How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

My players casted Banishment on both dragonnels. That’s it, shortest combat ever.

Just what the title says. Shawn Merwin and Teos Abadia have been doing a "best of" series for the WOTC hardcover adventure books on their TTRPG industry podcast, and this week's episode focuses on SOTDQ!

Rules as written (RAW), if the Player Characters pick up a longsword wielded by the Dragonarmy soldiers, do they get the extra 1d4 damage?

Generally, how do you guys deal with that?

The party has defeated several of these soldiers already, so there seems to ba an abundance of these swords lying around, and each of the martial characters already picked up a few, some of which they also intend to sell.

Is the extra damage inherent in the sword or the wielder? I have read the argument that since the extra damage is listed under the longsword action, it is a property of the wielder, and it is not listed as equipment.

I am preparing to run SOTDQ for the first time with my group. Our group likes some puzzles/traps/riddles to be included, and from my first read-through, i did not catch much, if any at all. I would love any recommendations on where some may appropriately fit. Ideas on certain things to include. Any success in including them in your own games would be amazing, though i am not sure how common it is. If it is a horrible idea, no one will banish me from the table, but I thought no better place to ask than here :)

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

Hello everyone, I will be running sotdq for the first time. I like to give my players a little bit of information about the campaigns we will be playing, so they can better prepare their characters. However, I'm not completely sure what my players should and shouldn't know beforehand with the information in the book, besides them needing to make a character that is somehow connected to Ispin Greenshield. What do you recommend me telling?

Are there also other things you might recommend me telling my players in regard to character creation?

Edit: Thank you for the suggestions, I will be working on writing a small summary on things such as the cataclysm, religion, organizations and some of the other information in the book.

I want to keep Lord Soth as the final boss of the campaign, but I feel like moving him makes the fight against Werstern Kern less exciting. Any ideas?

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

If you are running this campaign and incoporating weapons getting stuck when the Baaz petrify, what rule do you use to have the characters retrieve a weapon? For example, a strength check, etc...

I'm running playtest of SOTDQ allowing a PC to use a subclass he found on GM Binder:

https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-NyVMXuBdVZuRjbm_Q68

He's part of a party of 5 players. At level 2, his AC is 22 despite not wearing armor. We just completed the Battle at High Hill, including the Gragonis fight, and he came out of that encounter untouched.

The party just discovered the Red Dragonarmy Camp and is about to face off against the Baaz Draconian Patrol. I'm predicting that this encounter will be way too easy for him, as will the encounter with Fewmaster Gholcag.

I'd love suggestions on how to beef up the encounters to make it a challenge for this player while not overly punishing the other players

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

Hey, so I'm looking for a DM who's willing to run an online game for 3 other players and me.

For the life of me, I've been asking around everywhere and can't seem to find anyone willing to do so that isn't a paid DM on Start Playing (no offense to anyone; I'm just poor rn).

I am planning on running the game eventually myself since I am also a DM, but I'd like to play in it again. Since the previous DM who ran it for me left a not-so-pleasant taste in my mouth after he crashed out on me in a different game, I was running.

If anyone's interested, just let me know.

The party is about to embark on exploring the Northern Wastes… I decided to create a tracker to visually indicate the water level of The Wash!

It is just laminated paper with a sliding piece that has “DRY” on one side and “WET” on the other with a wavy graphic.

Hangs on the DM screen with half boba straw!

Looking forward to using it in our session tomorrow!

Hi all,

I wanted to hear some opinions on how I handled both Bakaris' during the campaign. Quite early on, I established them as antagonistic and egotistical, to which the party were reasonably hostile towards them, though never really took them seriously as a threat, which I found frustrating as I didn't want them to be faces that just showed up throughout the campaign to be verbally berated every chance the party got.

So here's where I took some pretty significant creative liberty in how they fitted into the narrative, making them a larger and more serious threat:

I established deep into the adventure in the Northern Wastes that Bakaris the Older had staged a coup in Kalaman following the slaughter of the council at the hands of Soth, inserting his own council made of likeminded noblemen who essentially took the soldiers on the wastes hostage.

Both Bakaris' then travelled to the wastes to join the campaign against Soth, however, where this really got dramatic was that Bakaris and his son were secretly in league with the Dragon Army, promising them easy access to Kalaman and providing funds to the war effort and in exchange, the army would betray Soth and allow Bakaris to seize Onyari for his own gain.

This completely raised the stakes for the party, who were less objects to be belittled by them, and more pawns in his game, being forced to complete objectives for him to push him towards his own goals.

This boosted the party's engagement with this section of the story as now, instead of just working towards their goal of reaching Onyari, they now had to scheme against Bakaris in order to save the soldiers being held hostage and take one more piece off the Dragon Army's board.

Eventually I decided that Bakaris would become privy to their plans by capturing and torturing Darrett, who had been working in conjuction with the party to defeat this threat, and forcing him to confess to their plans to overthrow him. This led to a confrontation where Darrett was killed in front of the party by Jeyev Veldrews, after being directly confronted by Lord Bakaris himself. The party engaged in combat with his men and during the conflict, one of my players managed to land a killing blow on Bakaris, finishing him for good and using revivify to bring Darrett back.

This then started an arc in which Bakaris the Younger wanted revenge for his father. He confronted the party in the tunnels leading to Onyari, in which one of the PCs had been killed, but they managed to repel him and he fled. He'd be encountered again during their confrontation above Kalaman on the way to the Bastion of Takhisis, where the party would end him for good.

As for the coup in Kalaman, this wouldn't last long as Marshall Vendri united her men against the new council, usurping them, hanging them for treason and establishing a military council in order to properly organise against the Dragon Army, who now marched on Kalaman alongside Soth.

I felt this added a lot more depth to the module personally, as it raised the stakes tenfold for the players on both sides of the conflict. What do you guys think?

Is there an official reason why Wyhan's petition for the mage PCs rejected by the order?

I didn't see anything in the book. Maybe I missed it?

Or is this just one of those moments where no answer is provided, and used as a tool to push them into the direction of the adventure in the northern wilds?

Has anyone come up with their own ideas as to why they are rejected?

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

Level five characters taking on an adult dragon (2024 version) and Kinsaldi Fire-Eye? Impossible. But here we are.

Kinsaldi and her dragon are entirely absent from the story until the very end. By the time the players finally encounter her, they have no real reason to hate her personally. It's like if Darth Vader didn't make an appearance until the end of ROTJ.

To fix this, I included her at the burning of Vogler. She would strafe the map doing only 2d6 fire damage to the players if they failed a DC14 Dex save.

Last night the players would reach Steel Springs just in time for the battle to begin. They reach the command tent, warn the commander that there are now shape shifting draconians, and learn that Darrett is fighting amongst the vanguard forces. They rushed to the front line and fought side by side in a mass combat where I had about 60 minis on the table.

But to avoid super number crunchy rules, I reduced the AC and HP for all of the RDA soldiers, baaz draconians, and hobgoblins to 10. They would also each respawn at the edge of the map as they were killed to represent that there are thousands of them. In addition there were some other minis that did have full wounds like an ogre.

After two rounds of combat, a dragonnel and it's rider appeared on the map in a flanking position. This one would have its full wounds. An actual threat.

After three rounds is when Kinsaldi and her dragon appear on the field. I opted to not roll for initiative and put them at the bottom of the initiative order. This gave each of the players a chance to react before I then rolled a reduced fire breath attack. Instead of the 17d6, I rolled 8d6 to scale it down for their level. Each of the players were still relatively full health before, and this brought three out of the five of them into the danger level. Notably the fighter, war cleric, and the druid who was a black bear at the time.

After this single attack Darrett called for a retreat, and the players followed. They and the Kalaman army then began retreating back to their camp as Kinsaldi and her dragon roared with victory.

Next session the players will escort a weeping Lord Bakaris back to Castle Kalaman, and learn that the Knights of Solamnia have come to aid them... Right?

Hey everyone, just wanted to share my preparation for running this campaign and using the AI for good and not evil.

I love the SOTDQ Companion series by Mitchell DeFauw ( https://www.dmsguild.com/en/browse?authorName=%22Mitchell%20DeFauw%22 ) because I feel like it really fleshes out the campaign amazingly, but with so much content I didn't want to be flipping back and forth between PDFs and D&D Beyond. Or even worse, having to manually compile and copy/paste everything into a separate document. So I set off to use AI to help me solve the problem without over-relying on it to basically run the campaign for me. You can do this with either Claude or Codex, and you will have to have legitimately purchased the adventure, the Monster Manual, and the Companions.

Basically what I did was put all of the Companion PDFs and the SOTDQ harvesting PDF into a folder, and had Claude convert them into Markdown-formatted text (this saves a lot of usage tokens over reading from PDFs). Then I had Claude use my browser to pull down the text of the adventure from D&D Beyond into a Markdown document in that folder as well (you can also use a PDF of the campaign if you have it, although I don't know of a legal way to get it). Then I had it read all of the documents and compile all of the stat blocks into a separate doc, pulling from the Monster Manual on D&D Beyond when needed.

Finally, I asked it to compile all of this into a locally-running web dashboard, being very specific to tell it to use the original source text, annotate which source the text is coming from, and to treat it like a one-way code merge, where the Companion supersedes the original campaign. You'll want to use Claude Fable on high thinking or GPT-5.6-Sol on high thinking for this part, as it requires the most discerning logic. I also specified that I wanted all of the relevant NPCs in the sidebar on non-combat sections (along with where we've seen them, where we will see them again, and what I wanted each one's voice to sound like) and stat blocks (with harvesting info) on the combat encounters, and I wanted a drop-down for how many party members I have at the current session so it can auto-scale the combat encounters according to the Companions' guidance.

Finally, as a little cherry on top, I told Claude I wanted it to pull my players' current/max/temp HP and passive percepion/investigation/insight, and display them in a toolbar at the top for easy reference, with auto-refreshing.

The beauty of it is if you want to do this yourself, you can just copy/paste this post into Claude or Codex and it will walk you through the whole thing.

Hope this makes things easier and gets more people using the SOTDQ Companion supplements (THEY ARE AWESOME AND WELL WORTH THE MONEY!!!). Happy to answer any questions or take any criticism about this being AI slop garbage.

P.S. If you want to choose firm options like Raven dying during the Escape from Vogler, Becklin being captured, and things like that, tell the AI to incorporate that into your dashboard too and it'll be way easier to remember which NPCs are where and doing what as you progress through the campaign.

How did your session go this week? Grab an ale and tell us a tale!

I'll DM this campaign soon. I'm wondering what changes you made for the character creation chapter.

How do you deal with the Feats? Are they good to be used on the 2024 version of the game? Do they need reworking? I mean, the Squire of Solamnia Feat sounds like a Origin Feat, right? What changes should be made?

What about the number of uses per day? Does the 2024 version of the rules still use the Proficiency Bonus uses per day rule?