Any tips for running premade modules?

[jaappleton]

So, I've run a few homebrew campaigns before. Had a lot of success, always kept a good, open dialogue with players as to what they liked and didn't like. Session Zero to lay out what kind of campaign it'd be. And our last campaign wrapped up, and they're looking for more. We play maybe once every 3 weeks.

And my DM is running us through Curse of Strahd, starting with Death House. And its so... much... fun. So atmospheric, so detailed in ways that I haven't been able to achieve myself. I'm not a professional writer / designer, after all. This is a weekly game.

So if I can CoS for my group (which would start in a few weeks), there's no way that I'd get ahead of my actual playing party in the module. I'm a good enough player that I can separate character knowledge from player knowledge, and its easy to do that when my character in CoS has 5 Intelligence anyway. :smalltongue:

But I've never run a published module before. I'd read through some. I read all of Lost Mines of Phandelver, I skimmed Princes of the Apocalypse, but CoS just seems so much damn fun that I'm really hyped to run it myself.

So my question is... Any tips? Both for CoS, and for running a published adventure.

[Wildarm]

Read the entire thing over in detail several times.

Try and get an idea in your head about the motives and actions of NPCs and monsters in each area.

Keep a mental note of any time related things that might be happening if the group takes a long time to accomplish a certain section of the campaign. Try and provide clues to players if some dire is going to happen if they don't hurry up and save the world.

Check out some of the reviews people have done online in particular for things pointed out as unbalanced or just don't make sense. Feel free to make notes and changes as you see fit.

I've adapted several adventures and locations from published material into my homebrew campaign. It works reasonably well if you spend some prep it. You're used to making your own homebrew world so you have a good idea of how a place might fit into your world. For CoS, feel free to add in old NPCs you used previously, it's pretty easy to reskin certain NPCs to be a familiar face who also got lost in the mists and found themselves in Barovia.

[Unoriginal]

This thread may help you:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?575962-Questions-RE-Mad-Mage-and-DMing-a-premade-module

Lots of things stated there would also apply to your situation.

[Madfellow]

Read the entire thing over in detail several times.

I wouldn't recommend doing this right away, just because it's too much work to put yourself through right out of the gate.

However, I would recommend that you read through the intro and the first chapter or two, just to get a good idea of how things are going to start and how the first couple sessions are likely to play out. After each session, read a head to the next couple chapters and keep planning ahead. The chapter on the town of Vallaki in particular is pretty dense and over-detailed, and there are other locations detailed later in the book that your party might not even find or be interested in traveling to.

But my biggest piece of advice would be this: Make it your own. Don't be afraid to tweak things about the encounters or the NPCs, or just how you decide to present them to your players. Wherever you can, try to tailor elements of the adventure to your players' characters and to your own tastes.

Good luck. :smallsmile:

[Foxhound438]

But my biggest piece of advice would be this: Make it your own.

^same. I've ran some dungeons out of Tales from the Yawning portal (more than once for the earlier ones), and the best part according to feedback that I get is how much I change things on the fly. Never once did a module tell me to act like an octopus trying to communicate via charades, but that didn't stop me from doing so.

[MaxWilson]

So, I've run a few homebrew campaigns before. Had a lot of success, always kept a good, open dialogue with players as to what they liked and didn't like. Session Zero to lay out what kind of campaign it'd be. And our last campaign wrapped up, and they're looking for more. We play maybe once every 3 weeks.

And my DM is running us through Curse of Strahd, starting with Death House. And its so... much... fun. So atmospheric, so detailed in ways that I haven't been able to achieve myself. I'm not a professional writer / designer, after all. This is a weekly game.

So if I can CoS for my group (which would start in a few weeks), there's no way that I'd get ahead of my actual playing party in the module. I'm a good enough player that I can separate character knowledge from player knowledge, and its easy to do that when my character in CoS has 5 Intelligence anyway. :smalltongue:

But I've never run a published module before. I'd read through some. I read all of Lost Mines of Phandelver, I skimmed Princes of the Apocalypse, but CoS just seems so much damn fun that I'm really hyped to run it myself.

So my question is... Any tips? Both for CoS, and for running a published adventure.

Take a look at Courtney Campbell's posts on running Hoard of the Dragon Queen (http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/p/hoard-of-dragon-queen-index.html), starting with this one (http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2014/09/on-hoard-of-dragon-queen-episode-i.html). It will give you an idea of what sorts of things you will need to rewrite, both in terms of content/challenge and (equally importantly) in terms of re-formatting to make the adventures easy to run at the table.

[Sigreid]

Use the module as a guideline. Don't be afraid to take it off the rails, especially since the average party will.

[Capac Amaru]

1. Work with the players to give them background hooks that tie into the plot. Example: When I ran my party through Phandelver, I had the druid character looking for her old mentor who had disappeared, Reidoth.

2. Don't be afraid to give NPC's their own motivations and things to do. Look for side characters with special skills, and make use of them. Example: the two doppelgangers in the phandelver campaign may be spying on the party from early on, or infiltrating the town to sow dissent amongst the villagers, or even carrying messages between the big bad's servants.

3. Use monsters regional effects where applicable.

4. Mix in some false rumors with the regular quest givers.

5. Think about the how time is flowing, and how different entities might react. Success isn't always success. Example: my party fought the big bad, had their asses handed to them, and retreated. They rested for the night, and when they came back... the villain and his surviving henchmen were gone, taking what they could with them, and destroying anything else of value.