Lore Dump #4 - Folktales of Beverast

Fairies

Somewhere along the countryside, in the middle of the harvest season, a mother reminds her sons "Don't forget to strap your boots down tonight, it's the Eve of Mischief, don't want the fairies to get them!" 

There are said to be parallel realms, entirely different worlds, connected to the World as we know it where creatures such as fairies come from. Fairies, like other creatures from the Feywild, are mischievous little buggers. They are nature's pranksters. 

Dryads

Said to be the sirens of the forest or Mother Nature's vampires, dryads are known for their uncanny ability to charm and lure unsuspecting victims into their groves to devour them. Another creature connected to the Feywild, Dryads often live in solitude and lay claim to large regions as their hunting grounds. Predatory in nature, dryads are also shapeshifters and often appear in a variety of shapes to stalk, lure, and kill their victims. Trees sustain themselves from the sun and rain, dryads sustain themselves on the life essence of the living. 

Trolls

The bastard children of Nature and the Giants, trolls are seen as lowly to giants and outsiders to many of the forest. In the Age of Giants, many trolls served as shamans or druids for their giant kin. Much like nature itself, Trolls are said to be blessed with the ability to regrow and regenerate out of next to nothing. Once the kings of the forest, trolls like many giants, were driven back into caves, mountains and hunted to near extinction. 

- Summaries of the public knowledge collected and spread by the Wardens.

DM Deep Dive #4 - Running a Published Adventure

Wizards of the Coast has published 15ish ready-to-play 5e adventures at this point. Most are $50, hardback, and sell themselves as all you need to play. I have attempted to run/ran a total of 3 (Lost Mines of Phandelver, Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Curse of Strahd), only having 1 truly good experience. I have a sour taste in my mouth due to a few bad experiences and I’ve learned many lessons along the way and I’ll share them here. 

Lost Mines of Phandelver - my first true adventure I ever ran. It was fun, the group was new, I was new, everything was fresh, and as an adventure it is truly easy to run. Some things are a little convoluted and a certain baddie definitely needs a little buffing up to give the adventure a solid villain, but overall it was a wonderful experience. It’s a good, standard, little bit of everything D&D experience that you can very easily remix with your own content. 

Curse of Strahd (pre-Ravenloft Guide) - Oh boy. Horror is a just as poorly defined as a genre as fantasy. The group, due to wanting tons of secrets and potential for inter-party conflict and drama, ended up with a overzealous 40k Paladin, the son of Dracula, a literal werewolf (found the class on Reddit), blood ritual creepfest sorcerer, and basically Trevor Belmont. Out of the gate I had already homebrewed Byrgenwerth into Barovia, completely rewrote Vallaki, and made it an unfocused and unrecognizable adventure. Strahd became a meme by the 2nd interaction with him, all the tension was gone and we wrapped up Barovia as quickly as possible and went back to good old gonzo kitchen sink fantasy. I truly believe this devolved to insanity because of a mismatch of expectations. 

Ghosts of Saltmarsh - This game probably had the strongest start to any I’ve ever run. I ran the first 3 pretty by the book and everyone was having fun  I didn’t set up the council very well, they didn’t much care for the politics that much, they were in the middle of a murder mystery that took them to Seaton (homebrew adventure), then COVID hit and we stopped playing for a long time then attempted to pick it up right where we left off. Everyone had forgotten what was going on, understandably, we had a small change of characters, so we then jumped ship literally and went to exploring the a jungle with a “only-the”highlights” style speed run of Tomb of Annihilation. The game puttered out about halfway through that due to scheduling.

Current Campaign - I started this campaign with the first chapter of the notorious Tyranny of Dragons. It started with a bang, it had a cool villain, and it was high octane adventuring. I absolutely loved it! I changed motivations to fit the setting, and wrapped up the conflict without it bleeding into 15 levels of questing. It was a great use of a module  

Lessons learned

1. Modules are wonderful as toolkits to steal chapters, pages, NPCs, quests. 
2. Modules can work really well if well written and everyone is on the same page going in. 
3. If you are going to run a module in it’s entirety, make sure you try and keep it in the same spirit as the designers intended and make alterations as you see fit as you go. Don’t rewrite on the front side, that’s way too much work. 
4. Make sure everyone is on the same page with each other and the DM. The Curse of Strahd party was truly a nightmare, pun intended. 

Hope my experiences and lessons help! Let me know in the comments what you want me to talk about next!

- C&D Daniel

6 Episodes in, DM Pulse Check

This isn't a regularly scheduled post but I'd like to share where my head is at for the game now that we are a little over a month in. I love it. I often get really hyped during the pre-campaign planning stage which promptly fizzles out due to many things; differences of expectations, scheduling, characters not fitting, the conflict not sticking, to name a few. But this go around I am trying to approach things drastically different and it is really working out. Life is super busy at the moment but I don't feel burdened by the game, or prep, or any of this either. It's a really good time right now and thanks to everyone for playing, reading, or listening in for this ride!

- C&D Daniel

Lore Dump #3 - the Dark Elves

"They came from beneath the deepest mountains, arisen from the dark depths of the underworld. A people seeking salvation and freedom from the umbral chains on their dark hearts. Three peoples; orc, dwarven and elven, united against the dark lords from below. This will undoubtedly cause the coming of a new age., and the people of this world will set the tone" - From the Letters of Val'antheius of the First Circle, written to Eleronadel, the High Listener. 

The following is a synopsis of the knowledge collected within the Library of Listeners.

The Dark Elves, or Drow, are a group of Elven folk who at one point in the far past descended into the Underworld to establish their home. They lived here for many millennia until they became aware of the strings that were slowly being put upon them by the Dark Lords of the Underworld. They had become puppets to the schemes of the Dark Forces and sought to break free of their bondage. Legend tells of a warrior named Nax'tharus who led his people out and onto the surface where they faced the blinding light of the sun for the first time. They struggled to find their place in the world and still do. 

The emergence of the subterranean races was mostly in the last 50 years, to an elf this is but a fraction of their life, to a human, over half. We are not even one generation into the repercussions of three new peoples arriving in this world. The geopolitical forces at play are still on edge. These people were entirely alien but 50 or so years ago. They have mostly found their homes in the shaded grottos and forests left unclaimed or enough out of the way to not be worth disputing. Xenophobia is abundant, sadly. Many people don't care for outsiders as it is, let alone outsiders of this world as they know it. However the Drow have not given up hope and most seek to truly find their place in the world here, while few sects seek retaliation and violence against those who would condemn them. 

During their exodus, Nax'tharus fought opposition within his own people, namely Tal'deloron, a Drow mage who saw the Dark Lords as sources of power that should be utilized. This caused a splinter in the Drow people and that group of Drow rebels calls themselves the Sidaru, or Servents of the Spider in the common tongue. They wish to see those who stand against them and wish to keep them on the outskirts stricken down and conquered. They are very militant and widespread. Their influence grows, and the fear of the Drow kind, in general, does so as well. The Drow have a tough job making a good name for themselves, and the Sidaru are making it no easier. Many Drow have loosely united under their warrior leader, Nax'tharus, who seeks peaceful assimilation, a kingdom of his own, and a seat next to the surface kings. Only time will tell the fate of these people.

- From letters and stories within the Library of Listeners.

DM Deep Dive #3 - The Self-Propelling Campaign

"How do you plan for everything the players could possibly do every session? What if you planned all this stuff for them to go right and they go left?" is a question I got from a friend who was starting his DMing journey. My response was simple, I don't. I started DMing like this, it was horrid. Every decision was an illusion, every encounter was "balanced", I thought out every line of NPC dialog and wrote pages of exposition that I made sure to read off every session. I spent hours and hours each week combing over every detail. I had no idea what I was doing, and that was okay. This was 5 years ago and I have DM'd a number of campaigns since then and fallen on my face a number of times doing so. 

Fast forward to today and I have finally reached my current DM nirvana. I have reached my inner peace. I spend maybe 30 minutes to an hour each week actually prepping my game and here is what I changed.

1st - Understand your world's truths, don't memorize your NPC's bits of knowledge. This is true for any setting, homebrewed or published, you need to make sure you understand your world's inhabitants' world views through their eyes. You don't need to memorize the dates of your world's history you need to understand the repercussions of the actions of history. If a cataclysm happened long ago and the cultures of the world directly reflect this, it paints a much more vivid picture than just knowing that dragons destroyed the world 1000 years ago in a great war. Maybe the scales of these dragons are now the currency instead of gold, or dragons are being hunted and exterminated so that it never happens again. To do this, I don't sit down and write it all out I just think about different aspects of the setting as I am out walking my dog, driving to work, listening to music, doing anything really. But the important part is I am just digesting my ideas, not making anything explicit and a fact until it comes out at play. 

2nd - Do less, only prep what you need. If your players told you that they are planning on going into the dungeon over the hill, just prep the dungeon over the hill. Don't worry about the ruins to the left or the goblin cave to the right. Players have a short attention span. If you give them an endless menu of options just because you want them to have the most fun and choose their own path, more often than not the options on the menu will end up being bland compared to if you focused all your fun and ideas into that one dungeon they already said they wanted to go to. Players also will get distracted easily and lose track of the hundreds of locations with carefully planned interconnected plot hooks. Combined with the toolkit point coming next, prep really gets streamlined. To that point, have you ever spent hours and hours planning an extremely complex plot only to have your players forget it all? Me too! I got to this point from that happening countless times.

3rd - Expand your toolkit. Make sure to have a diverse toolkit that you understand and know how to use and use well. Personally, I think the names in the back of Xanathar's are terrible. It's hard to use to me. So I made my own, a simple 2d20 list of first and last names and cross them off as I go. It's simple, I know how to use it and it's quick. The same goes for the encounter tables in the DMG and Xanathar's, they are utterly unusable to me. Instead, I make a simple 2d6 bell curve encounter table for the immediate region around the players full of hand-picked monsters that I can roll on if the players go exploring. I frequently use the Reaction table as previously explained in the last posts to give flavor to these encounters as well. 

4th - Respond don't predict. If your players ask what's over the mountains to the east, tell them what the NPC they are talking to actually believes is over the mountains. If you understand your setting and the customs of the people are who inhabit it, these kinds of questions shouldn't need explicit prep. If you understand your world and have the proper tools, the game runs itself. The players gather rumors from nuggets of knowledge that are from the point of view of the NPCs in the world, including all of their misconceptions, they piece together where the adventure is, they set out, decide how to approach, decide how to handle the situation and the world reacts. At every stage of that, no pre-planning is needed it can be done entirely reactionary. As a DM, this is freeing and truly exciting because you are no longer reading off of a script you are exploring the world with them. 

Hopefully, this perspective on prep gives your game new life. Use it all, use none of it, let me know what you think! If I can clarify anything more, leave a comment and I'll be happy to.

- C&D Daniel