Scourge of the Sword Coast: Introduction

This is one of those great big, multi-adventure campaign sort of books. Because
my own campaign takes place over a fairly wide area, and because one of my groups has their own agenda that takes them traveling in and out of a series of different locales, I don't tend to run these strictly in order and one after the other as laid out in the book. If my players happen to be in Daggerford (Riverport), Scourge of the Sword Coast stuff might be going on. If they're in Saltmarsh (a short distance to the north), they will likely encounter stuff from Ghosts of Saltmarsh collection, and so on. So the adventures are interleaved with each other in an attempt to give my campaigns a more sandbox-type feel.

It should be noted I did not run Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle to start this. I just tweaked Scourge until it fit into my own campaign story. The intro starts with scores of refugees from the eastward countryside flowing into Daggerford seeking shelter and protection after being raided by orcs and goblins and having their towns and villages sacked. Meanwhile, the Duke is distracted by a feud he's having with a friend, who he has accused of stealing a dwarven artifact from his collection. As written, the players enter Daggerford amidst all this chaos. The first part of the adventure is all role-play, with players piecing together a story by talking to NPC all over the city.

For the Riverport Rebels, I ran the first introductory bit of this before I ran it for the Class of 81. (This detail will be funny later.) For their hook, it started out pretty straightforward. Refugees arriving in town, chaos ensues. Stephanie, Taijitsu, and Darren (Sir Peter has gone off on a quest of some sort...you know, paladins gotta paladin.) wake up in the morning intending to go out and try to help and figure out what's going on. However, they eventually start to realize an unfortunate development has occurred in the night.

And that development is that they have inexplicably been turned into dogs.* One of the Duke's enemies targeted them with some magic to get them out of the picture for a while.

Nobody in this adventure as written gets turned into dogs. However, my husband (Darren/Sir Peter) thought it would be a fun thing to try. So I re-wrote the first part of the adventure, the part that takes place in the town gathering intel, so that they and everyone they had to deal with was a dog or cat seeing the event unfold through the situations of the humans in their world. So after being chased out of the Duke's manor by the Duke's steward, Regus, the three of them (Darren as a golden retriever, Taijitusu as a doberman pinscher, and Stephanie as a dachshund) hit the streets to seek out their friend Val, a local witch they frequently deal with. They went through a bunch of craziness to get her to realize that it was them and not pesky stray dogs, and she eventually got wise and used Speak With Animals to get the lowdown. To say she thought it was funny is an understatement.

For this adventure, I created a collection of NPC for them to interact with.

Among others, there was Fortunata the cat, from the Lady Luck Tavern, Timothy, a puppy waiting for his fisherman master having lunch inside a pub, Sarge, a guard dog at the city militia barracks, Sylvia, the pompous cat from the Duke's manor, and my favorites, a trio of aggressive stray dogs (Mofe, Bill, and Fluffy) led by a terrifying housecat named Killer Queen, who roamed the streets shaking down other wandering animals. (Taijutsu remarked that "Bill looks like he just got out of prison."  He ain't wrong.) So the encounters laid out in the module happened more or less as they were intended to...just with this weird little twist. By the next morning, the Rebels were back to their normal selves, none the worse for wear.


For the Class of 81, I actually ran the intro part after they had run the second section of it that took place in the town of Julkoun. I also ran it on the same map after the Rebels had run the adventure, and on a whim, I left the cat and dog tokens scattered across the city map because hey, what city doesn't have its share of wandering cats and dogs, right? The Class ran this part of the adventure as written...they weren't turned into animals. However, they did notice that the map had a suspicious number of cat and dog tokens scattered across it, and in their paranoia began to speculate wildly about what that could possibly mean. Were the creatures cult spies? Criminal operatives in disguise? These thoughts seemed to ratchet up their paranoia to new heights, to my vast delight.

So anyway, instead of seeing all the refugees entering Daggerford and then getting intel and using it to head out to Julkoun (now overrun with goblins and orcs), they had gone through Julkoun on their way to White Plume Mountain, found it occupied, and then decided to clear it out on their way home. They didn't find out where the inhabitants were until after they'd returned to Daggerford. So I ran it more like a sandbox situation. A lot happened on that trip to White Plume.

But in either case, this intro section is set up as very much a sandbox, and the players are free to tackle their information-gathering however they see fit. The NPCs in town have their own agendas which will be in full swing as the players move through the town. It will take some effort on the part of the DM to make sure they know what will be going on when, so some studying ahead of time will be in order. There are a lot of characters and a lot of stories and info. One way I made this easier on myself is that I loaded a lot of basic information directly into the NPC character tokens on my virtual tabletop and left them simply scattered around the map, either on the main layer or on the hidden DM layer. Thus all I had to do to give myself a quick crib note was to click on the tokens so they'd give me an instant refresher.


*This impulsive dog twist was so fun and hilarious that it inspired us to create and publish a Roll20 Marketplace module, Westwind Garden, in which the players are transformed into a collection of different animals and sent to break a curse.

Heist

My daughter really loves anything involving heists. So I went looking for a module that was based around one. I found this one on the Roll20 Marketplace and decided to take a chance on it. It is a little off-brand adventure that has a real homemade look and feel to it. But it's very well put together, features a collection of very nice maps, and the story is an exciting, three-dimensional jaunt. Kudos to Andrew Cohen on this one. At some point, I'll probably try his other adventures. While this can easily be run as a stand-alone, it is part of a four-part collection that can be run in order. Only reason I didn't do that was because I wanted the heist part specifically.

The hook is that an old wizard send the players to a tower that a cult is using for an outpost to retrieve a MacGuffin, in this case, a shard of a powerful relic. 

The tower is a nearly impenetrable tower several stories high, guarded on top by a small dragon. Inside, a cult has posted a small militia. The shard is somewhere inside the tower. The players are tasked with breaking in, finding the shard, and escaping with it.

What makes this module different is that the wizard has compiled some intelligence on the place, which he will freely share with the players. He will also equip the players with a collection of magical and mechanical items to help them with their assault on the tower. What the players do with this intel and these items is entirely up to them. They will devise their own plans for how the adventure is going to go down. 

Each floor of the tower has its own well-appointed map. However, I am a notorious over-builder when it comes to this stuff. And I like to be extremely organized on the front end of any game I run so it runs as smoothly as possible. So because each floor has its own map page in Roll20, and because the guards (and the players) will move up and down between floors on either the stairs or the EXCELLENT fireman's pole, I duplicated character tokens and placed them in specifically labeled corals on the GM layer. That way, if guards chased the players down the stairs to another level, or came running when they heard noise, I'd already have those tokens ready to go when I swapped maps out. (This came in really handy when Stephanie and Taijisu turned invisible, snuck up on one poor schmuck sitting at his desk, and used the desk as a bulldozer to push him down the fireman's hole, causing him to plummet, howling, to the bottom.)

I suppose once a party got into the tower, they could simply murder-hobo everything that moved, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun and going the sneaky, creative route. Using the wizard's toys and the fun set up of the environment is the entire point of this one. 

So far, I have only run this one for the Riverport Rebels. I may upgrade it to a higher level adventure at some point and run it for the Class of 81 at some point. It is definitely a fun one!

White Plume Mountain

White Plume Mountain is a classic module from way back in 1979 by Lawrence Schick. There's a reason this thing is still being published and a reason why one Paul Kidd wrote a (abominably and embarrassingly terrible) fictional novel about it: because it's a really, really fun module if your group enjoys puzzles. It is definitely on the favorites list among both my gaming groups. My groups love puzzles, so I even added a few more to the adventure. It is considered a "dungeon crawl" but it's a dungeon crawl that features a lot of really different encounters and puzzles, so if you are looking for your basic "kick down the door, fight the monster, loot the treasure" adventure, this ain't it. If you want some high-stakes, crazy, use-your-brain-as-your-main sort of fun-run, step right up. 

I particularly like the accompanying illustrations in this one, as this is a pretty dimensional dungeon and the illustrations really help. I made them into handouts for my players. Plus, the rustic map of White Plume Mountain and its surrounding environs is cool. "The hut of Thingizzard, beware her potions." Love it.


I know Roll20 has a digital version of this one as part of a bundle that you can pick up, but I was halfway through building it from scratch when I realized that, so I just pressed on and used mine. So I can't say how it is. 

SPOILERS!

The given hook is that three legendary weapons named Wave, Whelm, and Blackrazor have been stolen from their wealthy owners and the culprit claims to be none other than the wizard Keraptis, thought dead for over a millennium. The players are hired to go retrieve them from the wizard's lair. 

When I ran this for the Rebels, I played that pretty straightforward. After all, they are Duke Orsino's special task force. So I didn't have to do much of a reach to send them on their way. 

The Class, though, have no such connections and are dealing with their own problems (namely, what to do about the evil relic in their possession and how to keep this awful cult in check). So they require a little more motivation. So in their case, Boz (a precognizant), who had been badly injured the night before by a cerebral stalker in the lair of an azurite-tripping mind-flayer, took a turn in the night. The rest of the party was awakened by his fevered ramblings, which clued them in that it was time to come clean about the Eye and also gave them some clues about what they needed to destroy it.  So off to White Plume they headed to retrieve these legendary weapons Boz had been rambling about. 

In both groups, getting to the mountain wasn't that simple. It took a long, several weeks-long trek dotted with many adventures along the way. I had placed a dramatic overlay of the mountain itself, with its plume of white steam right on the map and when the players saw it appear where they were heading, they started getting genuinely nervous. Genuinely nervous players are like a long rest and a hit of Bardic Inspiration to me. Pretty much my favorite thing. 

The entrance to the dungeon is a muddy cave from which steam blows in intervals, seeming to breathe. As written, there is a trap door which requires a search through the mud to find and a strength roll to open. I replaced these checks with a puzzle lock to solve and a lever to pull. 

Inside, the tunnel floors are flooded so that the characters are required to slog through warmish, scummy water and algae-slick tunnels. There is a small side room containing an underwater wheel, which will drain the tunnels of water if turned.  

The players will navigate a gynosphinx with a riddle, a pool with kelpies that will absolutely charm and drown anyone they can snare, a room full of numbered flesh golems that will either fight the players or aid them (depending on their skill at number riddles), a lock-behind-you chamber full of glass spheres containing an assortment of keys, treasure, and scary things that attack, a suspicious couple that evidently act as caretakers, a cavern full of boiling mud with a tricky series of swinging platforms they can use to traverse it (the solution to this I admit I don't really get. In play, it doesn't seem to work out so much, at least in my experience. Just figure out a way to make it fun and exciting and go with it.), a classic vampire in a coffin, a corridor that makes metal increasingly hot the farther along it the characters travel, a weird room with magically suspended streams of water the players must kayak through, a frictionless room that has what amounts to mulchers in the floor, and a room containing a hedonistic halfling that turns out to be a shape changing ogre that lost a bet. However, the two encounters that are the defining features of this entire module are the monster-filled "inverted ziggurat" and the boiling underground lake containing a giant crab inside a magically-maintained bubble. These are the two main things that people think of when they think of White Plume Mountain. 

The so-called inverted ziggurat is a sort of deadly zoo exhibit with stepped water tanks filled with ferocious water creatures and alternating with dry levels filled with equally deadly land creatures. Players have to figure out a way to get to the bottom of it. 

The Class did a lot of ranged shooting and distraction in this encounter using illusions to lure the creatures into position. They have a lot of ranged firepower, and though they were below level for this module, they did fine. They tend to drag around a lot of NPC with them, and I kind of regret I didn't actually level it up more than I did. This was the module that showed me I probably needed to start hitting them harder than I was. But no mind, they had fun. 

The Rebels don't pack the numbers or the damage output that the Class does, so their descent was a lot more calamitous. Stephanie, ever the strategist, remembered one of the caretakers from their earlier encounter saying she fed the animals in the labyrinth. So she created an illusion to appear as that character bearing food to draw the animals towards herself, safely on the top tier. Darren and Taijitsu made their ways carefully down the layers as Rolf covered them from above. At one point, they ended up having to fight some of the land creatures as they attempted to descend from one of the pool-levels, and in desperation, deliberately shattered the glass, hoping the torrent would create a chaotic situation in which the animals would fight each other and leave them alone. They made their way to the now-flooded bottom, aided by ranged attacks from Stephanie and Rolf. 

The giant crab in the underground lake, known in the lore as  "beast in the boiling bubble", is the other very creative encounter that give fame to this module. The players must battle this giant crab inside a bubble that feels as if it's made of think, transparent rubber. The water outside the bubble can be seen boiling like a hot kettle. A player would have to be very stupid indeed to not realize what would happen if that membrane were to be pierced or ripped. The crab is equipped with a rune-covered band on one of its claws...protection against psionics, which is a relic of an earlier version of D&D. The Class speculated wildly about what the band did, and went out of their way to remove it as soon as they could. In my game, it did nothing, but it could be tweaked to be anything the DM wanted.

The Class also ate the crab during their long rest. I mean, after all, their bard is a Halfling and no way is he going to waste that much fresh crab meat.

I mentioned that I added some puzzles to this module. The floating kayak encounter is basically this: characters float into a room where a bunch of thugs are waiting to beat them unconscious. If your players are chomping at the bit to get into a fight, there's nothing really wrong with this. But I frankly thought it was rather uninspired, so I replaced it with a puzzle to get out of the locked beatdown room. I used one of Paul Camp's puzzle packs from the Roll20 Marketplace, Laser Puzzles Fantasy Edition. 

The final encounter is I guess supposed to be a sort of boss encounter, where the players, having beaten all the encounters and are now leaving victorious, end up having a voice mockingly telling them they must now fight a pair of efreet. But come on, if that crab and that killer zoo, or even the vampire wasn't a "boss fight", a couple of tacked-on-at-the-end-as-an-afterthought  efreet aren't really one, either. I thought the efreet encounter was a little corny, and kind of anticlimactic, so I didn't use it in either case. Again, your mileage may vary. Never a rule saying you absolutely must run a module exactly as written. There is more than enough combat in this module to keep my players happy even leaving a few out, so adjust as your situation dictates. 

Death In The Cornfields

When I first started running for the kids, it was during the summer when my nephew (who plays Tijitsu) would come and stay with us for a week or two. So I was sometimes running for a couple consecutive days and scrambling to keep up with enough material. This "hey, let's play D&D for a week" was a new thing and I wasn't really prepared. I wasn't running online yet (which would have helped), so I was scouring Firefly and the internet just to keep up with the demand. 

So one of the things I picked up was Death In The Cornfields, which I was able to download. It's a short side quest, and isn't really enough material for an entire session by itself, but it makes for an interesting side adventure. 

It's basically a bleak, rural village where the characters end up stumbling upon a tragic situation where a family must deal with their belief that their son will become a vampire. 

Honestly, when I first looked it over, I wondered what I was missing. There wasn't much to it. It was basically a rather contrived short story and there's not much for the players to do other than observe the events unfolding. 

Don't get me wrong, it's still more interesting for what I'd call an "overnight encounter" than, say, your basic "players are set upon by giant spiders while they are trying to sleep" scenario. But only barely. And the story is just sort of pointlessly depressing. So to be honest, when I got finished with messing around with it, it wasn't the same adventure. 

My players are very much into hands-on stuff in their games. So instead of just presenting the events as written, I re-wrote the story and the objective. 

Upon reflection, I didn't need the module for this. I guess it just jump-started the idea. 

Anyway, so the "vampire" had been cursed and the way to remove this curse and save him and the village was to find three artifacts that had been lost. I don't remember what the artifacts were, but it doesn't matter. I wrote a series of rhyming riddle verses to hit at where the artifacts might be hidden. Then I went out in the backyard and hid actual items in the areas the riddles referenced. 

One was hidden in the edge of the woods, where they encountered twig blights and had to fight them (we went back inside for the combat rounds). One was hidden in a large bush of lavender growing in my herb garden. And one was in a "broken down, abandoned Gurrish caravan" (yeah, no kidding, I have the base of a dismantled Romany style vardo in my yard). So the kids spent some time hunting in real time for the artifacts. They found them, participated in the cleansing ritual, and saved the boy and the village. 

Which was a heck of a lot more fun and less depressing then the story as written. 

So I guess this post is less about Death In The Cornfields and more about homebrewing a quick sidequest on the fly. 

The Riverport Rebels Stop A Coup

Dungeon Masters have to wing it.

I don't care how much you plan ahead. You will end up winging it at some point. At many points.

Back in the Bad Old Days, modules had to be hand-keyed. Old school D&D

modules consisted of a simple, gridded map and an incomplete key, which had to be filled out by the DM. You had to add monsters and treasure to your rooms.

Because I was so strapped for time the first time I ran for the kids, I actually ran off an old key I wrote back when I was something like 15 years old, and half the stuff in there I only remembered it when I was actually running the module. Which meant that one of those monster encounters consisted of a forgotten human berserker lurking inexplicably in one of the rooms.

I mean...it's a different time, right? They're not gonna just murder-hobo the guy. So they struck up a conversation with him, which meant I had to come up on the fly with a reason a lone human man might be hanging out in a monster-filled labyrinth.

So the story I came up with in that moment was that he was Rolf Larsson, a former soldier from Riverport who had had to go into hiding because he had been framed as the mastermind behind a coup attempt within the Duke's militia and they were looking to hang him on trumped up charges.

Why I went there, I have no idea. I opened my mouth and that came out.

My daughter and husband have always loved mysteries and intrigue, and all three of them enjoy role playing and figuring things out. So they insisted on pursuing that story line.

I had to stop and level with them. I said, "I don't have a story for that fleshed out. But if you give me till next time we play, I will have you a mystery to solve surrounding this plot line.

So that session, they went ahead and explored the rest of the module and by the
next session, they rooted out an elaborate plot by a bad faction of the militia, rescued the Duke, gained intel from the Bad Guys, and joined forces with the Captain Mercutio of the Riverport militia to splinter and defeat the threat to the town.

By now, the Rebels had made a bit of a name for themselves in the city, and had
gained the trust and regard of the Duke himself (and maybe more importantly, the Duke's steward, Regus), so they hired the Rebels as a special unit the Duke relied on to take care of special cases. He put them up in some apartments on his estate and that'show the Riverport Rebels became Duke Orsino's special task force.

So to translate, the newspaper says "The Duke was going out of town with three guards, and two random people jumped out of the bushes wearing armor and deadly weapons. When this happened, two of the three guards attacked Captain Mercutio, but luckily three people (Sir Peter, Stephanie, and Taijitsu) fought the ambushers and defeated them.   Captain Mercutio was hurt, but survived. The Duke rewarded Sir Peter, Stephanie, and Taijitsu with Rolf's freedom."

The Brain Gorger's Appetite

 The Brain Gorger's Appetite is one of my favorites. It has a lot of different beats to it, a fun, intriguing story, and some real humor. All my players are real role players, so that made this one even more awesome, as there is plenty of opportunity for that. 

I will echo other reviewers in that the given hook is a little contrived, but if you are a DM, just tweak it to fit your campaign. The Rebels were already known to the Duke Orsino of Daggerford (Daggerford is called Riverport colloquially in my campaigns) and his steward, Regus. In fact, they live in apartments in his manor and do special assignments for the Dukedom (sort of a Rat Queens premise). So it was simple enough for Regus to approach them with the news that the "Duke is acting weirder than usual and I'm worried." (my nephew was actually pretty surprised to learn that all I really did was change some names in the module to make it fit our setting. It fit absolutely seamlessly into our campaign. )

When the Class of '81 ran it, it was a little trickier, but it is in their best interest to make sure the town is safe, for several reasons, so with the help of Captain Mercutio of the town's militia, they were able to infiltrate various posts within the Duke's household. We made it work. It helped that three of the party members are in a band (Tifinin, Sorrow, and Ivar).

There are several black and white maps, wonderful black and white drawings, and a color map of a copper mine. 

SPOILERS AHEAD

The players have to negotiate an attempted hit on the Duke's sister via a jewelry box mimic, political intrigue, and a series of clues suggesting that a criminal faction is involved. The string of clues take the players to a criminal headquarters in a foundry, a copper mine, and a manor house containing a doppelganger and gang members, and a later attempted hit on the party by a gang of thugs.  

The Rebels killed the thugs at the foundry and set them up to look like they'd gotten into a fight over a card game and killed each other. They also wrote "Devos is coming" on the wall in blood. There is no Devos. But now the criminal factions in Daggerford are more than a little on edge because they don't know who Devos is. These kids are savages. 

This module gets extra points for scaring the bejeebus out of any player that realizes 1. what a mind flayer is and 2. The fact that low level characters don't stand a snowball's chance in hell against one. But what they don't know is that the thing is so out of its mind high when they encounter it that it's not nearly as dangerous. Still, that is a hard boss fight. The thing has allies. And the Class almost lost their rogue, Boz, in that fight. 

The punchline of all this is that it was all an elaborate and dangerous drug cartel running deals out of Daggerford. The "brain gorger" (it's a mind flayer, lets be real) had gone nuts with addiction. 

Grinda today

At the copper mine, there is a kobold guard that is being bullied by the other kobolds for not being tough enough. Macterah, a member of the Class, could not abide this and was very, very kind to the kobold. In fact, she couldn't stop thinking about him, and the next morning, announced that she would return to the mine to retrieve him from his situation. What she didn't know was that the kobold had followed the party back to their ship and stowed away on board. So he was in the hold when they returned after not being able to find him. And that's how Grinda the Crying Kobold became a permanent part of the Class of '81 campaign. 

Return to The Class of '81

Adventures To Date

In Search of the Unknown

The Riverport Rebels Foil A Coup

The Tomb of Crossed Words

The Brain Gorger's Appetite

Death in the Cornfields

The Pillars of Pelagia

The Fey Sister's Fate

The Ghosts of Saltmarsh: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

Underworld Speculation

Heist

Scourge of the Sword Coast: Introduction

Against the Cult of the Reptile God

White Plume Mountain

Islands of Plunder #1: Spices and Flesh