I want to thank everyone for all the help, I really appreciate all the ideas and suggestions! This all has given me some new insight on how to handle things, and I'm happy to hear some people have had positive experiences with low player campaigns. This is all also especially helpful since the player really wants to be a Tiefling rogue, which might help out a lot actually as they'd have dark vision. Being a newer player, they're unsure which archetype they'd want to go into out of the three, I get the sense that no matter which one they decide on wouldn't affect much, but recommendations are welcome! I was also wondering, does anyone know what level they should be at by the start of each chapter if they are starting around level 4-5? Perhaps it would just be something I'd get a feel for down the line, but whether I go the route of giving them experience points to level up their character through encounters, or setting milestones that automatically level them up by the start of each chapter (which might be better given the circumstances of a more story focused campaign), many have said in reviews that Out of the Abyss isn't the clearest on what levels the players should be at by the start of each chapter, and that its more up to the DM to setup random encounters to level up the players rather than things setup in the adventure. Besides this, I really think the NPC ideas could be helpful too. While it would be fun to play a DMPC, I feel like I would have a very hard time trying to separate my DM knowledge from my player knowledge, as well as the fact I am not quite ready to handle managing all of the stats that would come with a player as well as the monsters, and regular NPCs. So perhaps yes, I could go have other NPCs that follow the player which are temporary and only go up to a certain point. For instance, I could have a few prisoners help the player evade the drow a little ways then leave, and after a bit of solo trekking the player could encounter a wandering Duergar whose eager to help them out (which I could explain some way from the fact that both tieflings and duergar have some ties with Asmodeous, lord of the nine hells). I think this would be easier to handle as I'd be going off the NPC's assumed knowledge rather than my own (and I'd feel less bogged down with keeping track of changing stats if I could use pregenerated ones ) . I'd need some advice on what CR I should make the companion NPCs in relation to the character, but that seems like it could be found out pretty fast through a bit of trial and error. That being said, I do not want to base the mechanics and survivability of the game entirely off of putting NPCs in place. Though I'd provide a bit of them at certain points, as suggested I'd want to either start the player off at a higher level, or adjust the encounters so the player could traverse around by themselves if they really wanted to at a few places in the campaign.
