Saturday’s.

Well the inaugural D&D 5th Edition campaign for the Marauders have come to an end. Overall I had a ton of fun. I wanted to share some insight and behind the scenes details for posterity and to examine the new model. When we started we had been Pathfindering for 6 YEARS, and were pretty used to the formula: the Sunday group played the Adventure Path because they could game each week and the Saturday group got the adventures that took you all over the planet with amazing one-shots. Well, WotC is doing something similar so I moved to just run the free ”Adventurer’s League” one-shots dealing with the Cult of the Dragon. They were set in Phlan on the Moonsea, and I moved them to Neverwinter (because I really like what they had done with the city). We started playing D&D the month the rulebooks came out, and by end of the year the group proved to be more active and invested than before. I attribute this to three things: 1) Having a home base of operations where everyone got to gradually know the city. 2) Steve’s Journal which with a 5 minute read let anyone catch up to what was going on, and 3) folks sharing pictures and comments in the group’s Facebook page for all to see. The fact that the same NPCs kept showing up and even when skipping a game they were interesting enough that folks would still interact with their favorites. Things got really cool when Seth decided to have his evil character start dicking around with the group that led to paranoia, conspiracy theories and interwoven plot complications like never before. And they loved him for it. It gave me something new to add to the stories we told and expand on. By the end of the year it also became clear how really cool WotC’s new “Adventure Path” hardcover adventures are. Basically, they’re supplemental material, new monsters and items, and chapters which are each adventures in themselves. While they are all linked in a common story, they were also written as individual missions. This changed everything! I couldn’t do that with Pathfinder and the Saturday model. This makes these adventures all the easier to insert, so I swiftly moved to let you play out the two first adventures Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat.And as usual I found most of the on-line complaints about the Tyranny of Dragons books completely unfounded. Folks completely lost their minds if the cartographer mislabeled a secret door on a map or when they decided not to include details of every settlement along the path. The encounter locations were great, the monsters were brutal and fun and the villains memorable. Something else also happened. There wasn’t the slightest hint of any real burnout because the game prep had literally dropped by nearly 75% or more. Sometimes I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do after spending a half hour reading the weekly adventure, gathering a few minis, printing out a few stat blocks and then, wow, done! So I spent it working with the players and developing more of a cohesive story. I wrote Neverwinter Looking Glass newsletters to be used in game to provide clues, updates and political happenings. I recall fondly one night I was staying overnight at a jobsite in my hotel not being able to answer emails fast enough for over an hour. By the time I wrote someone back, two more had popped in!Finally, the new game allowed you all to spend more time thinking about what your characters were going to do within the story and get involved instead of making cheat-sheets of rules, figuring out your suite of new powers and magic items, and spending an average of 5 minutes when leveling up. The end result is this was one really great game. Thanks all for playing it out! Now, time to look into those endless abyss…