The latest session of my Roll20 Waterdeep campaign saw the third-level party finally return to Waterdeep after a longer period away from the city and get back into some of the faction quests that actually related to Dragon Heist! They’d discovered a map showing an ancient treasure stored in the first level of Undermountain, but Onyx the Paladin realised they still hadn’t dealt with the … Continue reading Waterdeep Tales: Zhentarim and Undermountain
My Waterdeep campaign keeps going in strange directions. It began as a Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign, but it has become a Waterdeep sandbox campaign. The characters keep on going off and doing other quests. The characters have just spent a couple of sessions out of Waterdeep saving merchants from orcs, then exploring the very unusual dungeon the orcs lived in. The initial caves were fine. … Continue reading Tales from my Waterdeep Campaign
Exploring the wilderness could be a dangerous endeavour in the early forms of Dungeons & Dragons. If the random encounter table indicated an encounter with goblins, OD&D suggested that the party discovered 40-400 of them! It paints a view of a dangerous world. Outside of the civilised nations, large warbands of monsters stalk the land. It was only the humanoid monsters (orcs, kobolds, goblinoids, bandits, … Continue reading I Track the Monster to its Lair!
Back in AD&D, each class had its own experience point table. Partly this was because the characters gained abilities at different rates, so a thief gaining levels quickly kept it more in line with the abilities of the fighter. And part of it was because that is just how they did things then. Different classes, different rates of advancement. The most iconic advancement was the … Continue reading If 5E Experience Tables worked as they did in AD&D
Special Delivery is a short adventure by Shawn Merwin for level 1 characters. In it, a patron hires the adventurers to escort a carriage and its passengers to a border barony. It is not set in the Forgotten Realms, but instead in its own setting. I suspect you would have little problem adapting it. Although there is no lack of action in the adventure, it … Continue reading 5E Adventure Review: Special Delivery
My Roll20/Discord replay of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is continuing very enjoyably. The characters are more involved with the factions than when I’ve previously run it, and they’re doing other side quests as well. I’m going to keep them involved with the factions and other quests not related to the main plot of Dragon Heist for longer. Having a complex city life can make for great … Continue reading Running Dragon Heist: Factions and Quests
I find that one of the biggest challenges I have when playing in a role-playing game is that I’m working from imperfect information. I don’t know everything that my character would know. I often don’t know the big picture stuff – what are the nations, the names of the rulers, the countries we’re at war with. And I’m even less likely to know small picture … Continue reading Handling Imperfect Information
I’ve started running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as part of my Roll20/Discord D&D games during the lockdown, but this is the first time that I’m doing so not as a D&D Adventurers League game. As a result, I’m going to be changing things up a bit. The fact is that the first chapter is as about as good as I want an opening chapter in an … Continue reading Running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist – again!
By the time the characters enter Elturel, they should have two NPCs with them: Lulu, the winged hollyphant, and Reya, the Hellrider of Elturel who has been doomed (with the rest of Elturel’s defenders) to Hell. As noted in my last instalment, the reasons for them descending are muddy in the adventure-as-written, but I suggest that they have already learned of the need to gain … Continue reading Running Descent into Avernus, part 6: Entering Elturel
The latest session of my Dungeons & Dragons Greyhawk campaign was the first one of the series that we played on Roll20. We spent the first hour mucking around with the interface, the next two hours negotiating with the djinn, and spent the final hour finally fighting the Wind Dukes of Aaqa! The set-up is as follows: In an expedition to a magical cave, Paul’s … Continue reading Adventures in Greyhawk: Wind Dukes and Djinn
