H.O.T.D.Q. Episode 4: Length/Running It. [Spoilers]

[The Shadowdove]

Hey forum-lurkers,

I'm running Hoard of the Dragon Queen as part of an actual play Podcast project. We just finished Episode 3 and have returned to Greenest. The party was informed by Tarbaw Nighthill that Leosin Erlanthar has already gone to Elturel and they are to follow after him with their findings.

I'm reading up on Episode 4, as well as other people's experiences while running it, and it feels almost excessively drawn out. Many people run it in 5-8 sessions it seems. Yet only a fraction of the (written) side quests seem to have much that benefits the main storyline.

I understand that this is largely due to there wanting to be an emphasis in how long the trek between Greenest, Baldur's Gate, and castle Naerytar. However, while I feel my group would be good sports and find ways to enjoy this episode as is, I'd like to do some snipping.

As such, for sake of entertainment as well as keeping things moving and relevant, I'm wondering how much I can remove or merely describe via narrative to capture the intended feel, without making this episode seem pointless.

In short, for the tldr crew, I want to only keep the important quests and pertinent social encounters of episode 4, and to just capture the journey length in descriptors rather than extended sessions. How do I do this effectively?

Thank you so much. I am happy to have access to so many more experienced and book savvy players.

-Dove

[Zippee]

To be honest there's not much in Episode 4 that you can't chop.

You want the opening discussion with Ontharr and you can (and should) expand on that, maybe be have a city encounter with some cultists and then move on.

You could pretty much just narrate the whole caravan journey, allow a few investigation checks and such but there really is very little to discover on the journey itself. If earning XP is an issue (you kind of need to switch to milestone awards real soon anyway, so it's moot) you can have a couple of encounters - for instance, although the route of the caravan doesn't go via Boerskyr Bridge, this is a shame as ROT takes you there - so you could include that and have some cult based encounter, hey Ontharr might ask you to stop by fort Tamal and link up with the paladins there and do a thing. Or you could tie something into the ROT plotline as foreshadowing.

The module also wants the stop at Daggerford to meet other NPCs, again it's very sketchy. You could build that up into something much bigger with some proper plot and encounters. I know they have scenes in the travelogue but really you could replace the whole thing by building more into the departure from Baldur's Gate and the arrival in Waterdeep (which is extremely sketchy and a major missed opportunity). So you could have the party bumping into said NPCs whilst observing the caravan end point, investigating how the cargo jumps from trade caravan to road construction, etc.

I ran this straight through over many sessions, mile by mile. We had some fun side treks and in the end my party used encounters to disrupt the cult wagons, cause crashes and find excuses to search them and what not. We had fun but it was hard work to keep it going day after day and with hindsight it would have been better to just move from point A to point B and wrap all the necessary investigations and encounters into the start and end point. So make more of Baldur's Gate and getting attached to the caravan and then hand waive until Waterdeep and make something up to cover the offloading and the move to a construction company.

One of the oddest things about Chapter 4 is that after this long travelogue, the module gives you the briefest glimpse of Waterdeep and then sets you on the road again. Enduring all that travel just to find out it begins again was too much. This was the point when my players said enough is enough - in fact two of them departed and headed to the hills north of the destination. This resulted in all of the next two chapters being completed with a fractured party (3 elements) - it turned into a great storyline, but it very nearly derailed the whole thing.

My recommendation: cut it as written.
Make more out of the departure at BG, handle the journey through narrative, make more out of the arrival in Waterdeep, handle the next journey via narrative, make the roadhouse a finale. Call that the chapter. Move onto Chapter 6.

If you want to add a couple of break points in the long journey, go from BG to BB then Daggerford, Waterdeep, roadhouse. The important stuff and investigation options can all happen at those waypoints.

[The Shadowdove]

Update:

I ran the entire episode 4 in one session. It took somewhere around 3 hours.

I don't feel like I left much out actually. Despite the fact that it normally takes a handful, or two, of sessions the lengthy trip felt lengthy. I narrated in the distance, detailing whenever they'd passed anything of note or traveled a couple of hundred miles.

I narrated an uneventful trip to Elturel. They checked a couple of vastly different taverns looking for Leosin and eventually found him and Ontharr Frume at the tavern that the order of the gauntlet was using as a base of operations.

They were geared up, given the run down, some incentive was provided, then they were shipped off the next day so they could beat the cultist caravan to Baldur's Gate.

They met Frumes contact and hung out, keeping and eye out for cultists. Saw a cultist they recognized, who was traveling with Rezmir, as they were buying wagons and provisions. Hopped on to the caravan as guards.

Nearly out of the fields of the dead one of the cultist wagons blew a wheel and spilled some stashed loot out. The players and an NPC helped, one player was recognized (but not informed of this) and the NPC was caught trying to steal/disappeared later.

They happened across a town they had to stop on and went off to hunt. Ran the golden stag mission. Tossed in a few giant spiders who ambushed them while tracking the wounded stag-elf. They scored a +1 longbow and a pal.

They then happened across the Harper buried up to his head in the road. Saved him. Future ally bonuses. The cultist who recognized a player was getting too suspicious and Jamna by then had been a bit nosey. She helped them kill off the cultist, pretending to be a Harper agent like one of the players.

Ran the last murder event.

Now they're off to episode 5.

[Zippee]

They then happened across the Harper buried up to his head in the road. Saved him. Future ally bonuses. The cultist who recognized a player was getting too suspicious and Jamna by then had been a bit nosey. She helped them kill off the cultist, pretending to be a Harper agent like one of the players.



hah the sociopathic ranger in my group shot the head as soon as it blinked but then they did survive the full on assassin encounter [just]

You did a lot in 3 hours - my lot couldn't even decide which wagon to sit on in 3 hours

and Jamna is now a fully fledged PC in the group - one of two secret Zhentarim agents in the group which is causing all kinds of fun politics with the Council of Waterdeep (we're half way through RoT now)

[The Shadowdove]

hah the sociopathic ranger in my group shot the head as soon as it blinked but then they did survive the full on assassin encounter [just]

You did a lot in 3 hours - my lot couldn't even decide which wagon to sit on in 3 hours

and Jamna is now a fully fledged PC in the group - one of two secret Zhentarim agents in the group which is causing all kinds of fun politics with the Council of Waterdeep (we're half way through RoT now)

That's hilarious. I guess it doesn't matter much as an NPC if you don't have any Harpers anyway. No way to tell that the head was the agent Leosin tells players to find without being able to see the tattoo on it's
arm. And what you don't know can't hurt you! Or can it....yeah sometimes it can, definitely. But not so much in this case!

Jamna was pretty fun. Only one of the players detected her lie when she claimed to be a Harper and that drove the other two players insane because they still believe she's a Harper. The one who sensed deceit just shrugged it off and suggested she help kill the cultist that recognized them.

How long has RoT taken you guys to get to where you currently are in the storyline? I'm thinking of jumping right into that, but we may do a bit or homebrew in between to clear the sinuses some.

I don't recall whether or not Jamna is actually a key npc post episode 4. I'll need to figure it out before we play next week, for sure. They're about to arrive in waterdeep.

[Zippee]

Well the party started out being led by a Harper elven wizard and an OotG dwarven paladin (who died in the final combat in castle Naerytar) and now includes reluctant Enclave agents (ranger and druid) an agent for Lord Uldar (fighter), two Zhents agents (Jamna and the halfing bard they released from Talis's prison) still 'led' by the elven wizard (in the loosest possible sense of led.

They are a very mixed bag, in his report to Leosin, the elevn wizard described them thus:


I'm not sure that anyone in the party is particularly interested in our goals save possibly the gnome [Jamna] / Mads [fighter]. Franz [ranger] is a loose cannon and not honest. He would steal the family silver if he could. Not to be trusted. Vilios [druid] is hard to read. There are question marks there for sure. Mads seems honest and commited to the cause and probably the most reliable of the three. The halfling [bard] appears to be a troublemaker. I don't trust him, he's impetuous, unreliable and may have other plans. You need to keep an eye on him. Remalia may be right in her assessment.


Jamna never really reappears in the module but is a useful figure to use in Waterdeep if you expand on events there.

As for length of play – we play for about 3 hours per session on a week night, so it’s taken us a while.

Progression has been thus:

Session 1 – caravan guards journey from Iriabor towards Baldurs Gate, got them to Greenest
Session 2-3 – Greenest in Flames
Session 4-5 – Raiders’ Camp
Session 6-8 – Dragon Hatchery
Session 9-15 – On the Road
Session 16 – Construction Ahead
Session 17-23 – Castle Naerytar
Session 24-26 – The Hunting Lodge
Session 27 – First Council part 1
Session 28-30 – Search for Varram (Tomb of Diderius)
Session 31 – First Council part 2
Session 32 – will be heading to Luskan to begin Sea of Moving Ice / Cult Strikes Back #1

Note the party missed the castle as they were late pursuing Rezmir through the portal, instead they’ll pick up the crashed castle in the extra Frozen Castle module (or adaptation thereof)

We took a break between end of HoDQ and start of RoT and distracted ourselves with a bit of Star Wars and Exalted - that was mainly due to the number of absences due to summer holiday season

[The Shadowdove]

It's rad that you have a pretty close, if not entirely accurate, account of how many sessions it took. Sounds like you have a pretty interesting party.

We made characters with Adventure's League rules and I've been recording them/editing them into 1 hour segments.

We started with 3 players.

Elven ranger. He died in the raider camp. Ambushed by a couple of people who recognized him.

Silver Dragonborn fighter, now a battle Master, gladiator background.

Blue Dragonborn paladin, multiclassed warlock now. Noble background

The player who played the ranger was replaced by a gal playing a blasty evocation gnome wizard that's kind of a rockstar meets crazy cat lady.

I haven't really pulled any punches or fluffed dice/removed monsters from the encounters. So there have been a few close calls.

Our progress is as follows, so far:

Session 1-2: intro hooks/greenest in flames.
Session 3: raider camp.
Session 4: dragon hatchery
Session 5: on the road.

We probably play closer to 3 hours per session. With three players there is a lot of clutch life or death situations, but less people to deal with in combat/roleplay. So I think that helps us progress quickly.

I also tend to prep everything and condense it into a detailed bullet point list of things I'd like to accomplish each session. So we kind of meander our way to each important part of the episodes.

I feel my players are all of like Monday in that they will have dialogue with NPCs, get their first impressions, sometimes have silly conversations, but they keep their head in the game.

So we don't spend a lot of hours just talking to people and get to the facts pretty quickly. This doesn't mean that we don't go on tangents...we talked for a good ten minutes straight about the faerun version of judge Judy.

Part of it is that they know we're going to be turning out sessions into a newbie Podcast and try not to drag things out unnecessarily.

It's also because we played in an out of the abyss game that fell apart due to people growing tired of the monotony of repetitive randomly rolled encounters for months on end of playtime.

Our dm was a nice fellow, but he didn't do a good job of making the exhaustingly long, arduous, and deathly underdark journeys feel unique nor like we were progressing. It was mostly dicing against the same monsters each session in random order, and it wore on people.

As such, we try to move things along nowadays.

[Zippee]

It's rad that you have a pretty close, if not entirely accurate, account of how many sessions it took. Sounds like you have a pretty interesting party.


I always keep a date-session-XP progression log for these things, it helps with the beat and pacing to be able to look back and realise how long this or that took, especially when running the same module for a different group. It can be extraordinary to see how different the record can look group to group.


Part of it is that they know we're going to be turning out sessions into a newbie Podcast and try not to drag things out unnecessarily.

It's also because we played in an out of the abyss game that fell apart due to people growing tired of the monotony of repetitive randomly rolled encounters for months on end of playtime.

Our dm was a nice fellow, but he didn't do a good job of making the exhaustingly long, arduous, and deathly underdark journeys feel unique nor like we were progressing. It was mostly dicing against the same monsters each session in random order, and it wore on people.

As such, we try to move things along nowadays.

That would make sense, and also why you'd be concerned about the length of On the Road.

We were using straight up XP awards through to the end of Castle Naerytar and the only way to keep the party on anything like the right path was to have a lot of side-treks and opportunity to develop story line [plot XP] during the journey, hence the need to spend session time on it. Direct XP started to get wonky through Castle Naerytar and fell off the tracks at the Hunting Lodge, so we moved to huge plot dump XP and then into milestone for RoT. In hindsight we should have used milestone from the beginning, we'd have been able to obtain a much better pace and beat that way.

I found that really the game only begins with Castle Naerytar, up to then it's all intro. We could have as easily started the party off investigating dodgy going's on at the Roadhouse on behalf of Waterdeep merchant guilds and had probably a better experience that was more related to Waterdeep politics and would thus lead into RoT and its Council sessions easier. In fact something like this was the plan as these players had just come out of LMoP (in fact the elf wizard and dwarf paladin, did come from that group) but most of the players wanted different characters, so we started at the beginning.

Making long journeys interesting is a challenge, I did it as a sequence of set-piece encounters. Alternating RP, combat and investigation encounters to keep it interesting. Some of the sequences fell flat but some turned into the best form of improve RP. All in all, a couple of travel sessions, the final battle in Naerytar, the Mexican stand-off with Talis and a couple of the RoT encounters have been voted best scenes by my players, so it can't have been all bad :)