D&D 5E The 5e Big Book Mega Campaign!

[Charles Rampant]

Hey all,

So in the thread about 'the problem with 5e adventures', [MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION] wrote the following interesting remarks:

I'm wondering now that at this point whether you could run four of the campaign concurrently? Can you intersplice Lost Mines, Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Storm King's Thunder so that you can do certain chapters of one before following a thread to an early chapter in another? They all take place in and around the Sword Coast (and even for the parts further away like Greenest in Tyranny you could substitute a closer town, say in the Silver Marches or something.) If you don't run them as "Plot train is running, jump on and never jump off or everyone dies!"... and instead let PCs hit several of the introductory chapters as they go based upon where their interests take them... you pretty much can run several different stories back and forth. Which is great if you choose not to award Milestone XP, but rather actual earned XP-- you can hit the opening chapters of two or more of those books and gain the actual monster XP necessary to level up, rather than just get it awarded to you.

Yeah, there's still DM work involved-- mainly timing of events, relocation of events so plot hooks can get grabbed and followed-- but at least you no longer have a single plot, you have several. And you can take out those chapters from the books you don't like and instead advance each AP's story by adding in hooks off of the chapters you use from the other books.
Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...n-of-published-adventures/page5#ixzz4L4Xp64zU

I'd like to talk about this some more! The post was in response to the thought that there was no longer the 'string lots of random modules together to form a campaign' option for DMs, unlike AD&D. I think that there is a lot of merit to this idea. It has been long noted that the 5e adventures are kind of modular. (I can strip out Vallaki, say, and insert it into my campaign world with relatively little effort; you'd just want to change references to Strahd and Ireena to more appropriate figures, and then you'd have a 'nice' little town with crazy politics for the players to interact with.) Some other things are even easier to do. For example, PotA dungeons are extremely steal-able, with only a tiny handful of NPCs and corridors needing to be changed.

Let's suggest something, in fact something that I'm contemplating for my next campaign. I've done my research, and collated just about everything written about Waterdeep into a single wiki for my own use. I could take OotA (Underdark chat), PotA (elemental dungeons), STK (giants!) and even some small parts of ToD (dragon and dungeon lairs). The party does some Waterdeep stuff, you know, and then they get asked to investigate some strange events out in the Dessarin Valley, which isn't so far off. They go out, and find some weird wickerman stuff going down, a fire cult in the hills. They deal with that, including a dungeon complex underneath. At the bottom, they find a journal, which mentions the 'hated Water cult, hiding in the Dock Ward of Waterdeep', with a picture of the guy who gave them the quest in the first place. Great! Then, on their way home, they pass Goldenfields - just in time to meet some Giants...

Perhaps I'm not saying anything very novel here. So let's have a question: have you done this? Do you think that the 5e adventure modules, plus SCAG, make for a compelling basis of a mega-campaign?

 

[Charles Rampant]

A side note, which I didn't want to shove into the (already too long) comment above: you could very easily slow down advancement for this. If the party is about 7-9th level, they can handle most content in the adventures from what I've seen so far, especially if they've acquired a few powerful magical items from each. You can probably get a lot of mileage out of just sticking at those levels for a long time, resolving the various chapters of each book, rather than power-levelling past them. Player buy-in would be the hard part, as players like to advance; you could perhaps just give out the exp as normal, but increase the exp required to level, so that they do advance but just very slowly.

 

[robus]

I'm not doing exactly that. I'm planning on my group to tackle OotA as a high-level (15-20) adventure post RoT. But it should be pretty epic as they clean out the Underdark of rampaging demon lords.

 

[Daern]

Yes of course. Plus, there's tons of DMsGuild short modules to choose from, including Adventurers League modules which are somewhat official if wildly varying in quality.

I've been running Curse of Strahd. If they survive, the group will wander out of the Balinok mountains into the Dessarin Valley where they will encounter all kinds of giant drama and possibly some cult dungeons.
I also would like to run the endgame of Out of the Abyss if my campaign ever gets to that level.

 

[l0lzero]

Not familiar with those adventures (not huge on the published adventures myself, just like the conceptually), but I don't see why you couldn't if you spent some effort looking at the timelines, and overlap of regions.

If you go through the books, taking note of what takes place where, you could probably pretty easily construct a timeline letting the events unfold simultaneously (or sequentially, however you want to run it). Sequentially would let you better control what happens, but simultaneously would make for a more vivid and alive world where characters would have numerous choices to make as to what they want to do all the time. It seems to me like that'd be a super fun campaign to play in, and you could easily get a party to 20 with it just by having them do most of the content. Maybe the lost mines of phandelver have a hidden entrance to the underdark where some drow come in and capture the party, then they escape and make their way back to the surface after a bit of craziness, start having to deal with giants, before returning to the udnerdark to stop demogorgon. Dunno anything about ToD, so, I can't really add anything relevant to that.

If you have a plan for the order, it would be rather easy to up the encounters in the other adventures by just looking at the monster CR calculator and then adjusting the monsters numbers accordingly so the content is viable at any level the party encounters it at, and it's not like you even have to up them all that much, you could just refluff a similar creature at a higher CR, and call it whatever it was supposed to be.

It'd be funny seeing a party of 13th level characters captured by the drow, bust out, start casting their magic, and all of a sudden escaping slavery is trivial, but now the drow are also right about that level too, so suddenly the party thinks, "Oh, I'm just going to fly off..." and Ilvara is like, "Dispel magic, bruh" and they just kind of plummet.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Man, you could probably do it, but who has the time?

It's taken me the better part of a six months, on a bi-weekly basis, to even get through about half of Curse of Strahd.

Mega-campaigns sound neat and fun, but I do not have infinite time to play D&D, and the time I do get is something I want to get somewhere with, narratively. Spending that time spread out between 3-4 plotlines means either I'll be 40 before any of them finish or I'll mangle them together to be shorter or (as is often the case with D&D campaigns) they will peter out with a whimper as the inevitable chaos of real-life shuffles up the players so much that continuing on the same campaign/storyline isn't really very meaningful.

Personally, I'd go the other direction. If there was a "minicampaign" version of these adventures with a tighter level range and maybe about a month's worth of play experience in them (maybe more tightly focused), that'd be the kind of thing I'd be interested in. And the kind of thing I might be tempted to squoosh together into something a bit more substantial.

Like, I'm enjoying the crap out of Curse of Strahd, but if you wanted to design for a shorter, tighter adventure, make it maybe level 7-8 and focus more tightly on the search for What Your Tarokka Cards Mean (ie, how to get all the items!) and then the megadungeon of Castle Ravenloft.

That's probably harder to sell in book stores, where big, lush, hardcover adventures seem more "worthwhile" as a product, but it's really better-suited to my needs than even a 10 level spread campaign is at this point.

 

[OB1]

I'm not doing exactly that. I'm planning on my group to tackle OotA as a high-level (15-20) adventure post RoT. But it should be pretty epic as they clean out the Underdark of rampaging demon lords.

Based on my post RoT experience in PotA, I'm betting your going to have a blast! Note though that our group did that with only 2 of the 4 RoT PCs, and found that it's been oddly well balanced for it.

My only advice would be to consider only leveling them up twice during the campaign. Or, at the mid point, move over to SKT, then back into OotA for a demon lord endgame at level 20. Either way, if it's a full 4-6 PC party, they may find most challenges trivial without a bit of work, but at that level a DM can afford to just throw things at the PCs and if it's too tough, they'll have ways to escape, regroup and try again.

 

[Sunseeker]

I think I lean in @I'm A Banana's direction. I'd rather see some more compacted versions of these campaigns than some even larger inter-linked campaign. For all the people I hear tales of playing with the same group since the Silver Age of comics, playing the same campaign in the same setting with more or less the same characters, the more I realize I'm not interested in that.

I enjoy a good campaign, I like a little bit longer session that most but I really think that anything that has solidly run for a year is plenty of time to experience a good campaign, grow some characters, have good times, and then move on.

I don't think WotC is ever going to start publishing short, 15-50 page "adventure books" but I wouldn't be against seeing a "big book of quests" that taken as a whole, presents a very generic sort of campaign, but could easily be interspersed into other games, or presented as simple one-shots for shorter games.

 

[robus]

Yep - I'm feeling the appeal of that too [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION]. After this mega-campaign I want to do a couple of shorter things. CoS reset in Innistrad (for more thematic reasons) and then the AngryGM's megadungeon project set in Zendikar (if it's ready by then). After that... who knows. Hopefully WotC will have branched out beyond FR. If they haven't I think I'll continue to reset things in the M:tG worlds for thematic variety. The upcoming Kaladesh setting looks fun.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Like, I'm enjoying the crap out of Curse of Strahd, but if you wanted to design for a shorter, tighter adventure, make it maybe level 7-8 and focus more tightly on the search for What Your Tarokka Cards Mean (ie, how to get all the items!) and then the megadungeon of Castle Ravenloft.

I believe they did publish that. They call it I6