Designer’s Notes

This homebrew adventure was my entry point into 5E and return to the tabletop RPG hobby after a 15-year break. Writing this adventure was a learning exercise for 5E rules and adventure design. Naturally, you will spot a lot of mistakes, bone-headed decisions, and quirks that are due to my own failings, lack of attention, or preferences.

A Note on Railroading and Player Agency

This is a linear adventure. If you like classic open-ended sandbox stuff, this might not be for you. I tried to add as much player agency and sandbox elements as possible, especially within specific nodes of the adventure, but there is an overall plot that unfolds and requires player buy-in.

Even you dislike this kind of adventure design, maybe some sections can be used as stand-alone, location-based adventures.

A Note on Balance

Balance is tricky. For one, I have learned a lot from the OSR community about the joy that can be found in unbalanced encounters or, more precisely, a setting that contains a whole range of encounter types and it is up to the players to decide how to engage or disengage from dangerous situations. You see some of this thinking reflected in this adventure–some encounters are very deadly when players decide to go for a straight-up fight. I have also become a fan of Morale rules from older editions of the dragon game, which can also be found as an optional rule in the DMG. I strongly suggest you use some version of morale to make your encounters more dynamic (see below 5E Rules).

Within the confines of 5E rules and the CR system, I have found official guidelines to be fairly useless. I have played this adventures with two groups. One had four experienced and tactically skilled players, the other had eight novice players with competent PCs. Encounter balance varied wildly between the two groups and relative to the official encounter difficulty. The experienced group would regularly steamroll encounters–eventually I would simply throw encounters at them that were “balanced” for the 8-player group. A challenging encounter would invariably require multiples of the “deadly” rating with additional environmental hazards build-in and a drawn-out adventuring day. All that is to say that encounter difficulty largely depends on your specific group. The monsters and encounters provided in the text were my baseline for providing my groups with different challenges. You will have to adjust as you see fit.

5E Rule Suggestions

I generally like the 5E rule system, although, over time, there certainly were things that became a bit annoying. The two most difficult things to me were 1) providing interesting challenges to PCs with many versatile and near-limitless powers, and 2) avoiding dragging combat encounters because PCs and monsters have large HP pools.

Here are the rule-changes and guidelines I used to keep the game to my liking:

  • I tried hard to avoid adventuring days with only 1-2 encounters. Instead, I tried to follow a pattern of 3-4 hard to deadly encounters or otherwise resource-draining scenarios and two short rests per long rest.

  • I made short rests ten minutes and kept Long Rests at eight hours, except when adventuring in specific environments (see, e.g., Into the Desert). If I were to run this again, I would just use the Gritty Realism and Slow Healing optional rules throughout.

  • I recommend adopting the new Exhaustion rules from the OneDnD playtest.

  • Don’t roll too much. Use backgrounds and skill proficiencies to determine baseline success. Only roll in situations were PCs are under pressure or risk of failure.

  • Give information freely, let players describe their actions without defaulting to abilities on their character sheet.

  • Make traps obvious, the challenge is disarming or circumventing them.