D&D General Actual Play: Heroes of the Borderlands Starter Set

[Zaukrie]

I haven't run the content as written, but the maps and components make it a great resource for running games on D&D Beyond.

I run short adventures in a West Marches style campaign and the cave maps are easy to adapt. I used cave B as an old alchemist's lair with a well that slowly created lantern oil. The characters were tasked with investigating the cave and gathering up some of the oil.

Prep was maybe 10 minutes to add the map to my campaign, drop monster tokens, customize stat blocks, and write up my notes. The players cleared out the orcs and kobolds who had taken over the place, not before igniting the oil pool, and rescued a wandering alchemist that the bandits had captured. The automation in Maps and assets on D&D Beyond made everything really easy.

I'm curious what automation you mean? thanks,

 

[mearls]

I'm curious what automation you mean? thanks,

With the D&D Beyond homebrew tool, you can code your monsters to automate all of their rolls. The markup language takes getting used to, but it means that all of the die rolls are in the game log. I can use the encounter manager and the digital dice with NPCs, homebrew monsters, etc.

So for today's session I adapted the first adventure from MCDM's Where Evil Lives. I used custom-made goblins, hobgoblins, and spiders. For those, I create a homebrew version by starting with the baseline monster and modifying it. For instance, I can take the goblin stat block and change its numbers to work with my in-progress 5e monster system.

That means my prep took about 15 minutes - add the encounter map to Maps, turn on fog of war, add homebrew monsters to the map, and voila!

Even better, for playtest I have a complete log of all die rolls so I can see how well the encounter maps to my projection.

The starter set really captures the ease of expansion from the original Keep. I've dropped in a few different published adventures as points of interest along with the box's contents.