In our previous installments, I introduced us to one of my all-time favorite adventure modules, The Red Hand of Doom, and walked us up through the battle at Vraath Keep. Today, we’re finishing Chapter 1 of the adventure, through the Day of Doom at Drellin’s Ferry. I’m going section-by-section; as always, if you have the book or the PDF, you can follow along pretty closely. And, if you’re an extremely cool person who is reading or listening to The Chaotic Neutral Chronicles, this writeup takes us through the plot of Episode 030: The Battle of Tanner’s Crossing.
The Giant and the Bridge
En route to Skull Gorge Bridge, the party has the opportunity to discover Old Warklegnaw, the last of the giants in these woods. I found this to be an absolute wildcard encounter. Some groups will attack on sight. Hard to break adventurers of the giant-killing habit. But hopefully your players will try to enlist Old Warky’s aid, and this is where your campaign vibe will determine entirely what happens next. In mine, the party got Old Warky to help them destroy Skull Gorge Bridge, something they had already set their minds to doing. The adventure sidebar suggests he can go seek out his kin in the foothills and get them to help against the Red Hand.
Think carefully about how to keep Old Warky from upstaging the party. You don’t want him to become your DMPC, stomping his way through the encounters in the rest of the adventure. You know your group best, and you can zig where they zag, but I’d recommend one of the following:
- Warky vanishes into the foothills, and the horde is weakened somehow by his offscreen antics.
- Warky helps them at Skull Gorge, but insists on staying in the forest to defend his ancestral home.
- Warky becomes deranged at the sight of goblins and goes into a frenzied rage, wreaking havoc on the battlefield in a most unhelpful manner.
“Victory” with Old Warky, for the party, should come in the form of some sort of advantage gained against the horde. The adventure suggests delaying the horde two days.
From here, the party should reach Skull Gorge Bridge. This is a terrific encounter with a lot going on – terrain, varied foes, non-combat objectives, the whole nine yards. Skull Gorge Bridge is an opportunity to both give the party a thrilling victory over a nasty foe and suggest the sheer might of the horde approaching the Vale. Most parties worth their salt will be interested in taking down the bridge itself, and the adventure has plenty of notes on how they might attempt such an undertaking.
The key here is how to force the party to action. The soldiers aren’t stupid – they’re not going to be lured into the woods or away from the bridge. The green dragon is definitely not stupid. It’s worth using whatever intel the party gained at Vraath Keep to emphasize the time pressure as well: the horde will arrive soon if they don’t do something. Above all else, focus in on why your party went to the Bridge. Are they here to gather intel and sneak off? I would make the hobgoblins, hell hounds, and/or dragon more likely to be patrolling the nearby woods, making combat more likely. Are they here to destroy the bridge? Make it clear from the sound of distant war drums that they have to act fast.
Ozzyrandion, as written, is a challenge in 3.5e. In fifth edition, as a Young Green Dragon, Ozzy alone is CR 8, and that’s without any of the potions this adventure gives him, let alone the platoon of hobgoblins. Consider how to balance that for your party. As a green dragon, he should be cunning and treacherous – maybe he has beef with the hobgoblin sergeant, and wants to let the hobgoblins get bloodied before he enters the fray. Or maybe he orders them to stay back, because he wants these kills himself. Whatever it is, you can find some opportunities to roleplay Ozzyrandion and tweak the challenge level of the encounter.
Following Skull Gorge, the PCs might continue on to Cinder Hill, as noted in the adventure. This is a wonderful chance for you to convey the threat level. Don’t skimp. Make it clear: they’re screwed if they get too cocky. The “what now” sidebar suggests some possible options for how to handle spunky players trying to infiltrate the horde or ambush some patrols.
Runup to the Day of Doom
Ah, one of my favorite parts of the adventure. This has it all: creative little combat encounters, character-heavy roleplay, and the day-tracking and circumstance-bonus-social-rolls that run a lot of Red Hand of Doom.
While the adventure text notes that the best option is to simply evacuate the town and flee, I think most parties will choose to bloody the horde a little before leaving, giving you a chance to run the Massacre at Drellin’s Ferry section.
You get to play with optional encounters here, which is always fun – I like the Goblin Raid encounter, and the suggestions in the sidebar to mix up the ranks of the raiding parties to keep it spicy. The chimera attack is good clean fun. If you run a lot of these, you may find that bullheaded parties hell-bent on fighting the horde might change their tune. Potions of Healing shouldn’t come cheap out here.
One challenge in this section is the number of NPCs with opinions…and how few of those NPCs ever come up in the adventure text again. There’s good opportunity here to make a memorable character for the party to continually bounce off. Roll with whoever your party focuses on. If for some reason they really take a shine to Kellin Shadowbanks, find a role for him down the line during the siege of Brindol, or during some other random encounter during the war.
This section has that special sauce that makes RHOD stand out for me in general: a lot of wiggle room for your party to get up to mischief/have unique encounters/etc while still staying on the general narrative. A marching horde is a wonderful storytelling tool, and you can drive the party before you with the threat of the oncoming horde.
In my campaign, the Massacre at Drellin’s Ferry was a noble stand, albeit still a loss for the party. Be careful with this one. It’s the kind of encounter that can easily spiral into a TPK – intentionally so! They should’ve run away days ago! Even if you have to stretch plausibility a little: as soon as the party looks ready to run, give them an out. A soldier calling for a retreat, the hobgoblins taking a long time to get the next raft in the water, whatever it is – give the party some narrative options to cut and run.
If they stubbornly die here: RHOD was always going to be hard for them.
Finally: this section of the adventure provides two options for giving them the hook to check out the Rhest Trail. The first option is a soldier from Brindol arriving with news of the blockade on the road; the second comes during the “The PCs’ Next Move” section at the end of the chapter. Something I love about this adventure is the little “here’s what they should have learned” bullet point list at the end of the chapter; as a DM, it’s a gift from the heavens to know exactly what you need to convey to the players. How they learn these things can be up to you, but they need to understand
- The threat of the horde.
- There’s a plot hook north, in the ruined city of Rhest, along the Rhest Trail road.
This’ll pull them nicely along into the story…although, as we’ll see in Part 4, there’s plenty of meandering available if that’s your party’s tendency.
That’s all for now! I’ll be posting the rest of these in time, but my plan is to have them come out when the article content matches the story content in The Chronicles. So keep those wits about you…Part 4 is coming eventually.
The Chaotic Neutral Chronicles 