D&D 5E Tightening up/editing Princes of the Apocalypse

[Tobold]

The missing delegation hook is weak, so making the cults more prominent and turning this more into an adventure of "we need to fight elemental evil cults to save the region from an apocalypse" is probably the better approach.

The main difficulty in terms of flow is that the adventure has 13 dungeons ranging from level 3 to 13 in challenge. As written the players might very well at level 3 start with the level 5 Sacred Stone dungeon, and then go from there directly to the level 8 Temple of Elemental Earth. You need to decide whether you are okay with that. If not you need to either introduce keys that prevent the players from doing the second series of dungeons before having finished the 4 haunted keeps, or you need to manipulate the information the players get to try and steer them in the "right" direction.

My personal solution is a mix of all that. I shortened to Lost Mines of Phandelver by removing some side quests and the lost mine. Instead Glasstaff and the goblins are in league with the air cultists. Gundren is a target because he has a book (instead of the map) that describes the fight of the dwarves of Besilmer against elemental evil. Air cultists instead of dragon cultists are in Thundertree. And Glasstaff flees to Feathergale Spire leaving a letter from Aerisi Kalinoth behind giving directions. So fighting cultists should be on top of the agenda of my players once we finish the goblin castle (where another air cultist caster replaces the doppelganger). In PotA itself I will use cult actions like the cult reprisals to steer my players. And with Gundren's book they got the information that the order of difficulty of the cults is air<water<stone<fire. So if they want to go to a higher level dungeon first, they can, but at least they know the consequences.

 

[Tekarana]

Where is the Triad?

We will soon be finished with Princes of the Apocalypse after 70+ sessions. It has been a GREAT campaign, but not particularly an easy one to run. i've had to modify little things along the way. I will just make a quick checklist here of things that come to mind:

1. From the outset, give the heroes some personal reasons to investigate the missing delegation. I had the heroes start from Phandelver with a mission from Gundren, but they did not have a lot of personal attachment to the delegation, aside from what their respective Factions, the Encalve and Gauntlet, had to tell them. So they were motivated by faction needs, not personal character needs.

This should be its own bullet point, but oh well, here another - the Red Larch section has TOO MANY NPCS. Pick some, flesh them out, change the names (their names suck) and focus on the backstories that interest the DM. I fleshed out the Delvers some, but after a while it all faded to the background of the main plot.

2. I introduced the necromancer cave and the Tomb of Moving Stones as the first dungeons. The necromancer was a follower of the One Eye, and throughout the whole adventure I clued in that the Elemental Eye had a 5th and secret cult above the four Elemental cults. The necromancer had actually kidnapped two girls from Red Larch and one of them is already zombified when the PCs find her.

3. Be sure to hammer the players at low level with RANDOM ENCOUNTERS in the Sumber Hills. This is and should be a dangerous place. When they get to higher level they can easily skip the hills in typical D&D teleport fashion, so utilize the environment while you can. In addition to combat encounters, you might want to add some weather encounters, WEIRD weather encounters.

4. Halfway in the campaign I had Haayon the Punisher take over all of Red Larch with his orc minions, hoping for the PCs to return so he could take their elemental weapons. He has two major NPCS and friends of the PCs held hostage. I made him into a Death Giant, and he probably should have had some Legendary powers, but I didn't want to make him overly baddass (which he still was, he was Huge size and dealt devastating damage with a man sized double axe)

5. I changed all of the encounters on the Stone Bridge to a red dragon cultist who is waiting to ambush anyone on the bridge, but specifically the PCs. Regardless, they nearly killed the dragon and forced it to flee. It reappeared two more times before it was finally slain in the Fane of the Eye.

6. The Helm of Belsimer and the Tomb of Torild. I changed this A LOT. A WHOLE lot. Per the book, there's only a single check to find a secret door that has been supposedly hidden for a thousand years. Hell, a child could walk in there, roll a 20 and find King Tut's Tomb. No. I made the Tomb into a three level, golem guarded trap, like something out of Indiana Jones, and they had riddles to solve too. In fact, I think I had to give some hints. I kept the whole dwarf and doppleganger subplot intact.

https://app.box.com/s/u9o7hcwphzh1c3yosusm5tkq1nzmfbw9

7. The Vale of Dancing Waters was filled with dwarves who were originally in the same Gauntlet faction as a paladin PC. After he died, the dwarves were still loyal to the PCs who had helped them fight off the Water Cult who had broken into their sacred Temple and slain ALL the innocent dwarf priests.

8. The 5th and final Cult of the Eye is The Triad, an undead trio of 15th level liches who cast simultaneously and have Lair attacks. Custom made sonsofbitches, they were the hardest thing the PCs fought in the whole campaign, although they managed to skip fighting ANY OF THE PRINCES! I have to admit I find that a little disappointing. But hey, they pulled it off.

9. The Mirabar Delegation - I made this way more important by adding 4 seers who were druidic delegates from the Good Elemental Princes, who were sending out feelers into the world, and who could possibly close a node together. They are found out and betrayed and quickly shut down by the elemental cults.

10. Closing a Node with a weapon requires the OPPOSITE element, not the weapon associated with that element. This creates some more backtracking for the PCs.

11. One of the biggest changes was mechanical - we don't use the default Initiative system of d20, we use a random card based initiative system that for me is actually FUN, unlike the static default system.

12. Devastation Orbs - I created a new orb, a Super Devastation Orb, a combination of all 4 elements, and it can only be done by the Triad in the Fane of the Eye. One of these nuclear bombs destroys Beliard completely, wipes it off the map in probably the most frightening part of the entire campaign for the party, they were running from an elemental god destroying the entire town behind with a flood, striking lightning, hail and fire and a tornado.

13. Another BIG side quest, the second Devastation Orb is auctioned off in Yartar to the Sons of the Kraken, only to be stolen back from the Zhentarim. Due to the nature of the orb, it cannot be moved magically to another location, it must be physically transported. In Yartar, the PCs get embroiled in a Faction War between the Kraken Society, the Zhents, the Hand of Yartar Thief Guild, The Red Wizards of Thay, and on the good guy side, The Harpers, the Enclave and the Gauntlet, although the good factions are sorely outnumbered.

14. I can't even tell you how many battles were tweaked from what the book describes. All of them maybe? It just depends. As the PCs gained levels I had to make the bad guys tougher too. This REALLY became evident in the Water Temple when they are fighting a coven of hags, leveled ogre bodyguards, a naga and a 3rd edition water demon and other assorted nastiness.

14. F--- the Water Node. Maybe I made it TOO hard, but it was a real slog. The enemy would hit and retreat, hit and retreat, and the the Druid turns into a water elemental and slips through the entire level, striking from puddles, it was a convoluted confusing and drawn out mess that we were all glad to see end.

There were more tweaks and changes, but those were some that came to mind. It was definitely "MY" version of Princes of the Apocalypse, and I love this adventure, I do love it, I love how the maps are connected, and the motivations of the cults and whatnot. Oh, that reminds me of something else...

15 - The Prophets and Their Backstories. The book goes into a lot of depth in different sections about the backstories of the prophets. YOU, as the DM, unless you come up with a way for the Players to know this stuff, it's a waste of space. They will never know and they will just hack the enemy to pieces like a mindless ochre jelly. So, try to find ways to hint at their backgrounds. In maybe the best part of the Water Node, the Aboleth gave a PC psychic flashes of Gar Shatterkeel's story, and it nearly drove the PC insane.

Anyway, I love this campaign, but it was WORK every step of the way, and it required lots of both small and large modifications.

THis is sooo helpful. Some of these things have really been bugging me when running this campaign. A couple of questions to the way you fitted in the Triad.

- Did you locate the Triad in the Fane of the Eye?
- Do you have a story reason for it to be a group of liches?
- Is it possible to see a list of the capabilities of the liches ?

I love the adventure, but it is difficult to run due to the many needed modifications as a first-time DM (at least for this large of an adventure.

Best Regards,

Kjertan

 

[Mercule]

The missing delegation hook is weak, so making the cults more prominent and turning this more into an adventure of "we need to fight elemental evil cults to save the region from an apocalypse" is probably the better approach.

This. 1,000 times this. I tried to play with a gradual reveal and mystery about what was going on. I don't think the game ever did recover from that and the whole group (me included) opted to just drop the adventure because it was so slow. I'd gotten to a point where I'd gone back and radically reworked things to try to build momentum, but it was too late. You need to drive some urgency fairly early.

Other bits:
1) Shrink the scale. The towns are small and none of them have all services a PC might want. Many of the plot hooks encourage the party to move between towns, but the distance tends to make every such hook seem remote and like it's someone else's problem. The towns should be no more than a day between them. Many times, they should be a there-and-back in a day distance.

2) Pay attention to hearing distance. A lot of the encounters are actually within earshot of one another. That can cause encounters to come in waves. Cultists would be aware of their reinforcements, but some of the tactics listed don't reflect that.

3) Let the cults recruit. There are a lot of notes about "if these guys buy the farm, the monsters from room XX move here". A lot of times, that actually puts the new occupants in a mismatched tactical position, which isn't horrible, but the net effect is that a guerrilla approach ends up highlighting what might otherwise be a minor design flaw. Just having a handful of "replacement" cultists/mooks every few days works well. Also, there are a few monsters/NPCs that are called out as being "in training" or something similar. Let these guys advance and take on the stats of whatever they're advancing towards, if the PCs take too long.

4) Read the notes about door construction, lighting, etc. very carefully. It really sucks to get halfway through a given complex only to reread that all the doors are stone and you've been allowing pretty easy checks to listen for monsters behind them. It also sucks for the PCs because they've been leaving the tank at the rear to try to stealth past said stone doors that would probably block most of the sound.

5) Run the area around the Scarlet Moon Hall as theater of the mind. It's freaking huge and ideal for ranged attacks. I actually borrowed the idea of zones from Fate and blended it with melee/short/medium/long range. It was probably one of the most fun segments of the adventure, but I think it would have been a royal pain and somewhat interminable if I'd tried to draw things out on my mats.

6) The Temple of Howling Hatred has a section of randomized encounters that can actually come up totally empty if things work out just right. This is actually OK. My players started to feel like, "It's quiet -- too quiet." When things finally happened, the tension release was very cool.

7) Read the tactics for the different cults. There's a lot of dungeon time. This is what makes it feel like multiple dungeons, as much as anything else. Yes, that means sub-optimal tactics for some groups, but the overall feel works.

8) Some of the NPCs have contacts outside the area. If the PCs head off to Waterdeep or Neverwinter to re-equip, these NPCs can call on their allies during that time to keep things feeling alive. You'll probably have to stat up some of the allies, but it's a great opportunity to adjust the adventure to the way your players are handling it, if they aren't doing this "by the book".

9) Use milestone advancement. Even without adding reinforcements, the PCs could do things in an order that will let them quickly (and relatively safely) level up early on, then go through a couple lower level areas without advancing at all. If you do add reinforcements, the math could get even wonkier. I think the book has advice on when those milestones are -- basically, every chapter. Note that this has become my general philosophy on 5E, but this module was part of the push.