D&D 5E Trouble in Red Larch - embellishments?

[pukunui]

Hi folks,

I'm about to start a new episodic campaign, and I'm thinking that I'll kick things off with the "Trouble in Red Larch" section of Princes of the Apocalypse. I'm going to use a homebrew setting, so I'll strip out all the FR-related details, and I won't use any of the leads to the elemental cults. I'm mostly just going to use the town, some of the NPCs, and the little mini-adventures and scenarios for 1st and 2nd level characters through the Tomb of Moving Stones adventure. From there, I'm going to have the PCs go off on other adventures around the homebrew world.

What I'm wondering, though, is whether anyone has done anything to embellish any of the Trouble in Red Larch encounters - or even the town of Red Larch itself. If you have, please share them here!

Thanks,
Jonathan

 

[pukunui]

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Here's a short <post> where I dragged up some other Red Larch-related information from other FR sources. That said, it would all work well enough outside the Realms.

 

[77IM]

Attached (if it works right) is a handout I gave my players at the beginning of the adventure. Noteworthy is how I tried to spruce up the NPCs in Red Larch, who I thought were a bit bland at best, and downright boring at worst. I'm of the opinion that a good town design has like 4-5 interesting NPCs rather than the dozen or so boring NPCs presented in Red Larch.

For example, the awesomely-named Mangobarl Lorren, the town baker, is supposed to help Zhentarim characters because "he has distant relatives in the Zhentarim." In my world, no freakin' way is that guy just a "relative!" He is a retired assassin, for sure. The spa owner is a wearbear (although the PCs have not figured that out yet) and Vallivoe is a wizard with an orange cat familiar and is secretly a Harper.

This was only partially successful; even the more interesting NPCs were not enough reason for the PCs to return to Red Larch, when they can easily obtain supplies in most other towns. If you want people to return to Red Larch frequently, make it home to the region's only magic shop and only mid-level cleric, as well as a good place to recruit hirelings. Players won't want to go all the way to Waterdeep or Yartar for that stuff.

To me, Red Larch is really one of the most disappointing parts of the adventure. A lot of words are spent describing a perfectly mundane and boring place. That may be done on purpose to encourage PCs to get out of town and get into the dungeon, but it could have been done with a lot fewer words.



As for complications in with Larrahk and the earth cultists, there were two, but both emerged during play:

1. Larrahk knocked out the party in a TPK. I had them regain consciousness bound and naked in the dark. At low levels, lacking weapons and armor and spellcasting foci is actually a pretty serious problem and can turn trash mobs into challenging encounters. Eventually they found their gear and went back on the offensive.

2. When they encountered Larrahk for the second time, two town elders were present: Dornan, their leader, and another guy who's name I forget but who was having misgivings about the whole thing. As the PCs fought Larrahk, the two town elders fought each other! Afterwards, Dornan agreed to testify against the OTHER cultists in return for amnesty. His trial is still ongoing and it remains to be seen whether the PCs will honor that bargain.

 

[pukunui]

Cool. Thanks guys!

EDIT: What about the initial encounters around Red Larch? Did anyone do anything to spice them up at all or did you just run them as-is? I'm talking about the ones like "Bears & Bows", "Haunted Tomb", "Necromancer's Cave", and so on.

 

[77IM]

My group actually did "Trouble" before "Necromancer's Cave" which may be why the earth priest got such an easy TPK. The only changes I made were to really play up the Necromancer as a lunatic, taunting the PCs and babbling excitedly about "the eye!" Also they knocked him out and dragged him back to town for trial, where he was hanged the next morning after confessing to necromancy -- I didn't like the bit about how he's supposed to evaporate into a wisp of shadow when he dies (it doesn't make any sense for such a minor foe to have a special death sequence).

I didn't do any of the other low-level encounters ("Bears & Bows" etc.) as they struck me as kind of dull. The players were more interested in following the hooks they had chosen, tracking down Dara Algwynnen, doing favors for Vanifer, and getting revenge on pirates. Mangobarl Lorren hooked them up with this sweet job running an Inn for a few days...

 

[pukunui]

OK. I'm thinking of this sequence:

1) Bears and Bows
2) Haunted Tomb / Last Laugh
3) Necromancer's Cave
4) Bloody Treasure
5) Tomb of Moving Stones

I'm not going to be running the main elemental evil adventure, though I may use a few bits and pieces here and there - like some of the more interesting side treks. I'm mostly going to be running short, unconnected adventures from old Dungeon magazines and the like. The thing is, I had originally planned on doing a sort of tutorial to kick things off with, but one of my players can't make it to the first session, so after a bit of humming and hawing, I came up with the idea of running the "Trouble in Red Larch" mini-adventures for the first session.

The PCs' exploits will catch the attention of the innkeeper, Kaylessa, who will become their long-term mentor and patron. I'm making it so she's actually a silver dragon in disguise and the Swinging Sword is actually a portal network that she has sworn to guard, so she can't go out and do much herself. Every once in a while, though, she has to go check on her hoard, so she seeks out people she can trust to watch the portals/inn for her while she's gone ... this might come up at some point during the campaign.

Anyway, once they get Kaylessa's attention, she'll help them train up to 3rd level and then send them through a little test (the tutorial dungeon) before revealing the truth about the inn. It's basically the Narnia wardrobe on steroids. Most portals will just lead to other parts of the world, but there may be a few that lead to other planes (like maybe there's a portal to the elemental plane of water at the bottom of the inn's well). They'll be able to use the portal network to go on all sorts of adventures.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) I'm not going to be running the main elemental evil adventure, though I may use a few bits and pieces here and there - like some of the more interesting side treks. (snip)

I've been wanting to do a series of blog posts providing extra information about some of the FR locations in PotA to allow DMs to expand it using existing Realmslore. Thanks to Real Life intruding, I've only done three posts but I think that if I ran a campaign in that area, I would actually go with the various hooks I have found in 2E's Volo's Guide to the North and ideas like yours of mixing a portal network with Dungeon adventures.

There's actually a lot of canon material for this region.

 

[Nebulous]

Cool. Thanks guys!

EDIT: What about the initial encounters around Red Larch? Did anyone do anything to spice them up at all or did you just run them as-is? I'm talking about the ones like "Bears & Bows", "Haunted Tomb", "Necromancer's Cave", and so on.

I used both the Tombs and the Necromancer Cave. The necromancer had kidnapped two little girls from town, one of whom was already zombified, and the other was in a cage. Larakh ended up retreating to the necromancers cave after a near TPK in in the moving stones, but in his weakened state the necromancer killed him.

 

[pukunui]

I've been wanting to do a series of blog posts providing extra information about some of the FR locations in PotA to allow DMs to expand it using existing Realmslore.

Yeah, I had a look at the old Volo's guide after reading your post. There's some cool stuff in there. I've ripped Red Larch out of the Realms and plopped it into my nebulous homebrew world. I've renamed it "Larchwood" as well. I'll have some of the side treks and maybe even some of the surface cult areas for the PCs to explore. I particularly like the "Burning Man" joke, so I'll definitely use the Sacred Moon Hall episode. I'll probably just have the various surface cultists be on their own though (like Larrakh and Elizar). I won't use any of the temples or whatever. Maybe some of the nodes, if the PCs want something a bit more fantastical at higher levels, but I'm not actually going to run PotA. It's mostly just going to be random stuff culled from Dungeon and older adventure modules.

I used both the Tombs and the Necromancer Cave. The necromancer had kidnapped two little girls from town, one of whom was already zombified, and the other was in a cage. Larakh ended up retreating to the necromancers cave after a near TPK in in the moving stones, but in his weakened state the necromancer killed him.

That's a neat idea. I think I can do something with that. Perhaps some of the Tarnlar children got too curious ...