Out of the Abyss: Is it really horror?

[Taejang]

My group is planning which of the WotC campaigns to run next, and are trying to decide between Princes of the Apocalypse and Out of the Abyss. One player wants OotA, but two others are concerned about the tone of that one. I've seen reviews saying it is more of a horror campaign, and I know the madness rules are in effect.

So, without spoilers, what do those of you who have played it think? Does Out of the Abyss feel creepy and/or scary most of the time?

[mgshamster]

I'm running it right now. The first four levels can be a little scary, and the madness is a bit horror-y, right up until you figure out what's going on (usually by level 5, right after the first town). After that, presumably your characters rally themselves to fix the problem, and the rest of the campaign is gathering info and fighting back.

The opening is only scary insofar as you've been captured by the drow and you're in an unfamiliar environment.

It's more of a "I don't know what's going on and things aren't normal or as they seem" kind of scary - and the more you learn, the less is unknown and te less scary it is.

That said, PotA is definitely more of a classic adventure.

OotA is no Ravenloft. It's not specifically horror themed. If you found Alice in Wonderland style madness scary - then you may have issues with OotA. Otherwise, it's a *very* fun campaign, both to run and play.

My players have told me it's the best campaign they've ever been in, and I've had absolutey no attendance issues with game beyond the normal life stuff (compared to some PF APs, where they'd make up excuses not to come).

[Ashdate]

As a DM running OotA right now, I think the book does a good job of creating a setting, but the madness angle could be pushed more.

There's plenty of great individual moments the book presents that you can play up as a DM. The book is less helpful in between. My advice: work some sort of horror of madness into every encounter you can. His doesn't necessarily mean madness checks, but lean on your favourite tropes. And DO NOT allow the players to "reset" their trips to the madness tables easily. The book suggests Major Restoration should work, but (should your game get that far) I would be reluctant to allow it to work.

[Telok]

No it's not horror. It's more like "Yeah, we're not high enough level to deal with that. We'll come back next month and kill it."

It's also not a campaign for a novice DM. The DM needs to do lots of planning between games and be comfortable with running ten to fifteen NPCs with the party. In addition things will really suffer if you don't do full descriptions and explanations.

If the players are told "You've been captured by the drow. There are other prisoners in the cell with you who won't help you. You must escape before anything happens to you." Then the players are going to escape or die trying, both of which will miss about 2/3 or the content and half the XP in that area. If it keeps happening like that... It isn't pretty.

In our game it's looking like we're going to escape the Underdark at level five after hitting about four or five of the town/dungeons.

Not a campaign for novice DMs.

[Ashdate]

I will second Telok's warnings. The number of NPCs is a fixable problem, but the book doesn't have much to say about what kind of level PCs should be at for particular chapters (outside a few benchmarks), says little about treasure outside some sparse notes, requires a lot of work to ensure travelling isn't filled with trivial daily encounters, and requires a deep read of the module to figure out what the heck is even going that has caused the Underdark to become a big mess.

(I disagree that it can't be horror with a little effort tho.)

[Taejang]

<thoughts>
This pretty directly answers my question. Thanks!


There's plenty of great individual moments the book presents that you can play up as a DM. The book is less helpful in between. My advice: work some sort of horror of madness into every encounter you can. His doesn't necessarily mean madness checks, but lean on your favourite tropes. And DO NOT allow the players to "reset" their trips to the madness tables easily. The book suggests Major Restoration should work, but (should your game get that far) I would be reluctant to allow it to work.
Having not read the campaign yet, the reasoning behind your thoughts here doesn't make any sense to me. But it sounds like it will once I actually read the book, so I'll keep it in mind.


It's also not a campaign for a novice DM. The DM needs to do lots of planning between games and be comfortable with running ten to fifteen NPCs with the party. In addition things will really suffer if you don't do full descriptions and explanations.

If the players are told "You've been captured by the drow. There are other prisoners in the cell with you who won't help you. You must escape before anything happens to you." Then the players are going to escape or die trying, both of which will miss about 2/3 or the content and half the XP in that area. If it keeps happening like that... It isn't pretty.


I will second Telok's warnings. The number of NPCs is a fixable problem, but the book doesn't have much to say about what kind of level PCs should be at for particular chapters (outside a few benchmarks), says little about treasure outside some sparse notes, requires a lot of work to ensure travelling isn't filled with trivial daily encounters, and requires a deep read of the module to figure out what the heck is even going that has caused the Underdark to become a big mess.
These are good warnings to know ahead of time. 5e is the first tabletop any of us have ever played (alright, I played like two nights of 3.5e years ago, but yeah). Phandelver was, to us at least, a great campaign, but the published campaign left out a lot of details. No stats for NPCs who are put in harm's way, no personalities or back stories or motivations for major NPCs and enemies, details like "Glastaff runs away" but no details on what that means in the campaign (can you track him? how? where does he go?), etc.

My take on the published campaigns was that they provide a nice framework, but the DM still has to put in effort. Hoard of the Dragon Queen has reinforced that notion. So I'm not really surprised that OotA would require planning and effort, though it sounds like this is more the case here than with others. Would you agree?

My first homemade campaign had 14 NPCs involved in and out of combat in the first two game sessions. Plus enemies. I learned a heck of a lot about tracking multiple characters, speeding things up so "DM turns" don't take all night, and other important things like "hey, this character is too similar to this other character, the players can't keep them separate in their minds." Sounds like those lessons will help me run OotA.

[mgshamster]

If you're the GM for this, here's some stuff I've compiled for OotA, all on the Paizo website:

Resources for OotA (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t5ms?Out-of-the-Abyss-Resources)

My campaign log (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t6iu?Out-of-the-Abyss-Campaign)

Hard Labor ideas for the opening chapter (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t5uy?Out-of-the-Abyss-Hard-Labor#1)


And some extra stuff:
Magical trinkets for minor magic items to give out (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2t7xp?What-are-the-most-fun-magical-trinkets-in-5E)

Before you start the campaign, give yourself about a month to prepare. Read through the whole book and write up a rough outline of major events. Then reread the first half of the book (up to chapter 7) and create a better outline for the first half of the campaign. That's everything up until your players leave the underdark.

Then reread chapter 1 and draw up a detailed outline with notes for each NPC, how things are going to work, and how you're going to hep them escape. Let them come up with their own ideas, but use the book's ideas to assist if necessary.

For the opening chapter, it's important to show them how powerful Ilvara really is so they don't get any ideas to attack the drow (they need to flee and they need to understand that they're getting chased and it's dangerous if they get caught).

From there, you can go one chapter at a time - the hardest part is figuring out which town they're going to go to first. Gracklestugh is probably the hardest to run, because the chapter is so convoluted - there are multiple resources for helping run Gracklestugh - but I strongly recommend you draw out your own map and ensure you completely understand how the city is set up before they go there. I didn't do that (trusting the resources I found on the net and my own reading of it) and I had to backtrack what I told my players several times. I think the best way to understand gracklstugh is to make up your own mock party and run it by yourself as if you were both playing and GMing - then you'll have a solid understanding of the city for your players to do their own thing.

Also, don't worry about using every little bit in the campaign - each time you run this campaign it will be a little different, and the decisions your players make may completely remove some aspects of the book - don't worry about it if you skip sections or even entire chapters. Treat it like a living world where things happen outside of your player's actions (and sometimes because of it).

When you get to the travel sections (you'll get back to chapter 2 several times in the campaign), try to have the random event pre-rolled so you know what's going to happen and it doesn't feel artificial to your players.

It's a tough campaign to run, but with ample preparation and asistence from us in the community, you can make it a very fun campaign. Feel free to contact me if you need assistance.

[Taejang]

Thanks for those resources, and the heads-up about prep time. Our current campaign has a few months left, but I just ordered the OotA book and will have lots of time to look over things, make some specialized charts and lists for my DM screen, etc. I'll look at the links after reading through the book.

[Goober4473]

I'm a few sessions in to my OotA campaign, and I've been playing up the horror. The lack of resources in an unfamiliar and weird place, being hounded powerful by enemies, and various weird encounters have worked well to keep things spooky.

If you need some help dealing with all the NPC companions, I also created a Companion System (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?459858-NPC-Companion-System-Idea) to help, specifically for this campaign.

[mgshamster]

I'm a few sessions in to my OotA campaign, and I've been playing up the horror. The lack of resources in an unfamiliar and weird place, being hounded powerful by enemies, and various weird encounters have worked well to keep things spooky.

If you need some help dealing with all the NPC companions, I also created a Companion System (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?459858-NPC-Companion-System-Idea) to help, specifically for this campaign.

Things are still kind of spooky from an alien perspective - but my players are no longer under-equipped. Not only did I let them have their starting equipment (plus some) after the escape from Velkynvelve, I also gave them an encounter with a traveling merchant and a lot of gold/valuables in Gracklstugh (which they used to purchase things like platemail and other desired equipment).

They're now in Neverlight Grove, and even though I've been down-playing the horror aspect - they're still freaked out by the alien nature of the myconids.

Oh, and I have two linked to Goober's companion system in the links I provided earlier, and I'm actively using it in my campaign. It's working really well for my group, but it does change the nature of the NPCs and your group may or may not like that change.

[joaber]

Personally, I never saw horror working in D&D, in the best looks like a noir movie.
I think Call of Cthulhu or Word of Darkness are better systems for that.

OotA is great, ravenloft is fun, but isn't horror.

[Serket]

My group is planning which of the WotC campaigns to run next, and are trying to decide between Princes of the Apocalypse and Out of the Abyss. One player wants OotA, but two others are concerned about the tone of that one. I've seen reviews saying it is more of a horror campaign, and I know the madness rules are in effect.

There's a limit to how horror-y something can be while using D&D as a chassis. Horror is about disempowerment. D&D is about power growth. They conflict on a fundamental level. You could have extra rules to make things slightly scary, but it will never be "a horror game", the closest it could manage is "an action-adventure game with some horror elements".

[Telok]

Your game will benefit if you explicitly tell the players that there are chances to do stuff outside the starting jail cell and that they don't need to escape immedately. Also be sure that they understand that the guards are higher level than they are and there are factions within their captors.

At the kuo-toa village make sure the players know there's a ritual going on and don't have ______ suddenly bamf in at the docks and start wrecking.

If you need a dungeon to flood for some dramatic escape scene don't have it all be perfectly level and set next to a huge lake. Just collapse the exit passages, one of your players will have read the very generous swimming rules and remember that the exit is less than 200 feet away.

Mention the loot. Don't assume that the players know that they need to look down a well or that a particular enemy has valuable equipment. Our DM eas amazed that we left "so much valuable loot" behind untill we reminded him that he never mentioned or hinted at any of it. We honestly thought that some enemies had armored scales and nasty bite attacks when it was really valuable and lootable equipment.

[mgshamster]

Mention the loot. Don't assume that the players know that they need to look down a well or that a particular enemy has valuable equipment. Our DM eas amazed that we left "so much valuable loot" behind untill we reminded him that he never mentioned or hinted at any of it. We honestly thought that some enemies had armored scales and nasty bite attacks when it was really valuable and lootable equipment.

I've had to do that a few times. Our last session they fought a bunch of monsters who had killed a bunch of drow. My players never even thought to look for the left over drow equipment after defeating the monsters.

[Telok]

I've had to do that a few times. Our last session they fought a bunch of monsters who had killed a bunch of drow. My players never even thought to look for the left over drow equipment after defeating the monsters.

What I found really helpful for that sort of thing was to have enemies drop or throw stuff. Incorporate an archer/pike wielder and draw the weapon on the map when he drops one to switch to the other. Bags of poisoned caltrops are pretty good too, but those may be rather too dangerous to allow in 5e. Piles of nets could be used to create tripping hazards even if they missed a target and having something drawn on the map (assuming a grid or such) tends to remind people about things.