Looking for feedback from people who ran/played Red Hand of Doom

[Dralnu]

RHoD is usually called out as one of, if not the best, 3e module out there. I've only managed to play through the beginnings of it, but I've read through it multiple times and absolutely love the concept. I want to write something similar for 5e.

I was wondering for folks who ran/played through it, what did you like most about it? What set it apart from other modules? What did you dislike about it? Was the formating okay? Was the story pacing good, were the situations believable? Best NPC? Worst? Best/worst encounters?

[Starbuck_II]

I like the beginning. All the hooks are useful. Treasure at the keep, etc.

I liked that the ending depends entirely on the PCs (Victory points).
But which choices let the module adapt to their plans (Destroy the bridge, befriend the giants, elves, etc).

I thought the old man who lived with his dogs was most memorable, but the female captain of guards was really good when one DM ran it.

Talk about rest of questions later (things to do tonight).

[Seward]

I think it works best if the climax is the Battle of Brindol. The final chapter was a very dangerous anticlimax for us. If you reverse the order, as some suggest, tone down the final chapter and beef up Brindol to account for the levels. The sense of urgency as an army is marching across the land adds a lot to the overall feel, and it just isn't there for the final chapter, no matter what the ostensible danger of delay might be. Ho hum, evil priest doing bad ritual. Been there done that.


If you are GMing pay attention to the objectives. Sometimes the encounters are designed to kill the PCs - assassins should be finishing off unconscious bodies and in most cases fight to the death. Sometimes the encounters are more about the bad guys escaping a PC ambush rather than winning. Sometimes there are objectives bad guys want to accomplish that will either force them to stay longer than they otherwise might, or try to get away with stuff, giving PCs more time to try to finish them off.

If witnesses to PC actions do escape, later encounters should take into account PC abilities and tactics displayed. Eg, if a Wyrmlord was nearly captured because party members disguised themselves as goblins and got close before discovered, there should be better password and recognition codes, critters with scent posting (assuming alter self wasn't part of the disguise) etc. If PC's use a ton of area spells, future encounters should feature enemies as dispersed as possible to minimize the impact. If PC's have great ranged attacks, consider smokesticks or clerics having obscuring mist prepared or on a scroll. Etc.

PCs who get creative with strategic movement will have an advantage, but mostly shouldn't know how much it helps. They should always be pushing to do things faster if they can, but will usually never really know when the hammer will drop, how fast that army really can move across the terrain. I can't speak for 5e, but in any version of 3.x through Pathfinder, somebody with a wand of cure light wounds and one horse per character can force-march the horses to hustle all day and cover 4x the distance of a normal party. If he's willing to burn out the wand some more and the party's willing to accept some fatigue (or has a few lesser restoration spells on hand) the party can travel 16 hours a day and cover 8x the distance of a normal party on foot. Druids and wizards can often do things to improve on this, or allow short-cuts away from roads with no loss in speed. Some parties will burn a fair amount of spell slots and/or consumables on this, some won't. In general it tends to lead to more fixed encounters/day (eg, a party might travel from Drellin's ferry and take out both roadblocks and head into the Rhest swamps in a single day, doing at least 3 encounters and probably several of the other "on the road" encounters without resting) but attempts to ambush or assassinate the party will likely be harder as the would-be ambushers might have a hard time predicting where the party will be for an ambush, and find it impossible to catch up if they get behind until the party returns from whatever it was they were doing.


If you're converting to 5e, you will want to think about the following. I don't recommend a 1-1 conversion for these reasons:

The treasure is very uneven, which can lead to underequipped PC's in the mid-late chapters if the GM doesn't do something to adjust. OTOH, if the PCs do a good job of ganking some of the mid-level peons in certain encounters they can end up swimming in potions and other consumables. Likewise if your PCs have a train of horses or a sorcerer with tenser's disk or something they can get some wealth back by simply looting everything from every Hobgoblin they encounter. It's bulky, but the wealth is present.

The module is intended for four PC's starting at 5th level and advancing about 1 level per chapter. Stronger parties need stronger opposition (most of the RHOD guides seem to assume a party of 6 people 1-2 levels ahead of the guidelines and advocate massive buffs to a lot of opposition). Pathfinder characters are slightly stronger than 3.5 characters at level 5, but not a whole level's worth until maybe level 8-9, especially if they're only getting the gold/treasure provided by the module. In 3.x, the Battle of Brindol works a lot better if PCs do not yet have access to 5th level spells (eg, they can be level 9 if they have no single-classed cleric, druid or wizard, but should probably be kept to level 8 if they do). I don't know if 5e has a similar power jump at L5, where in Pathfinder/3.5 things like Teleport, Commune etc come on line.

My experience with 5 in-level characters with veteran players (we had over 100 years of D&D in various forms sitting at the table) using D&D 3.5 is that we had a very brutal battle once per chapter, about one character death every other chapter and 1-2 other battles that might have gone bad if we hadn't planned well and/or had a bit of luck. Do not boost the encounters unless the party is actually stronger than expected, and mentally drop an inexperienced player a level in raw power compared to the paper stats. All of the important bad guys in the early chapters will tend to break off battle if seriously challenged and try to run. Playing this as written means some brutal encounters will ease off a bit but later encounters will be even tougher, as these individuals recur.