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Lord Ruby34
2017-04-08, 02:18 PM
Right, so I started DMing Red Hand of Doom back in January and have finally decided to write up a campaign journal for posterity. The only catch? I’ve been slowly converting the entire module to 5E to be more newbie (and DM) friendly. I figured I’d share my experiences for others hoping to convert the module themselves, as well as invite commentary on the plot, my DMing style, and have a good place to collect my own questions about how to proceed in the future. Obviously I welcome commentary.
Oh, and my players are currently in Rhest, so anything before that is my memory of the event, which is not necessarily 100% accurate.
I had my players generate characters using 27 point buy, and start at fifth level. I didn’t limit sources, but the only ones I had available were the player’s handbook and Volo’s, only one player took advantage of Volo’s, and no one multiclassed. Our first session started with supervised character building. I let them make whatever decisions they wanted, but told them they could rebuild until the start of session 3.

The PCs
Argus: LG Half-Elf Paladin of Devotion. The player has played D&D only briefly before, and it was Pathfinder. He’s one of the newer players. He chose folk-hero for his background. Morningstar and board, protection.
Damakos: CE Noble Tiefling Warlock, Pact of the Fiend. This is the newest player of all, having never played D&D before in general. He really wanted to be evil, and I eventually relented and let him. I told him that if it got really disruptive we’d have to change things. He was okay with that.
Kara: CG Aasimar Rogue, Assassin. The player has a good amount of experience with 3.5, and less with 5E. He asked if instead of the criminal he could use Spy as his background and I approved.
Norras: CN Outlander Hill Dwarf Druid, Circle of the Mountain: The player had some experience with D&D, but not 5E. He picked up the rules faster than anyone else anyway.
Rutella: VHuman Fighter, Battlemaster: Has some experience with D&D, a mix of 4E and 5E. He likes the idea of role-playing but is often too shy to actually do so. He also picked Folk-Hero, but justified it as saving the town of Nimon Gap from a Hook Horror when first starting out. Sword and Board, dueling.

Session 1
I had the PCs start off in Brindol, and made them give me a reason why they knew each other. After a brief debate they told me that they all managed to end up on the same side of a barfight, for different reasons. After utterly destroying the other side they realized that, hey, we could all make some money together by hanging out and killing things together. I gave them the Vault of Vraath’s keep plot hook to get them pointed in the right direction, and then for additional nudging had the party get approached by a dumb sounding, shady man who gave them a letter for Captain Soranna at Drellin’s Ferry and warned them that if they opened it he’d do bad things to them. They realized he was bluffing about his threat, but took the letter and the payment anyway, with the promise of more gold from Soranna once they arrived in Drellin’s Ferry.

After a brief discussion on whether or not to buy horses before they left the party headed for Drellin’s Ferry on foot. The first night out two different players tried to read the letter in secret, Kara recognizing the K that sealed the front of the letter as being intensely suspicious. To her mortification it turned out to be from exactly who she thought it was, but the content wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. Blushing, she tried to return the letter to the place they had agreed upon, but managed to wake up the party by stumbling around in the dark. After a brief in character discussion Kara finally handed the letter over (represented by an actual letter I wrote in my most feminine handwriting), and the rest of the group got to find out that it was a letter promising Sorrana that Kaal would try to slip away from her obligations soon to meet her “in the usual place”. One forgery check later and Kara was pretty confident that the seal looked good as new.

They stopped briefly in most of the towns along the dawn way, avoiding Kara’s parents in Talar and staying overnight with Rutella’s mother in Nimon Gap. They left Terrelton already wary due to rumors of bandits that had been plaguing the town for years, and thus weren’t entirely surprised when they noticed humanoid figures in the trees, preparing to rain arrows upon them.

Norras won initiative and wind walled the archers before they could do any serious damage, knocking several of them out instantly and ruing the shots of the rest of them. They thought they were headed for some easy clean-up after that, but the sudden appearance of a pair of hobgoblins and Wargs spoiled their confidence. They still didn’t have much of a problem. Rutella dueled the Bladebearer, quickly gaining the upper hand with a flurry of accurate attacks and ripostes. Argus started going ham, laying low both Wargs and the Cleric with a series of well-timed smites and normal attacks with his morning star over three turns. Kara stumbled around, blinded from the cleric’s first spell, before activating her Aasimar racial ability and taking to the sky. Norras and Damakos struggled against the remaining hobgoblin regulars once they closed to melee range, but were able take a few down and hold out long enough to be rescued by Argus and Rutella.
After a few rounds of combat the hobgoblins were cleared out and we called the session for the night. We’d meet up next week for the interrogation of the cleric they captured.

Lord Ruby34
2017-04-11, 01:39 PM
The PCs – Same as last session.
Argus: LG Half-Elf Paladin of Devotion. The player has played D&D only briefly before, and it was Pathfinder. He’s one of the newer players. He chose folk-hero for his background. Morningstar and board, protection.
Damakos: CE Noble Tiefling Warlock, Pact of the Fiend. This is the newest player of all, having never played D&D before in general. He really wanted to be evil, and I eventually relented and let him. I told him that if it got really disruptive we’d have to change things. He was okay with that.
Kara: CG Aasimar Rogue, Assassin. The player has a good amount of experience with 3.5, and less with 5E. He asked if instead of the criminal he could use Spy as his background and I approved.
Norras: CN Outlander Hill Dwarf Druid, Circle of the Mountain: The player had some experience with D&D, but not 5E. He picked up the rules faster than anyone else anyway.
Rutella: VHuman Fighter, Battlemaster: Has some experience with D&D, a mix of 4E and 5E. He likes the idea of role-playing but is often too shy to actually do so. He also picked Folk-Hero, but justified it as saving the town of Nimon Gap from a Hook Horror when first starting out. Sword and Board, dueling.

Session 1 Update
Right, relevant to note that when the battle turned against the hobgoblins the remaining few decided to flee. The party wasn’t having any of that, and mercilessly shot them in the back as they ran.

Session 2
The session began with the players dragging the hobgoblin cleric into the nearby farmhouse for interrogation. The discovery of the dead farmers and merchants prompted some curiosity, but nothing that took them very long. Argus and Rutella decided to dig graves while the rest of the party conducted the interrogation. After a few checks and some IC roleplaying they managed to get the cleric to start ranting about how the Red Hand served Azzar Kul, chosen of Tiamet and that they would be swept away by the might of Wyrmlord Kharn, and that the inhabitants of the Ferry town would be crushed by the red hand. A second later the hobgoblin realized that he had said too much, and tried to cast a spell to escape. Considering he was currently tied to a post with a rapier to his throat, that didn’t work out too well. Kara stabbed him a few times and left him there.

Unfortunately, as soon as they got back to the road they realized that two of the hobgoblins they thought they killed were gone, along with the swords of all the ones that they actually did. Whoops. The party shrugged and continued on to Drellin’s Ferry. At the gate they were challenged by Sargent Hersh, who I played as a sad and lonely middle aged man who probably wasn’t all that bright. They loved him. Their first order of business was to talk to Soranna. Kara went to deliver the letter with Damakos, while the other three messed around in town, talking to the innkeepers, shopkeepers, and spying on people while in the form of a cat. At first Soranna was happy to receive her letter, but when she asked if they had read it things went south. Kara rolled deception. 2. “Uh…noooo?” Soranna quickly shut the door in their faces and they took that as the que to regroup for the night and plan how to get to Vraaths Keep. The others had already identified that their best bet would be finding Jorr Natherson and getting him to guide them there. When they talked to Wiston, flanked by an unsmiling Captain Sorrana later that night he gave them much the same advice and 550 gold apiece to take care of the goblin problem for them.

The party set out early the next morning, again declining to purchase or rent horses, in search of Jorr. They found him in his cabin, and Norras, Rutella, and Argus all helped to calm the dogs and make them friendly. Before Jorr came out and demanded to know what they were doing on “his pro-per-tai” As soon as they mentioned hobgoblins Jorr quickly became helpful, offering to help them get to Vraath’s Keep and enthusiastically hoping that the group would “run into some o’ dem *redacted* gobbos ‘long the way.” He hadn’t killed one in ages, and had even been run off while hunting by a group of them a couple weeks ago. He proposed the theory that they might even be holing up in Vraath Keep, despite rumors that it was haunted. He told them if they left now they could be there by nightfall. The party declined, and decided to set out in the morning so they could approach during the day. Jorr shrugged his shoulders and warned them that they’d have to pass through Ol’ Bessy’s territory, a hydra. The party was indifferent to enthusiastically vicious (EXP!).

On the causeway the next morning they briefly decided whether or not to simply sneak by the hydra, or to grab the shiny thing that Norras and Kara had spotted. Greed won out, and Kara went off alone to try and grab it, unfortunately that shiny thing happened to be a chain shirt, still on a skeleton that was pinned under a wagon. Kara got it without waking Ol’ Bessy, but made enough noise on the way out that she attacked!

What followed was a rather practical demonstration of exactly how the action economy worked as Norras won initiative again and summoned a pack of wolves for Bessy to chew through. They held her long enough that the party had killed her before she got anywhere near them, but took nearly an hour in real time to do it. We called the session there and I resolved to make sure that combat would be more tactically interesting from there on in.