Running 'Out of the Abyss' soon, any tips?

[MustacheManny]

Specifically about keeping all those NPCs straight. I love the characters they've included, but there's so many of them at the start! And they almost all want to follow the players around directly after the escape from Velkynvelve.

[Zhorn]

In your notes, assign a character you can keep a clear memory of for how they sound (tv show, movie, cartoon, actual RL person, whatever). Someone that gives you a frame of reference for when you need to roleplay them.
Last time I had a good 15 NPCs the party was seeking out to contact over and over, I swapped from giving the NPC their own voice and changed to each NPC having a character I'd do an impression of.

The dwarf at the blacksmith? He's now William Wallace from Braveheart.
The teifling at the tavern? Tom Ellis's Lucifer
Town sheriff? Jake from Rescuers Down Under

It's easier to juggle impressions than it is to juggle original characters.

[SunderedWorldDM]

Or do what I did, either kill most of them in Velkynvelve or make them run their separate ways after escape. A nice 3 NPCs is manageable, and there's a chance player favorites could show up later, but otherwise, it's just a better idea to keep the NPCs to a minimum. (As long as that includes Stool. If you kill Stool, the party will riot.)

But if you do want to keep them around, make sure that there's as little overlap as possible. She knows how to get to Blingdenstone, so if we want to go there, she guides us. He forages, providing the food always. If you portray the NPCs uniquely and keep their functions and MOs different, all the better for you!

Other tips I picked up:
-You're better off making some new thread than following Gracklstugh to the letter. It's too confusing to run straight out of the book well, and chances are you'll make up something cooler or roughly equivalent to what the book says. Just get the PCs to Themberchaud, Whorlstone, and maybe the Cairngholm Caverns somehow and you'll be right as rain.
-Prep your random encounters beforehand. It'll really help make the Underdark be a lot cooler if you already have set piece battles in mind before the travel montage starts. If you're not a good encounter prepper, an easy formula is to take a location-based random encounter and smoosh it together with a monster-based one. A yawning chasm with a night hag and her skeletons. A gas leak with the drow pursuit catching up.
-Foreshadow as much as you can. A grisly NPC murder on the road to Gracklstugh, perpetrated in secret by Buppido. Demonic glyphs on the walls. Intelligent oozes harrying the party and trying to convert them to the cult of Jubilex. The rumblings of the Maze Engine, even. There should be a sense of survival and foreboding for as much as possible.

Best of luck, and have fun! I'm sure your players will love your game.

[AttilatheYeon]

Or do what I did, either kill most of them in Velkynvelve or make them run their separate ways after escape. A nice 3 NPCs is manageable, and there's a chance player favorites could show up later, but otherwise, it's just a better idea to keep the NPCs to a minimum. (As long as that includes Stool. If you kill Stool, the party will riot.)

But if you do want to keep them around, make sure that there's as little overlap as possible. She knows how to get to Blingdenstone, so if we want to go there, she guides us. He forages, providing the food always. If you portray the NPCs uniquely and keep their functions and MOs different, all the better for you!

Other tips I picked up:
-You're better off making some new thread than following Gracklstugh to the letter. It's too confusing to run straight out of the book well, and chances are you'll make up something cooler or roughly equivalent to what the book says. Just get the PCs to Themberchaud, Whorlstone, and maybe the Cairngholm Caverns somehow and you'll be right as rain.
-Prep your random encounters beforehand. It'll really help make the Underdark be a lot cooler if you already have set piece battles in mind before the travel montage starts. If you're not a good encounter prepper, an easy formula is to take a location-based random encounter and smoosh it together with a monster-based one. A yawning chasm with a night hag and her skeletons. A gas leak with the drow pursuit catching up.
-Foreshadow as much as you can. A grisly NPC murder on the road to Gracklstugh, perpetrated in secret by Buppido. Demonic glyphs on the walls. Intelligent oozes harrying the party and trying to convert them to the cult of Jubilex. The rumblings of the Maze Engine, even. There should be a sense of survival and foreboding for as much as possible.

Best of luck, and have fun! I'm sure your players will love your game.

Haha, the last time i played this, Stool got killed and the party nearly went Hannible Lecter on a non combat NPC who clearly would have died during a fight.

[iTreeby]

If you keep flash cards of the npc stats, it can be handy. If stool dies, you can't communicate with everyone.

Spoilers below...


Shushar and stool are noncombatants so don't take much combat space

The most likely route out of velkenvelven is to head north to darklake and then to the fungus place. If you read the transit rules, all the random encounters are supposed to be in 5 or10 feet wide caves unless otherwise stated by the terrain table so unless everyone has ranged weapons (to fire at enemies with partial cover) marching order will dictate who the few characters who can even attack are. It gets a little more complicated if the drow search party catches up (they easily can) then you can end up with a two front battle.

If you let things take their natural course, you won't have to worry about the npcs too much as they will die fairly quickly. Plus most of the npcs will betray the party at some point (Topsy and Turvy transforming into wear rats can happen whenever you want within the first 20 ish days)

The party can get out of the underdark fairly quickly, at that point, most of the npcs aren't coming back.

Sarith (the drow prisoner) is really useful for not having to role randomly for direction traveled but remember that he is content to let the party fail and not say anything to anyone about how he knows the way around.

[Telok]

Absolutely do not start with "you're captured and have to escape" without much much more explanation and/or exposition. The players will run a jailbreak as soon as possible and either die to the drow or escape with neither gear nor allies.
Go ahead and start with a week long cutscene of captivity to set the stage.

Over prepare. Don't grind things to a halt for 10 minutes because you need to find stats or rules from 3 different places in the book. Write out cheat sheets of everything you'll need and put relevant info next to each other. Put your light and stealth rules in one place, pur your random encounters and starting encounter distance next to that.

[micahaphone]

Flash cards were nice, I did have some of the motley crew run off on their own early (topsy and turvey mostly),bupiddo was a scary threat that came back to life once, haunting them.

All in All, I recommend looking at this online guide / DM supplement, it has some great tips and suggested changes.

https://www.elventower.com/out-of-the-abyss-guide/


I've used some of their random events, and gave my players a choice between the long journey up to the surface where they'd fight Ilvara (as per the book), or to go with some deep gnomes to reactivate an old teleportation circle. Ilvara appeared and they had to fight the drow cadre off for 10 rounds while a gnome got the portal working. The circle was in an area like this:

-----
-- o ---
--- ---
-- x --
- x x -

dashes are wall, o is the teleportation circle, and the xs are craters from an old fight back during the loss of blindenstone.

The drow approached from the bottom, filling the bottleneck with Darkness to divide up the battlefield at first.
The twist was that 8 rounds in, at the top of the cavern, an undead mindflayer appeared and started drawing on the wall. The party was busy down below fighting drow, and it wasn't hurting the gnome wizard, so they didn't respond immediately. He drew a circle on the wall, and through it came Orcus. Cue music change! Now they had to GTFO asap, even though the drow were being cleaned up. A hurried fight to get the party and their allies onto the circle while zombies are erupting all around them and ****'s hitting the fan.

I did this because orcus is cool and underused when you play by the book. The undead mindflayer also hints at him taking over a colony whose elder brain recently died.

[Samayu]

We took the easy way out on the NPC captives. They were with us but ignored. They never got into combat, and only died when something really major happened, and the DM just told us that one or two of them didn't make it.

And if a PC died, that player made a new character of the appropriate level, using one of the NPC's as a base.

[micahaphone]

I should mention that for my party of 3, I decided a houserule that each combat, they could choose one npc from the party to join them, and the rest were fighting other combatants or otherwise occupied. Early game they frequently used Derendil to help tank hits and get in the thick of things, sometimes Sarith or Jimjar if a little more dps was needed, but after they were ~level 5 they rarely even used that feature anyway.

[Misterwhisper]

I am a huge fan of notecards.

Also, the maps in the book are horrible, be prepared to adlib some locations.

Be prepared to go off book.
- we killed the level 5 priestess in the first escape by making a chain out of the shackles and one of us scaled down the wall into the lower room of her 3 story area and took our gear, then thanks to some lucky rolls by our rogue and ranger and she dropped before her second action.
- quite often the group just went, “nope, not our problem” and ignored things.
- we ditched the npcs in the first actual city we came to.
- the only death we had was when the cleric in the party killed the rogue in the party due to corruption.

Pretty sure none of that was planned in the book.

[Jerrykhor]

You should kill off those you don't want around. There are so many ways they could die, like failed attempt at escape, fell into the water and killed by the ooze, demon attack, stay behind to cover players escape etc. For me, i killed off Ront and Prince Derendil during the escape. Eldeth decided to follow some shield dwarf scouts later on.

[Safety Sword]

Get really familiar with the madness rules and use them. :smallsmile:

[Cwyll]

Keep a couple with the group, but let the others get split off in the initial escape.
Don't feel that you need to kill them all off too fast (unless there's one you really don't like).
They can then turn up now and again in the future as/when needed

[Sherlockpwns]

IMO the best part of OOTA for our group was the early stages, surviving in the UD with nearly nothing. As the DM my big advice here is twofold:

First, the escape is hard. What I ended up doing was basically sacrificing an NPC (somewhat at random) every time they would have lost a party member due to either incompetence or straight up bad luck. The plus side is this weedled down how many NPCs I had to deal with. By the time they were safely away I think there were only 3 or 4 surviving NPCs left. It was a straight up massacre and the players loved it.

Then the survival began as they made their way to deliver Stool back to his clan (who sorta became their mascot and beloved NPC? Weird). I continued to use the NPCs as sort of "penalties" - In particular I recall one of them did something very dumb with the madness and rather than have it impact the player, it impacted the NPC, causing them to do something dangerous and attract enemies... which ironically due to some unexpected dice roll ended up killing the NPC. This was their first clue of the madness.

What I ended up doing was pre-rolling the "events" that would happen based no the distance they were traveling. Basically their trip was pre-scripted by me in advance. I let them choose all kinds of things, how fast / careful, left, right, towards this town or that. However, for the random encounters no matter what they picked they were going to get the encounter. This made the escape very interesting for them and manageable for me. What they picked MAY impact how their encounter starts or plays out. Moving slowly and stealthy would be taken into consideration when they come across a trading caravan or horde of zombies, but there was no "avoiding" the zombies or caravan encounter (granted they could have bypassed it or not fought them, they could have just encountered the event and chose to do nothing with it potentially).

Anyway, so every day they travel had a chance of an event and I had a giant list of the events they'd deal with in a day. That plus managing their food and water and trying to scrounge for weapons and armor kept the early stages of OOTA very interesting.

By the 1/4 mark (Around level 5) they were no longer worried about just surviving and way into the whole madness plot.

Oh and one more tip! I made madness uncurable. The madness they were gaining could be suppressed via certain spells but not removed. I created a slightly more complex system of ever increasing and detrimental madnesses. The first effects were always minor, but every time something happened that was going to cause more madness (and they failed their saves), the madness within would grow. I did force them to RP their madnesses, and gave everyone the option that they could "violate" their madness for one moment in exchange for a save vs more madness. It created some of the most unique characters and decisions I've ever had a table. We had a player who believed they were invincible, a player who could never tell the truth about their current state, a player who believed someone in the group was a traitor. And about a half dozen different phobias.

I also had the players track their "Madness counters" on their own sheets with tick marks. This added to their paranoia, it doesn't even have to represent anything real. I had them add a tick every time they rolled (Success or not). I tracked their real madness separately. By the mid point in the campaign several characters had sheets that were COVERED in tick marks. Very C'thulu.

I hope this helps! I frankly loved running this campaign and was sad when two players had to move, forcing its abrupt end just after the mid-way point.