Behind the Screen: The Sunless Citadel

When I cobbled together the game world for my Sword Coast Ramblers adventure, I had a simple idea. Just throw all the official content from published 5e adventures on the map, and let the players choose where to go. The story evolves based on their interest, and I emphasize or back-burner plot points to suit the party. As of now, they've completed most of the adventure locations outlined in Lost Mine of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak, with a couple side treks including the haunted house from Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and the mansion from Candlekeep Mysteries. There's plenty of hints and glimpses and cameos of characters from other books, thanks to a scrying orb in the party's possession. Ravens call out incessantly as they navigate the Neverwinter Woods, and Morgantha the night hag from Curse of Strahd has a vendetta against our Cleric of Selune.

Of course, with a completionist party there runs a risk of outleveling the region. They don't want to leave any stone unturned, but the content itself could quickly become trivial. They're eager to break out into the greater north, and I have breadcrumbs at the ready from Rise of Tiamat and Storm King's Thunder. First though, all our current plot threads converge on the Sunless Citadel.

Lore wise, the Citadel is a fortress and shrine to the dragon Ashardalon that sunk underground during a cataclysm decades ago, including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions from mount Hotenaw. The dungeon involves warring factions of Kobolds and Goblins, a baby white dragon, the trail of a missing adventuring party, and hordes of blights spawning from a Gulthias Tree. There's items described in the adventure that offer hooks toward other locations, as well as a couple conveniently placed entrances to the Underdark. If this were World of Warcraft, we'd be looking at a zone's main dungeon that culminates the story so far.

Tying Things Together

I had several plot hooks in play that led here.

1. Cryovain, the titular Dragon of Icespire peak, had been placated with treasure earlier. On another meeting, the party countered her demand with the offer of a favor instead. So, she claimed something had been taken from her by the Drow (led by The Spider, a villain found in Wave Echo Cave), and brought underground where she can't reach it. She told the party they'd know it when they see it.

2. The blights, a Gulthias tree clipping, and Anchorites of Talos were all encountered throughout the region in the Woodland Manse and Thundertree ruins. The Emerald Enclave has been driven away, and the trail of the resident druid in Thundertree has gone cold with rumors that they'd gone mad.

3. Our Drow player character had a deep want to find a way to the Underdark and save a backstory character. I tied The Spider into the underground slave trade outlined in Out of the Abyss, and hinted that he traded something to the residents of the Citadel in exchange for passage. That player's left the table for the time being, but those same Underdark tunnels can be utilized as a way to nearby Gauntlgrym.

4. Our Kobold character was tasked at the outset to aid in the effort to drive off goblins and claim the citadel for his tribe, meaning the party won't want to fight everything they meet in there. Venomfang, the green dragon in the Thundertree Ruins, took great delight in watching the players and the cultists fight each other, and welcomed the same Kobold in his tower to parlay. After learning about Cryovain, he demanded that whatever it is she wants, the party brings it to him first.

You can imagine the reaction at the table when the party finally gets to Meepo's chamber in the dungeon, see the empty cage, and learn that he'd been raising Calcryx, a baby white dragon. Their original goal of eventually slaughtering Cryovain is suddenly very complicated. At this level they could easily take any of the dragons in play, but the idea of reuniting Cryovain and Calcryx holds the promise of having them leave peacefully, and opens them up as interesting characters. Venomfang as a threat, or an opportunity to betray Cryovain gives some player choice and the ability to consider a much darker route for how to play things out.

Making Things Interesting

The only problem with the Sunless Citadel? This dungeon is designed for Level 1 characters, and after adventuring for months and checking things off the list, we're levels 5 and 6. The party could one-shot most of the threats in the dungeon, and that's just not interesting or fun. I found guidance to swap in some higher level stat blocks for the creatures that exist there, but I also needed to keep running with this theme of monsters as characters. The Foreward to Curse of Strahd talks about how disinteresting a game gets when the residents of a dungeon have no reason to be there aside from combat, and I take that to heart. What's going on here, and how is the party going to interact?

The upper level is easy: Kobolds vs Goblins. There's no doubt the party would side with the Kobolds. but knowing their goal is to take Calcryx out with them puts them at odds. They needed to find a way to get the dragon out of the dungeon without angering or killing its keepers. Promising Meepo that he can keep caring for the dragon on the surface, and plotting a stealthy escape route made for an exciting mini-heist. They spun a yarn that the dragon was taken to the Underdark, and while the kobolds were otherwise engaged, used Dust of Disappearance to hightail it out of there.

The lower level of the Citadel features passive skeleton gardeners tending to the Gulthias tree's spawn. The bugbear Balsag guards the entrance to the Underdark and another female but unnamed bugbear works alongside the gardeners elsewhere in the dungeon. The book tells us nothing about her, but it came clear enough to me that these bugbears know and care about each other.

The party bumped into a blight, drawing the ire of the skeletons and Balsag. During the fight, our cleric used Turn Undead which sent one of the gardeners panicking down the nearby hall, alerting a host of goblins and the second bugbear. We were faced with a long drawn out fight, so I had her arrive and demand a stop to the violence. Some tense conversation followed, but ultimately our Minotaur character with a black and white sense of justice equated the bugbear guarding the passage with involvement in slave trade and decided to start up the fight again. All throughout, female bugbear raged at them mourning Balsag, calling the party murderers and monsters. Although all I did was pause the combat to deliver dialogue, the party spent the aftermath trying to sort out about how to approach creatures just doing their thing. My theme is starting to take root.

Later in the dungeon there's a pair of Salamanders (swapped in from Fire Snakes). They exist in different rooms and have little description other than that they're there. They killed the first one without a thought. The second one though, they found resting in a nest and fell over themselves apologizing for the intrusion. They didn't dare mention their run in with first Salamander, and quickly put together what was going on and felt terribly for it. They're learning.

By this point my table is fully buying into this idea that factions of monsters aren't simplistic punching bags, and have their goals and reasons for being places. They've alerted Cryovain of Venomfang's plot and imagined the battle that must be happening fully off-screen. They're now rushing to return Calcryx to her with actual worry that she may be injured. The things at stake are ultimately more interesting than just monsters to fight.

Rewarding Curiosity

The best part of all this is that many of the plot points going on are things the players mused about and theorized casually 'how could these two things be connected', and as a DM I have the full power to just say Hell Yeah. Being creative and quick on the draw isn't the easiest, most natural thing for everyone. Luckily, when you're running a game you have a handful of other brains investing themselves in the world and coming up with ideas. Players will ask 'what happens if I do this' and very often the answer isn't right there for you in the printed adventure as-is. You could just say nothing happens and the moment falls flat, or you can let the players craft the world through their interactions. An example:

There's an out of the way chamber in the Sunless Citadel that holds an old tributary statue of the dragon Ashardalon. There's a collection plate in its mouth that seems to want something. As far as the book goes, that's it. No trap, no treasure, no reward for finding this place other than seeing a pretty statue. My table became very interested in this room and how it works. I couldn't let that opportunity slide by. They put a treasure on the collection plate, the statue glowed with a fire from within, and an ancient, distorted magic mouth spell proclaimed "Ashardalon accepts your gift". Then the head threw back like a pez dispenser and the treasure tumbled inward.

Well, the party decided, there must be more treasure to be had in there. They investigated the mechanisms of the statue, considered destroying it, and eventually decided to lower their kobold friend Meepo inside. They tied a rope around him and offered him to the statue, then lowered him. And lowered him. And it kept going until they were nearly out of rope. And then, a tiny faraway echo from deep within. "Shiny!" And then a rumble and a growl and panicked kobold noises. The party pulled him back up, mortified but with a handful of gemstones as a reward. He obviously took more than he'd let on, his pouch near bursting with his own treasure, but the party decided he deserved to keep it. Rolling with this player idea felt good for everyone at the table, introduced a tiny story to play out, and turned an otherwise nothing room into a memorable encounter.

What's Next

As my party nears the end of a story arc, I'm in the process of preparing more locations through chapters of multiple books. There's a lot more that happens nearby with Phandelver and Below and the Essentials Kit trilogy, but there's a want to travel to new regions, so these plots will likely continue on in the background, picking and choosing which locations and missions are interesting enough to surface. Storm King's Thunder gives plenty of life to the greater area, and the party's expressed interest in traveling south towards Waterdeep where we can cross paths with the story in progress from Tyranny of Dragons. I'm excited to see what the second act holds, and look forward to more surprises and twists as the world comes together before us.

Fight Before Christmas: Five Years Running!

 It's that time of year again! The very first game I ran for my home group was Fight Before Christmas, a simple system adapted from Lasers and Feelings where character creation all comes down to one number and a whole lot of improvisation. In 2020 as we were just getting into playing TTRPGs online, I found this fun little game and decided to give it a run. I wrote a scenario full of pop culture references and set my players loose to play around in a ridiculous world. Immediately after that, I became a go-to DM for the group and in between running two full length campaigns, we played numerous other one shots and always, always came back for Fight Before Christmas

Wanna check it out? It's free on Drive Thru RPG

Need some musical accompaniment? I score my games exclusively with tracks from the OverClocked Christmas collection

The gameplay is dead easy, borrowed from Lasers and Feelings. The only number on your character sheet is your Naughtiness rating, from 2-5. When the player wants to do something in game, you decide if it's Naughty or Nice, and roll a D6. Two of them if you're skilled at the task, and another if you're prepared for it. You want to roll lower than your number for Naughty, and higher for Nice. It's an incredibly simple system. Everything else is ad-libbed in character fun as the players act as a crack team of holiday heist mercs out for Santa's goods.

Each year we've done this, I pulled more weird and ridiculous Christmas pop culture and lore in. The 2020 game gave us an infiltration mission into the Home Alone house, where a grownup Kevin McCallister had plans to entrap Santa and inherit his power. One player character intervened and took the beard for herself instead. In 2021 a series of clues led the party around New York City to uncover a revenge plot weaved by the protege of Frosty's evil magician. 2022 reframed Home Alone in a Saw pastiche with an escape room puzzle orchestrated by the Grinch. Then in 2023 I took the group on a time travel mission to Victorian London to save Christmas cheer from a ghost busting Scrooge.

This year I have another fun mission lined up. Not to give it all away, but it's set in 1996, involves a skyscraper, an enigmatic villain with an accent, and an intruder crawling in the ductwork.


I spend a lot of time preparing materials for my games, and find that Fight Before Christmas works best when all we have at the table is some scenery and music, letting the players run with the story and seeing where it goes. All that's needed from me is some narrative push. It's not the biggest blockbuster game, but I'll always have a place in my heart for it and love that we started a holiday tradition with our group.

Putting a Stake in Curse of Strahd

After eighteen months, our Curse of Strahd campaign is over. I posted recaps each week on Mastodon, as well as kept a Travelogue doc over our 70 sessions. It was an incredible journey, and the most emotionally invested game we've run. While the final battle was nearly trivial, the connections we made with the characters was the real highlight. I tried my best to give each player some unique backstory hook that would weave into the world, and for the most part I feel like I succeeded. There were stretches of weeks where we played entire sessions just conversing in character, delving into nuances of the plot without drawing a weapon or rolling a single die.

 Near the end of 2023 while moving into our first house, I was very sick between a bout with Covid and the stress of it all, and could barely function. But the group kept the game going with barely any direction from me while I pushed through. I still haven't fully recovered, and struggle now to come up with words sometimes or keep NPC banter up in a way that can get frustrating, but the deep creative work we put into the campaign was enough fuel to see it through to an incredible end.

This is my second big campaign, and while the first one was a homebrew dreamed up entirely of our own making, this one felt more like a world that we made our own. We explored every nook and cranny of Barovia, know every character's name and face, and forged the types relationships that's like gold in a writers room - where you know exactly how any two would interact in a room together. It was something special.



I'm taking a break from high-intensity DMing with a lighthearted little foray that I'll post about here in a bit. But for now, I'd like to share our campaign travelogue. This is free to read and review, use any ideas for lore or plot twists you like: Curse of Strahd Campaign Log

Strahd Dies Tonight: A Ravenloft Matinee

Good Evening... again and again

As my Curse of Strahd campaign wraps up, I realized that I was really happy with the version of Castle Ravenloft that I'd put together. It's one of the most iconic Dungeons across all of D&D after all, and a lot of work went into configuring, linking and populating the maps. In the time working on it I learned the ins and outs of the castle the way one learns the layout of a video game. And so, I figured, why not repackage it as a re-playable adventure?

Turns out, D&D Beyond has some ideas for how to speed-run the castle as a one-shot, and so I pulled from that and now have my own twist on it ready to go. "Strahd Dies Tonight!" is now live with sessions available all through June, and then continuing further as long as I can help it.

Strahd Dies Tonight! on startplaying.games

The Rules

To make the game run quick and smooth, there's a few tweaks.

Madam Eva's Reading: The Tarokka cards are used to determine the random location of key items in the campaign, as well as where Strahd can be found in the castle. Since this adventure is contained within the castle, several cards are omitted to ensure the treasures are always present somewhere.

No random encounters: Just traps and monsters that already exist. If the party decides to camp out to wait for or hide from Strahd, then we'd be rolling something to get them moving.

Strahd's Boons: After each hour of real time play, the players are offered a boon in exchange for being bitten. This gives them some extra firepower for the final battle.


 

My Tweaks

NPC Cast: The twenty possible "fated enemies" in the campaign are available for the players to choose and play as. With their stat blocks exactly as described in the book, they range from a ten year old girl with commoner stats, to one of the most powerful mages in the multiverse, and a bunch of Barovian born and bred monsters in between. I filled out their biographies with text out of Lunch Break Heroes' "Lights in the Darkness" supplement so that players can quickly get a feel for the character with some roleplay directon.

Roguelike Progression: There's a bigger story going on here. Although the castle and  characters reset each playthrough, I'll be keeping track of what happened where and key in some clues as we go.
 

My Setup

I've moved my Foundry instance to the cloud, improving performance for everyone compared to when I ran it right off my desktop PC. Thanks to this, I'm able to make a heavy duty, high production value game. Here's a little bit of what you'll see and hear:

 

Sound like fun? "Strahd Dies Tonight!" is live now at startplaying.games. Come play with me!

Sword Coast Ramblers - Open World D&D!

Over the last few years, my group has run a handful of D&D adventures following the plot from their officially released books. We go through the locations in order, fight the final boss at the end, and say goodbye to our party with an epilogue. Sometimes a little bit of homebrew gets snuck in, and sometimes the party goes a little off the rails necessitating some improv. I imagine that's the experience for most tables. You make some stuff up on the fly, and it becomes canon for the greater world of your future adventures, but for the most part you're beholden to The Story as it's laid out by the author.

Every now and then with these adventures though, we get this peek at the fact that several of them take place in the same setting, The Forgotten Realms. Turns out over decades and editions and tons of sourcebooks, the place has been pretty fleshed out. I frequently find myself on the Forgotten Realms wiki, discovering snippets of that rich history and wondering what would happen if a table just... had... everything at their disposal.

Well, we've been building our collection of 5th edition adventures over at D&D Beyond for a while now. At this point it feels like the only thing stopping us is that tunnel vision of running one adventure at a time and calling that a whole campaign. Some of the books even propose methods to link them together with other adventures in fairly simple ways. Taking it a few steps further, a real, proper open world campaign using all canon content can bounce back and forth between major storylines, following the party's whims and showing off what a lived-in world this is. All it takes is a DM with an encyclopedic knowledge, or just enough organization to seem like it.

So, how do we do it?

For starters, you'll need at least a surface level understanding of the geography at play, and when and where the majority of the official adventures are set. Break down the chapters and side quests of each book to determine the appropriate level ranges, and turn those into pins on your map. Choose a starting location and introductory plot hook, and get adventuring just like always! As players hit appropriate levels for story beats from other books happening nearby, you can deliver news and new plot hooks that let them veer in a new direction.

Because the story begins to bounce between adventures, you need to be quick on the draw with prep. The D&D Beyond Importer tool for Foundry lets you get all the official maps ready to go, configured and populated in a few clicks. Stash them and your entire cast of monster stat blocks into a compendium for when they're needed. From there, it's just a matter of reading up on upcoming locations as they happen.

Another key tool in all this is a notes management app. I'm playing with Obsidian.md and its RPG manager plugin and find its got a great setup for managing relationships between factions, locations and characters. It takes some doing to get all the names and places in there to begin with, but once set up you have a lightning fast mini wiki at your fingertips. I did this in Foundry before, preparing the entire Curse of Strahd world prior to game time, and found it ended up killing in-game performance. An outside tool for information only the DM needs anyway is a smarter way to go.

Now then, what source books do we need to flesh out the world?

- Dungeon Masters Guide, Players Handbook, and Monster Manual, naturally

- The Sword Coast Adventurers Guide gives great background on several locations, written from the perspectives of in-world personalities. Letting the players get their hands on this information helps fill out the lore.

- "Volo's Waterdeep Enchiridion" from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is useful for players in the city

- The Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer performs a similar function

- Xanathar's Guide to Everything gives a great set of random encounter tables and downtime activities


And for adventures, here's my rundown for how and where they can be used, going through the books in release order

- Lost Mine of Phandelver

This adventure takes place entirely in and around the town of Phandalin and can take characters as far as level 5 before you branch out into further adventures. There's nothing saying the players couldn't have reason to travel to other nearby towns earlier however - Triboar just to the East is another starter down and the initial plot hook has the characters having come from Neverwinter to the north.

- Tyranny of Dragons

This starts a short ways south in Greenest, but after level 5 turns into a road trip to Waterdeep where a council sends the party to all corners of the region to build allies and defend against the Cult of the Dragon. Your party might get roped into one or more of these excursions. Or perhaps while in town they could stop by the Yawning Portal to visit a megadungeon or two.

- Princes of the Apocalypse

This is set in the Dessarin Valley, east of Phandalin and south of Triboar, with the town of Red Larch serving as the party headquarters. A handful of side quests for surrounding towns are described which could be stumbled upon by wandering parties. The main plot involves the dealings of four elemental cults and culminates in clearing out each of their dungeons, each of which is appropriate for a different level group.

- Out of the Abyss

This Underdark adventure begins with the party captured by Drow, stripped of their weapons, and forced to flee pursuers as they try to get back to the surface and escaping by way of of the Dwarven city of Gauntylgrim. By level 8 they're recruited to dive back down and take out the rising demon lords. While this seems disconnected from the rest of the Sword Coast adventures, keep in mind that there can be entrances to the Underdark anywhere, and each settlement described in the book has its own thing going on. Also, getting captured and losing your equipment hits a lot harder for an established party vs a group of newly rolled characters.

- Storm King's Thunder

This is where the open world idea takes off. The main story here involves rampaging giants and a need to restore order by visiting locations all across The North. It offers multiple possible starting towns, with the choice between Triboar near the Dessarin Valley, Goldenfields near Waterdeep, or Bryn Shadar way up in Icewind Dale. Chapter three handily lays out a massive atlas with every town, road and patch of trees described along with story hooks and suggested encounters. This doesn't need to be the main story in a campaign, but it absolutely does the best job criss-crossing with all the others.

- Tales from the Yawning Portal

This is a collection of dungeons re-imagined from previous editions. The book provides the framing device of the Yawning Portal, an inn in Waterdeep whose main feature is a well where adventurers are lowered down into the megadungeon Undermountain below. Characters in Waterdeep could be recruited for any combination of these excursions, and the portal could whisk them anywhere you need them to go! The dungeons don't have a canonical place on the map, but the book does provide loose suggestions for where to put them.

- Tomb of Annihilation

This jungle adventure takes place far south in the jungles of Chult, and provides its own little open world to explore with several interesting locations and side stories. The whole thing culminates in a huge multi level dungeon. A party generally takes a boat from Baldur's Gate to kick this off. As part of a larger campaign, you can pick and choose which locations and objectives to offer as part of a visit.

- Waterdeep: Dragon Heist

This is an introductory adventure for characters starting in the City of Waterdeep, and describes lairs and machinations of four different villains which can be encountered depending on the season you're setting the adventure in. Being low level, it's unlikely to challenge a party that came to Waterdeep from elsewhere, but with some tweaks and focus on story instead of combat it could engage a visiting group with an interesting side quest.

- Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage

The megadungeon of Undermountain is laid out in all its glory here, meant to be the logical next step for a party that played Dragon Heist. Any one level of this book is a self-contained dungeon on its own, opening it up to being visited at any time for any reason during your campaign.

- Ghosts of Saltmarsh

Okay you got me, this isn't officially set in the Forgotten Realms. As a transplant from Greyhawk, you can use a good lot of this book for its ship and naval combat rules, and sidequests in the Trackless Sea. DMs running this on the Sword Coast tend to place the town of Saltmarsh on the coast just west of Phandalin and north of Leilon.

- Dragon of Icespire Peak

This introductory adventure is set in and around Phandalin, already overlapping with the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Its structure is also easy to slot in, as a series of side quests and locations to explore in the area. Adding this to the campaign gives a new villain, the white dragon Cryovain, who can show up anytime, anywhere while the party's moving between locations.

- Storm Lord's Wrath \ Sleeping Dragon's Wake \ Divine Contention

This trilogy is a linear series of quests that follow up from Icespire Peak, taking the party west from Phandalin to the ruined town of Leilon, where they rebuild and fend off a number of threats from the surrounding region. A party wrapped up in this story might not stray far unless you give them specific reason to do so, such as putting the rebuilding of Leilon on a timeline and locking further progression of the story while they adventure elsewhere.

- Descent into Avernus

This adventure begins in Baldur's Gate, but soon after draws the party into another plane entirely after visiting Candlekeep and taking a portal to hell itself. Once that jump is made, you're likely committed to finishing the fight before letting the party return to the land of the living. Using bits and pieces of the adventure would require some creativity, but could offer variety to the setting.

- Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden

This takes place entirely in the far northern reaches around the settlements of Ten-Towns. Its also one of the starting locations for Storm King's Thunder, giving more to do and fleshing out the area. In later levels, there's a wandering dragon construct to contend with that makes the region all that more dangerous before delving into frozen caverns and dungeons to retrieve an artifact with world-altering power. Pull that little macguffin at your own risk,.

- Candlekeep Mysteries

This book lays out a series of short adventures all of which are accessed by magical books within the library of Candlekeep, located south of Baldur's Gate and a long way from most of the action happening in the region. However, there's nothing saying one or more of the books couldn't find their way to the party via other means.

- Wild Beyond the Witchlight

A wandering carnival offers a fun distraction for the party with interesting characters and minigames. Should they follow through with the story as presented, they find themselves trapped in the Feywild and need to treat with the Hourglass coven before returning. Like Descent into Avernus the locations and characters within can serve as an interesting side trek to liven things up, but getting the party on this path will keep them there for a good while.

- Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

A newer introductory adventure, this one puts the party on a small island near Neverwinter. This serves as a simple starting zone with a small, manageable amount of quests before letting a party hit the mainland.

- Keys from the Golden Vault

This book presents a series of heist based adventures, most of which are location agnostic and can be slotted in anywhere, anytime. It's possible to add The Golden Vault as a new faction in the campaign, and offer their missions as a lucrative side hustle while in a large city like Neverwinter, Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate.

- Phandelver and below: The Shattered Obelisk

This newest book is actually a retooling of the first introductory adventure, covering the same grounds and then extending the story to some far out places. The action remains centered on Phandalin though, so it might be more something for the party to come back to and find in progress at a later point in the campaign.


It certainly seems like a lot, doesn't it? Well, wish me luck because I'm going to be trying it this year!

Casual Episodic fun with Adventurer's League

Although Dungeons & Dragons puts a whole lot of effort into marketing the next big book, multiple times a year, there's a lesser known series of official content floating out there: Adventurer's League! These are self contained adventures designed for Organized Play. That is, you can sit down at any table for any one of these adventures, play it out in a single sitting, and take your character along to the next one. I'm not running a table in a game shop or convention, but I do like the idea of players being able to come and go as they please and swap out characters any time. So! I've been adapting Adventurer's League content into a loose campaign for my group.

As of now, we've just finished Season One, thematically linked to Tyranny of Dragons which was also the first official book we ran. Each module is a stand alone adventure, but they link together to tell an overarching episodic story. In this first season, the players thwarted a handful of plots put forth by the Cult of the Dragon, and became refugees from the town of Phlan when Vorgansharax arrived and declared himself ruler. The season ends with a daring rescue of high profile citizens, but ultimately the party must leave the town behind and over the next couple seasons will be gathering allies before returning.

If Phlan sounds like a familiar town, that may be due to it being the setting for Pool of Radiance, a classic D&D computer game the events of which are canon and referred to frequently in the lore of these modules. Several locations in this Moonsea region also have history across previous editions of D&D.

Major events in the storyline are designed as Epics, adventures meant to be played across multiple tables simultaneously with their events affecting each other. I adapted and ran the first one "Corruption in Kryptgarden" towards the end of the season. This involved my players each running three characters as we bounced around in the narrative. It was an incredible experience, and I'm already looking forward to the next big story beats as we continue along.

Visuals

To encourage the lighthearted, casual feel of the game, I wanted the visuals to be bright and tactile. Many modules include black and white maps, which I could import into Dungeondraft and trace over easily enough. The textures have a toylike feel to them, and pairing them with 2MinuteTabletop's sticker styled tokens works perfectly.

Screenshot of Foundry VTT - encountering a pair of animated armors in the Jade Temple

And since plenty of the gameplay happens outside of combat maps, I leverage JamesRPG's animated backdrops and the Theatre Inserts module to facilitate an immersive theatre-of-the-mind setup, similar to my more serious Curse of Strahd campaign.

Screenshot of Foundry VTT - setting the scene for adventure!

Systems

Since each module has a set level range, it'd be impossible to play a single character throughout the entire season. So, players choose from their pool of characters at the start of each session resulting in an interesting variety of party makeups. To keep track of who's played which adventure and how familiar the characters are with eachother, I set up a tracking system within foundry with the 5e Downtime module.

A character sheet tab tracking relationships with other player characters, easy tracking for how often they've adventured together 

A character sheet tab that tracks which adventures a character has taken part in 

And with factions being a central gameplay element, I made use of a supplement that doles out actual rewards for gaining renown and ranking up across the five factions: Guide to the Five Factions.


In the second season, we're switching from milestone to XP levelling to slow progression down a bit, and dedicating more effort into making the 'downtime days' doled out by the modules more useful. I collated Dakota Cash's "Downtime Expanded" into Foundry for my players, and as an extra bonus every seven days used triggers a Bastion turn from the new Unearthed Arcana. This represents happenings at the guild chapterhouses in Mulmaster, a much bigger city than the first season's Phlan. This could end up in a dearth of magical items being added to the in game economy, but I'm not terribly worried as we have limits in place regarding how many can be brought into play at a time.

 Screenshot of Foundry VTT, showing off merchant sheets, one set up with downtime activities and another with Bastion facilities

As we hit the ground running with the new season and new characters, I'm excited to see what stories we put together. Adventurer's League is quickly becoming one of my favourite campaigns to run!

Fun with running Curse of Strahd in Foundry

For 2023 I'm running my second campaign, the highly regarded official adventure "Curse of Strahd". Leading up to my prep time, I surveyed my group to decide what sort of rules, systems, and focus we should have. This landed on a highly immersive, roleplay focused adventure with realism rules in place. The difficult part of this is balancing and automating those rules so that they don't encroach on the atmosphere. Here I'm sharing some of the resources and tools I found that anyone else leverage for this or any other campaign. Enjoy!


Supplemental Material

To beef up the story, I picked up several supplements and am incorporating bits and pieces. This gives us new NPCs, some guidance on pacing and intertwining plot hooks, and even some completely new quests and locations to discover. Here's a few recommendations:

High Production Value

The setting for Curse of Strahd is the moody, mist covered demiplane of Barovia. Being a popular book, there's no shortage of art out there to draw from. To enhance the atmosphere of my game, I've drawn on these sources:
The result is a pretty cohesive look and feel where the majority of the gameplay happens in theatre of the mind, switching to overhead battle maps for exploration or combat. Artwork straight from the official book blends in seamlessly.

The team engaged in combat at the Tser River crossing

Ireena enjoys the view at Tser Falls

Gathering around the Vistani campfire

Storytelling with the Vistani

Travel System

I made the decision that to increase immersion, the players won't be looking at overworld map while travelling. Instead, they're on a travel montage scene using animated backdrops. Theatre Inserts lets us keep the players displayed as portraits along the bottom of the screen, including text boxes so they can continue roleplaying without necessarily being 'on the map'.

The overworld map does exist as a scene in my game world, but it's for my own reference only. I track the players location and have notes and landmarks in place as clickable buttons using Monk's Active Tile Triggers. Clicking a landmark switches up the background for the travel montage scene that the players have active, loads up the appropriate Syrinscape mood using SyrinControl, displays the readaloud text with Narrator Tools, and preloads the battlemap if one is available so that we can quickly switch to it.

The DM view of Barovia

Configuration for a landmark

In some cases we have forks in the road or options regarding where to go. I put these to a vote using the Visual Novel Choices addon.

The team decides not to enter Old Bonegrinder


To display travel progress while on the road, I leveraged the Boss Bar module and created an actor that sits hidden on the montage scene. We use Innocenti's Travel Pace to chart our course, then set the actor's max hp to match. For each hour of travel, I use the programmed features to 'heal' the travel actor by an amount based on how many miles we can go at each pace. They also deplete a 'stamina' resource telling me when the party needs a rest. A togglable status effect for difficult terrain automatically halves the 'healing'. Meanwhile, the Random Encounters module automatically triggers for every 30 minutes of game world time while the travel scene is active, letting me know whether and what we're running into.

The travel actor

Food and Water

We enjoy the Rest Recovery addon for automating rules around characters needing to eat, drink, and sleep, then automatically applying exhaustion if needed. However, it becomes a pain reminding players to consume things from their character sheets (or make sure they have them on hand) on every long rest. Since they have a cart with a water barrel as part of their party, I placed all the rations and water in one place, and created features to automatically deplete a day's worth of food and water in one click, speeding up the process for everyone. The Party Resources module helps the team keep track of what they have on hand, including in their own inventories.

The food and water actor, party sheet and resource tracking

Next, I devised a method to make sure fresh meat, fish and berries age and go rotten over time. When the group takes a long rest, I trigger a series of inventory square tiles that look for and replace fresh food with less fresh food.

Meat aging automation

Encumbrance and Inventory

We're enforcing carrying capacity rules in this game, using the Variant Encumbrance module to track and automate the effects of carrying too much. While this does technically integrate with Item Collection to enable bags and chests to hold other items, our preferred approach is to create separate actors and use them as Item Piles instead. This way each bag and chest is an actual object in game with its own carrying capacity being tracked, and it's super easy for players to pop them open and drag and drop items back and forth.

Downtime Activities

On top of the standard rules for foraging in the wild, I've incorporated systems from a few different supplements into downtime activities. This took the creation of several roll tables and journal entries, leveraging the Downtime TrackingGatherer and Mastercrafted modules. From the players' end however, they can just click a button on their character sheet that guides them through the required rolls, and then adds the appropriate rewards directly to their inventory. During rounds of downtime, we use the Out of Combat Tracker so players can see at a glance what everyone else is up to.

Sources for these systems:

A player's downtime tab


The out of combat tracker


Journals and Lore

Being a big world with plenty of interconnected stories, I wanted to make sure my players have information at their fingertips so they could keep track of everything going on. So, on top of writing session recaps in a shared Google Doc, I also maintain the journal system within Foundry. Using Monk's Enhanced Journals, there's different types of entries for people, places, quests, points of interests, even shops. They can all be linked via relationships allowing the players to click around and explore wiki-style.

Journal entries and lore

Combat Rewards

When you choose to run a campaign with milestone leveling instead of experience, random encounters and combat in general has the risk of becoming an unsatisfying slog. There are rules for calculating gold rewards for combat based on the difficulty rating, though it doesn't fit well with realism rules to be able to loot cash of off wild animals. To split the difference, I have Monk's Token Bar calculating rewards and assigning them to a Commendations loot sheet. The players can't collect these until they check in at town. I've created 'token' items that help track how many creatures they've downed of different types, and these will be redeemable for weapon enhancements or high quality gear.

The growing rewards list for the party's combat encounters

The Faction reward shop, still in progress

Time and Weather

I recreated the Barovian Lunar calendar in game, adding important dates to help keep the group centered in the world. Simple Calendar, Smalltime, and Smallweather all integrate together to automatically affect lighting and add weather effects to scenes.

Calendar and weather controls

And that's about all the fun integrations I have to show off for now. Feel free to check them out and enhance your own game!