Tyranny of Dragons AAR

[JFahy]

My group finished Rise of Tiamat last week, and as there are only a few hundred writeups on the subject
already I thought I'd submit another. The spoilers will blot out the sun. I'm going to try and keep it
terse so that someone might actually read it, and in the process I might end up skimping on detail.
If you have questions or think something critical is missing, please let me know.

This is not a storyline I'd recommend for an inexperienced DM. There are railroady sections, which
require a little finesse to pull off without irritating your players, and there are fairly open sections where
the party can have the run of a large region and you better be ready to improvise. Also, the various
chapters of the story (especially in Rise of Tiamat) aren't very cohesive unless you do some studying
and tweaking to make them so.

Notes by episode

Hoard Episode 1: Greenest in Flames
Decent way to get things started. The church and mill are nasty and could easily spell doom for an
inexperienced group or for players who don't care about combat optimization. My son's paladin took
the duel at the end, made a pretty good show of it but lost. The town treated him like a hero (because
Cyanwrath was a big scary guy, and because he did order the hostages released) and a cool rivalry started
to build between the two of them.

Hoard Episode 2: Raiders' Camp
Effective as an information dump. Do some thinking about how the cult recruits, because the PCs will be
rubbing elbows with tons of recruits here. (I ended up with kind of a "proletariat revolution, cast down the
kings and be part of a new order, those who glorify the dragon queen will be exalted" thing, plus some
mercenaries who at that point are a little bemused by the whole thing but are fine as long as the money's good.)

Hoard Episode 3: Dragon Hatchery
Blah blah blah and then they met two berserkers and Cyanwrath and they all died The End. Be careful with that fight.
The dragon eggs don't matter unless you make them matter, but appearing as they do in a dragon cult base in the
final room, my group thought they must matter a lot. The intent in the module is that the eggs are being brought to
TWO black dragons that the party will meet around level 6-7 when a dragon fight is still pretty inappropriate.
"Find out what the eggs are for" is largely what kept my group going through the upcoming railroad, and in the end
they broke the eggs just before getting to Castle Naerytar.

Hoard Episode 4: On the Road
An amazing number of pages dedicated to the caravan group. I did very few of the random encounters because spending
half an evening on stuff-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-story bugs me. I did, however, get enthused about the Fields of
the Dead that you pass through and made them horrendous by having an amped-up wight ranger stalk the caravan.
Fun times having to fight alongside the cult because it's better than getting wiped out by zombies.

Hoard Episode 5: Construction Ahead
They pass through Waterdeep, which feels like it should be a bigger deal. There's a detailed map of a building for some
reason and a half-orc who I found myself not caring about. I skipped this. (Did anyone use this section and make it
relevant? I'd be interested to hear how.)

Hoard Episode 6: Castle Naerytar
This worked. They got into recruiting the lizardfolk, getting their noncombatants to safety and planning a fight against
the bullywugs. (By the way, painting Reaper frogmen to look like realistic frogs was a hoot.) Dralmorrer Borngray
traumatized them pretty good with Fire Bolt spam, just for flavor I had him launching the bolts from the blade of his
sword and so in desperation the battlemaster tried disarming him. It finally worked, and they were further traumatized
when he summoned it right back into his hand and continued ruining them.

They bumped into Azbara Jos just afterward, and he used "I don't want to fight and you're in no shape to fight" to walk
past them and down into the caverns.

Hoard Episode 7: Hunting Lodge
This worked. Painting a troll's club to look like a birch tree is a hoot. Around this point...how to put this. I realize
that in a society without cell phones, it would be a lot easier to just walk up to somewhere with some clothes on
and say "yeah, I'm with the cult, ____ sent me". And the story depends on the party doing it an awful lot. But it
starts to feel stupid after a while. In the lodge is where I finally snapped and had Talis narrow her eyes, challenge
them with a question and go "Impostors! Slay them!". Nice touch, having her get caught unawares so that her +1
armor is locked up in her room. However, because I didn't like the nest on top of the building, I had one of her
bodyguards carrying the shield.

Aside - I never represented the shield as cursed. The paladin used the hell out of it for the rest of the campaign,
and had squishies staying near him to avoid arrow fire. I told him there was an inscription on it in an archaic
language, which one character translated as "Barrier keeps friends close" - then a more expert translator read
it as "I am Barrier. Keep close, friends."

Hoard Episode 8: Castle in the Clouds
Your players probably still wake up screaming about the berserkers-and-Cyanwrath fight, and now you get to do
vampires to them. My group approached this fight idiotically and only because I'm a big softie did they not get
torn to shreds. If you're painting vampires, work out what colors they would have worn in life, then mix every
color with dark grey before applying it - they come out looking darker then they should, and all desaturated, like
the color has been sucked out of them. It's a really good effect.

They met Rath Modar, who I played very polite and professorial - he kind of made it sound like he'd been captured
by the cult and asked if he could just get off at their next stop. They said yes. (Note: Rath is quite important later,
and they don't make that totally clear in Hoard. For reasons to be cleared up in a bit, I suggest you switch Rath
from a ???wtf???illusionist???wtf??? to a conjurer. I'll tell you one of the reasons right now - it's so that he has
several means of teleporting away if the party is in kill-everything mode.)

The dragon fight is a good closer - it's quite dangerous. My group used Shatter to bring down part of the roof
on Glazhael, they got a crazy series of criticals and still almost lost. Then Rezmir showed up with an bunch of
ogres, the ogres got absolutely worked by a Grease spell and Rezmir went down.

This is important: attuned Hazirawn is game-warpingly powerful. Unattuned, it is merely a superb weapon.
Remember that it's sentient and evil. I mishandled Hazirawn, and the player who had it, badly and it damaged
the campaign and my relationship with that player. (I decided in advance that it would be attuned until X
happened, and then X took much longer to happen than I anticipated. I would definitely recommend that you
go with Hazirawn refusing to attune unless Y happens.)

Rise Episode 1: Council of Waterdeep
The council thing kind of works, but you have to be ready to have the representatives arguing with each other,
ideally in ways that don't make any of them sound stupid. My group sort of got into it, befriended a few of the
reps, disliked some others (we had two characters with dark skin, one of them a half-elf, and the dwarf ambassador
kept insinuating that they were drow) and I made a poster with stickers to track their faction reputations.

The module mentions that the giants want Skyreach Castle back, and I kind of liked that idea so I ran with it.
It says a frost giant is the emissary they send to make the request, so the meeting went...
[FROST GIANT] "Skyreach Castle is ours. Will you return it to us?"
[PC] (Thinking he means frost giants, not giants-in-general) "We have seen no proof that it is yours, and we have need of it."
[FROST GIANT] "Very well." (Exits)
Information the PCs didn't have: the viking-like frost giants want an excuse to raid and take part in the chaos the
war is producing, and "they took our flying castle" sounds good enough - so they told the emissary to do a really
half-assed job of asking for it back. And from then on, almost every time the party ran into the cult outdoors,
I'd throw in a handful of frost giants. (The emissary camped a few miles outside of Waterdeep with a bonfire
burning, in case the good guys changed their minds, but they never did.)

Warning: Start thinking, immediately, about how you're going to use the council reputations. You don't want to
end up with a Mass Effect 3 "you've spent weeks unifying all these factions and none of it mattered" conclusion,
so don't let it happen like...I...pretty...much...did. :smallfrown: (I thought about it a lot but never had any really
good ideas so the whole thing kind of fizzled. ****.)

Rise Episode 2: The Sea of Moving Ice
I skipped this. You go get this expert on the horn, but there's no benefit if you find her and nothing happens if
you don't. I couldn't think of a good way to fix that, so out it went. (How did you fix that?)

Rise Episodes 3 and 4: Wyrmspeakers
Did the tomb of Diderius, it went okay. Painting Reaper snake-men to look like real snakes is not as fun as
doing the frogs, but pretty good. Varram was in bad shape (bitten) when they got him back to the castle, so
they never did get around to interrogating him. (Then they agreed that he be handed over to the dwarf
ambassador, and thus was executed Varram the White.)

I rewrote Neronvain, mentioned how the elf prince had been killed, and then the elf forest started filling up
with green dragons. In exchange for the cult doing nothing else to the elves, Neronvain was using Secret
Elf Royal Family Stuff to shroud the greens so they could raid everybody else and hide in the forest in places
where the elf windriders couldn't find them. So Episode 4 got deferred.

Rise Episode 5: The Cult Strikes Back
I did the second attack with a bunch of kobolds raiding Greenest to get the good guys to show up, and then
they got ambushed by some NPCs I cooked up. Went well. I used a bunch of my Skaven miniatures as
kobolds (so I had a metric crapton of them) to keep things lively and had a green whelpling scout the fight
and then escape, so I'd have a justification later for having lethally-targeted-and-prepared assassins for attempt
number three...which I then didn't do. Wups.

Rise Episode 6: Metallic Dragons, Arise
This worked. Here's my lame attempt at a rewrite: instead of the Dracorage Mythal, which I know nothing
about and didn't like much, long ago the elves crafted the Drakhorn during a war with the dragons. It enrages
them, it attracts them, and (the reason the elves made it) it makes them go feral. A dragon who hears the
horn from close up has its intelligence drop into the low single digits; they can't use magic, they attack blindly
and fight ferocious-but-stupid, and don't run if they're losing. It helped the elves win the war, they locked it
away, and now it's been stolen.

Bad news! The Drakhorn works on all dragons. I had it sound at exactly the wrong time, just as Atakarn the
Silver in half-dragon form was arriving to introduce himself to the Council of Waterdeep, so he made his entrance
by paralyzing a couple guards and giving a third one a busted skull. Diplomacy prevailed, but the metallics
want the horn destroyed forever. And the masks. And Atakarn wants the dwarf king's dragonscale armor.

Rise Episodes 7-8: Xonthal's Tower and Mission to Thay
I skipped these, and it's not because I didn't think they had potential. I was just getting horribly burnt out
and wanted to get to the finish before I completely ran out of energy/patience. No reflection on the module.

And now, a few words about Rath Modar. I wanted to make him more important because he's the one who's
figured out how the ritual works, he actually has an interesting motivation for summoning Tiamat other than
just doing it and then hoping for a pat on the head, the party has actually met him before the final chapter
(I don't like villains like Severin that you meet for the first time in Room 31 of the final dungeon) and because
if Rath's still around, you actually have something to talk about when you go to Thay: you want their help,
Szass Tam wants to get his hands on Rath to do ultra-nasty things to him.

I had made teleport circles a bit of a thing (and had made a mock-up of one out of foam with removeable
runes), and the party was collecting rune sequences for the Chalet, Naerytar Castle and various other
places; another reason I made Rath a teleport master was so he could pull off shenanigans with the
circles. He had helped set up the treasure transport network, the third assassination attempt was going
to happen on the Council of Waterdeep set because of Rath accessing the Waterdeep teleport circle,
and the good guys were going to have trouble getting to the temple of Tiamat because Rath had locked
out the circle.

Rise Episode 9: Tiamat's Return
First observations: even at 1" = 10' the temple's quite big. I had to lay down some Ikea boxes on top
of a table to produce enough space for it. Second observation, even in the new white plastic dragon miniatures
get a little pricey.

The fight, as written, is "blow up Severin then clean up the adds" and those 1v5 fights generally go badly.
Also, one of the party had been walking around in the black mask for months and I wanted to give him some
thrills, so my revised version was that each section had a red wizard, a dragon, a wyrmspeaker and a big
gaggle of cultists. Each wyrmspeaker except the black one had their own mask during the ritual.

When the ritual was almost done all the mask-wearers started to float toward the center of the room.
The first ones to get there were the green (a green half-dragon champion I made up) and Talis the White
(killed by the PCs, then raised). When they touched they started to grow, and then in a series of horrifying
wrenches their bodies began changing into something draconic. (Not what they were expecting. A line about
'becoming part of the queen's glory' was more literal than they realized.) Each mask, along with the head
of its victim, because a Tiamat head. Two of the wyrmspeakers were dead, and so when Tiamat appeared
two of her heads keeled over uselessly, and because the PC hastily vacated the black mask that head formed
as a fleshless skeleton - so they had to deal with a red-and-blue-only Tiamat.

I mostly liked how this worked, but for a while it was bad for the players' morale. They fought their hearts
out killing dragons (well, one) and beating down wizards and wyrmspeakers, and then when Tiamat started
coming through anyway...'railroad' isn't a word we toss around a lot but two people said 'inevitable' and
I think they were fairly unhappy. However, they perked up quite a bit when I told them about the dead heads
(the following week) and they realized it hadn't all been for nothing. And they were very curious about
the debuffs she had and what had caused them ("Yeah! I did that!").

I had her partway through the portal, a la Kil'Jaeden, and as her hit points ticked down I had her start
slipping back incrementally, until finally they did a burst of damage and she fell back into Hell.

Summary
Don't let a PC attune Hazirawn unless they jump through some (evil) hoops.
I humbly suggest that Rath has better villain potential than Severin.
Early in the campaign, study the final episode so you have time to think about how you want it to play out. Make the factions matter in tangible ways!
Think about why people join the cult, so they don't sound 100% stupid/crazy when PCs talk to them. Some of the best villains think they're good guys.


We got through it in 120-ish hours (10 months x 4 sessions a month x 3 hours per session, give or take), started with 4 players (2 experienced)
and ended up with 5, and I think overall there was more fun than aggravation. If you have any questions, I'd be delighted to try and answer them,
and if you've rewritten parts of the adventure I'd like to hear what you did.

[saeval]

I really just want to say thank you. I've read some of it, not all. currently running that campaign. actually, that's a lie. I'm currently at work and will read the rest later. but it seems extremely useful from what I have read.

[Madfellow]

Hoard Episode 2: Raiders' Camp
Effective as an information dump. Do some thinking about how the cult recruits, because the PCs will be
rubbing elbows with tons of recruits here. (I ended up with kind of a "proletariat revolution, cast down the
kings and be part of a new order, those who glorify the dragon queen will be exalted" thing, plus some
mercenaries who at that point are a little bemused by the whole thing but are fine as long as the money's good.)


My take on it was, "Tiamat is the only god strong enough to unite the cosmos under a single rule and bring about true, lasting peace." Frulam Mondath wound up as the mouthpiece for that after the party captured her. I eliminated Cyanwrath from the adventure entirely, and left Rezmir out of the beginning stuff, so Frulam was the level 1 boss for my table. That worked out well I think; the party sorcerer quickly developed a grudge against her and the rest of the party had to talk him out of just killing her in the hatchery.



Hoard Episode 3: Dragon Hatchery
Blah blah blah and then they met two berserkers and Cyanwrath and they all died The End. Be careful with that fight. The dragon eggs don't matter unless you make them matter, but appearing as they do in a dragon cult base in the final room, my group thought they must matter a lot. The intent in the module is that the eggs are being brought to TWO black dragons that the party will meet around level 6-7 when a dragon fight is still pretty inappropriate. "Find out what the eggs are for" is largely what kept my group going through the upcoming railroad, and in the end they broke the eggs just before getting to Castle Naerytar.


Again, I left Cyanwrath out of my game, so this wasn't an issue. The party smashed all of the eggs except one, which the sorcerer sold to a noble in Baldur's Gate known for his exotic appetites.



Hoard Episode 4: On the Road
An amazing number of pages dedicated to the caravan group. I did very few of the random encounters because spending half an evening on stuff-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-story bugs me. I did, however, get enthused about the Fields of the Dead that you pass through and made them horrendous by having an amped-up wight ranger stalk the caravan. Fun times having to fight alongside the cult because it's better than getting wiped out by zombies.


I cherry-picked NPCs from the list to be the merchant and assistants who hire the party as bodyguards. For each PC, I picked one NPC whom I thought would be complementary in terms of personality. For the party cleric I went with Green Imsa (in my game, Isabel the Blue Sorceress), who approached him asking if he could heal her "skin condition." That eventually morphed into its own big thing; the party sorcerer took an interest in her and agreed to mentor her.

Likewise, I picked out three of the encounters to constitute the journey north: giant eagles, jerk nobles with a depressed knight as their bodyguard, and giant spiders.



Hoard Episode 5: Construction Ahead
They pass through Waterdeep, which feels like it should be a bigger deal. There's a detailed map of a building for some reason and a half-orc who I found myself not caring about. I skipped this. (Did anyone use this section and make it relevant? I'd be interested to hear how.)


The party wakes up in the roadhouse in the morning and sees that Isabel is missing. They look around a bit, and in the padlocked room they find a trail of blood leading into the trapdoor. The incursion into Castle Naerytar then became a rescue mission. The party sorcerer even changed his alignment in response to this event (CG to CN).



Hoard Episode 6: Castle Naerytar
This worked. They got into recruiting the lizardfolk, getting their noncombatants to safety and planning a fight against the bullywugs. (By the way, painting Reaper frogmen to look like realistic frogs was a hoot.) Dralmorrer Borngray traumatized them pretty good with Fire Bolt spam, just for flavor I had him launching the bolts from the blade of his sword and so in desperation the battlemaster tried disarming him. It finally worked, and they were further traumatized when he summoned it right back into his hand and continued ruining them.


My advice for anyone picking up this adventure: leave out Snapjaw. He looks interesting on paper, but if the party does get him on their side, he can basically get them into the castle without breaking a sweat, and at that point it just feels like the adventure is on autopilot, because it basically is. One of my players got especially annoyed by this, and I really can't blame him for it at all.



Hoard Episode 7: Hunting Lodge
This worked. Painting a troll's club to look like a birch tree is a hoot. Around this point...how to put this. I realize
that in a society without cell phones, it would be a lot easier to just walk up to somewhere with some clothes on
and say "yeah, I'm with the cult, ____ sent me". And the story depends on the party doing it an awful lot. But it
starts to feel stupid after a while. In the lodge is where I finally snapped and had Talis narrow her eyes, challenge
them with a question and go "Impostors! Slay them!". Nice touch, having her get caught unawares so that her +1
armor is locked up in her room. However, because I didn't like the nest on top of the building, I had one of her
bodyguards carrying the shield.


After reading this chapter, my thought was, "How exactly does Talis expect to get away with this? This makes no sense." So for my game I made her an undercover Harper agent instead. Outwardly she had to act like a high-ranking cultist, but she would periodically wink at the PCs. They couldn't figure out why, though. :smallsmile: Finally the sorcerer confronted her in the basement (while she was interrogating a defector who got caught) and nearly killed her before finally figuring it out.



Hoard Episode 8: Castle in the Clouds
Your players probably still wake up screaming about the berserkers-and-Cyanwrath fight, and now you get to do
vampires to them. My group approached this fight idiotically and only because I'm a big softie did they not get
torn to shreds. If you're painting vampires, work out what colors they would have worn in life, then mix every
color with dark grey before applying it - they come out looking darker then they should, and all desaturated, like
the color has been sucked out of them. It's a really good effect.


I left out the vampire fight as well, having Talis go off to take care of it while the party did their own thing. If the party had insisted otherwise, instead of a vampire they would have been fighting a vampire spawn (perfectly appropriate for their level, and they'd never know the difference).



Rath is quite important later, and they don't make that totally clear in Hoard.


He's really not. The party can kill him and it won't change anything. I flipped through the entire Rise of Tiamat book and couldn't even find a mention of him.



The dragon fight is a good closer - it's quite dangerous. My group used Shatter to bring down part of the roof
on Glazhael, they got a crazy series of criticals and still almost lost. Then Rezmir showed up with an bunch of
ogres, the ogres got absolutely worked by a Grease spell and Rezmir went down.


My group got blasted by ice breath in the first round and nearly dropped. Then the sorcerer polymorphed it into a centipede, took it to a narrow flight of stairs, dismissed the polymorph so it changed back and got stuck in the stairwell, and then pelted it with fireballs until it died. :smallsmile:



This is important: attuned Hazirawn is game-warpingly powerful. Unattuned, it is merely a superb weapon.
Remember that it's sentient and evil. I mishandled Hazirawn, and the player who had it, badly and it damaged
the campaign and my relationship with that player. (I decided in advance that it would be attuned until X
happened, and then X took much longer to happen than I anticipated. I would definitely recommend that you
go with Hazirawn refusing to attune unless Y happens.)


Yeah, I took one look at Hazirawn and thought, "Hell-no." He's still perfectly useable, just as long as you leave out the attunement option. The cleric and rogue were immediately suspicious of this guy, but the fighter and sorcerer liked him, so they kept him. Only in the most recent session did Hazirawn finally meet his end.



Rise Episode 2: The Sea of Moving Ice
I skipped this. You go get this expert on the horn, but there's no benefit if you find her and nothing happens if
you don't. I couldn't think of a good way to fix that, so out it went. (How did you fix that?)


Granted, this episode isn't terribly important in the grand scheme of things, but it looked amusing enough so I ran the group through it. Orcaheart, Bonecarver, and Maccath were all fun characters to run.



Rise Episodes 3 and 4: Wyrmspeakers
Did the tomb of Diderius, it went okay. Painting Reaper snake-men to look like real snakes is not as fun as
doing the frogs, but pretty good. Varram was in bad shape (bitten) when they got him back to the castle, so
they never did get around to interrogating him. (Then they agreed that he be handed over to the dwarf
ambassador, and thus was executed Varram the White.)


This is where we are right now. The party just sacrificed Hazirawn to the Pool of Divination to learn the location of the cult's headquarters. Interesting note: the party cleric comes from the Sunset Mountains. His response: "Well... going home is going to suck."



I rewrote Neronvain, mentioned how the elf prince had been killed, and then the elf forest started filling up
with green dragons. In exchange for the cult doing nothing else to the elves, Neronvain was using Secret
Elf Royal Family Stuff to shroud the greens so they could raid everybody else and hide in the forest in places
where the elf windriders couldn't find them. So Episode 4 got deferred.


This one was fairly straightforward. The trapped chest in Neronvain's chamber was great! :smallbiggrin: The rogue panicked so hard when she got stuck by that needle, and then, "Yeah, your hand is gone."



Rise Episode 5: The Cult Strikes Back
I did the second attack with a bunch of kobolds raiding Greenest to get the good guys to show up, and then
they got ambushed by some NPCs I cooked up. Went well. I used a bunch of my Skaven miniatures as
kobolds (so I had a metric crapton of them) to keep things lively and had a green whelpling scout the fight
and then escape, so I'd have a justification later for having lethally-targeted-and-prepared assassins for attempt
number three...which I then didn't do. Wups.


After the party got back from the Sea of Moving Ice, they found out Frulam had escaped from the Order of the Gauntlet's custody. The cleric conducted a Scrying ritual in the local church in order to locate her, followed by three days of pursuit on horseback. They caught up to her in an inn, the sorcerer hit her with a Dominate Person, and then... the blue dragon Lennithon shows up. :smallamused: The party saw him coming a mile away (literally, I mean), so the sorcerer quickly cast Teleportation Circle to get them back to Waterdeep (come to think of it, he did a lot of heavy lifting in this game). Second encounter was a trio of cultists in Rolo's Tentside Inn.



Rise Episode 6: Metallic Dragons, Arise
This worked. Here's my lame attempt at a rewrite: instead of the Dracorage Mythal, which I know nothing
about and didn't like much, long ago the elves crafted the Drakhorn during a war with the dragons. It enrages
them, it attracts them, and (the reason the elves made it) it makes them go feral. A dragon who hears the
horn from close up has its intelligence drop into the low single digits; they can't use magic, they attack blindly
and fight ferocious-but-stupid. It helped the elves win the war, they locked it away, and now it's been stolen.


I'm going to skip this one entirely. It basically boils down to five dragons sitting in a row saying, "I'll only help you if you [insert demeaning errand boy quest here]."

[JFahy]

My take on it was, "Tiamat is the only god strong enough to unite the cosmos under a single rule and bring about true, lasting peace." Frulam Mondath wound up as the mouthpiece for that after the party captured her. I eliminated Cyanwrath from the adventure entirely, and left Rezmir out of the beginning stuff, so Frulam was the level 1 boss for my table.
I skipped Rezmir at the start too; they didn't lay eyes on her until Chapter 2. Did you blip out Cyanwrath to avoid the nearly-impossible duel, or just to avoid having too many faces?



My advice for anyone picking up this adventure: leave out Snapjaw. He looks interesting on paper, but if the party does get him on their side, he can basically get them into the castle without breaking a sweat, and at that point it just feels like the adventure is on autopilot, because it basically is. One of my players got especially annoyed by this, and I really can't blame him for it at all.
I used Snapjaw and they seemed to like interacting with him, but to avoid what you mentioned I had the cultists and frogs really dislike and distrust the lizard men - so he could distract and give them information, but he wasn't an Infiltrate the Castle Free card.




After reading this chapter, my thought was, "How exactly does Talis expect to get away with this? This makes no sense." So for my game I made her an undercover Harper agent instead. Outwardly she had to act like a high-ranking cultist, but she would periodically wink at the PCs. They couldn't figure out why, though. :smallsmile: Finally the sorcerer confronted her in the basement (while she was interrogating a defector who got caught) and nearly killed her before finally figuring it out.

Neat. I didn't use the Harpers enough and you're making me wish I had.




(Rath Modar)'s really not (important). The party can kill him and it won't change anything. I flipped through the entire Rise of Tiamat book and couldn't even find a mention of him.
Let me walk that back. I rewrote him to make him more important and was pleased with how it went. As you say, in the modules as written they could whack him at first sight and nothing would really change. For the record, his motivations and history are in Rise pp9-10.




Yeah, I took one look at Hazirawn and thought, "Hell-no." He's still perfectly useable, just as long as you leave out the attunement option. The cleric and rogue were immediately suspicious of this guy, but the fighter and sorcerer liked him, so they kept him. Only in the most recent session did Hazirawn finally meet his end.

Because I'm unwholesomely obsessed with tying things together, I made Naergoth Hazirawn's original owner. Hazirawn started screaming his head off when he heard his master, and Naergoth tried to get his sword back.




I'm going to skip this one entirely. It basically boils down to five dragons sitting in a row saying, "I'll only help you if you [insert demeaning errand boy quest here]."
It's kind of foregone-conclusion, isn't it. Two of their requests are "yes, after the story's over you can have these items we don't want". However, a significant fraction of my dwarves are greedy pricks, especially with strangers, so they knew getting a dwarf king to give up a family heirloom wasn't going to be easy.

[Daishain]

My advice for anyone picking up this adventure: leave out Snapjaw. He looks interesting on paper, but if the party does get him on their side, he can basically get them into the castle without breaking a sweat, and at that point it just feels like the adventure is on autopilot, because it basically is. One of my players got especially annoyed by this, and I really can't blame him for it at all.
Going to disagree with this one in part. I do think that problem merits consideration, but all it takes is a little tweaking.

In my case, I had him leading lizardfolk warriors that what'shisface ordered to stay separate from the rest of the tribe as a precaution. The cultists aren't aware of him and his band. He is useless as an infiltration device in that capacity, but can be talked into assaulting the castle if given reasons to do so his master would agree with, or simply giving advice to help the party subtly enter on their own (such as the hidden underwater tunnel).

My players told Snapjaw that the cult was smuggling in more wealth than his master was likely aware of (true), and that multiple whole shipments could be seized entering the swamp before the cultists directed them elsewhere if castle Naerytar fell quickly (not quite true, but they and the dragon thought it was, so good enough). Some negotiations and one terrifying though fortunately brief conversation with an immensely powerful psionic black dragon later, and they seized the castle while running at the head of a small lizardfolk army. They missed out on some things that way, but they were getting tired of the 'pretend not to stick out like sore thumbs' shtick anyways. The default campaign really does use that a bit too often.

[Fizban]

I haven't read the whole adventure since I still hold some hope of playing it myself, but after seeing how moronic the first chapter was I evaluated the first three in detail and read through the fourth. In horrible scrawling .txt file notes. You say it might require a little finesse to pull off, I say it was written by people that don't want to write actual modules anymore. Our newbie DM was under the impression he could run a module as written, because that's kinda the point, but RHoD this is not. Yes I know you can't run any module blind, but I've run RHoD, World's Largest, and studied Return to the Temple's opening: it took me while to distill episode 1 here into something useable. It should also be noted that we intended to use episodic leveling, because it's easier and suggested right there in the module, but I doubt you could exceed that for some time anyway.

Of course as you lampshaded above I'm sure there are already better versions of my rant elsewhere, but you did ask if anything critical was missing and I think this is it: as the first major adventure line of 5e, for new players that expect a pre-written adventure to work and old players that expect some actual quality, this module starts out failing and does not get better for some time. I'm very glad the other guy paid for it.

tallying encounters:

wandering monsters- nil, should not be encountered before "seek the keep," and with a 50% chance of an extra encounter to and from mission (not counting the +33% chance if you're using the "safe" tunnel), this makes no -redacted- sense. the sanctuary makes it look like you weren't intended to roll these between missions, but the roll for using the tunnel (which you pay for with extra encounters) makes it look like you are.

seek the keep: 1+3= four. foes have advantage to beat sneak or bluff so this is unlikely, but finding a way through without fighting is referred to as "retreat to avoid them entirely" (retreat as a word is usually used in combat, not to avoid combat).

basically if you keep "retreating" long enough you should be able to do it without fighting at all: avoiding a group gets you past but rolls 1d6 and every total 4 rolled adds a new group to avoid, with some luck you can do it in just a few rolls and even without luck you should be able to pick your battles against the smallest groups to break through. this encounter is actually an evasive chase/breakthrough in the streets grabbing up villagers and smashing through the weaker parts of the enemy line, but you have to put that all together yourself. and none of this is properly conveyed to the DM. if this was written properly, it would be only 1 mandatory encounter.

the sally port: should be run a bit after reaching the keep to maintain tension, 1 encounter +1 if not barricaded

the tunnel: 1 heavy and 1 light encounter, the second with a time limit to avoid even more ambushes
more tunnel: 1/3 chance on every exit they'll have another encounter to deal with

dragon attack lists 20 defenders, dragon kills+injures 1d4+1d6 each breath which are replaced later, players must deal 24 damage vs AC 19 or roll a crit to drive it off and the defenders are somehow useless because plot (dragon has no resistance or immunities to speak of so this is bogus). no indication if the dragon remains in bowshot between breaths. i guess this is a free encounter for resources, but it makes no sense.

save the mill: 1 (with possible rout), 1 ambush (that doesn't make sense, why would you go in there once the fires are out?)

sanctuary: this is a minimum of 1 encounter if described properly

half-dragon champion: in order for sending out a PC to make any sense, the half-dragon must describe his fair duel properly beforehand, reminding the (likely new) players that 0hp is not instant death and swearing not to execute his oppenent if and when they fall. this would let players know that they can take the beating (with some risk of an insta-kill crit or string of bad death saves) and gamble on the half-dragon's honor. i also don't agree with the NPC auto-dying since there's no reason he shouldn't get 3 death saves to live like the PCs (volunteering for that is enough to qualify him for folk hero status alone).


whole event is on a time limit, 9pm to 4am. sounds like this is meant to determine how many missions you do: as many as you can fit in the night at 1 hour per mission, minus short rests. 7-2 would be 5 encounters, but most missions have 2 encounters so it's actually 10. especially at level 1 resources will be gone long before that.


overall, this fails at telling you what's happening and setting up how to run the missions. wandering encounters should not be listed first and really aren't appropriate when the missions already have too many encounters. not enough attention is given to the govenor's combat wounds, the militia's strength, or the idea that the players are dodging between enemy groups while the keep is surrounded, instead looking more like a work list of too many fights. and it's not really "missions" since there are only two missions where you leave the keep: saving the mill and the sanctuary, and the tunnel doesn't even do anything (maybe it's required to do the sanctuary).

the sanctuary encounter is the best worst example. it should start with what the adventurers see, but instead starts with a list of foes and you have to figure out how to present it yourself: "there are 9 foes at the door with the battering ram, with 15 more slowly marching around the building taunting the people inside. the back door is obscured by a cloud of smoke." with that information you could actually formulate the suggested plans of attack instead of asking the DM. then you apparently make it back to the keep with no random encounters.

mandatory encounters: as low as 5 if it was presented properly.

Then after a bit I decided to perform the logical extension and run it through their xp calculators:
party level and size with encounter difficulty threshold totals from DMG:


med hard deadly total xp per day
four 1st's 200 300 400 1200
three 1st's 150 225 300 900
five 1st's 250 375 500 1500

four 2nd's 400 600 800 2400
three 2nd's 300 450 600 1800
five 2nd's 500 750 1000 3000



note that multiple creatures are considered more difficult and cost more of the "encounter budget," but don't give you more xp (same as it's always been). total xp per day still refers to the adjusted difficulty, so a party that fights deadly mobs will have to rest and take longer to level up than a party that slowly murders individuals.
the multipliers have a massive amount of wiggle room, counting 3-6 creatures all as the same multiplier, which only works if you have 5' corridors to choke them. furthermore, this module is intended to be run at 1st level, when characters have the absolute least access to area effects and extended resources, the worst time to be messing around with random encounters and hordes of enemies.


let's start with the random encounter table full of enemy hordes:
6 kobolds 300
3 kobolds+ 1 drake 350
6 cultists 300
4 cultists+ 1 guard 250
2 cultists+ 1 acolyte 200
3 guards+ 1 acolyte 250

2/6 groups include kobolds that have pack tactics and ranged weapons in addition to the highest danger ratings. the rest compensate with nearly double the hit points. the ambush drake could one-shot with a surprise round. if you roll the weakest option on the table it might be suitable for a random encounter, but otherwise this is all bull.


how about the actual mandatory encounters? (assuming a good party that saves people and knows what to avoid, which is hard to do because the module is written like an idiot)

seek the keep:
8 kobolds 500

the sally port:
1 lyte, 4 k's, 1 drak 500

dragon attack:
n/a, you die or you don't

save the mill:
encounter table 200-350

sanctuary:
2 cultists, 6 kobolds 500

champion:
n/a, you remember PC's don't die at 0hp or you don't

so that's three deadly+ encounters involving swarms of foes with pack tactics and ranged weapons. total is 1700+, doable at 2nd level with room for an extra encounter or two (maybe), but otherwise out of reach even for a group of six 1st's.



what if they players don't know exactly what they're doing and take the module's bait?

seek the keep:
+3 encounters 300*3

the old tunnel:
2 rat swarms 100? (these are way stronger than they should be even if they flee at 1/2hp)
2 cultists+ 6 kobolds 300
bonus penalty fight 200-350 (1/3 penalty every time you use it, vs no penalty for methods unlisted)


and if the DM rolls those random encounters?
appox 50% per travel* 4 trips (in+out for mill+sanctuary), +2 encounters, 400-700



grand total for someone trying to run this straight out of the box and expecting full completion: 4000xp worth of difficulty in a single day. more than even a full party of five 2nd level characters. So yeah, this adventure was written by a moron and should start at 2nd level, not 1st, by their own encounter building rules. it's only doable at 1st if you know all the tricks: don't fight anything on the way to the keep, climb down a wall instead of using the tunnel, don't enter the mill (not that you'd have any reason to), and rush the smoke behind the sanctuary. even then you'll need a sor/wiz with burning hands and acid splash to even the odds against the kobold swarms, and either a load of stealth or banning your DM from rolling extra encounters. so yeah, perfectly doable if you're a playtest group that's run the module before and has a party ready for it.

so how did my party do it? after we go to the keep we just started ignoring stuff. didn't even run the sally port fight, ignored the rats in the tunnel, used a squad of guards with a surprise round to take out the group that was near the tunnel and ignored random encounters after that, rolled easy outside the mill and barred the "ambush" inside. then i realized 1: none of the raiders had long range weapons, and 2: the sanctuary was within bowshot of the keep. so I demanded to know what was in the armory, "found" 15 longbows, and told the guards to keep shooting till it was done. let the guard go to his arbitrary death since i forgot "death saves" could protect me and the module says he doesn't get any.



episode 2

this episode is a joke for combat, though it'd be some decent roleplaying if waltzing into a bandit camp made any damn sense. but this written by morons for morons so there you go. you get the level 2 strength you needed for last episode just in time to roll nothing but skill checks that don't care about level. of course if you started at 2nd and thus have now reached 3rd, you'd have some cool spells (invisibility, pass without trace, enhance ability, detect thoughts, etc) that would be great for this sort of mission. no point in evaluating this since the only fight is outrageously unbalanced is obviously not meant to be fought with no proper followup.


episode 3

holy bats an actual dungeon. new table:


med hard deadly total per day
four 3rd's 600 900 1600 4,800
three 3rd's 450 675 1200 3,600
five 3rd's 750 1125 2000 6,000

four 4th's 1000 1500 2000 6800


at minimum 3rd level, there are actually resources to ration. this episode doesn't seem to mention what happens if you retreat for a long rest, but as long as it's only 1 day it shouldn't stretch belief and the last section mentioned there are safe caves to rest in.

as usual, rooms are not meant to get involved in each other's fights, and only a couple rooms have that possibility. there are two paths through the dungeon, one of which is concealed in the "durr you didn't ask" sort of way, as are all the traps which I'll ignore for the moment.

minimum path 1, rooms 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 (extra 11++)

minimum path 2, rooms 1-2, 12-, 11+, 9, 10

minimum path 2X, rooms 1-2, 12-, 9gtfo

bonus encounters: 1/6 multiplied by up to 7 rooms in and out, stacking with existing encounters. lovely.

rooms 5 and 6 are gotcha bs, a trog fight for tons of cash hidden in garbage, and a max hp reduction for touching a curtain. players are likely to investigate at least one or the other, but I see no reason to punish them for it.


room 1
2 "dragonclaws" 600

room 3
2 violet fungi 150

room 4
10 stirges 625 (+invisible gotcha bats, lol)

room 5
4 trogs 400

room 7
4 kobolds+ 1 wk 300
3 penalty drakes 1350-2700? (reduced hp, bad position)

room 8
6 kobolds+ 6 wk 1350

room 9
cyanwrath+ 2 'serks 4000 (+1 zerk for each extra PC because ha)

room 10
2 guard drakes 1350
1 roper 1800 (if your DM's a mean person)
4 trollfaces 200
(actual challenge varies wildly depending on drake/kobold/roper? timing)

room 12-
2 guard+ 5 cult 450

room 11+
FM +1 guard +3 cult 1150

room 11++
FM+ 3 guard+8 cult 2400 (actually depends on funneling/AoE use)

room 9gtfo
FM+cyanwrath+2 'serks 2900 (could add more guards but eh)



based on the difficulty values and ignoring random extras, we have a couple easy, couple medium, and couple hard encounters, which are all fine until the wtfbbq three bosses at once fight at 4000 which is nearly your entire day all in one fight. and that's not an exaggeration, since you'll need to nova wildshape, rage, healing, or something to outlast cyanwrath's 57hp and the berserker's 67hp each, while they're putting out as much dps at the whole party put together with double greatsword/lightning breath/reckless attack. fighting them all together at anything less than full strength is insane.

the trick here is to have someone who accepted the duel back at level 1, who now at level 3 can take him on solo. this is not physically possible for any normal character. maybe a moon druid who saved both wildshapes for brown bear for this exact fight, and led the fight with a heat metal for extra dps and disadvantage on cyanwrath's attacks. otherwise you're facing a level 6-8 NPC with a level 3, and even with all that you're still screwed if he crits and/or you lose your spell.

unorthodox tactics? good luck baiting him with a familiar or something, the room is so small there's no way you're dodging a round of attacks that way. sneak past? no mention of ever sleeping. invisible? three eggs to smash, good luck getting out now that you're surrounded and invis has broken. smoke them out? good luck doing that unnoticed, and even if it works you'll just have to fight them all at once. cave in? not enough magic.

The first episode is balanced pretty well for a 2nd level party, but you're supposed to run it at 1st in a single night. I guess the point is to make the players feel like -redacted- when they run out of gas just getting to the keep and hide there all night without saveing anyone. The second episode clearly doesn't intend a serious fight. The third is a nice little dungeon with a spread of difficulties and a low chance of random encounters, with a ludicrous boss fight that cannot by bypassed. They claim this was playtested? That actually makes more sense: the people who signed off on it had already played the module multiple times, so they didn't need actual descriptive text that made sense and could prepare perfectly for each encounter that they already knew from experience.

I read 27 playtesters: that's not enough for 6 full teams, so at best 3 normal and 2 oversized (you know they didn't try it with 3-man parties). All the gushing about writing an adventure while the rules were in beta seems to reinforce the attitude of "I'm not writitng this up because it's not gonna matter anyway wah wah make it up yourself." "Compelling adventure design?" Even going back to read everything with hindsight the only thing I'm compelled to do is rage about how stupid it is every step of the way.

On to episode 4 and it looks like the momentous tier shift happens incidentally after a line of random caravan encounters with only light intermittent combat. This chapter is massively focused on roleplaying, and while as usual the introduction is terrible with a long expository crawl and no flesh for it's NPCs, the main section is pretty sweet. A list of random NPCs to use on the road and a a bunch of interesting encounters to use along the way. Only problem is rather endemic to this type of episode, where stuff happens and no one has a chance of detecting it simply because the instigator "was careful," but that's how PC's usually enact their plans anyway so turnabout can be fair. More problematic is a scene where breakfast is interrupted and apparently the players just let the guy do his whole scene without interruption, yeah that's not likely to happen. So at this point it seems like it's starting to come together, we've got a long adventure as the players literally follow a load of cultist loot up the coast, doing stuff along the way. The problems with levels 1-3 were that they never should have happened: start at 3rd, roll into a wrecked town, blend into the enemy camp, boomerang back and smash some eggs before following the loot. Fix the Cyanwrath fight and you're good.
Or the tl:dr version: the first three episodes are not balanced at all even by WotC's own rules, unless the players have already played the adventure and know exactly what to do or are a level higher than suggested. Even then the boss fight in episode 3 seems deliberately designed to require blind luck for avoiding PC deaths. That said, I did like episode 4's long caravan journey, it's actually the type of adventure that should be written in this style and had tons of NPCs set up for roleplaying, too bad the adventure didn't start there.

[Daishain]

I say it was written by people that don't want to write actual modules anymore. Our newbie DM was under the impression he could run a module as written, because that's kinda the point, but RHoD this is not.
It was written by people with a restrictive page count and with the Adventurer's League in mind. For that particular setting, it can be run as written by someone that knows how to tweak things on the fly.

For the sake of what I consider 'normal' games however, the writers and many people who have revised it (myself included) strongly suggest using this as a basic guideline for an adventure rather than a complete one. In that particular role, it works just fine. Interesting characters, settings, and overall plotline, with plenty of room to tweak content and add new stuff in. Use the book as inspiration rather than one's sole source of content. My (now ex, the group is literally moving apart) players just finished my version of HotDQ, and they're calling it the best campaign they've ever participated in.

Take Greenest for example. It is an excellent opportunity to display the horrors of war, and hint at the times to come should the players not step up to the challenge. My players encountered everything ranging from defecting kobolds trying to escape the cult, to a rape in progress, to a pair of mercenary bugbears roasting a dismembered Halfling on a spit. Cyanwrath began his challenging speech by murdering a captured member of the Greenest militia that I had previously cast as a guide and helping blade to the party, and I otherwise ensured that his introduction had players champing at the bit both in and out of character to get a piece of his scaly ass. The scornful and insulting way he treated his fallen opponent did nothing but fan those flames. (I did increase the player's odds of survival, but not to the point that it wasn't a very tense couple of rounds) By the time they took Cyanwrath down, ending that particular hook, they had a sense of just how big a problem the cult presented.

[Madfellow]

I skipped Rezmir at the start too; they didn't lay eyes on her until Chapter 2. Did you blip out Cyanwrath to avoid the nearly-impossible duel, or just to avoid having too many faces?


Mostly to avoid that duel, yeah. It just felt too railroady and demeaning. What's odd though is that I hear most players in other groups actually enjoyed it.



episode 3
rooms 5 and 6 are gotcha bs, a trog fight for tons of cash hidden in garbage, and a max hp reduction for touching a curtain. players are likely to investigate at least one or the other, but I see no reason to punish them for it.


I thought this was interesting: when my party got to the three way fork, they asked if there was any kind of indication as to what was down each path. Knowing that one room had troglodytes, one had rotting meat, and another had an animal pen, I described each path based on what odors they could pick up. They went left to the drake pen, since it smelled the least foul.

The guard drakes are bs, though. I knew that just from looking at them, so instead I replaced them with ambush drakes (and again, the players would never know the difference).

The violet fungi in the previous chamber were a slog though; just big ol' sacks of HP that take forever to die and can't dish out any meaningful damage. Snore.



the trick here is to have someone who accepted the duel back at level 1, who now at level 3 can take him on solo. this is not physically possible for any normal character. maybe a moon druid who saved both wildshapes for brown bear for this exact fight, and led the fight with a heat metal for extra dps and disadvantage on cyanwrath's attacks. otherwise you're facing a level 6-8 NPC with a level 3, and even with all that you're still screwed if he crits and/or you lose your spell.


Yeah, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to win that fight.

[Daishain]

Yeah, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to win that fight.
They aren't, the first fight is supposed to be unwinnable. The second, winnable with the help of party mates but not solo. Someone might go for a second round on the duel, but they'd be foolish to do so, and I suggest that DMs make that reasonably clear.

[coredump]

I

The first episode is balanced pretty well for a 2nd level party, but you're supposed to run it at 1st in a single night. I guess the point is to make the players feel like -redacted- when they run out of gas just getting to the keep and hide there all night without saveing anyone.
It never says to run *every* mission, yet we ran several at 1st level and did fine. The Sanctuary was easy, assuming you didn't treat it like a beserker rush. Yes it was a hard episode, it was *supposed* to be. It shows that you need to use good tactics and quick thinking for difficult encounters.


The third is a nice little dungeon with a ...ludicrous boss fight that cannot by bypassed.
Really? Is that a rule that I missed? We could have bypassed it quite easily. If you guys just charged in.... that is not the fault of the adventure.
We scouted the room, my Paladin challenged him, he advanced for a dual... then we all ganged up one him for a roundish while the beserkers rushed forward. It was hard, and we had 1-2 folks go down (but not die) by the end. But using good tactics and quick thinking... we won.
But... we could have just scouted and left if we thought it would be too hard. That is another lesson... you *can* bypass encounters if need be.



Or the tl:dr version: the first three episodes are not balanced at all even by WotC's own rules, unless the players have already played the adventure and know exactly what to do or are a level higher than suggested. Even then the boss fight in episode 3 seems deliberately designed to require blind luck for avoiding PC deaths. .
They are meant to show that good tactics and quick thinking are needed in a deadly situation. If a group just went "Charge" at every fight... of course they were doomed.

[coredump]

Mostly to avoid that duel, yeah. It just felt too railroady and demeaning. What's odd though is that I hear most players in other groups actually enjoyed it.
Railroady?? A challenge is issued, the either accept it, or they don't. That is not a railroad, that is player choice, and their choice matters... which is the opposite of a railroad.




Yeah, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to win that fight.It says right in the adventure that they are *not* meant to win that fight. It is an encounter that is designed to do several things:

1) Sets up Cyanwrath as a 'goal' of a bad guy to kill
2) presents/reinforces the reality that not every encounter is required to be of 'appropriate level'
3) Sets up the climax of Ep 3, presents CYanrath as 'honorable' and that he likes duals
4) Gives the PCs some recon/intelligence on Cyanrath so they can choose to engage or not when they see him in EP3
5) Puts an emphasis on how badly the cultists have manhandled the town.
6) Makes things 'personal' between the PCs and the Cult

IOW, it was a great encounter... much better than the typical "just kill the monsters" encounter.

[Madfellow]

Railroady?? A challenge is issued, the either accept it, or they don't. That is not a railroad, that is player choice, and their choice matters... which is the opposite of a railroad.


Cyanwrath shows up at the gates with a group of hostages and challenges someone to a fight. Sure, they can technically say no, but the adventure is trying to guilt trip them to enter an unwinnable fight.



It says right in the adventure that they are *not* meant to win that fight. It is an encounter that is designed to do several things:
1) Sets up Cyanwrath as a 'goal' of a bad guy to kill
2) presents/reinforces the reality that not every encounter is required to be of 'appropriate level'
3) Sets up the climax of Ep 3, presents Cyanwrath as 'honorable' and that he likes duals
4) Gives the PCs some recon/intelligence on Cyanwrath so they can choose to engage or not when they see him in EP3
5) Puts an emphasis on how badly the cultists have manhandled the town.
6) Makes things 'personal' between the PCs and the Cult


1) A fight against Frulam Mondath (CR 2) in which she retreats when she hits half health accomplishes exactly the same goal, without the risk of killing off a PC.
2) The dragon already did that.
3) Again, Frulam Mondath serves the same purpose just as well, without the risk of a TPK the second time around.
4) Cyanwrath is squatting on the only obvious entrance into the hatchery, and once he spots them snooping around it's not like he's just going to let them go about their business unmolested. In other words, no, they do not have a choice to just avoid him if they don't want to fight him. If they see him and he sees them, a fight is going to happen.
5) The town is on fire and is being looted. Also, dragon. I think the PCs got the message loud and clear.
6) See point 1.



IOW, it was a great encounter... much better than the typical "just kill the monsters" encounter.


And you're entitled to that opinion, as are the many other people who share it. I don't share it however, and I made a conscious choice to exclude him from my game, and I don't regret it at all.

[Fizban]

For the sake of what I consider 'normal' games however, the writers and many people who have revised it (myself included) strongly suggest using this as a basic guideline for an adventure rather than a complete one.
It's definitely a good starting point, yeah, but like I said it's the first module I've seen that was so incomplete, especially for a flagship entry. You say the writers mentioned this, did I miss some text in the introduction that leans more strongly on the "only a starting point" angle? That would make me feel a bit better.


I thought this was interesting: when my party got to the three way fork, they asked if there was any kind of indication as to what was down each path. Knowing that one room had troglodytes, one had rotting meat, and another had an animal pen, I described each path based on what odors they could pick up. They went left to the drake pen, since it smelled the least foul.
Nice move there.


They aren't, the first fight is supposed to be unwinnable. The second, winnable with the help of party mates but not solo. Someone might go for a second round on the duel, but they'd be foolish to do so, and I suggest that DMs make that reasonably clear.

It says right in the adventure that they are *not* meant to win that fight.
We are not referring to the first duel at level 1, that would be silly. The boss fight in episode 3 is still ridiculous weather someone tries another duel or you run it as written. When I said the best chance was a solo fight with a perfectly armed druid, it's because fighting Cyanwrath and two berserkers with even more hit points in close quarters is a terrible idea.

It never says to run *every* mission, yet we ran several at 1st level and did fine. The Sanctuary was easy, assuming you didn't treat it like a beserker rush. Yes it was a hard episode, it was *supposed* to be. It shows that you need to use good tactics and quick thinking for difficult encounters.

Really? Is that a rule that I missed? We could have bypassed it quite easily. If you guys just charged in.... that is not the fault of the adventure.
We scouted the room, my Paladin challenged him, he advanced for a dual... then we all ganged up one him for a roundish while the beserkers rushed forward. It was hard, and we had 1-2 folks go down (but not die) by the end. But using good tactics and quick thinking... we won.
But... we could have just scouted and left if we thought it would be too hard. That is another lesson... you *can* bypass encounters if need be.
To clarify, I have only "played" episodes 1 and 2 (as the DM did not have the preparation or experience to pull it off). I then evaluated 1-3 based on my DMing experience and the DMG's own experience rules. I see you were in the player seat, which means I suspect you have not read the module yourself. I agree on the first episode in the sense that there are only 5 or so encounters I would consider neccesary (for plot and saving people like the heroes the module assumes you are). However, the module presents first a random encounter table, followed by a list of missions, and those missions are written with lists of enemies. All of it is weighted towards "fight this massive list of guys," making it extremely likely a DM who isn't paying careful attention will allow the players to bring way more on their heads then they can handle before they've finished even the core missions. In order to make it work the DM needs to go through and basically write a module out of the module, interpreting how everything fits together and writing proper descriptions so the players can make informed decisions.

Regarding the unavoidable boss fight: from what I recall when I made those notes, Cyanwrath's position is such that you cannot reach the goal without passing him. Unless the whole party has multiple castings of invisibility it is impossible to sneak through there, unless your DM simply allows to to arbitrarily sneak without any sort of cover or concealment. Your tactics are sound, but even then the numbers are stacked against the party, and I cannot tell what the battlegrid looked like, what the rolls were, or even if the DM secretly fudged or nerfed the berserkers. It sounds like your DM had the berserkers back out of charge range when you pretended to offer a duel, but there's nothing about that in the module (I'd expect the guards to stay close specifically because of the most obvious trap, note also that it says Cyanwrath immediately attacks after his one line. This is why I consider an uber-druid solo to be the best option). What I do know is that by WoTC's own encounter calculator's this fight is off the scale and the foes are concentrated power with just plain bigger numbers than the PCs.

5) The town is on fire and is being looted. Also, dragon. I think the PCs got the message loud and clear.
That was actually part of my problem, since our DM couldn't quickly find details on the allied/enemy forces the whole episode didn't make sense. There were more than enough guards to just pelt the dragon to death with slings but it was apparently invincible and he missed the part where the army had apparently encircled the entire keep. Thus I decided the govenor was incompetent losing against these scattered skirmishers and used my "noble background" as justification for ordering everyone up to the walls. I reasoned that as a defensive fortification there should be some bows in there, and the sanctuary building is literally within bowshot of the keep. Solved things pretty well.

[coredump]

I agree on the first episode in the sense that there are only 5 or so encounters I would consider neccesary (for plot and saving people like the heroes the module assumes you are). As far as the plot, there are no 'necessary' missions in Ep 1. They are all presented as options, for the player *and* the DM...

However, the module presents first a random encounter table, followed by a list of missions, and those missions are written with lists of enemies. All of it is weighted towards "fight this massive list of guys," making it extremely likely a DM who isn't paying careful attention will allow the players to bring way more on their heads then they can handle before they've finished even the core missions. I really don't get this? Because the missions have a list of bad guys that means the DM will make bad choices? It means the players will make bad choices? The module even explicitly states "missions don't need to include combat" The Sanctuary (for example) has a "massive list of guys".... nothing in the adventure says you have to fight them. We used an illusion to get some of them to run off, then ambushed the couple of guys in back. It took hardly any fighting at all to get in and get out.
We made sure to clear the tunnel first thing, to avoid many of the wandering monster checks.
We were more than willing to run from encounters whenever possible.



In order to make it work the DM needs to go through and basically write a module out of the module, interpreting how everything fits together and writing proper descriptions so the players can make informed decisions. What? What needs to be 'written'?? I will agree, it does work better if the DM bothers to actually *read* the episode before running it. (preferably the entire adventure, but at least the episode...) But once read, I don't see what 'other module' needs to be written. Its a fairly straightforward set of situations... the DM just needs to pick which ones to present, and the players need to pick which ones to accomplish.



Regarding the unavoidable boss fight: from what I recall when I made those notes, Cyanwrath's position is such that you cannot reach the goal without passing him. Then I suggest you recheck the module. The only thing the players will miss by ignoring that fight is a few black dragon eggs. (and the treasure in the chest) Most of that entire cave complex could be skipped.



What I do know is that by WoTC's own encounter calculator's this fight is off the scale and the foes are concentrated power with just plain bigger numbers than the PCs. The author has confirmed that when they finalized the module, the beserkers had about half the HP they ended up with. Maybe less damage, he didn't cover that.
Yes, it is a hard fight, a *very* hard fight. And for some parties, the wiser choice would be to avoid it if possible. But that is part of the game too. Knowing when to fold and wait for another day.


That was actually part of my problem, since our DM couldn't quickly find details on the allied/enemy forces the whole episode didn't make sense. Did your DM not bother to read the episode before running it? It mentioned several times that the town is over run, that the keep is surrounded, etc.

There were more than enough guards to just pelt the dragon to death with slings but it was apparently invincible Not really. First you have to assume they have slings. Then they are likely not proficient, perhaps even at disadvantage, and afraid of the dragon, and etc etc.

I reasoned that as a defensive fortification there should be some bows in there, and the sanctuary building is literally within bowshot of the keep. Solved things pretty well.First... that is the point. Good tactics and quick thinking are the key to defeating even a Deadly encounter.
OTOH, the sanctuary is only in range of Longbows and Heavy crossbows. Otherwise it is not so clear that even extreme range will work. And while there might be some bows.. a small town is not planning on holding off an army, just enough to discourage small raids etc. If you found 10 shortbows, I think that would be a lot. But... as DM I would have made it more to reward such a good idea.

[Madfellow]

Then I suggest you recheck the module. The only thing the players will miss by ignoring that fight is a few black dragon eggs. (and the treasure in the chest) Most of that entire cave complex could be skipped.

The dragon eggs in the hatchery are the GOAL of that dungeon crawl. Out of curiosity, what did you think the objective was in that mission?


Yes, it is a hard fight, a *very* hard fight. And for some parties, the wiser choice would be to avoid it if possible. But that is part of the game too. Knowing when to fold and wait for another day.


Cyanwrath is squatting on the only obvious entrance into the hatchery, and once he spots them snooping around it's not like he's just going to let them go about their business unmolested. In other words, no, they do not have a choice to just avoid him if they don't want to fight him. If they see him and he sees them, a fight is going to happen.

The PCs have no indication of what's in that chamber before they enter it. If they enter it, they'll be seen and challenged by Cyanwrath. If they turn back after that, guess what? Cyanwrath's going to chase after them and use his lightning breath to cook their hides.

[Fizban]

As far as the plot, there are no 'necessary' missions in Ep 1.
It's kinda pointless to buy a module if the players refuse to play it.

The author has confirmed that when they finalized the module, the beserkers had about half the HP they ended up with. Maybe less damage, he didn't cover that.
Yes, it is a hard fight, a *very* hard fight. And for some parties, the wiser choice would be to avoid it if possible. But that is part of the game too. Knowing when to fold and wait for another day.
Once again I would like to see a source on these quotes, but you just admitted yourself that the fight was never meant to be that hard so why on earth would you assume it's a good idea to run it that way?

Did your DM not bother to read the episode before running it? It mentioned several times that the town is over run, that the keep is surrounded, etc.
I already said he was inexperienced, which is why I looked at it myself. The specific information I'd asked for as a player was "how many?", because the actual number we'd seen was paltry. If I remember correctly the size of the enemy army is hidden at the end of a paragraph which continued through a page turn, a sad accident in formatting-but it should never have been at the bottom of a paragraph in the first place.

Not really. First you have to assume they have slings. Then they are likely not proficient, perhaps even at disadvantage, and afraid of the dragon, and etc etc.
First... that is the point. Good tactics and quick thinking are the key to defeating even a Deadly encounter.
OTOH, the sanctuary is only in range of Longbows and Heavy crossbows. Otherwise it is not so clear that even extreme range will work. And while there might be some bows.. a small town is not planning on holding off an army, just enough to discourage small raids etc. If you found 10 shortbows, I think that would be a lot. But... as DM I would have made it more to reward such a good idea.
The thing about 5e is that none of those penalties matter. Proficiency for them is only a +2 bonus and you already get disadvantage for long range so who cares? Slings used to be free, currently cost 1sp each, and rocks are free. That's why I said a defensive fortification that didn't even have any weapons. The DM did in fact reward me with 15 longbows, but that's not the point. The dragon is undamaged because the module specifically tells the DM to ignore the rules and make the dragon immune to the guardsman's weaponry so only player damage counts for driving it off. The dragon has what, 60-90hp and leaves after taking 25 or so? Peasants are more powerful than they've ever been and the module has to cheat to make the plot work. There are few guards, unknown refugees, and the module gives you no weapons, that's all fine-but in order for any of my "quick thinking" to work against the dragon the DM has to ignore the module point blank. I could go over the episode paragraph by paragraph to point out all the design problems, but no one wants to read that and I don't want to write it.

I don't think I'm going to convince you and I didn't want to take up this much of the front page anyway, people should have room to discuss later parts of the adventure too. Suffice to say that no matter how well it went for your group and how easy it seems to you in hindsight, clearly someone else had a different experience, and that means it can't be perfect.

[Daishain]

It's kinda pointless to buy a module if the players refuse to play it.He meant that in the sense of any one encounter being completely optional. Don't like the fight with Lennithon, or the one with Cyanwrath? Chuck em, and the story works just fine without.


Once again I would like to see a source on these quotes, but you just admitted yourself that the fight was never meant to be that hard so why on earth would you assume it's a good idea to run it that way?I can't link it myself (in between tasks at work and dealing with a filter), but the principle clarifications came from Winters on the WOTC forum. You should be able to find it without much trouble.

Are you asking from the perspective of the writers or the DMs that took the book to heart?

If the former, it isn't their fault the difficulty of creatures they were using changed after the book was due. This isn't the only such instance either. For example, the chapter 4 encounter with assassins camping an inn. Originally, it was 4 young green slaads in disguise. Then the young green slaad entry disappeared, and the writers were told they needed to use something else. So they went for assassins instead, who at the time were at about the same power level. Then, after it was too late to change anything, the strength of the assassin entry shot through the roof...

If the latter, not much can be done about that save hope that they or their players find discussions like this and realize the mistake.


I already said he was inexperienced, which is why I looked at it myself. The specific information I'd asked for as a player was "how many?", because the actual number we'd seen was paltry. If I remember correctly the size of the enemy army is hidden at the end of a paragraph which continued through a page turn, a sad accident in formatting-but it should never have been at the bottom of a paragraph in the first place.

Inexperienced or not, common sense dictates that if an enemy force is numerous enough to prevent a population of around a thousand civilians from spanking them with broomhandles or whatever else comes to hand. the answer to "how many?" is going to be high.


The thing about 5e is that none of those penalties matter. Proficiency for them is only a +2 bonus and you already get disadvantage for long range so who cares? Slings used to be free, currently cost 1sp each, and rocks are free. That's why I said a defensive fortification that didn't even have any weapons. The DM did in fact reward me with 15 longbows, but that's not the point. The dragon is undamaged because the module specifically tells the DM to ignore the rules and make the dragon immune to the guardsman's weaponry so only player damage counts for driving it off. The dragon has what, 60-90hp and leaves after taking 25 or so? Peasants are more powerful than they've ever been and the module has to cheat to make the plot work. There are few guards, unknown refugees, and the module gives you no weapons, that's all fine-but in order for any of my "quick thinking" to work against the dragon the DM has to ignore the module point blank. I could go over the episode paragraph by paragraph to point out all the design problems, but no one wants to read that and I don't want to write it.
That encounter could have been handled better. I believe the intention was to ensure that the players have an active hand in dealing with Lennithon. Doing nothing and having the common plebs deal with this massive threat doesn't really work with the 'you are the heroes here' vibe the chapter is trying to establish. If the players shoot at him like the module seems to want, fine. If they get involved via rallying the defenders into doing better than just shooting wildly, that works too. I gave my guys multiple options, including cover effective against breath attacks, extra NPC archers cowering in the barracks, and ballistae on the tower. Actually increased Lennithon's effective health bar in response, and they still blew through it with ease when they split up to take advantage of that stuff.

P.S. Concerning range, I'm pretty sure they also made a mistake with that scale bar. Those would be very small buildings otherwise.


I don't think I'm going to convince you and I didn't want to take up this much of the front page anyway, people should have room to discuss later parts of the adventure too. Suffice to say that no matter how well it went for your group and how easy it seems to you in hindsight, clearly someone else had a different experience, and that means it can't be perfect.Perfect? of course it isn't perfect. The thing is a flawed mess. But the point we're trying to make is that this mess is easily recoverable, and worth recovering.

[coredump]

The dragon eggs in the hatchery are the GOAL of that dungeon crawl. Out of curiosity, what did you think the objective was in that mission?There is exactly *nothing* in the adventure to indicate those eggs are the goal. No one knows they are there, you don't know they are there, you were not sent for them, getting them (or not) has exactly *no* impact on the cults plans in the adventure.

Your GOAL is to gather information about the cult and what their plans are. That is what you were sent for, that is what you need to follow them, that is what you need to thwart their further plans. If the DM erases the entire room 10.... it changes nothing in the adventure except some XP.






The PCs have no indication of what's in that chamber before they enter it. If they enter it, they'll be seen and challenged by Cyanwrath. If they turn back after that, guess what? Cyanwrath's going to chase after them and use his lightning breath to cook their hides.
If your group doesn't understand the benefits of stealth, that is not the adventures problem. If your group was unable to find the concealed entrance from Frulums chamber, that is not the adventures problem.

Heck, even if you didn't bother to look for the concealed entrance, and even if you did just blunder into that room without scouting.... even 'just run away' is a valid tactic.

[Fizban]

I can't link it myself (in between tasks at work and dealing with a filter), but the principle clarifications came from Winters on the WOTC forum. . .
I'll take your word for it then, I'm not interested enough to dig through another forum. From the perspective of the critic? If it's not the writer's fault the monsters got changed, then it's a problem because someone else thought it would be okay to change monsters after the module was already finalized. I'm sure it won't be a problem for future books now that the MM is printed, but from the website and marketing it sounds like WotC really wants us to follow these adventure paths and modules, and they royally screwed up encounter balance in the very first one they printed. At least one of the writers noticed the problem later, and WotC (in what I'm told is their usual pattern) refuses to admit any balance problems, when they could have easily put the original versions in the web supplement if they wanted. I guess I find it. . . disrespectful? They go through all this trouble playtesting, even put them in the credits, then screw it up and don't fix it. It makes me feel better about the writers but someone are butts.

It seems I still can't let this bone go, maybe I should do a separate thread (except I'd want to do the whole module).
I want to continue stressing that I am evaluating these episodes based on reading them as a DM and comparing them to actual published adventures I have run. I'm not just freaking out cause my DM skipped a paragraph, that would be dumb. And when I read episodes 1-3 they made no sense individually, or together. Information is in the wrong place if it can be found, goals are listed without suggesting a method to achieve them, methods are suggested without telling the players the situation, and there is no concept or suggestion of pacing. "Run as many or few as you want" followed by more than twice as much as could possibly be handled is wrong. "Not every encounter has to have combat" is no excuse: some groups prefer combat and every encounter can be solved by combat. There is no warning that trying to run everything as presented, as a fight, won't work. That's bad design. The only way to find out that you cannot run all the encounters, is to either try and fail, or total up everything yourself. So I did.

Inexperienced or not, common sense dictates that if an enemy force is numerous enough to prevent a population of around a thousand civilians from spanking them with broomhandles or whatever else comes to hand. the answer to "how many?" is going to be high.
To quote people above: maybe they're afraid, maybe the enemy used superior tactics, maybe the governor's a traitor, maybe anything. That is why I asked, and it shouldn't have been a problem because yes it should be obvious because it should be written in big letters early on when establishing that they lost the battle. When reading the module, instead of showing us why the town has lost with mechanics (thousands of troops routed them and surrounded the keep), it just tells us they lost and we have to hunt for the relevant information. Attempting to infer enemy numbers does not work because they move in small groups to allow PCs a chance at surviving combat. The final group the PCs fight or avoid on their way into the keep averages 7 bodies, after which "raiders encircle it in increasing numbers." It is not until episode two at the end of "camp alertness" right before "captured" that we find the number (a bit of information the players were asked to find out which is not actually on the list of things they can find out in the "exploring the camp" section). The answer by the way is about 180 in the camp, not that we know the population of the town or their number of guards to compare. Would have to use the map, depending on how many per building I could see anywhere from 100-500.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm the only person who expects important information to be easily available when it matters. Because if I'm a DM I want to know, and if I'm a player I won't accept vague handwaving about my enemy's numbers and capabilities. I don't play idiots, and I don't expect the DM to make up numbers out of thin air (especially when they're likely to be contradicted later). Now since I've looked it up, an easy estimate. Say half the army is looting and half is surrounding the keep, 90 troops divided into nine 10 man groupings around the keep, facing inward and hurling stones at the walls whenever a head pops up. Was that so hard? Now why can't that be anywhere in the the first episode? Instead of the module showing us how the town fell, it's up the DM to figure it out by working backwards.

That encounter could have been handled better. I believe the intention was to ensure that the players have an active hand in dealing with Lennithon. Doing nothing and having the common plebs deal with this massive threat doesn't really work with the 'you are the heroes here' vibe the chapter is trying to establish.
The only problem with that is it's completely disingenuous: a group of 1st level PCs are only heroes in the sense that they're willing to rush into danger. Each is equivalent to maybe 2 generic guards. I'd be fine if it said the guards refused to come out of hiding, or acknowledged their efforts while calling for more damage from PCs, but instead the guards are simply "ineffective." Once again it's an easy fix, but it wouldn't need fixing if it made any sense to begin with.

Looks like the dragon is a lot stronger than I remembered (hp+frightful prescence), so I'll grant that it could easily solo half the town at once and it's only leaving since it doesn't feel like getting scratched up. If that was made clear in the description it'd be pretty terrifying, but like you said the players are somehow heroes at level 1 so instead it's dumb.

P.S. Concerning range, I'm pretty sure they also made a mistake with that scale bar. Those would be very small buildings otherwise.
In 3.x at least, the standard peasant house (the one you got in the DMG for 1,000gp) is a 20' square, so most of those buildings are actually quite large.

Perfect? of course it isn't perfect. The thing is a flawed mess. But the point we're trying to make is that this mess is easily recoverable, and worth recovering.
Worth recovering sure, I do think it starts picking up at Episode 4 and hope the trend continues (seriously, I think that caravan trip is cool). Easy not so much, at least not for ep 1-2 (I did say 3 was mostly okay except the boss fight).

Edit:
*snip*
Yes, yes, and if your group had done any investigating in either this or last episode they'd know that the whole point of the cave is guarding a set of dragon eggs, but hey it's not the adventure's fault you don't know the point of the adventure. The secret entrance you're talking about is actually more of a trap btw, also leads to the exact same room Cyanwrath is in and you can't sneak past someone with darkvision no matter how hard you shout "stealth!" Sure you can just run away, and hey if you're using milestone level ups you don't even have to enter the dungeon just turn around and leave and you'll get full xp! And if you don't play dnd you can do something else! It's a boss the players are meant to fight, after being guilt-tripped and baited into it they most likely want the fight, and it was accidentally overpowered without correction due to dumb WotC politics. And the fact that's it's right there on the printed page is indeed the adventure's problem. (Though a lesser one compared to the sins of ep 1-2).

[Madfellow]

There is exactly *nothing* in the adventure to indicate those eggs are the goal. No one knows they are there, you don't know they are there, you were not sent for them, getting them (or not) has exactly *no* impact on the cults plans in the adventure.

After the cult abandons their camp, the only thing remaining that is of any interest is the cave complex that the cultists refer to as "the hatchery." Considering it's a dragon cult, it's fairly obvious that they're trying to raise dragons in there, which is a big deal. Leosin the monk charges the PCs to go back to the camp and look around, and the dragon eggs are among the more important things they can find. Frulam Mondath and her notes are the other important thing, since they outline the cult's plans to haul their loot north.


Your GOAL is to gather information about the cult and what their plans are. That is what you were sent for, that is what you need to follow them, that is what you need to thwart their further plans. If the DM erases the entire room 10.... it changes nothing in the adventure except some XP.

I suppose a DM COULD eliminate the dragon eggs from the... dragon hatchery... if they wanted to, you know, deprive the players of their dessert like a mean meanyface. Stealing dragon eggs from the evil dragon cult is a big win, and it feels like a big win to the players, especially when they're only level 3.


If your group doesn't understand the benefits of stealth, that is not the adventures problem. If your group was unable to find the concealed entrance from Frulums chamber, that is not the adventures problem.

Cyanwrath's chamber is a (mostly) square room with absolutely nothing to hide behind, and no doors; it's completely open to the adjoining staircase. If your DM lets you hide in plain sight, then I actually kinda feel sorry for all of his poor blind NPCs. The secret passage into Frulam's chamber requires a DC 20 Wisdom (Perception) check to spot. At level 3, the BEST that a PC can hope for is a 50/50 shot to find it, and that's only if they're actively searching for secret doors, which they're not likely to be. Likewise, the trap door going from Frulam's chamber to Cyanwrath's is also concealed by a rug and requires a Wisdom (Perception) check to find. Even if they do spot it, it also leads straight into the open chamber with nothing to hide behind and no indication of what's in there before the PCs enter.


Heck, even if you didn't bother to look for the concealed entrance, and even if you did just blunder into that room without scouting.... even 'just run away' is a valid tactic.

Until you run into wandering monsters (page 21), at which point you're caught between a rock and a hard place. Even before then, Cyanwrath has his lightning breath, which deals 22 damage on average. And he can action surge for extra movement speed to catch up with them, and he has a spear he can throw. The guy is a beast.

Edit: I think in the interest of trying to have a more informed, civilized conversation, perhaps Coredump you could tell us exactly how that encounter went for you and your group? It's possible (likely, even) that your DM altered parts of the dungeon for your group's benefit.

[coredump]

1) If a DM is inexperienced... that happens. But it is also *not* the adventures fault. It is pretty impossible to read that Episode and not know that there are a butt-ton of bad guys and no where near enough good guys. It is stated multiple times that the keep is surrounded, it is stated that the raiders are all over the town, there are no pockets of resistance, etc etc

2) Fizban: "Proficiency for them is only a +2 bonus and you already get disadvantage for long range so who cares?"
Because the Dragon's AC is 19, so with no proficiency and disadvantage, the commoner will hit once every *100* shots. Just how many shopkeepers, laborers, porters, etc are you going to get to shoot at a Huge Blue dragon when they know they have a 1% chance of actually hitting with this weapone they have never used...??
*IF* there are any 'guards' still alive, they will hit once every 20 shots.... do you really think they are going to last that long? Do you really think they are willing to try?
The adventure did *not* say the dragon was immune to the other attacks (Please stop making things up), it said the other defenders were "not effective", I would call 1 out of 100 as "not effective" too.

Since your DM was nice enough to 'happen' to find 750gp worth of longbows in storage.... yes you will have the range.... but that is not part of the adventure...and they are still not effective. How many arrows are they going to shoot to get 1 hit? And that is assuming they can even see the targets...

The Dragon starts with 225 hp (not 60-90), and normally stays out of range, between that, and its Frightful Presence, and its tendency to breath lightning at anyone that attacks it.... of course it has been barely damaged... No one is "Ignoring the rules" or "Cheating".

3) Fizban: ", and there is no concept or suggestion of pacing. "Run as many or few as you want" followed by more than twice as much as could possibly be handled is wrong."
Why is that 'wrong'?... do you expect every adventure to be spoon fed and to be exactly the same for every party? It is *great* that they give you options of what you can do. Pick and choose whichever are best for your group....I have never heard someone claim that being provided more options is a bad thing....

4) Fizban:
Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm the only person who expects important information to be easily available when it matters. Because if I'm a DM I want to know, and if I'm a player I won't accept vague handwaving about my enemy's numbers and capabilities."
As a DM... why do you need the exact numbers? What does that benefit? Why is it necessary for running the adventure? I would venture that many thousands of DMs have run that episode without that knowledge being in any way necessary. If it is important to you, there are plenty of ways of getting an estimate. But mostly, the answer is "plenty"
As a Player.... how do you expect to know this? You plan on asking someone? You know the keep is surrounded, you know you kept running into patrols, you know there are groups all over town. What more info do you need? and just how do you plan on getting it? (Excuse me Mr. Cyanwrath, I am performing a quick census of the invaders, um... how many kobolds are with you?"

5) Fizban: "Looks like the dragon is a lot stronger than I remembered (snip). If that was made clear in the description it'd be pretty terrifying"
Um... I thought you said you read this? How does anyone not think a CR 16 flying dragon is terrifying?? And yes, it was made clear that he was uninterested in this fight.

6) Please stop with the "Well, I guess you could just not play at all" BS... it is disengenuous and completely uncalled for. I am talking about the possibility of avoiding *one* fight that is *not* required to achieve your goals. No one said anything about 'not playing'. You seem to believe that every party should be able to easily beat every enemy encountered..... that is not the way the game is designed, and not the way they are designing the modules.

7) Madfellow: Please provide *anything* in the adventure that makes those eggs the 'goal' of the PCs. They are tasked with gathering information about what they are doing and where they may be going. Even if those dragons hatch, they can't even be helpful for at least another 6 years.
If the PCs leave the eggs and take the notes, they have achieved what they were sent to do, they can follow the cult and stop their plans.
If the PCs kill the eggs and miss the notes, they have not achieved what they were asked to do, they can't follow the cult, and have no way of stopping their plans.

8) Yes, getting the eggs is cool, and feels like a win. But it was not their goal, and is completely superfluous towards helping them follow and stop the cult, which is the goal. It would be cool...but if you can't get past Cyanwrath... then you can't get passed... doesn't mean you commit suicide.

9) Madfellow: You need to read the rest of the description, it is a DC 20 check *or* ""obvious if you walk to the end of the alcove." Do you really not check out rooms before you leave them?

10) Cyranwraths' chamber is pretty empty, but also pretty large, and very dark. Stealth is your friend.

11) "Running away" is only the plan if you somehow didn't manage to find the concealed passage *and* just blundered into the room without scouting ahead *and* don't have a party that can deal with that threat.

12) Sure, since you asked. We first scouted down the secret passage and got an idea of the lay out. We decided we would try and take them out. So the Rogue and Bard snuck down and went into hiding, then my Paly and the fighter came down. When Cyanwrath started to speak, I cut him off and said that his evil acts have forfeited his right to breathe, and if he was honorable enough to fight me, I would deliver Tyr's Justice. (or something to that effect)
Meanwhile the fighter was staying back and looking as non-threatening as he could.
Cyranwrathed bellowed his disdain for me and my weakness (or something to that effect, he had 'killed' me in EP 1) and came towards me. I either readied an attack, or a I dodged, I don't remember which at this point. Once he came close to me, my party's readied actions triggered, the rogue did SA, the Bard cast Heat Metal, not sure if the fighter got an attack or not.
He bitched and moaned about how 'dishonorable' I was, I explained that Tyr wanted Justice, and was not swayed by his 'evil version of honor' (etc etc) As I recall, some/most/all of the party got their regular attacks in, the the beserkers moved forward. Frulum cast some buff spells, but between the Heat Metal, Smites, and a few other things. (IIRC, somehow Cyan was blinded, but...has blindsight...oh well) Cyranwrath went down. I let Frulum know I was after her next (and she had run from an earlier fight already), so she decided to save her skin a second time. I *really* wanted to go after her.... but the beserkers were doing a lot of damage.... so I stayed and we focused fired one down, then the other. I know I went to 0 HP (half orc powers - Activate), and at we had one down at the end, and at least one went down during. (Bardic Healing Word FTW) But we managed to put down the two beserkers.
I eventually caught up with Frulum in the last Episode, and the fighter has been wearing Cyanwraths armor ever since.

We considered how hard the fight would be, and almost decided to *not* do it.... since by then we had already found the papers indicating where they were going next.

[Madfellow]

8) Yes, getting the eggs is cool, and feels like a win. But it was not their goal, and is completely superfluous towards helping them follow and stop the cult, which is the goal. It would be cool...but if you can't get past Cyanwrath... then you can't get past... doesn't mean you commit suicide.


First of all, it's a bit of a leap for a PC to commit seppuku if they fail a particular mission. Second, finding the eggs is not superfluous; they're dragon eggs, and therefore are inherently dangerous and valuable. Depriving the cult of six eggs deprives them of six dragons, and the Harpers can ransom the eggs back to their parents to keep them out of the fight.

Third, the PCs have no indication beforehand of how strong Cyanwrath and his buddies are. They have no way of knowing that he's a CR 4 creature and that the berserkers are each CR 2, or that this is a Deadly encounter. The only way they have of finding out is by challenging him and feeling the weight of his greatsword.



9) Madfellow: You need to read the rest of the description, it is a DC 20 check *or* ""obvious if you walk to the end of the alcove." Do you really not check out rooms before you leave them?


I was the DM, not a player. And it's not a room, it's a nondescript cavern tunnel. The PCs can search for secret doors if they want, but there's nothing to indicate that they should.



12) Sure, since you asked. We first scouted down the secret passage and got an idea of the lay out. We decided we would try and take them out. So the Rogue and Bard snuck down and went into hiding, then my Paly and the fighter came down. When Cyanwrath started to speak, I cut him off and said that his evil acts have forfeited his right to breathe, and if he was honorable enough to fight me, I would deliver Tyr's Justice. (or something to that effect)


I feel like your DM was being generous letting the whole party hide in one small dark corner, but I suppose the adventure is ambiguous enough to allow it. That's kind of the problem, though; it's not spelled out that PCs should have the option to hide from him like that. The layout implies an open space that doesn't offer stealth as a viable option.



Meanwhile the fighter was staying back and looking as non-threatening as he could.
Cyranwrathed bellowed his disdain for me and my weakness (or something to that effect, he had 'killed' me in EP 1) and came towards me. I either readied an attack, or a I dodged, I don't remember which at this point. Once he came close to me, my party's readied actions triggered, the rogue did SA, the Bard cast Heat Metal, not sure if the fighter got an attack or not.


OK yeah, everybody Readying an action to gang up on Cyanwrath is an example of very good tactics that clearly paid off. However, not every party is going to have that same idea. As soon as he draws his sword, that's likely to be an initiative roll.



Frulum cast some buff spells. I let Frulum know I was after her next (and she had run from an earlier fight already), so she decided to save her skin a second time. I *really* wanted to go after her.... but the berserkers were doing a lot of damage.... so I stayed and we focused fired one down, then the other. I eventually caught up with Frulum in the last Episode, and the fighter has been wearing Cyanwraths armor ever since.

We considered how hard the fight would be, and almost decided to *not* do it.... since by then we had already found the papers indicating where they were going next.

I find it odd that your DM put Frulam in Cyanwrath's chamber as opposed to her own. He could have killed you.

But I digress. I feel like this argument has gone on too long, and it hasn't really accomplished anything for either of us.

[Fizban]

I too think this argument has come to a close, we now know what coredump's DM allowed that changed the rules of the encounter and can see what happened. Still spoilering for length.

Why is [pacing] 'wrong'?... As a DM... why do you need the exact numbers? What does that benefit? Why is it necessary for running the adventure? I would venture that many thousands of DMs have run that episode without that knowledge being in any way necessary. If it is important to you, there are plenty of ways of getting an estimate. But mostly, the answer is "plenty"
If you went to read a book or watch a movie and they told you to just watch as much as you wanted or stop or skip around when you felt like it and watching the whole movie made it suck, would that be okay? The entire point of paying someone else to write an adventure is so that you don't have to write it yourself, and proper pacing is if anything the most important part of the adventure. If you overwhelm the players they'll feel cheated for having to sit out, if you don't provide enough challenges they won't feel like it was worth it, and a well-written adventure will already have this balance figured out. This one does not.

As a Player.... how do you expect to know this? You plan on asking someone? You know the keep is surrounded, you know you kept running into patrols, you know there are groups all over town. What more info do you need? and just how do you plan on getting it? (Excuse me Mr. Cyanwrath, I am performing a quick census of the invaders, um... how many kobolds are with you?"
Because I have eyes? At no point does it ever tell you how many foes are "surrounding the keep." This is exactly the problem: you agree that the players should just buzz off and not ask questions if they're told they're outnumbered and surrounded. I will not accept that answer because my character has eyes and can count.

Um... I thought you said you read this? How does anyone not think a CR 16 flying dragon is terrifying?? And yes, it was made clear that he was uninterested in this fight.
And clearly you have not, because none of the generic Monster Manual statistics are in the module. You have to look those up separately, and it took a couple posts for me to decide I wanted to go back and check the details again. And for that matter, how are you supposed to know it's CR16? As I was discussing with Madfellow, the module wants the players to look like heroes so it declares that the guards cannot damage the dragon. If they had attacked en masse, a large enough group of guards could deal 25 damage without any help from the players, but instead of writing an encounter using game mechanics it says no without giving a reason.

6) Please stop with the "Well, I guess you could just not play at all" BS... it is disengenuous and completely uncalled for. I am talking about the possibility of avoiding *one* fight that is *not* required to achieve your goals. No one said anything about 'not playing'. You seem to believe that every party should be able to easily beat every enemy encountered..... that is not the way the game is designed, and not the way they are designing the modules.
Then likewise I should ask you to stop with your ad hominem attacks against myself and my friends, as they are also completely uncalled for. As myself and Madfellow have already stated, Cyanwrath is blocking the eggs, and the eggs are far more clear of a goal than "wander around and look at stuff." Destroying or capturing the eggs is explicitly an xp reward at the end of the episode, and not noting this is your own failing in reading the module. Just because failing this clear objective has no impact on later adventures does not make it less important right now, and to use your own words again, the PCs have no way of knowing the eggs aren't important.

10) Cyranwraths' chamber is pretty empty, but also pretty large, and very dark. Stealth is your friend.
D A R K V I S O N. Oh, you might also not know that in 5e it's impossible to hide in "dim light," only complete darkness equivalent to blinding is sufficient to hide. Darkvision (depending on how you read the comma placement) converts at minimum all complete darkness within 60' of you to dim light (or at maximum all darkness into dim light). The dimensions of the room are such that unless he's standing halfway up the trap tunnel he can see the entrance to the egg room or anywhere else, and it is impossible to sneak past his darkvision.

cyanwrath fight
Your entire plan hinged on being able to hide when there was no way to be hidden (unless, as I just determined, he was concidentally standing in the furthest possible corner). Your party may have been allowed to ready actions outside of combat (which is impossible), or may have rolled initiative when your "duel" started, in which case the berserkers should also have rolled initiative and had readied actions trigger when your party attacked. You also happened to have the only no-save debuff spell that can save this fight which I called out above as being neccesary: Heat Metal, giving disadvantage on all his attacks and not a small amount of damage. In short, your DM let you dictate the terms of the encounter instead of the rules, you had the perfect spell, and you still had people dropping.

the Harpers can ransom the eggs back to their parents to keep them out of the fight.
That is an awesome idea and I feel evil for never thinking of it myself. Too used to ransoming people back as an evil tactic, but yeah these are infant sapient creatures and ransoming them back is far more useful and Good than just murdering them in the short-term.

[Madfellow]

That is an awesome idea and I feel evil for never thinking of it myself. Too used to ransoming people back as an evil tactic, but yeah these are infant sapient creatures and ransoming them back is far more useful and Good than just murdering them in the short-term.

I can't take credit for it; the Rise of Tiamat book calls out that option in like the first chapter. Specifically, it calls out that that plan WOULDN'T have worked. Turns out dragons get kinda pissed if you take their eggs. Who'da thunk?

[Ouranos]

DM's I'm sure are coming up with numerous creative ways to deal with the Dragon Eggs. In our game (we just finished Hoard) my paladin serves Bahamut. Recognizing dragon eggs for what they are, we brought them back to Greenest and bargained with the governor guy to store them long enough for a messenger to get to a temple of Bahamut we made up and get THEM to come for the eggs. Was all kinds of awesome to our group because we got stuff done.

[Fizban]

Heh, that's funny considering it's about half the plot of the main Dragonlance story. But those were good dragons and these are evil dragons so there's that. Or maybe it's just that they figure they can knock over some puny humans before their eggs are harmed. Ouranos went to a temple of Bahamut, send the dragon eggs to some metallic dragons to match the chromatics (as the chromatics had the metallic eggs in Dragonlance) and it sounds like they made it work.

Come to think of it, how long before there's a Tyranny of Dragons Handbook thread like we have for RHoD? That thread was mostly adjusting balance up and down or flavoring for campaign settings, but here we're already in Forgotten Realms and instead need creative suggestions for filling in the gaps so I'd say it's actually more important.

[Daishain]

My players arranged for Nighthill and his people to take the eggs with the intention of passing them on to the metallic dragon council as circumstances permit . From there they were placed in 'foster homes' with particularly patient dragons, under the premise that they were innocents who have yet to choose their path.

(I also greatly expanded the hatchery's operation to a full blown breeding and training program. My guys found nearly a hundred eggs in that cave, 5 were true dragons, the rest half dragon eggs laid by female cultists who volunteered for the honor of pairing with a great one. Even added a room to the cave network where the players observed a woman giving birth to such eggs. Had the operation not been interrupted, the hatchery would have produced a very potent fighting force dedicated to Tiamat's cause.)

[JFahy]

Heh, that's funny considering it's about half the plot of the main Dragonlance story. But those were good dragons and these are evil dragons so there's that.

But the eggs in Dragonlance are much more important. They're where the draconians are coming from, and the fact they're being held hostage is why the metallics initially aren't helping. The repercussions of finding out what's happening to the metallic eggs are massive in that situation.

In Tyranny, the actual repercussions of finding/recovering the black eggs are "perhaps you get some money". The writers repeatedly make noise about how this cult used to be into making dracoliches, and so when you find a clutch of eggs you think maybe you've found the beginning of a revelation, but you haven't.

There's a scriptwriter's saying you've probably heard, that goes "If the audience sees a gun in Act 1, make sure you fire it by Act 3...and if you fire a gun in Act 3, make sure the audience saw it in Act 1." Those eggs feel to me like a gun that's shown and never fired.

Considering they put a huge effort into supporting novice DMs in the new DMG, I would have thought their first adventures would be more novice-friendly. I would have understood that. But with Tyranny I found I spent a lot of time pondering how to tweak the story so it made more sense, and sometimes I still flat-out failed.

[coredump]

First of all, it's a bit of a leap for a PC to commit seppuku if they fail a particular mission. Second, finding the eggs is not superfluous; they're dragon eggs, and therefore are inherently dangerous and valuable. Depriving the cult of six eggs deprives them of six dragons, and the Harpers can ransom the eggs back to their parents to keep them out of the fight. The 'suicide' is attacking CyanWrath if you can't win. And the eggs are *completely* unnecessary to playing the rest of the module. Yes it would be good if they got the eggs, but the *goal* of the Episode, the *reason* they were sent there, and the *only* thing they need to proceed....is the information from Frulum's room. That is what superfluous means....



Third, the PCs have no indication beforehand of how strong Cyanwrath and his buddies are. They have no way of knowing that he's a CR 4 creature and that the berserkers are each CR 2, or that this is a Deadly encounter. The only way they have of finding out is by challenging him and feeling the weight of his greatsword. They know he one of the top leaders in the army. They know he uses a greatsword, and he gets 2 attacks, and may even have an idea of his attack bonus, and he is wearing Splint mail, and may have an idea of his Dex bonus. They also know he is tough enough to assume he can easily beat anyone in the town, including the meddling adventurers.
If that is not enough to tell he is going to be a Deadly encounter... then I am not sure how many more clues would be needed.




I was the DM, not a player. And it's not a room, it's a nondescript cavern tunnel. The PCs can search for secret doors if they want, but there's nothing to indicate that they should. Then you *really* should have read the description better. There is no need to "search for secret doors"... the *only* thing they need to do is bother to actually walk to the end of the alcove. The DC check is for PCs that are not willing to bother with the 20' walk to check out that area. Once they do, the opening is automatically seen.




I feel like your DM was being generous letting the whole party hide in one small dark corner, but I suppose the adventure is ambiguous enough to allow it. That's kind of the problem, though; it's not spelled out that PCs should have the option to hide from him like that. The layout implies an open space that doesn't offer stealth as a viable option. Just 2 PCs. The Rogue and the Bard, both with pretty good Stealth skills. I came down and walked out and the fighter came behind me.
Plus, from the adventure, it is actually completely dark in that room. Which didn't make sense so the DM put in a couple of torches, but either way it is a boost to Hiding.




OK yeah, everybody Readying an action to gang up on Cyanwrath is an example of very good tactics that clearly paid off. However, not every party is going to have that same idea. As soon as he draws his sword, that's likely to be an initiative roll. Yep, Good tactics and Quick Thinking are the keys to victory in a Deadly Encounter. If we didn't feel we could pull it off, we would have never gone down after them. (Well.... I might have, the whole "Vengeance" thing... which means they might have followed.... But we would have known it was likely a suicide charge)

But that is exactly the point, tough encounters are designed to be beaten *IF* the players can work together well.
If instead a party is going to just blunder around without scouting, and not bother trying to make plans (especially when you have the drop on someone), then they have no standing to complain about how tough encounters are.



I find it odd that your DM put Frulam in Cyanwrath's chamber as opposed to her own. He could have killed you. Longer story, but we ended up in a big fight where Frulum ran away once we started winning. She ended up down by Cyanwrath, but once we dropped him, she ran.

[coredump]

If you went to read a book or watch a movie and they told you to just watch as much as you wanted or stop or skip around when you felt like it and watching the whole movie made it suck, would that be okay? The entire point of paying someone else to write an adventure is so that you don't have to write it yourself, and proper pacing is if anything the most important part of the adventure. If you overwhelm the players they'll feel cheated for having to sit out, if you don't provide enough challenges they won't feel like it was worth it, and a well-written adventure will already have this balance figured out. This one does not. This is not a book or movie, it is an adventure to be used to play a game.
Each group is different, larger, smaller, more or less optimized, lucky or not, etc. I guess I understand that you want to be a slave to whatever the writer envisioned, but I *like* that the adventure gives us more options so we can easily adjust the Episode to match the desires of the players.



Because I have eyes? At no point does it ever tell you how many foes are "surrounding the keep." This is exactly the problem: you agree that the players should just buzz off and not ask questions if they're told they're outnumbered and surrounded. I will not accept that answer because my character has eyes and can count. I am sorry, but this is getting silly. You are on a tower wall, and you want to *count* the army out there? You have to walk all the way around the keep, trying to count kobolds etc that are 75-100' away, in the middle of the night, while they move about, some coming some going... and you and your 'eyes' are going to simply 'count them'? And you are upset that the adventure does not give you an exact number?
The *best* you can do is get a rough estimate of the ones you think you see... and there is plenty of information available to the DM to make that call. Sorry that your DM was inexperienced and made mistakes... but the info was there, at least as much as your PC could possibly determine.


And clearly you have not, because none of the generic Monster Manual statistics are in the module. You have to look those up separately, and it took a couple posts for me to decide I wanted to go back and check the details again. And for that matter, how are you supposed to know it's CR16? As I was discussing with Madfellow, the module wants the players to look like heroes so it declares that the guards cannot damage the dragon. If they had attacked en masse, a large enough group of guards could deal 25 damage without any help from the players, but instead of writing an encounter using game mechanics it says no without giving a reason. The DM knows it is CR16, the adventure *explicitly* tells the DM to telegraph just how deadly the dragon is... by destroying parts of the keep, and killing other defenders. If you can't tell that a Huge Blue Dragon that is killing folks by the handful is "Terrifying" to first level PCs, then they deserve to just die.
And again, the module *does not* say the defenders can't damage it, it says they are "not effective". Meaning they *can* damage it, but the chances of a commoner damaging this dragon is very minute compared to his chance of dying from the dragon breath. Attacking 'en masse' means they will die 'en masse' and likely still do no damage. And since neither the PCs nor the NPCs realize there is a 25hp threshold, it will be a suicide mission with no hope of success.
The Players have a *much* better chance of damaging the Dragon, and if they are careful they can stay safe and plink away.... when the dragon leaves, the PCs *are* heroes.


Then likewise I should ask you to stop with your ad hominem attacks against myself and my friends, as they are also completely uncalled for. As myself and Madfellow have already stated, Cyanwrath is blocking the eggs, and the eggs are far more clear of a goal than "wander around and look at stuff." Destroying or capturing the eggs is explicitly an xp reward at the end of the episode, and not noting this is your own failing in reading the module. Just because failing this clear objective has no impact on later adventures does not make it less important right now, and to use your own words again, the PCs have no way of knowing the eggs aren't important. I have attacked neither you nor your friends.
The PCs do not even know the eggs exist, they have no reason to suspect any were left behind. And they can't be sure what is passed Cyanwrath. They were sent for a reason, they accomplished that.... that is the goal. Yes getting the eggs would be good, killing kobolds would be good, killing ambush drakes would be good....*None* of those are the goal of the mission. Your mission was to get info about the cults plans and movements.


D A R K V I S O N. Oh, you might also not know that in 5e it's impossible to hide in "dim light," only complete darkness equivalent to blinding is sufficient to hide. Darkvision (depending on how you read the comma placement) converts at minimum all complete darkness within 60' of you to dim light (or at maximum all darkness into dim light). The dimensions of the room are such that unless he's standing halfway up the trap tunnel he can see the entrance to the egg room or anywhere else, and it is impossible to sneak past his darkvision. You are flat out wrong about Hiding and Stealth in 5E, plus you seem to assume that everyone just 'automatically knows' where everyone is, regardless of lighting, noise, whatever. You are again, wrong about that. There is a column or rock or something by the entrance down, and the room was very dark, even with Darkvision, dark is dim light, which gives disadvantage on perception checks. The Rogue stealthed down the entrance, and behind the column.


[quote] In short, your DM let you dictate the terms of the encounter instead of the rules, you had the perfect spell, and you still had people dropping.[/spoiler] No. *WE* dictated the terms of the encounter. *We* scouted ahead, we came up with the plan, we used good tactics to stack the deck in our favor. Part of our decision was based on having Heat Metal. But it is foolish to think that is the 'only' spell.
Hold Person would have been even better.
Levitate could have taken him out of the fight
Grease would have really messed with the beserkers
Crown of Madness
Phantasmal Force
Tasha's laughter
etc
etc
There are lots of spells that could wreck his day. And even more that could work depending on the party
Enhance Ability
Enlarge
web
moonbeam
etc
etc

And we haven't even touched on other possibilities.. like luring them away in one direction, while the party moves in from a different direction.

Players choices *do* make a difference...and that is a good thing.

[Madfellow]

Coredump, your group is clearly experienced and is capable of thinking tactically. And your DM was a bit lenient with you. And you got lucky. And it was still a close fight. Not all groups are going to have those same circumstances line up. Not everyone is going to find Frulam's notes first. Not everyone is going to think to hide, especially if they're getting cocky after beating around a few kobolds. Not everyone is going to gang up on Cyanwrath like your group did.

Most groups in this encounter got wrecked. Hard. Entire threads popped up on this subforum asking for ways to beat this guy. HotDQ, as the inaugural adventure, should have been designed to be newbie-friendly both on the DM and player sides of the screen. However the difficulty of basically every fight, especially this one, means that a certain amount of system mastery is required in order to play. Not everyone has system mastery, especially with 5e being still less than a year old.

So please stop assuming everyone is going to try the same strategy you did or have the same luck, because they didn't.

Edit: and yes it's okay for an adventure to include difficult encounters. Cyanwrath, however, is not difficult; he's nearly impossible.

[coredump]

Coredump, your group is clearly experienced and is capable of thinking tactically. And your DM was a bit lenient with you. And you got lucky. And it was still a close fight. Not all groups are going to have those same circumstances line up. Not everyone is going to find Frulam's notes first. Not everyone is going to think to hide, especially if they're getting cocky after beating around a few kobolds. Not everyone is going to gang up on Cyanwrath like your group did.
3 of the 4 have only been playing for a few years.
We did not 'get lucky'
Our DM was not 'lenient'.
If you don't find the notes, you can still go back and try a different route, or try and distract them, or...etc
You are right, not everyone is going to think to hide, nor are they going to think to focus fire. And they will likely die... because deadly encounters *should* require good tactics and quick thinking. If they just blunder around saying "go get them!" then they *should* die on a regular basis.... hopefully they eventually learn to start being a little careful when wandering around an unknown cave complex. Hopefully they eventually learn to focus fire on the biggest threat. Hopefully they learn to avoid a confrontation they can't handle.



Most groups in this encounter got wrecked. Hard. Entire threads popped up on this subforum asking for ways to beat this guy. HotDQ, as the inaugural adventure, should have been designed to be newbie-friendly both on the DM and player sides of the screen. However the difficulty of basically every fight, especially this one, means that a certain amount of system mastery is required in order to play. Not everyone has system mastery, especially with 5e being still less than a year old. "Most" groups? So you have the statistical research to back that up?? Or are you basing it on the people that came here (and elsewhere) to complain. I know of other groups that made it. I see no reason why an 'inaugural' adventure should be on "EZ Mode".... the players were given *plenty* of info about how hard of a fight this would be.


So please stop assuming everyone is going to try the same strategy you did or have the same luck, because they didn't. You keep trying to dismiss this as 'luck'.... but give no justification for it. We made choices, and those choices affected the difficulty of the encounter.... just like it *should* work. Ours was not the "only" strategy that would work.... I gave a list of spells that could have drastically helped any PC group. But it also depends on the party make up.
Perhaps we should reverse your claim "So please stop assuming that everyone is just going to blunder around the caves and never use tactics"

[Mellack]

I think your DM was generous with the stealth rules. If you do not have cover or heavy obscurement, you generally cannot hide. Darkvision should have negated your ability to hide, IMO.

[Madfellow]

3 of the 4 have only been playing for a few years.

And for some people, this was their first experience with D&D ever.



If you don't find the notes, you can still go back and try a different route, or try and distract them, or...etc
You are right, not everyone is going to think to hide, nor are they going to think to focus fire. And they will likely die... because deadly encounters *should* require good tactics and quick thinking. If they just blunder around saying "go get them!" then they *should* die on a regular basis.... hopefully they eventually learn to start being a little careful when wandering around an unknown cave complex. Hopefully they eventually learn to focus fire on the biggest threat. Hopefully they learn to avoid a confrontation they can't handle.

D&D is not a trial and error game. Any given play session is likely to take 4 or 5 hours or more. If that play session ends with a TPK, that's hours gone to waste and a recipe for a miserable evening. It's not like a videogame where you can just reload your last save 5+ times per play session.



I see no reason why an 'inaugural' adventure should be on "EZ Mode".... the players were given *plenty* of info about how hard of a fight this would be.

I never said anything about an "EZ Mode." The DMG offers a great outline of what constitutes an easy, medium, hard, or deadly encounter for a party of a given size and level. For the moment, let's assume a standard party of four. At level 3, that means an easy encounter is 300 XP, medium is 600 XP, hard is 900 XP, and deadly is 1,600 XP. A CR 4 half-dragon (1,100 XP) flanked by a pair of CR 2 berserkers (450 XP each) is a whopping 4,000 XP ([1,100+450+450]x2)! That's two and a half times what already would constitute as Deadly by the DMG's standards! That is not "difficult." That is just plain wrong. Cyanwrath by himself would be fine as a Hard boss fight for a standard party of the expected level.

And no, the players are not given "plenty" of info about how hard the fight is. All they see is three tough-looking guys standing in a room. Their party probably includes at least three tough-looking guys. To most players, this appears at first glance like it should be a fair fight. It is not.



You keep trying to dismiss this as 'luck'.


Sorry, I didn't mean to belittle your mad gaming skills, sir.



Perhaps we should reverse your claim "So please stop assuming that everyone is just going to blunder around the caves and never use tactics"

I'm not assuming that everyone is just going to kick down the door and fight. However, some are. Players should not be punished for being inexperienced. That is not how a game attracts new players.

And I don't understand why you don't just let this go. This encounter basically equates to a bug or a glitch in the game. It was meant to be one thing, and it turned out to be another. It was a mistake on the part of the game creators, one that the GMs had to correct at their tables.

[JFahy]

Edit: and yes it's okay for an adventure to include difficult encounters. Cyanwrath, however, is not difficult; he's nearly impossible.

Still fine as an encounter for newbies, though, because he teaches the lesson
"sometimes you're in over your head" without any lasting consequences. You
get beat down, a herd of friends charge out and stabilize you, lesson learned,
no serious harm done, and it sets up a grudge match. My group had to flee a
second time because berserkers are outrageous, and the third time they prepared
for the fight and killed him rather satisfyingly. :smallsmile:

(My first two sentences are about the fight in Greenest, by the way. I just realized
we're kind of jumping back and forth between the Cyanwrath encounters.)

[HarrisonF]

"Most" groups? So you have the statistical research to back that up?? Or are you basing it on the people that came here (and elsewhere) to complain. I know of other groups that made it. I see no reason why an 'inaugural' adventure should be on "EZ Mode".... the players were given *plenty* of info about how hard of a fight this would be.

You keep trying to dismiss this as 'luck'.... but give no justification for it. We made choices, and those choices affected the difficulty of the encounter.... just like it *should* work. Ours was not the "only" strategy that would work.... I gave a list of spells that could have drastically helped any PC group. But it also depends on the party make up.
Perhaps we should reverse your claim "So please stop assuming that everyone is just going to blunder around the caves and never use tactics"
My group also didn't have a lot of problems with Cyanwrath. We ended up being able to surprise him and his two beserker friends after we came in via the secret doorway with the help of a pass without trace. The wizard dropped a web on the three of them and we took out Cyanwrath before he got a chance to go. We engaged with the beserkers while they were webbed and took them down without a lot of trouble.

I could see the fight being a bigger problem if people just walked in without any sort of tactics. But that seems kinda silly to be doing in the headquarters of the enemy with unknown amounts of guards.

[Fizban]

Even added a room to the cave network where the players observed a woman giving birth to such eggs.
:smalleek: I was under the impression those would usually be uh, non-egg births, but that'll leave an impact.

But the eggs in Dragonlance are much more important.
Those eggs feel to me like a gun that's shown and never fired.
True, the eggs aren't billed nearly as strong here. For role-playing I'd like to think it would actually be good to have the occasional dead end, but in reality you can't use even a single red-herring because there's a high chance players will chase it to the ends of the earth. I quite like what Daishain did with it there.

I think your DM was generous with the stealth rules. If you do not have cover or heavy obscurement, you generally cannot hide. Darkvision should have negated your ability to hide, IMO.
It's actually harsher than that, the original text says "you cannot hide if a creature can see you," which means even half cover isn't enough since it doesn't block line of sight. You can only hide if you already can't be seen. . . The errata has "clarified" this by saying it's just up to the DM and changing it to "the question is weather it can see you clearly." I feel it is reasonable to allow hiding behind half-cover (including around corners) but it seems clear that light obscurement and dim light cannot be given the same status they used to have (check the Wood Elf entry), so most hiding is based on DM fiat.

This works fine for writing your own adventures, but as seen here is disastrous for trying to be brief in a published adventure. Some DMs clearly think that coming through the hole in the wall is good enough to allow a hide check, while others see absolutely no cover and a foe with darkvision making it impossible to hide. In 3.5 all you had to do was set the scene and the presence/absence of specific features would tell you what was possible, but not anymore.

[Daishain]

:smalleek: I was under the impression those would usually be uh, non-egg births, but that'll leave an impact.
Since they never define how the half dragon thing works given a mammalian mate, and for the sake of not having things slip into the horror genre, I assumed they were small enough at this point and then continued to develop in the shell for a few months before actually hatching. But yes, it was intended to be somewhat disturbing. (no I didn't go into graphic detail, and yes my players were all adults)