D&D 5E I am going to start DMing OotA in a few days- Any advice?

[Zardnaar]

How enthusiastic are you about running this Adventure?

It's not an Adventure you can pick up and play IMHO.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I played through it and the DM ran the travel sections as written in the book, i.e., way too long. Some three hour sessions were all travel and random encounters.

Don't do that.

Good stuff here: A Guide to Out of the Abyss - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild

 

[Charlaquin]

It’s tempting to answer “pick a module that doesn’t suck and run that instead,” but that wouldn’t be very helpful.

My biggest issue with the adventure is the almost total lack of player agency through the first like half of the adventure. The entire underdark sequence is just a long series of disastrous events the PCs can’t avoid or prevent, punctuated by long stretches of overland travel. It starts with the players in prison, and after they escape they’re railroaded from one underdark city to another, where they get captured, and escape when a demon lord shows up. Rinse and repeat. Honestly, I’m not really sure what can be done about this. It’s a glaring flaw with the design of the adventure, and short of a total rewrite, you just kinda have to live with it. But at least if you know to expect it, you can brace yourself for it.

 

[Zardnaar]

It’s tempting to answer “pick a module that doesn’t suck and run that instead,” but that wouldn’t be very helpful.

My biggest issue with the adventure is the almost total lack of player agency through the first like half of the adventure. The entire underdark sequence is just a long series of disastrous events the PCs can’t avoid or prevent, punctuated by long stretches of overland travel. It starts with the players in prison, and after they escape they’re railroaded from one underdark city to another, where they get captured, and escape when a demon lord shows up. Rinse and repeat. Honestly, I’m not really sure what can be done about this. It’s a glaring flaw with the design of the adventure, and short of a total rewrite, you just kinda have to live with it. But at least if you know to expect it, you can brace yourself for it.

I was trying to be a bit more polite.

Still think Princes of the Apocalypse is one of the better ones with minimal work to make it better.

 

[loverdrive]

Get yourself a copy of Veins of the Earth. Underdark is basically poor man's VotE.

As for module itself... It sucks and needs work. But that's a WotC hardcover adventure, what else could you expect?

 

[robus]

It starts with the players in prison, and after they escape they’re railroaded from one underdark city to another, where they get captured, and escape when a demon lord shows up.

Adding to that, unless you’re a master story teller all the insanity effects of the Demon Lords start to feel samey. Oh another city where some of the leadership is mad and others are trying to fight against it? By the fourth one my players were rolling their eyes. Fancy locations (which aren’t even all that fancy) won’t cover up a very repetitive story.

 

[clearstream]

I am going to start DMing Out of the Abyss soon, does anyone have any advice?

OOTA is overloaded with interesting NPCs and it is worth establishing connections between some of them and the players. The dire times depicted should inevitably result in emotional partings and losses.

In my campaign, which ran about 70 sessions and topped out at level 15, I took advantage of the following opportunities -

1. First there is a lot of underdark travel so I used the DMG guidelines for longer rests. In the end, settling on a 3 day long rest, 1 day short, and 1 hour breather (just to spend HD). That better aligned ability refresh with the pace of the campaign.
2. The besieged town of Blingdenstone became my PC's base of operations and locus of empathy. Many a brave deep gnome befriended the party and eventually fell at their side.
3. Rather than the contrived return to surface and events in Gauntlgrym, I found a way to make the lawful evil king of Gracklstugh a key ally. Serving much of the same purpose, but with more immediately relevant motivations. That amused my players because of course - these dwarves really are callous even if they happen to be helping the party at present.
4. Like many published adventures, OOTA narrates world-changing events and fails to follow up the ripples out from it. I tried to think how the various factions would be impacted and where they would see their interests. And likewise on the side of demons, I tracked where I thought the major demons were on the map and the radius of their corruption of the material realm. Some - like demogorgon - have a clear path to follow. Others - like Orcus - are left more to the DM.
5. As an example of the above, I mapped the kuo-toa diaspora (some headed north, others south, along the Darklake) and at times the party crossed paths with them. I think it is really valuable to your narrative to think of how the many underdark communities - despite being traditionally typecast as evil - will be impacted, and to create opportunities for your players to demonstrate the meaning of 'good'.
6. I had the drow split between a powerful majority that aimed to simply depart Faerun to follow Lloth into the Abyss, and a minority who believed Lloth would expend the drow recklessly for her own ends and felt the wiser course was to return the demons to the Abyss. That of course plays well into a key ally (the drow mage) and some interesting foes (the priestess in the opening scenes, and her family).
7. I made the barrier to the Library prevent non-good creatures entering, and allowed my characters to slide to non-good - for example if they simply murdered kuo-toa instead of recognising them as the victims they are. I made the OOTA timeline overlap the Tiamat timeline so that I could explain the absence of powerful NPCs as occupied with other world-threatening events.
8. In the late game, I involved characters like Mordenkainen - focusing of course on 'the balance' and not necessarily on saving Faerun from the demons. I did spice up demogorgon a bit, statwise. I gave him some movement and AoE abilities that he seemed lacking.
9. If you have Mordenkainen's then there is a really great opportunity to think about how this impacts the Blood War. The demons risk losing the Abyss, but gaining the Prime Material plane. The devils gain a chance to invade the Abyss, but risk the Material plane giving the demons far better resources. Clearly, the demons want a quick victory in the Material, while the devils want to protract any conclusion as much as possible.

I could go on, but hopefully this is enough for you to start unpacking the opportunities. OOTA is a rich, complex setting. I think the adventure path as written is really poor - it fails to grasp so many narrative opportunities! It also has this rubbishy Alice in Wonderland conceit: I strongly advise discarding that and playing events straight. They are far more powerful that way.

Once you let the characters wander into the Underdark, and meet real peoples there - heavily impacted by the most dire and powerful beings who physically corrupt the space around them - there is plenty of material to have fun with! Locations such as Blingdenstone and Gracklstugh are well enough detailed to run a hundred adventures, let alone one. Encroaching insanity gives you a lot of clear, really fun, motivations for NPCs. Altogether, OOTA is a diamond in the rough and my biggest criticism would simply be that, that places the burden on a DM to make the most of the material. Rather than treating it as a linear adventure, it is best treated as a campaign sourcebook where events are going to be propelled by the demonic incursion.

 

[clearstream]

It’s tempting to answer “pick a module that doesn’t suck and run that instead,” but that wouldn’t be very helpful.

My biggest issue with the adventure is the almost total lack of player agency through the first like half of the adventure. The entire underdark sequence is just a long series of disastrous events the PCs can’t avoid or prevent, punctuated by long stretches of overland travel. It starts with the players in prison, and after they escape they’re railroaded from one underdark city to another, where they get captured, and escape when a demon lord shows up. Rinse and repeat. Honestly, I’m not really sure what can be done about this. It’s a glaring flaw with the design of the adventure, and short of a total rewrite, you just kinda have to live with it. But at least if you know to expect it, you can brace yourself for it.

Rather than rewrite, or live with, you just let players step off the railroad and encounter the material in whatever order flows from there. You focus on the means and motives of the many groups depicted, put in motion by the Underdark-shattering actions of Lloth.

 

[Charlaquin]

Rather than rewrite, or live with, you just let players step off the railroad and encounter the material in whatever order flows from there. You focus on the means and motives of the many groups depicted, put in motion by the Underdark-shattering actions of Lloth.

Changing the order does nothing to fix the problem of every town being “ some of them are going mad because of the demon lord, but some of them aren’t yet. They capture you and prepare to sacrifice you to the demon lord. The demon lord appears and destroys everything, but you manage to escape.

 

[TheSword]

I am going to start DMing Out of the Abyss soon, does anyone have any advice?

Read the books Homeland and Sojourn (particularly the latter, though it only makes sense in the context of the first) by RA Salvatore.

They aren’t long books but they do a great job of showing what day to day life may have been like in the underdark. Those two books probably informed me of the Underdark as a setting and not just a big dungeon.

incidentally I’m not a massive Salvatore fan, I just think those particular books are excellent. The rest of the Drizzt books can take a long walk off a short pier.

If you have more time, the War of the Spider Queen books build on what was first expounded in the first books I recommended.