D&D 5E Tips for Tyranny of Dragons?

[embee]

I'm wrapping up my LMoP campaign. My players have grown to like their characters who are on track to finish at Level 7. Now, I've got my campaign hook as the Dragon cultists have broken Glasstaff out from the caravan transporting him back to face justice at the hands of the Lords' Alliance and Sildar has tracked his last known location to Greenest, where the party can go to try to pick up the trail.

Does anyone have any advice on running Hoard of the Dragon Queen? How would you run it and/or beef it up for Level 7 adventurers? Any tips or lessons learned from running it that you all can offer would be welcome.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[Parmandur]

I'm wrapping up my LMoP campaign. My players have grown to like their characters who are on track to finish at Level 7. Now, I've got my campaign hook as the Dragon cultists have broken Glasstaff out from the caravan transporting him back to face justice at the hands of the Lords' Alliance and Sildar has tracked his last known location to Greenest, where the party can go to try to pick up the trail.

Does anyone have any advice on running Hoard of the Dragon Queen? How would you run it and/or beef it up for Level 7 adventurers? Any tips or lessons learned from running it that you all can offer would be welcome.

Many thanks in advance.

If the PCs are Level 7, skip straight to Chapter 8, the Castle in the Clouds and tie it into LMoP somehow: you've mostly missed Hoard of the Dragon Queen by level advancement.

This is good, because the really frustrating stuff for most folks is at lower levels.

 

[Eltab]

Two EnWorld threads that will help:
Enhancing Hoard of the Dragon Queen
Enhancing Rise of Tiamat

 

[jayoungr]

I agree with Parmandur that Skyreach Castle is a good place to "hook in." It fits the PCs' level and is not too far from Phandalin geographically. From there, you can move to Rise of Tiamat, which is more popular than Hoard of the Dragon Queen (although I personally like both adventures a lot).

Here are links to the "Enhancing" threads mentioned above:

D&D 5E - Enhancing "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" (Practical stuff to try at your table!)

My players just gave me Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat for an early Christmas present, on the understanding that I'll run the adventures for them. I've seen comments around the net saying these modules can use a bit of work to make them run better at the table, so I'd really like...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - Enhancing "Rise of Tiamat" (Practical stuff to try at your table!)

(A companion to the similar thread for Hoard of the Dragon Queen.) My players just gave me Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat for an early Christmas present, on the understanding that I'll run the adventures for them. I've seen comments around the net saying these modules can use...

www.enworld.org

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Just skip all the drama with the caravan travelling, it's not important for the story. Shorten Greenest. Cut down the number of encounters during the rest of the chapters, just keeping the essence of the story. The cult is collecting treasure and they have a hatchery. That's most important until the sky castle. Skip the lodge.
Since HotDQ use milestone leveling, I think you can just beef up the encounters to level 7 (and skip a lot like I mentioned above), and I think it will match sorta fine with them hitting 8th around the sky castle.
And I reccommend the two threads mentioned plus Power Score's guide to Tyranny o fDragons.

 

[akr71]

I agree with @Matrix Sorcica - skip the caravan. I also agree that jumping in at Skyreach makes sense, but I would back it up and enter the story with the Hunting Lodge. My players made a deal with Talis the White to get onto the castle easily - she's pissed at being passed over for Varam as the White Dragonspeaker (or whatever the title was).

I think I mentioned many of my changes in the above mentioned threads, but in brief:

The dragon lairing below Skyreach did not fight to the death, but escaped - the treasure isn't the dragon's so why would it fight to defend it.

Cut to RoT - when saving Varam, the party recovers the mask, but on making good their escape from the Yuan-ti, they are confronted by Talis riding the same white dragon. She takes the mask from them and leaves - they are too beat up to consider fighting an airborne dragon.

My players love re-occurring villains and this gave them two - Talis & the dragon.

 

[embee]

I agree with @Matrix Sorcica - skip the caravan. I also agree that jumping in at Skyreach makes sense, but I would back it up and enter the story with the Hunting Lodge. My players made a deal with Talis the White to get onto the castle easily - she's pissed at being passed over for Varam as the White Dragonspeaker (or whatever the title was).

I think I mentioned many of my changes in the above mentioned threads, but in brief:

The dragon lairing below Skyreach did not fight to the death, but escaped - the treasure isn't the dragon's so why would it fight to defend it.

Cut to RoT - when saving Varam, the party recovers the mask, but on making good their escape from the Yuan-ti, they are confronted by Talis riding the same white dragon. She takes the mask from them and leaves - they are too beat up to consider fighting an airborne dragon.

My players love re-occurring villains and this gave them two - Talis & the dragon.

I'll look into this.

As it stands, I'm building some transitional encounters between the end of LMoP/DoIP and RoT and it's getting a bit tough to make sure the party has a full adventuring day. Right now, they're racing to open up places like Axeholm and the Dwarven Excavation to evacuate Phandalin because, well, there's a big, hungry white dragon lairing on Icespire Peak right now and a town full of people is more convenient as for hunting than having to fly out to sea to hunt.

Since it looks like I'm going to be skipping a lot of HotDQ, I can raid it for NPC mini-bosses who the party won't otherwise encounter. I'm trying to keep things somewhat thematic. When the LMoP campaign started, there was a goblinoid B plot and then an "orc attacks" C plot. But now that the Cult of the Dragon is going to start showing up, obviously, I want to shift over to kobolds, drakes, cultists, and draconoids.

I am going to bring back Hamun Kost, who I had digging for chardalyn at Old Owl Well using a team of zombies for manual labor because dead bodies are free labor and don't attract orc attacks. If he had hired workers from Phandalin, that would attract attention, which he really doesn't want. The party was going to try to kill him but then they saw that, yes, they are 4 armed adventurers but Kost had more than a dozen zombies at his command. And the sorcerer of the party still thinks Kost was lying. So I'll reward that thinking.

 

[akr71]

Since it looks like I'm going to be skipping a lot of HotDQ, I can raid it for NPC mini-bosses who the party won't otherwise encounter. I'm trying to keep things somewhat thematic. When the LMoP campaign started, there was a goblinoid B plot and then an "orc attacks" C plot. But now that the Cult of the Dragon is going to start showing up, obviously, I want to shift over to kobolds, drakes, cultists, and draconoids.

I am going to bring back Hamun Kost, who I had digging for chardalyn at Old Owl Well using a team of zombies for manual labor because dead bodies are free labor and don't attract orc attacks. If he had hired workers from Phandalin, that would attract attention, which he really doesn't want. The party was going to try to kill him but then they saw that, yes, they are 4 armed adventurers but Kost had more than a dozen zombies at his command. And the sorcerer of the party still thinks Kost was lying. So I'll reward that thinking.

I don't see why the Dragon Cultists can't have goblins and/or orcs in their midst as a bit of a tie-in. Maybe an intercepted letter drops a hint that there is something bigger motivating the goblins and orcs already encountered.

I totally skipped the Thay chapter in RoT and brought in elements from SKT instead, playing around more with Skyreach and getting the giants on board to fight their ancient foes. My players clearly had no intention of negotiating with or even travelling to Thay. Perhaps Hamun Kost can serve as a link there.

 

[Merifluous]

So this is different from what other were saying, but I would start with the caravan. I have ran the caravan twice (once around that level), and both groups absolutely loved it. I actually combined the caravan with the exploration chapter from Storm King's Thunder, and the two wove together easily and were additive (note I had ran both before). I would also probably cut or vastly simplify Castle Naerytar. Then you can go to the lodge/castle. Other bit of advice would be to see if you can introduce at least some of the NPCs from the council of waterdeep in RoT now so the PCs know them a little better. the council is the best part of RoT besides the final fight I think. I'd also go higher in the level range with stuff from HotDQ than RoT, I feel like the latter is the weaker of the two. You can scale any fight by just adding more enemies partway through if you want it to be tougher.

 

[jayoungr]

So this is different from what other were saying, but I would start with the caravan. I have ran the caravan twice (once around that level), and both groups absolutely loved it.

My group loved it too--it turned out to be the high point of HotDQ for us, in fact. But the encounters would have to be beefed up a bit for a level 7 party (except for the infamous assassins, I guess).

I think the caravan is a love-it-or-hate-it thing depending on the group. My suggestion to the OP is to take a look at that chapter in HotDQ and see if you think it's the kind of thing your players might go for.