I spent a lot of yesterday converting stats to run this classic adventure for my FLGS group of players. A couple of them will be playing the Phandelver adventure on a different night so I needed something else to use for our 5E game. I learned quite a bit about the various classes by writing up the NPCs.
Rufus as a battlemaster fighter is not to be fucked with. :)
Once I had an NPC of a particular class done up it was really easy to use as a template for others of that class just tweaking stats & adjusting for level differences.
Doing a straight conversion of the moathouse I realized the place was an absolute death sentence without a large party and possibly some henchmen, much as I remember it from 1E.
I plan on adding some other adventure locations and quests from the village so that the players can level up a bit before hitting that moathouse. I have some ideas for things to include but I would like to see if anyone has any fresh ideas on adventures for 1st level characters based in Hommlet.
Groovy. My home-brewed 5E campaign is a medium-sized sandbox that includes Village of Hommlet — arguably one of the more classic, atmospheric 1E modules. Honestly, my main struggle at this point is not coming off as a total fan-boy dweeb for this game; it is just a really sweet fit with these old dungeons, while providing tons of grist for the imagination wheel when it comes to defining and playing characters.
I'm currently running T1-4 for one of my 5e groups.
I agree that the moathouse is a bit of a deathtrap for first level characters, so I had them do B1 first. That got them to level 2, and then we started T1-4 proper.
Clearing out the upper level and half the lower level (they parleyed with the bugbears persuading them to leave rather than fight to the death, and then killed half the gnolls before offering the remainder a chance to flee too) got them to level 3.
They were then in a good position to be able to kill the humans down there and Lareth the Beautiful.
Travelling to Nulb, they met up with Mother Screng and managed to do some investigation and discover that there was a messenger taking information about them to a spy back in Hommlet. Managing to catch up with the messenger, they captured him and he revealed the identity of the Hommlet spies - so the PCs took the info to Rufus and Burne who quickly gathered a posse and arrested them.
The spies gave them information about the bandits in the tower and their secret passage that connects with the main temple and an exit, so the PCs went under the tower and ambushed Sigmar and Falrinth - finding the Orb of Golden Death.
On their way back, they attacked the bandits from underneath while they were busy feasting - and wiped them out, getting to level 4 in the process.
Since then they've made two forays into the temple itself. The first was through Falrinth and Sigmar's secret entrance, but they quickly realised they were massively out of their depth and retreated. The second was into the temple itself and they've just finished exploring the surface temple and descended to the first level.
Last time I ran T1-4 was a few years ago with AD&D. We did do some other adventures besides going right to the moathouse, but those were pretty specific to the PC's backgrounds (one was part of a circus for example) so I don't think those examples will help you much.
I'd be interested in seeing how it runs with a straight conversion though.
One thing I'm appreciating about the conversion of old pastel modules to 5E is that they are hard. PC's have more buffers to keep them off the mortician's slab than in 1E, but it is actually kind of difficult to find your way through even some of the low level dungeons without getting killed. Same goes for Mines of Phandelver - if the DM runs this straight (no wussing out, like having the dragon neglect to use his breath weapon or something) PC's can get killed really easily.
Definitely interested to hear how the moathouse goes, and the 5e conversion effort in general.
Going to run the first session tonight. I will be posting play reports. :)
My group have explored some more of the temple. I was very impressed how easy 5e made it to DM a running battle involving a sniper, a group of PCs and two different groups of monsters all in the Theatre of the Mind without a miniature hitting the table and without anyone getting confused. It was tense and exciting, and more importantly it all went along zippily. We managed three fights (including that big one) in a single afternoon session with various bits of exploring between them.
The PCs have now bugged out and hidden outside the temple so that they can get a night's rest and recover their abilities and spells. However, they're (rightly) worried that their last foray into the temple was a bit blatant and that they've now lost the element of surprise.
Oh - and the party fighter (a Dragonborn Champion Great Weapon Fighter) is an absolute terror on the battlefield. The people saying that fighters (and champions in particular) are useless obviously haven't seen them in action in "real" situations.
Last night was spent finishing character creation and getting a character made for the one guy in the group that rarely if ever, goes online due to shitty dialup.
After that was finished we got a chance to do some introduction stuff in the village, talk to a passing farmer about local rumors, check out the notice boards out front of the inn, and have a bit of lunch at The Welcome Wench.
The party:
Doober- mountain dwarf warlock
Courage- human paladin
Tarhun Turnuroth- dragonborn ranger (gold ancestry)
Therlynn Soldshort- lighfoot halfling rogue
Bran – human fighter
It was afternoon and the place wasn't that crowded. Doober spooted a nervous looking man sitting at the bar alone so he went over and struck up a conversation. The man introduced himself as Spugnoir, master of the arcane arts. Meanwhile the halfling crept on the fellow while the dwarf had his attention. She lifted his coin purse and thats where we ended the session.
We should have time to get in some actual adventuring next week.
Quote from: Exploderwizard;784639Last night was spent finishing character creation and getting a character made for the one guy in the group that rarely if ever, goes online due to shitty dialup.
After that was finished we got a chance to do some introduction stuff in the village, talk to a passing farmer about local rumors, check out the notice boards out front of the inn, and have a bit of lunch at The Welcome Wench.
The party:
Doober- mountain dwarf warlock
Courage- human paladin
Tarhun Turnuroth- dragonborn ranger (gold ancestry)
Therlynn Soldshort- lighfoot halfling rogue
Bran – human fighter
It was afternoon and the place wasn't that crowded. Doober spooted a nervous looking man sitting at the bar alone so he went over and struck up a conversation. The man introduced himself as Spugnoir, master of the arcane arts. Meanwhile the halfling crept on the fellow while the dwarf had his attention. She lifted his coin purse and thats where we ended the session.
We should have time to get in some actual adventuring next week.
Sadly I couldn't make it... At least they didn't need a Cleric.
Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;782628I'm currently running T1-4 for one of my 5e groups.
I agree that the moathouse is a bit of a deathtrap for first level characters, so I had them do B1 first. That got them to level 2, and then we started T1-4 proper.
Clearing out the upper level and half the lower level (they parleyed with the bugbears persuading them to leave rather than fight to the death, and then killed half the gnolls before offering the remainder a chance to flee too) got them to level 3.
They were then in a good position to be able to kill the humans down there and Lareth the Beautiful.
Travelling to Nulb, they met up with Mother Screng and managed to do some investigation and discover that there was a messenger taking information about them to a spy back in Hommlet. Managing to catch up with the messenger, they captured him and he revealed the identity of the Hommlet spies - so the PCs took the info to Rufus and Burne who quickly gathered a posse and arrested them.
The spies gave them information about the bandits in the tower and their secret passage that connects with the main temple and an exit, so the PCs went under the tower and ambushed Sigmar and Falrinth - finding the Orb of Golden Death.
On their way back, they attacked the bandits from underneath while they were busy feasting - and wiped them out, getting to level 4 in the process.
Since then they've made two forays into the temple itself. The first was through Falrinth and Sigmar's secret entrance, but they quickly realised they were massively out of their depth and retreated. The second was into the temple itself and they've just finished exploring the surface temple and descended to the first level.
Good tip on running B1 first. Also, thanks ya'all for this thread, I'll be checking it out for info to steal so I can run my kids through Village after we finish learning the game using the intro box set.
Session #2 was last night, our first full session of play!
The PCs visited the village elder, the druid, and Burne; the most worshipful mage of Hommlet, to get more information about the quests that they found on the notice board at the inn.
The Halfling rogue was convinced that the bounty on wolf pelts meant that the area was overrun with werewolves and asked EVERYONE about acquiring silver weapons.
Before heading out of town, the group stopped by the Temple of Cuthbert for a visit. There they met a visiting cleric of Kord who wished to join them on their quests (a new player deposits a quarter in the campaign coin slot)
WELCOME CLERIC!
Now with 6 members the party heads east to investigate reports of children going missing from some of the outlying farms. They visit the farmsteads, interview the families and gather enough information to lead them to a patch of forest east of the farms.
[ for this portion of the adventure I borrowed a monster from Pete Spahn's excellent adventure- The Stealer of Children. It was fun watching the players actually be puzzled and a bit unsure of what they were facing :D ]
The forest was quiet and the ranger noted that it was also devoid of normal wildlife. The party made their way to the far side of a large hill to discover a cave entrance partially hidden by bushes & vines. A few tracks showed the passage of a bipedal creature with four toes and long toenails. The party established a marching order, the cleric cast light on the paladin's sword, and into the tunnel they went.
The party followed the tracks into a larger cave with a stream running through it and several passages to choose from. They chose to remain on the trail with the most traffic and follow the footprints to the northeast. As the cave narrowed to 15 feet across before widening back up, the party began to smell an awful stench coming from somewhere ahead. Some babbling grunting noises were also heard.
The party formed a skirmish line in front of the narrow 15 foot gap leading to the streambed cave. Into their light a horrid little gnomelike creature came charging at them. They unleashed a volley of missile fire and the warlock hit it with an eldritch blast. The creature seemed to be shrugging off a good portion of the weapon damage it was sustaining and launched two vicious strikes at the paladin with its oversized fists......
.....and I rolled like crap. I do my combat rolls in the open so the pally breathed a sigh of relief. A short time later more weapon attacks and a devastating casting of guiding bolt from the cleric (gotta love radiant vulnerability!!) put the nasty bugger down for the count.
Thus the PCs were introduced to the horror that is a gromble. :)
The shop was closing so we ended the session there. They will get the kewl loot next session!
Well, my group re-entered the temple - and discovered that their worries about having lost the element of surprise were well founded.
The temple hierarchy already knew about the PCs from their previous forays and from information gathered from Hommlet spies. So the wiping out of half the temple guards in their last expedition was the final straw for them, and they laid a trap.
The party have just hit fifth level, and they entered the first level of the dungeons under the temple again. Unfortunately, this triggered a silent Alarm spell that had been left there by the people from the Greater Temple in case they returned. I was wondering how this would play out when the party played straight into the hands of the temple by going into the area with the harpies and ghouls.
They easily defeated the harpies and ghouls of course, but when the fight ended and they looked back to the portcullis that was trapping them they saw that the only exit was blocked by some hill giants.
I made sure that Hedrack told the giants to "take them alive" in a loud voice, as a kind of meta-game reassurance to the players that although this might be an unwinnable fight which they couldn't avoid (they were stuck in a dead end) it wasn't going to kill them and it might serve them to save some resources like uncast spells for a later escape attempt. They took the hint and a couple of them even went down feigning unconsciousness while they were still awake in case they could memorise the route that they were going to be carried to wherever they would be imprisoned.
Of course, the temple didn't imprison them at all but simply threw them into the Nodes as a sacrifice.
So now the party have explored part of the Air node and made friends with Jaes and Darley. And we finished just after they'd gone to the water node to see Ashrem - because Jaes knows that Ashrem has some way of controlling the teleporters...
Session #3 was last Tuesday.
The players of the warlock, cleric, and human fighter didn't make the game. There was a new player who joined us. The character is a gnome wizard. More about her in a bit.
So, after marching a long days travel to the village, checking out available quests, heading to the eastern farms to investigate things, staying up all night on watch, and then exploring the lair of a monster and slaying it I had everyone make a DC 10 CON save or suffer one level of exhaustion.
Of the three players who were present, only the paladin succeeded on the save. Although very weary, the party decided to check out the rotten smell coming from the chamber to the north. They shined their light into the foul smelling place to discover four child sized lumps on the cavern floor each crawling with movement of some sort.
Getting closer they discovered that the bodies were covered with swarms of rats! The 3 brave PCs moved in to recover the bodies of the victims. It was a REALLY tough fight. They battled the swarms in groups of two, but with only one character not at disadvantage on attack rolls, it was a close call. The rogue got dropped to 0 hp, and the pally used lay on hands to get him back up. A short time later the pally got dropped and was at a full 2/2 count on death checks before making the final one. As usual, I made all attack & damage rolls in the open. The ranger was also wounded but didn't go down.
As beat up and exhausted as they were, it was decided that the best course of action was to bring the bodies back to their parents and get some rest. On their way back to the farm the party encountered an unkempt rather smelly gnome wizard who introduced herself as Bedbug. They chatted a bit, returned to the farms to give the grieving parents the bad news and some closure, were fed a hot meal and took a long rest in a barn.
Not being tired as were the rest of the party, Bedbug continued on into the village taking a look around, visiting the mage Burne in his tower and so forth.
The group finished the rest, and enlisted Bedbug's aid in searching the lair for treasure. The party discovered some coinage, 2 potions of healing and finely crafted knife
[Brandybuck's Ogre Slaying Knife This is a finely crafted knife with a handle fashioned out of ogre bone, complete with a well tooled ogre hide sheath. The knife may be used to inflict piercing or slashing damage and functions in all other respects as a +1 magical dagger.
Anyone attuning to the weapon becomes aware of its true magical nature. The knife functions as a +3 weapon against ogres and scores double damage on any hit. A critical scored with this weapon vs an ogre will thus inflict 4 X damage.
Wee folk (which include halflings, dwarves, and gnomes) who attune themselves to this weapon may discover other emergent properties under the right circumstances........
The weapon was forged hundreds of years ago and wielded famously by Brogo "Mick" Brandybuck, a fearsome Halfling warrior who once slew six ogres single handedly with this weapon.]
After gathering the loot the party explored a bit more of the cave complex and discovered four giant bats in another cavern. The party slew the bats fairly easily. The ranger the paladin, and the rogue gained level 2.
End of session. :)