Hoard of the Dragon Queen: Prep Work

After a two year hiatus of not playing D&D, I'm super excited that this kind of fell in my lap!  A coworker mentioned she wanted to play D&D, then more people hitched onto that star, and it kind of snowballed into effect.  I've never run a home campaign (I've run stuff at conventions and gamedays for 3.5 and 4e) but since 5e is pretty free form and not as rules heavy as 4e, I volunteered to run it. However, I wasn't 100% up on the rules for 5e, so we agreed to play the published adventure Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

When you read HoTDQ, one thing becomes woefully apparent: This is not a plug and play game. You are going to have to do a lot of prep work.  The information is scattered around the book and it’s your job to make a story of it. Describing it to a friend, it’s more like doing an Ikea hack. Why buy a bedside table when you can make one out of a stool? (Of course, HoTDQ is more like buying a bedside table and then still having to butcher a stool to make it work.)

One thing I really did like was the bonds. Hoard of the Dragon Queen comes with a list of backgrounds to tie people to the adventure plot-lines. Some are good, some are decent, and some are pretty “meh”.  I cherry picked the best, combined and/or fleshed out some of the weaker ones, and created a few original ones to hand out to the players as well.   I've also gone out on a limb and attached a small power to the starting bond such as a bonus skill or a minor class feature.  This allows me to expand and provide future “boons” to the PC’s for completing goals related to their background and bond. A bit risky as it could overpower the PC's, but I feel that as long as the boons are used as an alternative to treasure, it likely will not overpower them and may foster better role play.

As a group, we decided to go with the Hero Points rule as well as the Plot Points rule.  I’m a fan of hero points as they allow someone to feel more badass at the times where it really counts. They *are* heroes after all!  I worry a bit about their game breaking potential, so we are only doing 5 points per level rather than 5 + level points.  Plot Points are something that I hope I can work with more.  I've been playing a lot of narrative games and while I like to think I can welcome a more “Fiasco” style to the game, we’ll see how it blends with D&D.

I wanted to dive right in to episode one at our first session, however, a brief perusal of blogs and forums really sheds light on the fact that HoTDQ is a lethal adventure.  My conundrum:  A lot of the players in the group were either brand new or coming back to the game after a hiatus. The possibility that they would not have the technical nous to easily navigate a first adventure with a high risk of total party kill was very real and besides, TPK’s are no way to introduce people to a game (I’m not one to fudge dice rolls either). My conclusion was that bringing them up to second level would greatly increase their survivability.  Dovetailing this is that HoTDQ kind of just drops a bunch of people in a caravan for “some reason” and then into a situation that expects everyone to rush towards overwhelming danger with no concern for cohesion. It's not something a character would naturally do and it requires the players to identify themselves as "heroes" and "a team" in a very meta-gamey sort of way.  I felt a better way to do it was to give them a more natural connection and have some minor success to build confidence.

Do they all talk at once? Take turns?
They look like they don't know either...

So I had to dust off some old books and creak into motion to create an intro adventure.  My goal was to create a situation that facilitated connection.  I decided that all of the characters had been with the caravan for less than a week, they were traveling for more specific reasons, and that the evening that we set the game in was the first time they actually sat down together to socialize.  They would start around a campfire and the first encounter would come to them.  While I did not find a module that fit what I wanted, I was influenced by “The Wizard’s Amulet” as I liked the feel of an ambush uniting a bunch of strangers into a team.  I made the caravan leader into an NPC who had a vested interest in the kidnappings that happened in a small town on the way to Greenest and threw in some foreshadowing of dragons and Tiamat as well.  I feel like it went over pretty well. I’ll put the session into it’s own "Episode 0" post.