D&D 5E AL Season 5 without AL

[Burnside]

PARNAST UNDER SEIGE, the finale of the Season 5 tier one arc, is set for this Sunday. It's a long one, so I suspect may take us two sessions.

 

[Ken Bowen1]

I have been running some of these modules as a campaign myself. I have a Storm King's Thunder campaign going, and I started this second game within the same world. I'm doing Bad Business tonight, and your write-up was helpful. Did you ever do Parnast Under Siege? If so I would like to see your experience, as it seems quite complicated.

 

[pogre]

I'm running a bunch of season 5 AL at a convention next weekend. They seem like they will be quite fun from reading and preparing to run the adventures.

My local (non-FLGS) group just finished the Tier 1 mods in Season 5; hopefully your group will have a better experience than ours -- we finished the Tier 1 mods with two players choosing to stop playing rather than move on...

I'm surprised folks did not enjoy these adventures. Every experience is different of course. I have not run much AL, but the organizers suggested these adventures in part because they loved the fifth season so much.

I've been preparing terrain and miniatures. Here is a picture of the BadFruul I modified and painted for Parnast Under Siege.

View attachment 98497

 

[Burnside]

I have been running some of these modules as a campaign myself. I have a Storm King's Thunder campaign going, and I started this second game within the same world. I'm doing Bad Business tonight, and your write-up was helpful. Did you ever do Parnast Under Siege? If so I would like to see your experience, as it seems quite complicated.

We actually did end up running Parnast Under Siege, and I'm sorry I never did a write up here. It was unfortunately a little disjointed because obviously it is intended as the climax of this fairly cohesive campaign arc, but my group went into it pretty cold due to our schedule issues.

Because of that I don't really feel comfortable rating it in the way I did the others. We ran it in two sessions. The first session was the preparation section and was quite complicated. It's been a few months so I don't remember everything, but this section is very player-driven and can go in a TON of different directions. Moreso than any other adventure in the Parnast series, it demands heavy prep on the part of the DM and a mastery of considerable storyline material- otherwise the session would get bogged down with a lot of page flipping. One thing I do remember being wonky was that the module seems to assume that the players would think Chandra Stol fleeing to her cabin in the woods was a bad idea; my players felt it was a totally reasonable idea and didn't try to stop her - and indeed there are no negative consequences to just letting her leave.

The second session was entirely the big battle. I ran this on max difficulty and it pushed 4 5th-level PCs to the absolute limit. It was basically 3 or 4 hours of fighting and at times a bit of a slog but they liked it because they had to go all out and use every last resource and barely eked out a win. The key moment was Arcane Trickster Millie pulling the coronet of intellect or whatever it was off Bad Fruul's head with her Mage Hand and a Nat 20 sleight of hand check, resulting in a rather grotesque Flowers for Algernon moment. The whole business of the evil drow priestess' spirit felt like it came out of nowhere and made little impression on my players - I'm guessing it might have meant more if they had played earlier AL seasons?

All in all this series of adventures was a lot of fun and I would recommend them. But after playing through the tier one arc my group was ready for something different, and we have moved on to Curse of Strahd rather than running the tier 2 stuff.