#lost mine of horncrest

[acommonrose]

Lost Mine of Horncrest Part 3

So this is coming almost a week after the session, because these things take awhile to write, but since I promised myself I would keep documenting the conversion process, here goes. 

This week they were in Thundertree. I didn’t actually change the structure of Thundertree itself so much (though there’s some interesting ties to other plots, one of which they have discovered at this point and one of which they haven’t). I did stat up monsters, obviously, but in some ways, the adventure was more changed by a player wanting to roll to seduce everyone they met than by any changes I made to the monsters or the world. (The dragon encounter next week is going to get interesting.)

While I’m sure I’ll have some interesting things to say about Thundertree after they finish it next week (or perhaps just advice to DMs whose players really want to sleep with dragons), for now, I want to talk more about how I had to structure the adventure, given that I dropped them in partway. The main information gained from the redbrand dungeon is that it tells the players about The Black Spider and Wave Echo Cave, but that’s the only real plot hook it gives, and the adventure is way too short if the players go directly to Wave Echo Cave at that point. So why don’t they? The adventure provides 2 reasons 1. the meta-reason that the players aren’t high enough level yet and 2. the fact that they don’t know where the cave is. The first reason wouldn’t do much with my group. (I am tracking XP, but leveling is much slower when they’re already level 6, and in any case, they’re not the sort of group that sees things like that as a barrier.) The second one, however, does. 

The adventure gives a lot of possible ways for the players to find the cave, and they’re aware of them before they finish dealing with the Redbrands. The “standard” approach is to rescue Gundren Rockseeker, who is introduced at the very beginning of the adventure, and use his map, which Sildar Hallwinter tells the party about when they meet him in chapter 1, but about half the side quests introduced in Phandalin give potential ways to find the cave, giving the players a lot of options for how to proceed through the adventure. I think that this sandbox type structure is really great if this adventure is being run as a standalone campaign, but I also knew I had to cut most of the side quests for this version of the game. For one thing, converting all of them in terms of statting up the combats appropriately, fitting the flavor into my world, and finding appropriate NPCs to give the plot hooks would be a lot of work for not much plot payoff. For another thing, their last arc was a very open-ended political plot, and it led them to flounder a lot at points, so I wanted a more linear structure here. That meant I needed to clearly rework the main plotline and adapt Gundren and Sildar. 

Gundren and Sildar are supposed to be trusted NPCs, so in the context of an existing campaign, I felt it was best to adapt them as people already known and liked by at least one PC. Since they didn’t really fit as any of the NPCs already introduced in the campaign (and I have a lot of those, I love NPCs) and the bad guys were going to be the paladin’s family’s allies, it made sense to make them trusted people from the paladin’s backstory. This suggests a slightly different structure to the background of the adventure. As written, Gundren is an adventurer/prospector who obtains a map of the mine. The baddies, who want the map, capture him and the map, and the PCs must rescue Gundren and save the mine. In my take, I needed Gundren to already have ties to the paladin (and therefore the bad guys), so things got a little reversed. The bad guys started with the map. Gundren is an ex-adventurer and prospector (giving him the same skill set as originally written) who now works as a guard and who helped train the paladin and her siblings. He took the map from the bad guys, went to investigate, and was captured in the process, leaving the PCs in the same place as in the actual adventure. So how did he get the map? Well, that comes down to my replacement for Sildar. Sildar, as I discovered is a pretty malleable character. While there’s definitely some character traits listed in the adventure, all that’s really important is that he’s a noble and can give the players the background information they need about Gundren and the map. This meant that I could replace Sildar with an NPC I’d wanted to use for a while: the paladin’s brother Tobin. I really enjoy using NPCs from PCs’ backstories, and Tobin would have both motive and opportunity to take the map. A beloved child of the bad guys would have access to their private vault. An angry teenager (especially one who had been forced more and more into participating in evil cult activities ever since his sister left for school) might randomly take something from the vault to get back at his parents without realizing its significance. Also I kind of wanted to see how my remarkably high-powered (even for their level) group of level 6 PCs would deal with being followed around by an angry impulsive level 1 barbarian teenager.

I had Tobin show up and give the players the relevant background (and therefore next steps) shortly after the raid on the frat house, which I now realize was probably a mistake. Sure, it’s the easiest way to provide plot hooks and exposition, but it gave the players a brief window when they had no real plot hooks connected to the main plot, so they fruitlessly searched for a way to find the cave, which was kind of frustrating on all ends. In hindsight, I should have kept the structure of the players rescuing the plot giver. Instead of cutting the first goblin dungeon altogether, it would have been easy enough to have Tobin captured in his own attempts to rescue Gundren and to have a plot hook to the Cragmaw hideout somewhere in the frat house (or at least revealed in the questioning of the frat boys). But, of course, hindsight is 20-20, and having Tobin show up on the PCs’ doorstep worked well enough. My first thought when prepping this was to cut all side quests altogether and have Tobin point the players directly to Cragmaw Castle. (I wasn’t sure whether Tobin would know the location or whether they’d have to capture a goblin scout, as suggested in the adventure, but in any case, the adventure doesn’t make it too hard to get the players to the castle.) Reducing the adventure to three relatively straightforward dungeons seemed a little too simple, though, so that led me to Thundertree.

I’ll be honest. Part of the reason I did this is that Thundertree looked like one of the most memorable parts of the adventure, and it felt wrong to just leave it out. It also had some nice ties to the greater campaign. (For example, the first big bad they killed was a necromancer who attacked the party with both zombies and awakened plants, so it was easy enough to imply that she had led to the initial fall of Thundertree.) The adventure also doesn’t give a ton of motivation for the players to go to Thundertree, beyond the fact that Mirna’s heirloom is there (which I did include but seems pretty minor when there are evil cultists making human sacrifices) and that one of the NPCs in town suggests that the druid there would know the location of either Cragmaw Castle or Wave Echo Cave. I wanted the players to rescue Gundren and not go for the cave directly, so I decided that specifically, they would have to seek out the druid to find Gundren. This made the plot simple enough. Gundren had gone out with the map and had gone missing. Before he left, he had told Tobin that if something went wrong, he should get in touch with an old friend of his from his adventuring days: a druid camped out in the old ruined town of Thundertree. Said druid had both the ability to scry on Gundren (thus figuring out where he was) and enough knowledge of the area to direct them to Cragmaw Castle. Tobin, who was unable to fend off the blights and zombies himself, turned to the party. Of course, while the druid is happy to point them to Gundren, he’d also like them to deal with this dragon. 

So far, they’ve fought through the first few encounters of Thundertree and gotten as far as meeting the druid and finding out Gundren’s location. Next session, they’re going to approach (and probably try to seduce) the dragon and finish up Thundertree. I still think Thundertree is one of the cooler parts of Lost Mine, but there’s definitely a lot of issues with how it’s presented, and there’s possibly things I’d change about it if I were running a straight version of this adventure (which is something I kind of would like to do at some point). For one thing, the plot hooks to get there are very weak. Mirna’s heirloom is just not really that much motivation, nor is the possibility of finding out information that can be gained a lot of different ways, especially given how far Thundertree is from everything. For another, there’s a fundamental flaw with the dragon encounter, which is that if the dragon isn’t going to be killed (and the PCs aren’t supposed to be able to kill the dragon nor does the druid ask them specifically to kill the dragon, just to drive them off), Thundertree, being a long abandoned town where no civilians are around to get hurt, actually seems like a pretty good place for them to be. But, of course, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the dragon next week.

#d&d tag #lost mine of horncrest

[acommonrose]

Lost Mine of Horncrest Session 2

So as I mentioned last week, I’ve been running a highly adapted version of Lost Mine of Phandelver for my ongoing campaign, which I’m discussing here. This week, I’ll be discussing their exploration of the Redbrand hideout, reworked as the basement of the Alpha Lambda frat house. For information on how I recontextualized this and got them there, check out last week’s description here.

As I mentioned, they decided that their best bet for finding where the frat boys were taking people would be to use the two least conspicuous members of the party as bait. This happened to be the warlock and the wizard, since the paladin’s a noblewoman (who had at that point already figured out that the frat might have ties to her cultist family) and the bard and rogue recently had a very public fake fight to throw off suspicious enemies/for fun. Mostly for fun. The three non-bait members each picked a person to watch (bard watching the warlock, paladin watching the wizard, rogue watching a random person who seemed to fit the profile, I believe), and I gave the party a chance to talk to people or play drinking games. Only the bard took up that offer, and after failing a DC 10 con save while playing beer pong, I decided she was drunk and under the effects of the poisoned condition.

I then had one of the frat boys approach the warlock (chosen over the wizard because the warlock’s had less to do in recent sessions) and offer her a drugged drink. The warlock drank it without much question, went unconscious, and was taken into the basement. The bard did notice, turned invisible, and followed, but due to the exact sequence of events and rolls, the rest of the party didn’t catch up for another moment or two. This turned out to be nearly fatal. I had the bard roll two stealth checks (advantage from invisibility + disadvantage from drunkenness led to it being straight rolls), first in the cellar area (to see if either the frat boy taking the warlock or the frat boys waiting in the barracks area heard anything) and then again after circumventing the pit trap (which she saw the frat boy avoiding and therefore didn’t have to search for) and entering the crypts area. She passed the stealth check by a significant margin in the first room, so I gave the frat boy disadvantage on the perception check, which took it from a nat 20 to... a 17. (This guy had no modifier, and I have fudged no rolls lately, so it was a stroke of incredibly bad luck for the bard’s player, who had a decent modifier and got a 16.) Because of it, I determined that the frat boy retreated to the “slave pens” to lock up the warlock but pointed out the bard to the arcane squirrels I had replaced the skeletons in the adventure with (because I had previously joked about the frat experimenting on squirrels), which happened to beat the bard on initiative and were enough to take her out in one round of attacks. I decided that the squirrels didn’t attack her while she was down, and she passed the death saves, but she was unconscious and taken into the holding pens with the warlock, which definitely led to some player weirdness during he rest of the session, since the bard had actually died (and been revived) the previous session. The rest of the party arrived, fought the squirrels (whose stat blocks can be found here, along with my revised “ruffian” frat boy and my powered up nothic), and that was the end of the first session, because the players were clearly not happy with how things had gone and it was not worth it to push the session longer, given that they were likely going to have to spend another full session on the dungeon.

I picked up with the players rescuing the captured party members, which was a pretty easy fight - there were only two frat boys, and each was roughly equivalent in power to one of the PCs. The bard was healed some during the fight, and the warlock (who was drugged but otherwise at full everything) was woken shortly after the fight. At that point, they were low on basically everything, and I let them consider the time they took regrouping and deciding what to do next as a short rest, which let them regain enough hit points that they didn’t just run away immediately. This also gave them the chance to deal with 2 NPCs. First, they rescued Mirna Dendrar (who plays a pretty similar role, though she is a college student with no children or husband) and got rough information from her about what she had overheard from the frat boys. It wasn’t very detailed, and they didn’t talk to her at length, but they did turn her invisible and let her sneak out through the frat party and sent her off to go talk to their favorite mom friend bartender. They did catch up with her later and got some of the Thundertree plot hook, but they didn’t talk to her much. To get more information, they woke up one of the frat boys guarding the cells (who I, on the spot, named Jeff). After some pretty grisly torture (and a great intimidation check), they found out that the people taken by the frat went to two places. Some were fed to a monster (and, thanks to a very good arcana check, they found out that it was a nothic and got some cool Vecna-related nothic lore that will probably come back later). Others were taken elsewhere, but Jeff didn’t know where.

What the party does with redbrands (or in my case frat boys) is something I’d really be interested in hearing about from other people who have run Lost Mine of Phandelver. I think this is something where, almost by coincidence, I set the players up to taking a nonlethal approach. In the adventure, it’s pretty clear that local law enforcement is just completely outclassed by the redbrands, and killing them would likely be a service to the town. In my game, law enforcement is sometimes morally ambiguous and disliked by the party (and possibly considered incompetent by the party), but they are reasonably powerful, and in the end, the party did turn over Jeff, as well as the names of the rest of the frat, to the church of the god of law (which is effectively in charge of law enforcement in my world). While that did give motivation for the players not to kill the frat boys (because murder is murder and the church of law is pretty strict), the players also chose to do nonlethal damage because at least two party members would have taken strong exception to outright killing of people, which seems like something other parties would have too. Or are D&D characters generally just too murder hobo-ish? In any case, taking one prisoner effectively and forcing him to be a guide is something that I didn’t really anticipate but makes a lot of sense, and I wonder if that’s an approach other groups have taken.

The group then proceeded to the nothic with a quick detour through the armory to thoroughly loot it. (Will they ever sell the armory they’re now carrying around in the bag of holding? Will they ever sell the random books, gems, and pillows that are in there from months ago? Who knows?) Jeff’s guidance made it so they didn’t have to search for the secret door, and the nothic battle was pretty straightforward. My only tip to DMs trying to run it is that, time permitting, you should write out the nothic says to each player if it succeeds on its weird insight against them. I think weird insight could be really cool, especially with a secretive party like mine, but I didn’t pre-write anything, and some of the wording was off. (My tired rogue player didn’t even realize that I was referencing her super traumatic backstory and was just confused.)

After dispatching the nothic, the party debated whether or not to leave straight away (since Jeff had told them about the tunnel out of the crevasse area). They determined, ultimately, that the guard barracks/common room areas were worthless to them, but did want to go into the wizard’s workshop and quarters (though the relevant person is... not a wizard in my game exactly) to get more information about where the girls were being taken. In this case, I replaced “Glasstaff” with Bran Galhyde, a noble previously introduced in the game as a member of the cult that the paladin’s parents are in. Bran’s involvement (and resultantly the cult’s involvement) had been suggested before, since said paladin had spoken to him before going to the frat house, and he had suggested that he had some involvement with the frat (though confirmed nothing). They had also found out from Jeff that Lord Galhyde (who I decided didn’t have reason to go by a pseudonym given the already secret nature of the operation) was organizing and paying for the transport of the captives, though this name didn’t mean anything to anyone but the paladin, who chose not to share what she knew. Hoping to get more information on where people were being taken, the bard and rogue embarked on a stealth mission, turning invisible and sneaking into the the workshop, where they rolled a good enough stealth roll that they weren’t noticed by the rat and a good enough perception roll to tell that there was one person in the next room. Deciding that the best way to handle the situation was to surprise attack (since even invisible people would be noticed rifling through papers on the desk someone was sitting at), the rogue sprung an attack and the bard cast silence. Since the individual (a well-dressed individual the party suspects but isn’t sure is Bran) was a spellcaster, he recognized the silence spell, drank an invisibility potion.

As far as relevant information the party got from this little expedition, they were able to get the Dwarvish book about the Forge of Spells in Wave Echo Cave, which was especially of interest to the wizard (conveniently the only one who reads Dwarvish), since I recently introduced an artificer NPC who is a friend/potential love interest of the wizard. They also found a letter to Lord Galhyde signed from “The Watched One” (my replacement for the Black Spider for reasons that will become clear anyways). I completely changed the content of the letter, since the one in the adventure doesn’t make sense with either my setting or the order in which I’m presenting plot hooks, but the letter they did get mentioned “the cave”, so the players are pretty set on finding Wave Echo Cave and stopping whatever horrible ritual might happen there.

Of course, they need to find it first, and there lies the plot of the next few sessions.

#d&d tag #lost mine of horncrest

[acommonrose]

Lost Mine of Horncrest: Session 1

So I think I said about a month ago that I’d be discussing the process of running Lost Mine of Phandelver for a level 6 party in an established homebrew world. Since we started in on that arc last night, I figured I’d give you a first look at how I’m converting it.

Note: Since some of my players follow me here, I’m going to try to be vague about anything that hasn’t yet been revealed to them yet. If you’d like a sense of the actual adventure and are not one of my players

I started effectively with Tresendar Manor, which those of you who know the adventure will realize is actually about halfway through the adventure. The main reason for this is that one of the main challenges I have fitting published adventures into my setting is that all the PCs are college students, so anything that requires them to travel to another town requires a fair bit of justification. Fortunately, the second chapter is all set in the town of Phandalin, and since the characters are already in a small-ish town and have wrapped up most of their short-term goals, that’s a good place to drop them into the adventure.

The second chapter of Lost Mine seems to have two parts. First, it introduces a number of NPCs, each of whom have quests for the party. While I will be using NPCs (some already introduced in previous arcs, most new) to give plot hooks, mostly I could skip this part. The other part is having the PCs drive out the Redbrand ruffians (who of course have ties to the actual villain of the entire adventure). This is the part that I’m focusing on for the first bit of the adventure.

Obviously, I can’t use the Redbrand ruffians straight, because for one thing, the town of Horncrest isn’t much like Phandalin. While the adventure has a gang of criminals openly terrorizing the town, that doesn’t make sense in a town with a lot of high level NPCs, especially since one of the issues I’ve had with this game is justifying why higher level NPCs don’t just deal with the various people the PCs fight themselves while still presenting said NPCs as generally competent people. (My players still tend to brand every NPC as incompetent or stupid. It’s a thing I have to live with.) It also doesn’t make sense, given that the characters have been in the town for about two months now, and the only thing they’ve heard about the Redbrands (well, the group I’m replacing them with) is a side (improvised) comment about them performing arcane experiments on squirrels.

So instead of using a “gang terrorizing the town” idea, I decided to use the approach of “shadowy organization taking people who wouldn’t be missed”. It still lets me structure the Tresendar Mansion dungeon the same way and have my Redbrands have pretty similar ties to the main villain of the adventure while making more sense in that setting. So how do I fit this comfortably into a college setting? The Redbrands became the Alpha Lambda frat, who I had previously established as having performed arcane experiments on squirrels. When I had made the offhand comments about this frat before, they had just been improvised jokes that my players decide to question me about (because... players), but the players were clearly interested in bringing down this frat, making them a great option to use as the Redbrands. Plus, girls going missing from frat parties is a classic trope in college stories. (I’m channeling that one episode of Buffy hard here.)

So how do I get the players there? Well, honestly, it didn’t take much prompting, since they already wanted to fight this frat, and most (though definitely not all) of them are pretty good about following plot hooks just because they seem like fun and something to do. I had a recent guest character who had fought a dragon with the party mention the fact that people had gone missing with parties, the party asked around about the girls, and made plans to go to the next frat party, setting up the two least recognizable members of the party as bait.

That last part also might be specific to this particular adaptation, since in the original adventure, the PCs stood out (being new in town) and also it was easy enough to find the mansion by asking around, which obviously works less well with the shadowy group taking people approach. I considered following the adventure where the group’s main hangout (a bar in the original adventure, obviously the frat house) is a ways off from the actual dungeon where all the interesting stuff is, forcing the party to follow the frat guys in some way. That seemed unnecessary, though, so I just put the dungeon in the basement of the frat house, providing the party with options involving snooping around the frat house looking for an entrance (that they didn’t know for sure would be there) or waiting for someone to be taken (requires either being bait or successfully identifying a target). They obviously took the bait approach with... interesting results.

I’ll talk about how I converted the dungeon itself next week, which was a much more mechanical process (since obviously the monsters appropriate for a level 2 party aren’t appropriate for a level 6 party). The party has only started to get into it, and since they didn’t all enter at the same time, I had to make some tough calls. Since I left the party midway through the dungeon after their first major combat (with none other than arcanely enhanced squirrels, obviously), I don’t have enough perspective yet to know if I made good calls on how I built or ran this dungeon, but hopefully after next week, I’ll have a better sense of this one.

#d&d tag #lost mine of horncrest