D&D 5E Forge of Fury in HotDQ

[Gradine]

So, I've been looking for ways to spice up Chapter 4 of HotDQ and I've come up with a number of ways to tweak or add to it (I'm also running the campaign in Eberron, so I've had to change quite a bit! You can find my session recaps here). One of the ideas I had was to add the Forge of Fury from Tales of the Yawning Portal. My idea for doing so works out as follows:

The road traveled in my version of Chapter 4 goes through the Eldeen Reaches and over the Byeshk Mountains, into the Shadow Marches. I was going to situate the ruins on the Shadow Marches side of the mountains, and have the old ruins be of Hobgoblin construction. The hobgoblins of the Stranded encounter are Dhakaani revivalists hoping to recover the forge for their people, and have been attacking caravans to gather the supplies necessary to force out the Orcs (the only creatures they're aware of are still in there). The hobgoblins will have information that the Orcs have supplying byeshk weapons and mined khyber dragonshards to lizardfolk who arrive every so often (the party will have encountered a few cultists by this point with byeshk weapons, and know their goal is to snap up dragonshards, so this should clue them in and give them a stronger reason to explore the Forge).

I was saddened that I wasn't able to find an Enhancing TftYP thread; not sure if it ever got started or if it got eaten in one of the recent board troubles, but the Enhancing... series of threads have always been an excellent resource. Are there any resources out there for enhancing dungeons from that book or from the Forge of Fury in specific? My party is 6 PCs who will be at level 5 by that point (my beefed up Chapter 4 will involve two milestone level ups, to account for the fact that Chapter 7 really isn't worth a level up), but half of them are new players and none of them are really optimizers at all, so I don't know how much work, if any, I'll have to do to adjust the balance of the encounters. I suppose Chapter 3 will give me a better idea of their capabilities in a straight dungeon crawl.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I dont think you'll need to tweak the dungeon a lot to make it a great fit for lvl 5 players, it wont be a lethal dungeon, but it still wont be a walk in the park as there is dangerous foes in Forge of Fury, even for a higher level group.
(Spoilers)
I also took elements from TftYP to enhance my HotD game. Instead of having a raid at the start, I run them through the Sunless Citadel (great fit with its backstory with the Dragon Cult); one item they found while exploring is the red dragon mask, but they dont know its powers yet. When they exit the dungeon, they get jumped by the Cyanwrath and the cult, mask get stolen with all their stuff. The rest goes as written in the campaign until Castle Nerytar. Since they have a map for Sunless Citadel foreshadowing the Forge of Fury, I make it so that the portal the cult uses to send its stolen loot to the flying castle is at the bottom of the forge on Nightscale's Island. Such a set-up allows the players to face more dragons (which I find oddly lacking in HotDQ) while foreshadowing the dragon masks for RoT

 

[Gradine]

I dont think you'll need to tweak the dungeon a lot to make it a great fit for lvl 5 players, it wont be a lethal dungeon, but it still wont be a walk in the park as there is dangerous foes in Forge of Fury, even for a higher level group.
(Spoilers)
I also took elements from TftYP to enhance my HotD game. Instead of having a raid at the start, I run them through the Sunless Citadel (great fit with its backstory with the Dragon Cult); one item they found while exploring is the red dragon mask, but they dont know its powers yet. When they exit the dungeon, they get jumped by the Cyanwrath and the cult, mask get stolen with all their stuff. The rest goes as written in the campaign until Castle Nerytar. Since they have a map for Sunless Citadel foreshadowing the Forge of Fury, I make it so that the portal the cult uses to send its stolen loot to the flying castle is at the bottom of the forge on Nightscale's Island. Such a set-up allows the players to face more dragons (which I find oddly lacking in HotDQ) while foreshadowing the dragon masks for RoT

This sounds pretty awesome! I've already got them started in Greenest (well, Windshire). I've already got some plans for Castle Naerytar, but a big part of the reason I was drawn to Forge of Fury was the opportunity to fight a dragon earlier (I was even thinking of tossing in a few wyrmlings earlier as a warmup). I was definitely considering adding in some foreshadowing of the dragon masks (if not the masks themselves) here as well; the corrupting power of the masks is something I'm playing up pretty significantly (especially given the very different role dragons tend to play in Eberron).