EdAbbey
Explorer
There are a couple of spoilers below.
Although it only arrived in my mailbox on Friday, last night I DM’d our group as we ran through part of the opening adventure in Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In prepping, I was too distracted by the high-quality first chapter of background information describing Saltmarsh as a setting. It's concise but very well done. As it turns out, I should have spent more time and put more effort into enhancing the actual dungeon (Chap 2).
So far, as presented, the first adventure comes off a bit repetitive. In the 20-odd areas on the ground and second floors of the manor where the adventure occurs, 3/4's of them have nothing of major significance. Most encounters are with insects. Multiple, similar, hidden compartments in fireplaces and chimneys yield some pretty paltry treasures. That being said, the repetitive inconsequential encounters have had a significant cumulative effect on our 1st-level party. We've had multiple characters knocked down to 0 HP and a couple very close calls with outright death. When we wrapped up last night, they'd blown through most of their HD and spell slots. They are poised to enter the caverns below the manor and are in no shape for the final, main encounter with a smuggler gang. Now, the options for our next session are a retreat/long rest or bumping them up to second level mid-stride. Story-wise and mechanics-wise, I'm not keen on either one of those options.
My advice to any DM's planning to run this would be to tweak the upper 2 floors of the manor. Cut out about 1/2 the rooms including most of the 'nothing of note' areas and at least a couple of the insect encounters. Perhaps one wing of the manor has collapsed from neglect and is now inaccessible. You may have to shift a couple of key encounters to other rooms but that shouldn't be a problem. As written, this converted 1e adventure module would have been a bit too slow, repetitive and dungeon-crawly for our liking. As the adventure book intends, incorporating the quality background material into the original storyline helps to spice it up. A few modifications to the dungeon layout would have also improved our session.
Although it only arrived in my mailbox on Friday, last night I DM’d our group as we ran through part of the opening adventure in Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In prepping, I was too distracted by the high-quality first chapter of background information describing Saltmarsh as a setting. It's concise but very well done. As it turns out, I should have spent more time and put more effort into enhancing the actual dungeon (Chap 2).
So far, as presented, the first adventure comes off a bit repetitive. In the 20-odd areas on the ground and second floors of the manor where the adventure occurs, 3/4's of them have nothing of major significance. Most encounters are with insects. Multiple, similar, hidden compartments in fireplaces and chimneys yield some pretty paltry treasures. That being said, the repetitive inconsequential encounters have had a significant cumulative effect on our 1st-level party. We've had multiple characters knocked down to 0 HP and a couple very close calls with outright death. When we wrapped up last night, they'd blown through most of their HD and spell slots. They are poised to enter the caverns below the manor and are in no shape for the final, main encounter with a smuggler gang. Now, the options for our next session are a retreat/long rest or bumping them up to second level mid-stride. Story-wise and mechanics-wise, I'm not keen on either one of those options.
My advice to any DM's planning to run this would be to tweak the upper 2 floors of the manor. Cut out about 1/2 the rooms including most of the 'nothing of note' areas and at least a couple of the insect encounters. Perhaps one wing of the manor has collapsed from neglect and is now inaccessible. You may have to shift a couple of key encounters to other rooms but that shouldn't be a problem. As written, this converted 1e adventure module would have been a bit too slow, repetitive and dungeon-crawly for our liking. As the adventure book intends, incorporating the quality background material into the original storyline helps to spice it up. A few modifications to the dungeon layout would have also improved our session.
