I ran “The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh” recently and noticed more than a few editing and design issues, most of which were cleared up by reading the original module. Not only does the reprint make a few editing mistakes but, for whatever reason, it also leaves out useful or vital information on occasion. For example:
1. I had a hard time understanding the house’s position in relation to the sea and the height of the cliffs on which it stood. The original module includes a sentence that is apparently missing from the reprint: “The Haunted House stands on the cliff top 70 feet above sea level and about 80 feet from the cliff edge.” This is useful information that IMO should have been included in the reprint.
2. Ned Shakeshaft and his merchant benefactor’s actions make no sense, as I detailed in
this thread. It would make much more sense for Ned to warn the smugglers that the party is coming and set up an ambush. As it turns out, however, the original module includes a paragraph explaining why this is not possible:
“Unfortunately for the merchant, he does not know how to contact the smugglers at short notice -- Sanbalet (the smugglers' leader) always initiates their infrequent meetings and never arranges for them to take place in the House. Thus the merchant knows the smugglers' base is somewhere in the House but has never been able to find it. Planting [Ned] in one of the upstairs rooms was the best plan he could conceive at short notice.”
Even so, I find the merchant’s plan so ridiculous that I decided to remove Ned from the adventure (you can find my reasoning at the other thread).
3. This isn't the fault of the adventure, but I wasn’t sure how to run the two encounters with spider swarms, so
I asked ENWorld posters for some help. Out of curiosity, I checked the original module and discovered that it doesn't even include swarms: It makes use of giant rats and giant spiders instead, which seem like viable alternatives for anyone who has similar problems with running spider swarm encounters. (Note: I ended up using the swarms and was happy with how the encounters turned out.)
4. The alchemist’s “philosopher’s stone” is pretty lame. No one in their right mind would attune to it without identifying it first (how would anyone even know that attuning to it was an option in the first place?). Not surprisingly, the original module handles this situation much better than the reprint: The cursed stone automatically attunes to whoever touches it first.
Also, I took this curse one step further in my own game. Not only could the attuned character not get rid of the stone, they couldn’t even let go of it. They could only swap it between their hands or pass it off onto someone else.
5.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh lists the Sea Ghost as having a crew of 7 bandits, but mentions 9 in the adventure text. According to the original module, there should be 8. This means that the
Ghosts version of the Sea Ghost has 1 more bandit than it should. The mistake occurs in Area 11, which
Ghosts of Saltmarsh incorrectly lists as having 4 bandits when there should only be 3 (according to the original module).
That's it. I hope this helps anyone running the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in the future. Overall, I think it’s a very good adventure, but I do wish WotC had taken a little more care in porting it over to 5E.
