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Enhancing "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" (Practical stuff to try at your table!)
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<blockquote data-quote="jayoungr" data-source="post: 6700369" data-attributes="member: 6702445"><p>The thing about Baldur's Gate is that the PCs aren't likely to go back there for the entire rest of Tyranny of Dragons, so whatever happens there has to be self-contained.</p><p></p><p>Whatever you do there, I recommend letting the PCs meet some of the NPCs who will later be on the caravan (if you run the caravan trip). You can start establishing bonds, and it allows them to meet the NPCs in small groups.</p><p></p><p>By the way, can those DDEX adventures be found online anywhere? I'd love to have a look at them. (EDIT: Found them, and I just realized that I'm playing in a campaign based loosely on them--the first adventure looks quite familiar. So I'd better not read them until later, I guess!)</p><p></p><p></p><p>My group had the same situation (they completely blew it when we ran through chapter 2, and Leosin had to escape on his own). Here's how I ran it:</p><p></p><p>1. I borrowed <a href="http://slyflourish.com/on_the_road.html" target="_blank">Mike Shea's suggestion</a> of having an encounter with the cultists in between chapter 3 and chapter 4. He suggested having it happen between the bandit camp and Greenest, but I didn't read his entry until my group was already in Elturel; so I had them encounter a barge that had run aground on a sandbank on the river instead. They found the <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/slyflourish_content/hodq_rezmir_letter.pdf" target="_blank">letter from Rezmir</a> in the leader's pack.</p><p></p><p>2. In Baldur's Gate, they visited Aravax Foxtraveler's place of business posing as cultists and got him to tell them how the treasure was traveling north. This was important because up till then, they didn't know whether it was going by land or by sea. (They had found a map in Frulam Mondath's office with an arrow going west from Greenest and pointing up the coast, so they already knew it was going north, but he could also have confirmed that for them if they didn't know.)</p><p></p><p>3. I said there was only one caravan per tenday going north to Waterdeep; it takes that long to assemble enough wagons to make it defensible. There were several ways they could be sure they were joining the same caravan as the treasure. Ontharr and Leosin guessed how long it would take the cultists to reach Baldur's Gate from the bandit camp traveling overland. The letter from Rezmir confirmed that the treasure was split up and transported in different ways (including by cart). Also, Aravax Foxtraveler was making contact with the cultists as they arrived in Baldur's Gate, so he knew when most of them would be ready to leave. But they could reasonably expect for there to be some stragglers, so if the PCs caught a later caravan, there could still be treasure and cultists in it.</p><p></p><p></p><p>The caravan trip was a real highlight of HotDQ for my group. A great deal of roleplaying happened during that part, and they made NPC friends and enemies that continued well past the journey itself. I think the fact that they were "cooped up" with the same group for an extended length of time was a major factor in this, as it gave them the chance to really get to know those NPCs in depth. So I urge you not to write it off just because it doesn't sound too exciting on paper. I think it plays better than it reads. That said, it includes a <em>lot</em> of incidents, so there's no reason you couldn't move some of them to an earlier part of the story.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="jayoungr, post: 6700369, member: 6702445"] The thing about Baldur's Gate is that the PCs aren't likely to go back there for the entire rest of Tyranny of Dragons, so whatever happens there has to be self-contained. Whatever you do there, I recommend letting the PCs meet some of the NPCs who will later be on the caravan (if you run the caravan trip). You can start establishing bonds, and it allows them to meet the NPCs in small groups. By the way, can those DDEX adventures be found online anywhere? I'd love to have a look at them. (EDIT: Found them, and I just realized that I'm playing in a campaign based loosely on them--the first adventure looks quite familiar. So I'd better not read them until later, I guess!) My group had the same situation (they completely blew it when we ran through chapter 2, and Leosin had to escape on his own). Here's how I ran it: 1. I borrowed [URL="http://slyflourish.com/on_the_road.html"]Mike Shea's suggestion[/URL] of having an encounter with the cultists in between chapter 3 and chapter 4. He suggested having it happen between the bandit camp and Greenest, but I didn't read his entry until my group was already in Elturel; so I had them encounter a barge that had run aground on a sandbank on the river instead. They found the [URL="http://s3.amazonaws.com/slyflourish_content/hodq_rezmir_letter.pdf"]letter from Rezmir[/URL] in the leader's pack. 2. In Baldur's Gate, they visited Aravax Foxtraveler's place of business posing as cultists and got him to tell them how the treasure was traveling north. This was important because up till then, they didn't know whether it was going by land or by sea. (They had found a map in Frulam Mondath's office with an arrow going west from Greenest and pointing up the coast, so they already knew it was going north, but he could also have confirmed that for them if they didn't know.) 3. I said there was only one caravan per tenday going north to Waterdeep; it takes that long to assemble enough wagons to make it defensible. There were several ways they could be sure they were joining the same caravan as the treasure. Ontharr and Leosin guessed how long it would take the cultists to reach Baldur's Gate from the bandit camp traveling overland. The letter from Rezmir confirmed that the treasure was split up and transported in different ways (including by cart). Also, Aravax Foxtraveler was making contact with the cultists as they arrived in Baldur's Gate, so he knew when most of them would be ready to leave. But they could reasonably expect for there to be some stragglers, so if the PCs caught a later caravan, there could still be treasure and cultists in it. The caravan trip was a real highlight of HotDQ for my group. A great deal of roleplaying happened during that part, and they made NPC friends and enemies that continued well past the journey itself. I think the fact that they were "cooped up" with the same group for an extended length of time was a major factor in this, as it gave them the chance to really get to know those NPCs in depth. So I urge you not to write it off just because it doesn't sound too exciting on paper. I think it plays better than it reads. That said, it includes a [i]lot[/i] of incidents, so there's no reason you couldn't move some of them to an earlier part of the story. [/QUOTE]
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