went lightning and I went control. I was playing a dog so we reflavored Melf’s minute meteors into Melf’s tiny tennis balls, and they did bludgeoning instead of fire.
I dunno why you guys are pushing back on override on this. I think he is quite correct about the game design (ie: are the encounters interesting to run / play, varied enough not to get boring, serve some purpose in the adventure etc...) of Avernus. And I generally think the quality of design sucks in all of the WOTC published hardback ... thingys ... whatever they are. Not modules. Maybe campaigns?
edit: and after looking at the list to refresh my memory god damn is the "for characters level X-Y" on these books a total lie
Any of the WOTC books that say they start at level 1 pretty much just say "make the DM invent content on the fly farting around until the party is level 4-5 then make sure this one incredibly contrived thing happens to start off the actual content you paid for. but don't expect anything that will actually get your players involved or invested cause fuck you"
I agree, by and large, even the campaigns I REALLY LIKE like COS, I basically redesign all the encounters
For example, if Strahd loses on initiative he dies in one round. I know this for a fact because in the cupboard's blood cup puzzle in Tomb of Annihilation 2 weeks ago, they opened one of them and I just dumped Strahd in, the real Strahd statblock
He never got a turn! 2 players, level 11, laying into him killed him before he could do anything
There are specific encounters that are very interesting, but require a lot of DM care, like the entire Fire Giant dungeon in SKT is really goddamn cool, and Dungeon of The Mad Mage and the new Candlekeep Adventures have a lot of very interesting encounters (the druid lich one is especially fun, although it is positively tame for the level range they recommend, a real party at that level will counterspell the druid lich and she will die having only done legendary actions, in all likelihood)
Which as a DM doesn't bug me too much, because I always redesign almost every encounter in published modules anyway, I'm there for the setting and the story (hacking off bits I don't like without remorse), generally, not because I want to throw a bandit captain and 7 bandits against my level 1 party or two vampire spawns against my level 14 party (and I basically don't even do random encounters, aint nobody got time for that with standard rest rules - UNLESS - the party is on a time crunch, then they matter)
I mostly just don't use pre gen content cause it all suffers from inherent inflexibility. I'll run certain individual modules as sections of my game if they aren't supposed to be, or necessarily need to be, a part of a grander narrative. Like I much more appreciate something like tales from the yawning portal where I can just take white plume or the sunless citadel and drop it into the game for a bit. If I'm redesigning all of the encounters entirely the material is basically useless to me.
I mostly just don't use pre gen content cause it all suffers from inherent inflexibility. I'll run certain individual modules as sections of my game if they aren't supposed to be, or necessarily need to be, a part of a grander narrative. Like I much more appreciate something like tales from the yawning portal where I can just take white plume or the sunless citadel and drop it into the game for a bit. If I'm redesigning all of the encounters entirely the material is basically useless to me.
I mean, I don't have to make a new tomb of the nine gods because I replaced a pop out monster with strahd, or make a new castle ravenloft because I added a boss fight against the 4 wives
there is value to using prepublished campaigns as a starting point
I already have to do so much work with the VTT that I can't be bothered to design every map from scratch like I did when I was in college
as it stands I probably end up going about 50/50
I might run a wholly custom game campaign next time, because that was really fun in the past, but if I do that ill probably take 2 weeks off work to work on it or something
Eh I've had a setting running live for the better part of a decade, most of the narrative and setting based stuff is the first thing I eject from published adventure content. I'll keep what I have to in order to maintain the published encounters but I'm rewriting all the history and motivations to better fit my setting.
I'm running Storm King's Thunder now (on hiatus to finish Tomb of Annihilation) in Exandria and the prep work for that was about ~40 hours
but still, I'm using the skeleton.
All locations were changed to match Exandria
Ancient giant civilization didn't need to be changed
Added a few new factions because Matt Mercer left Tal'dorei intentionally a bit sparse as a DM canvas
Integrated Strongholds and Followers content
Changed the barbarian tribe in the Stone Giant dungeon to be a lot less murder-death-kill-evil, more or less just people who don't fit in with the northern cities
Made the Stone Giants less evil, Kaylithica was just doing what she thought was necessary to protect her people
Created a Drow/Stone giant alliance based entirely on shared love of art and beauty, and took the Xorlarrin drow house and transposed it to Tal'Dorei, refugees from their dying city
Made the hill giant situation a bit more complicated, not just "hill giants evil", a large part being society's refusal to make an effort to find a place for them (literally you can pay them off with food, and you have magical food growing, this should work out)
Zalto's entire scheme was basically just an attempt to save his failing marriage, combined with a lack of respect for the lives of smallfolk
I haven't come up with shit for the frost giants yet, although I've already established that the current Jarl is a misogynistic asshole who is hellbent on returning the Ordening
I have a whole Aeor/Sansuri thing planned with lots of cool ancient magitech stuff that she's after
Much much more, but, the plot structure is more or less the same (except I'm doing all the giant dungeons), so far I've used the same maps for the giant dungeons (although I changed up the encounters a fair bit in Deadstone Cleft, I didnt need to do hardly anything to Ironslag). I do appreciate that I have the meaty skeleton of the campaign and the parts I haven't gotten to yet are still sitting there, easy to modify on the fly without having to take a whole bunch of notes or whip up a bunch of names - just helps with my own personal DM burnout, ymmv
I have a really strong itch to create and run the Schism of Menzobaranzen as a campaign. After the books, the city is poised for a secular revolution, and the most powerful house is kind of totally onboard with it. There's no published campaign for this, but I have the 2e supplement for the city and I've read all the books so I can probably do it justice
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Yeah, I think I'll go with that. I believe as written Morganatha killed her mother, so it would make sense for her to cull her daughters every few years to avoid the same fate and have replacements ready. And I really like the idea of the party seeing Bella's decapitated corpse as they stagger out of the windmill and Offalia rocking back and forth shell-shocked.
Plot twist. Morgantha blamed the capture on Bella and manufactured the entire thing to get a sister out of the way.
In my game, the first time they meet her at the dinner with Strahd, where
The other Strahd wives/husband took the opportunity to tear her apart at that point.
Wut!?
Thought the DM mind instantly goes towards some kind of reverse Hansel and Gretel. A strange child left to the woods with a lie knowing the wolves will find then, finding
a witch who was going to eat them, but instead offers to transform them (it's lower planer stuff, you have to accept willingly, regardless of outcome) into something that will survive the night. They then become queen of the wolves, and when the season gets cold and stays cold, kills and eats a shepherd who killed a pack member who was picking off the sheep one by one, bringing everything back to the pack to stave off starvation.
That shepherd was the surviving parent, and the wolf goes to sleep as a wolf and wakes as an Anis hag wrapped in a wolf's fur. Her new family survives on what is now her inheritance and the legends that warn of wolves that think and try to talk in these hills continues.
yep its fucked up, hags are awful
I changed this by giving the party 13 days to kill the mother night hag, and to allow them to undo the transformation by burning the night hag's heart in front of the newly created hag while casting Remove Curse 3 times on her - each cast permanently reducing the hitpoints of the caster unless they are holding a hag's Soul Bag, in which case the soul contained within will be consumed as fuel for the ritual
it's totally made up on my part, by the lore there's nothing to be done - the original child is just gone unless you have a Wish or something - but eh, any time my players want to stray from murder hoboism, and any time I can get my players to do a magical ritual that involves sacrifice I take it
I pretty much always homebrew hag covens and give them weird spells from previous editions or third party supplements like Sticks to Snakes or Isaac's Missile Storm. These spells being available to players if they do things for the hags, since they LOVE to make deals
It has a hag potion mutation table and I will buy any supplement with the words "mutation table" in it
the balance is all over the place in it, for example they have a legendary item that does nothing but alter self you into a maiden and you can't remove it, but it has cool ideas in it
like there's a Hag Spell that merges two creatures together to create a mutant of both of them that gets statistical bonuses
Best case it's a 'description'.
I'd say that it would work. You'd have to get the target to think about the place, though, and in detail. I'd roll a history check for the target in secret (adv. if it wants to help the players, disadv. if it's trying to foil them) and then, depending on the score, allow the mage to teleport with either the "viewed once" or "description" case.
I'd say that merely talking about the place in passing wouldn't yield enough enough detail for the mage to piece together a picture of it, so maybe get someone with high CHA to pitch in.
Is the person they're taking memories from willing to share them?
If so, I'd let them teleport. Maybe at a lower level of familiarity than the memory donor would do, but something higher than "Description". The donor is providing as much information as they can with direct mental contact.
The questions start when they're trying to pull them from someone who's not willing, I'd require them to start making some checks.
How do they get the donor to focus on the location? It's not likely to be in their random thoughts letting you grab them without being noticed.
If you delve deeper, the donor is going to notice you're there, but you're still going to have to drag that memory up.
How deep do you go with your mind probe before both people start taking psychic damage from your mind war?
If they succeeded and RP'd it out convincingly, I'd probably let them teleport at a "Viewed Once" level, since the information wasn't willingly provided and is unlikely to be completely accurate.
Maybe the donor makes a deception vs insight check they might be able to provide incorrect information throwing the party off the trail sending them teleporting down that "false destination" option.
for me they'd have to both force the int save to delve deeper, and get the person to think about the place in detail somehow (without arousing suspicion, because if they did that would loom largest in their mind), but if so then I'd definitely go "viewed once"
Certainly if the creature is willingly cooperating for this purpose
"I don't want the world, I just want your half"
One to two uncommon magic items per character and about 2.5k gold
Some people have gone through the treasure tables and figured out the expected amount of useful items you will acquire and it should be available with a google
You could also just take the DMG and then roll all the treasure tables they would have expected to get, then allocate those items afterwards
it's just
soooooo much combat, so much of a slog, everything is piled with resistances so the casters are pointless except as buff bots, we're 6 sessions into running around elturel fighting devils and it just feels like there's no point because the people of elturel are worthless meat sacks, everywhere we go is basically a dungeon full of elturians on the verge of being slaughtered so we can't ever short rest
and we got a whole campaign of just this endless slog of devil battles
ugh
the campaign equivilent of a battle arena where all the enemies are uninteresting to fight for half the party because its "I do magic missile" since saving throws are right out and they're resistant to fire and cold, the paladin would be having fun but there's about 10 combats per long rest so he runs out of spell slots pretty fast
and I picked a face character for a campaign that ran out of social interactions after we got sent to hell
face characters are terrible at making deals, my insight sucks, a billion persuasion doesn't help with that
I can't go to the store and buy cheese in this campaign without the merchant trying to screw me over because i only have +3 insight (not that there ARE merchants in this campaign anymore lol)
same vibe I have from out of the abyss, I think I just don't like "megadungeon" campaigns, and Avernus is basically an open air megadungeon
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
We have 2 wizards, 2 artificers, a bard, and a paladin. I'm the bard and I have sharpshooter and use my animated performance friend to give me advantage so I can do a strong arrow shot even though I have one attack, and use all my spells for support. The pie chart of "damage done" in the party is 50% paladin, 25% me, 25% the other 4 party members pretty much
and for 2 of them they're getting just as frustrated with me at this
like Storm Kings Thunder isn't all giants, making an entire campaign one enemy type is.... shit tbh
I did try to warn both wizards that wizards are terrible against devils, they won't keep up with a martial that is 3 levels below them in damage
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Yea, a wizard excels at control spells though. A wizard that focuses on damage is going to miss out in general. Being able to banish, wall, farie fire, levitate and a dozen other spells is where its at. I played a wizard in our avernus campaign and I mitigated mountains of damage and was able to consistently keep key enemies from being effective.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I can't wait to play dnd rogue squadron.
"ye kinda tall fer a dwarf!"
I'm not going to lie though, all I really want everyone to enjoy is the "Mad Max in Hell" part of the adventure.
The biggest recommendation I have with Avernus, after having played it and discussed it with my DM, is check out some of the re-works online, especially the ones that deal with the beginning of the game and with the vehicles. Stock out of the book the vehicles are a bit of glass cannons and we never really got the mad max feel from it.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Banish it's good because demons have bad Charisma saving throws, however I am telling you flat out that I have watched our wizards for months flail and flail trying to cast spells with saving throws against creatures with powerful stat blocks and magic resistance
Like our gnome wizard has never landed a cantrip against a devil
He also didn't want to roll a control wizard he wanted to play as a blaster, he just didn't realize that wasn't an option in this campaign thought I was overstating how utter trash wizards are in this campaign, and would be much better off playing a character that has a backup option for doing damage like I do with my bard
It could be how our DMs ran the game. I never had any extra issues against savings throws when I went through the campaign. Some spells fizzled, some went through just fine. I also played a Divination wizard, so it REALLY helped when I wanted something to fail a roll or me or one of my allies to succeed.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
this feels like being a martial in a campaign where every enemy has platemail and a shield and sometimes also the shield spell
our gnome wizard is a Graviturgist so look at STR and CON saves particularly (but they're all really high), like without an instrument of the bards it wouldn't be worth me trying to cast control spells, more often than not its just a wasted turn
I mean it's almost better that the whole party is casters because the DM has to tailor it appropriately, if we had one caster it would just be one dead weight party member and everyone else contributing a shit ton, entire campaigns of one enemy type is ... poor design imo. SKT isn't all giants, COS isn't all vampires, Avernus, so far, since leaving the Prime Material Plane, has been literally nothing but devils (around 10 to 15 combats I'd say)
I think I'll stick with it a bit longer at least but, yikes this thing sucks, and going by what the DM has said it's written terribly without all the changes he's made (it just drags the party around by a leash, essentially)
everything about this adventure screams that it was written for a higher level party (like, level ~7-9 start) and then they ended up saying "nuh actually level 1", because a party where the casters have 20 main stat and a +4 prof do much better against devils with saving throws
and narratively the idea of sending a group of level 4 to 5 adventurers (local heroes) to hell to fight an archangeldevil is absurd on its face'
I am having fun, but it's all with yucking with the party, mechanically it's an absolute drag and every fight is a resource intensive slog against buckets of hitpoints that only the paladin can easily reach
Yea, we had a good idea so our sorcerer went lightning and I went control. I was playing a dog so we reflavored Melf’s minute meteors into Melf’s tiny tennis balls, and they did bludgeoning instead of fire.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
edit: and after looking at the list to refresh my memory god damn is the "for characters level X-Y" on these books a total lie
Any of the WOTC books that say they start at level 1 pretty much just say "make the DM invent content on the fly farting around until the party is level 4-5 then make sure this one incredibly contrived thing happens to start off the actual content you paid for. but don't expect anything that will actually get your players involved or invested cause fuck you"
For example, if Strahd loses on initiative he dies in one round. I know this for a fact because in the cupboard's blood cup puzzle in Tomb of Annihilation 2 weeks ago, they opened one of them and I just dumped Strahd in, the real Strahd statblock
He never got a turn! 2 players, level 11, laying into him killed him before he could do anything
There are specific encounters that are very interesting, but require a lot of DM care, like the entire Fire Giant dungeon in SKT is really goddamn cool, and Dungeon of The Mad Mage and the new Candlekeep Adventures have a lot of very interesting encounters (the druid lich one is especially fun, although it is positively tame for the level range they recommend, a real party at that level will counterspell the druid lich and she will die having only done legendary actions, in all likelihood)
Which as a DM doesn't bug me too much, because I always redesign almost every encounter in published modules anyway, I'm there for the setting and the story (hacking off bits I don't like without remorse), generally, not because I want to throw a bandit captain and 7 bandits against my level 1 party or two vampire spawns against my level 14 party (and I basically don't even do random encounters, aint nobody got time for that with standard rest rules - UNLESS - the party is on a time crunch, then they matter)
I mean, I don't have to make a new tomb of the nine gods because I replaced a pop out monster with strahd, or make a new castle ravenloft because I added a boss fight against the 4 wives
there is value to using prepublished campaigns as a starting point
I already have to do so much work with the VTT that I can't be bothered to design every map from scratch like I did when I was in college
as it stands I probably end up going about 50/50
I might run a wholly custom game campaign next time, because that was really fun in the past, but if I do that ill probably take 2 weeks off work to work on it or something
but still, I'm using the skeleton.
Much much more, but, the plot structure is more or less the same (except I'm doing all the giant dungeons), so far I've used the same maps for the giant dungeons (although I changed up the encounters a fair bit in Deadstone Cleft, I didnt need to do hardly anything to Ironslag). I do appreciate that I have the meaty skeleton of the campaign and the parts I haven't gotten to yet are still sitting there, easy to modify on the fly without having to take a whole bunch of notes or whip up a bunch of names - just helps with my own personal DM burnout, ymmv
I have a really strong itch to create and run the Schism of Menzobaranzen as a campaign. After the books, the city is poised for a secular revolution, and the most powerful house is kind of totally onboard with it. There's no published campaign for this, but I have the 2e supplement for the city and I've read all the books so I can probably do it justice