Approaching the final couple of sessions for the starter set (Lost Mine of Phandelver) with my group and we have decided to start Waterdeep: Dragon Heist straight after (I'm gonna try the Alexandrian remix).
Thing is, as the sessions kept approaching the end of this adventure, my players started saying how excited they were for WDH but also how sad they would be once this was over. We are all complete D&D first-timers so there's some big attachment here to this party of new adventurers. As a sort of passing comment to lift the mood I said "Well you never know, maybe this won't be the end of their stories..." which did in fact lift the spirits and in turn lift my eyebrows as I realised that I had no plan for this continuation.
I am however planning to continue the WDH adventure by trying my hand at homebrew, just to get a feel for it and to see how far it goes. After that campaign, however, the option of returning to the initial LMoP party would be right there...a tempting group of Level 5 PCs ready to go, which is actually great because I can finally incorporate their backstories and utilise some interesting NPCs that are around the area.
So now we come to the issue. See if the end of LMoP was also the end of our campaign then I have a rough idea of what I'd do in the denouement. Since the end of this adventure will be sort of open ended, what exactly do I do after they finish the final dungeon and are stood around the lifeless body of the BBEG that they just defeated? I wanna give a satisfying conclusion...but it's not really a conclusion.
Well, how do other stories conclude with heroes having defeated a BBEG, and they leave it open for a sequel?
Think about the Marvel movies. OK, not all of them were great. But they almost all had a "post-credits scene" that linked them up to the next movie. At the end of Captain America, he wakes up in Times Square, and it ends. Then after the credits start rolling, they show him working out in a gym and Nick Fury comes to give him his next assignment, for example. At the end of one of the early Avengers movie, don't remember which one, Thanos went and took out the gauntlet he would use in a later film, and so on.
So what you need to do is think of the next BBEG, and when they return to town victorious over the first BBEG, they hear word of the second one. Or maybe fade to a cutscene the PCs wouldn't see, but the players do.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Simplest is probably to make the BBEG not really the boss. They were just a lieutenant working for a bigger, badder guy, and the PCs need to work up the ladder. Plant some letters in the current bad guy’s treasure horde that can make them realize this and start them in the direction of the new bad guy. This can be Easiest, since it doesn’t require you to do any homebrewing or plotting until the end. Alternatively, you start seeding the new campaign now. Have npcs start mentioning the next bag guy/organization now. Then after the party wins and goes back to town to celebrate, someone approaches them asking for help — either they noticed the PCs skills and want to recruit them to a good guy group, or just a farmer who’s kids were kidnapped, or whatever — something to set them on the road.
Neither of those are particularly innovative, but they don’t need to be, they’re just a bridge to get you from one campaign to the next. That’s where you get creative.
With my group that finished my own highly changed up dragon of iceapire peak, I had the town celebrate them, give them each a house and made them part of the community. In real life we moved and stuff happened so a few months went by. I simple picked up a few months latter im game, the hero worship has died down some, and life has gone back normal and Phandalin is growing. Now a trade caravan has come into town with tales of strange events on the road. Time for the heros to be heros again.
My point is you can always just pick it back up no matter how you end it, so I wouldn't worry about it.
In the background you can have sidequests or NPC's who seem to suggest something much bigger is going on in the background. Near the end you learn that thing is a much bigger threat then the one the party just faced and then at the end, give the party the option to retire, or to dig into this much bigger threat.
I would say give them that moment of the town being grateful but then give them a hook to the next adventure within that celebration, maybe someone has heard of their exploits and seeks them out with an interesting job that will take them to a new area or a larger city, if your doing lost mines and your bbeg is the spider maybe you leave a nice juicy plot hook of someone who hired him in water deep leading the players to go looking there, you can close that off fairly quickly once your players are in a new city, or drag it out much longer.
DMs guild also has several followup adventures in and around Phandalin; you think about using those at some point. If you picked up a couple of them now, you might be able to set some light hooks/hints that could be followed up later.
Thanks for all the advice! Think I'll give the party a hero's welcome and celebration in Phandalin after their victory (or I guess they all perish in a final heroic flurry). The BBEG of the campaign is called The Black Spider and the rogue in the party has a backstory of being an ex-member of a thieves' guild called The Silk Circle...time to come up with some connections and some very vague preliminary outlines for how the story could continue so I can sprinkle something in after the denouement.
Thanks for all the advice! Think I'll give the party a hero's welcome and celebration in Phandalin after their victory (or I guess they all perish in a final heroic flurry). The BBEG of the campaign is called The Black Spider and the rogue in the party has a backstory of being an ex-member of a thieves' guild called The Silk Circle...time to come up with some connections and some very vague preliminary outlines for how the story could continue so I can sprinkle something in after the denouement.
I generally dont see things as an end, but always a beginning, your players may want a session to regroup and decide where to go to next but it is a great opportunity to take this time to get them away from Phandalin, The Black Spider is one idea you could have your part travel to a far away city to chase down the lead, only to find the spider was an outcast form this group and they are pleased the party dealt with them, this opens up allies in a new city that they can prove themselves to. Say you killed a dragon do you (if they killed the green dragon), well so do 30 other people in this tavern :), you want to impress us better start working. Or maybe presenting themselves as the killers of the Black Spider upsets someone, the Spider was going to make them a lot of money, now they think the characters should pay that debt, make the organisation too big to being down but maybe there are factions and one offers to help the party if they just help them overthrow the current leader. Thieves guilds are a part of the mechanics of the world its more a case of having the right bad people in charge. Or maybe, if your going to waterdeep to chase down this lead the ultimate leader of this gang is Xanathar himself. A great reveal to the party that a beholder was the ultimate sponsor of the black spider, not something they can take out easily at the current level, but maybe, maybe they don't have to, maybe he has plans for them, offers of riches if they just do a few odd jobs. Maybe they start to research and find out about the new employer to see how they might kill it.
Remember they are going from being very big fish in a very small pond, to then becoming minnows again in an ever larger sea it might be a bit quicker to prove themselves but it really does help you reset things a bit and then lead them gently into your new adventure.
Wow that's a lot of ideas. Definitely gonna keep all this stuff noted for the future. Thankfully since we're jumping into WDH, I have a whole campaign's worth of time to prep for how this continues but I do need to plant a tiny seed at the end and will take some inspiration from this stuff for sure. Much appreciated.
Thanks for all the advice! Think I'll give the party a hero's welcome and celebration in Phandalin after their victory (or I guess they all perish in a final heroic flurry). The BBEG of the campaign is called The Black Spider and the rogue in the party has a backstory of being an ex-member of a thieves' guild called The Silk Circle...time to come up with some connections and some very vague preliminary outlines for how the story could continue so I can sprinkle something in after the denouement.
This is the track I'd take. You mentioned you had some good backstories and fleshed-out NPCs to work with - I'd build the next arc with those in mind.
At any rate, it's clear you have a group who enjoys their characters and the world they are in. That's like 80% of it right there. As someone else said, all you really have to do is mention word of a distant challenge or word of strange goings-on in the next town and your players will jump on it. They want to adventure, all you need to do is lay something out in front of them.
Glad the responses helped. As a new DM, I strongly recommend any other adventure than WDH. Chapter 2 alone takes major work from the DM outside of what's provided in the book to establish NPCs with motivations/quest that the PCs care about. Personally, given what you've written about the LMoP characters, I would use Halia Thornton as a hook to Giant attacks in the north and run ddal 05. Adventure league modules are DM friendly and season 5 is the best one. After you've gotten that under your belt, you'll know the players styles well enough to develop good NPCs for WDH.
if you want to run WDH right now anyway, check out dmsguild for some good supplements on NPCs and quest in Waterdeep. Good luck!
Glad the responses helped. As a new DM, I strongly recommend any other adventure than WDH. Chapter 2 alone takes major work from the DM outside of what's provided in the book to establish NPCs with motivations/quest that the PCs care about. Personally, given what you've written about the LMoP characters, I would use Halia Thornton as a hook to Giant attacks in the north and run ddal 05. Adventure league modules are DM friendly and season 5 is the best one. After you've gotten that under your belt, you'll know the players styles well enough to develop good NPCs for WDH.
if you want to run WDH right now anyway, check out dmsguild for some good supplements on NPCs and quest in Waterdeep. Good luck!
Welp, I've already bought the module and started prepping since a couple weeks back...no turning back now! I'm going to run an altered version of the campaign or a 'remix' using The Alexandrian (The Alexandrian Dragon Heist Remix) which fleshes out the campaign quite a lot, fills out some continuity errors and also adds...HEISTS. With only one small adventure under my belt, I do think that WDH might be a baptism of fire for city campaigns but myself and the players are really excited about it so I don't mind a few burns. I'll definitely check out some more supplements too, thanks!
I recently finished LMoP and didn't know if the players would want to continue or not, so this is what I did...
After the Spider was defeated, I had Gundren appear and tell the characters that he couldn't let the power of the mine fall into the wrong hands again. So he basically set off a magic explosive that collapsed Wave Echo Cave. Trying to be cinematic, the scene faded to black after the cave in. We faded back in at Phadalin an indeterminate amount of time later. After some exposition filling in story specific to choices the characters made earlier (including giving the red brand's tavern to a good goblin Droop they rescued from the keep (Tavern name: Droop There It Is)) we cut to a scene at the town center. Here we saw a statue being erected in honor of the (fallen?) heroes who saved Phandalin from the Red Brand menace and were a positive influence on the town.
This allowed any or all of the characters to come back for further adventures, or they could have died in the mine. If we ever want to play again, we have that option.
I want to run The Lost Labarotory Of Kwalish after my party finishes Frozen Sick, so at the end I'm going to have the Gnome quest giver approach them at the Jolly Dwarf and say something like "you lot seem like adventurous fools. Wanna make some coin?" And scene.
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Approaching the final couple of sessions for the starter set (Lost Mine of Phandelver) with my group and we have decided to start Waterdeep: Dragon Heist straight after (I'm gonna try the Alexandrian remix).
Thing is, as the sessions kept approaching the end of this adventure, my players started saying how excited they were for WDH but also how sad they would be once this was over. We are all complete D&D first-timers so there's some big attachment here to this party of new adventurers. As a sort of passing comment to lift the mood I said "Well you never know, maybe this won't be the end of their stories..." which did in fact lift the spirits and in turn lift my eyebrows as I realised that I had no plan for this continuation.
I am however planning to continue the WDH adventure by trying my hand at homebrew, just to get a feel for it and to see how far it goes. After that campaign, however, the option of returning to the initial LMoP party would be right there...a tempting group of Level 5 PCs ready to go, which is actually great because I can finally incorporate their backstories and utilise some interesting NPCs that are around the area.
So now we come to the issue. See if the end of LMoP was also the end of our campaign then I have a rough idea of what I'd do in the denouement. Since the end of this adventure will be sort of open ended, what exactly do I do after they finish the final dungeon and are stood around the lifeless body of the BBEG that they just defeated? I wanna give a satisfying conclusion...but it's not really a conclusion.
Any advice here would be much appreciated!
Well, how do other stories conclude with heroes having defeated a BBEG, and they leave it open for a sequel?
Think about the Marvel movies. OK, not all of them were great. But they almost all had a "post-credits scene" that linked them up to the next movie. At the end of Captain America, he wakes up in Times Square, and it ends. Then after the credits start rolling, they show him working out in a gym and Nick Fury comes to give him his next assignment, for example. At the end of one of the early Avengers movie, don't remember which one, Thanos went and took out the gauntlet he would use in a later film, and so on.
So what you need to do is think of the next BBEG, and when they return to town victorious over the first BBEG, they hear word of the second one. Or maybe fade to a cutscene the PCs wouldn't see, but the players do.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Simplest is probably to make the BBEG not really the boss. They were just a lieutenant working for a bigger, badder guy, and the PCs need to work up the ladder. Plant some letters in the current bad guy’s treasure horde that can make them realize this and start them in the direction of the new bad guy. This can be Easiest, since it doesn’t require you to do any homebrewing or plotting until the end.
Alternatively, you start seeding the new campaign now. Have npcs start mentioning the next bag guy/organization now. Then after the party wins and goes back to town to celebrate, someone approaches them asking for help — either they noticed the PCs skills and want to recruit them to a good guy group, or just a farmer who’s kids were kidnapped, or whatever — something to set them on the road.
Neither of those are particularly innovative, but they don’t need to be, they’re just a bridge to get you from one campaign to the next. That’s where you get creative.
With my group that finished my own highly changed up dragon of iceapire peak, I had the town celebrate them, give them each a house and made them part of the community. In real life we moved and stuff happened so a few months went by. I simple picked up a few months latter im game, the hero worship has died down some, and life has gone back normal and Phandalin is growing. Now a trade caravan has come into town with tales of strange events on the road. Time for the heros to be heros again.
My point is you can always just pick it back up no matter how you end it, so I wouldn't worry about it.
In the background you can have sidequests or NPC's who seem to suggest something much bigger is going on in the background. Near the end you learn that thing is a much bigger threat then the one the party just faced and then at the end, give the party the option to retire, or to dig into this much bigger threat.
I would say give them that moment of the town being grateful but then give them a hook to the next adventure within that celebration, maybe someone has heard of their exploits and seeks them out with an interesting job that will take them to a new area or a larger city, if your doing lost mines and your bbeg is the spider maybe you leave a nice juicy plot hook of someone who hired him in water deep leading the players to go looking there, you can close that off fairly quickly once your players are in a new city, or drag it out much longer.
DMs guild also has several followup adventures in and around Phandalin; you think about using those at some point. If you picked up a couple of them now, you might be able to set some light hooks/hints that could be followed up later.
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
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Thanks for all the advice! Think I'll give the party a hero's welcome and celebration in Phandalin after their victory (or I guess they all perish in a final heroic flurry). The BBEG of the campaign is called The Black Spider and the rogue in the party has a backstory of being an ex-member of a thieves' guild called The Silk Circle...time to come up with some connections and some very vague preliminary outlines for how the story could continue so I can sprinkle something in after the denouement.
I generally dont see things as an end, but always a beginning, your players may want a session to regroup and decide where to go to next but it is a great opportunity to take this time to get them away from Phandalin, The Black Spider is one idea you could have your part travel to a far away city to chase down the lead, only to find the spider was an outcast form this group and they are pleased the party dealt with them, this opens up allies in a new city that they can prove themselves to. Say you killed a dragon do you (if they killed the green dragon), well so do 30 other people in this tavern :), you want to impress us better start working. Or maybe presenting themselves as the killers of the Black Spider upsets someone, the Spider was going to make them a lot of money, now they think the characters should pay that debt, make the organisation too big to being down but maybe there are factions and one offers to help the party if they just help them overthrow the current leader. Thieves guilds are a part of the mechanics of the world its more a case of having the right bad people in charge. Or maybe, if your going to waterdeep to chase down this lead the ultimate leader of this gang is Xanathar himself. A great reveal to the party that a beholder was the ultimate sponsor of the black spider, not something they can take out easily at the current level, but maybe, maybe they don't have to, maybe he has plans for them, offers of riches if they just do a few odd jobs. Maybe they start to research and find out about the new employer to see how they might kill it.
Remember they are going from being very big fish in a very small pond, to then becoming minnows again in an ever larger sea it might be a bit quicker to prove themselves but it really does help you reset things a bit and then lead them gently into your new adventure.
Wow that's a lot of ideas. Definitely gonna keep all this stuff noted for the future. Thankfully since we're jumping into WDH, I have a whole campaign's worth of time to prep for how this continues but I do need to plant a tiny seed at the end and will take some inspiration from this stuff for sure. Much appreciated.
This is the track I'd take. You mentioned you had some good backstories and fleshed-out NPCs to work with - I'd build the next arc with those in mind.
At any rate, it's clear you have a group who enjoys their characters and the world they are in. That's like 80% of it right there. As someone else said, all you really have to do is mention word of a distant challenge or word of strange goings-on in the next town and your players will jump on it. They want to adventure, all you need to do is lay something out in front of them.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Glad the responses helped. As a new DM, I strongly recommend any other adventure than WDH. Chapter 2 alone takes major work from the DM outside of what's provided in the book to establish NPCs with motivations/quest that the PCs care about. Personally, given what you've written about the LMoP characters, I would use Halia Thornton as a hook to Giant attacks in the north and run ddal 05. Adventure league modules are DM friendly and season 5 is the best one. After you've gotten that under your belt, you'll know the players styles well enough to develop good NPCs for WDH.
if you want to run WDH right now anyway, check out dmsguild for some good supplements on NPCs and quest in Waterdeep. Good luck!
Welp, I've already bought the module and started prepping since a couple weeks back...no turning back now! I'm going to run an altered version of the campaign or a 'remix' using The Alexandrian (The Alexandrian Dragon Heist Remix) which fleshes out the campaign quite a lot, fills out some continuity errors and also adds...HEISTS. With only one small adventure under my belt, I do think that WDH might be a baptism of fire for city campaigns but myself and the players are really excited about it so I don't mind a few burns. I'll definitely check out some more supplements too, thanks!
I recently finished LMoP and didn't know if the players would want to continue or not, so this is what I did...
After the Spider was defeated, I had Gundren appear and tell the characters that he couldn't let the power of the mine fall into the wrong hands again. So he basically set off a magic explosive that collapsed Wave Echo Cave. Trying to be cinematic, the scene faded to black after the cave in. We faded back in at Phadalin an indeterminate amount of time later. After some exposition filling in story specific to choices the characters made earlier (including giving the red brand's tavern to a good goblin Droop they rescued from the keep (Tavern name: Droop There It Is)) we cut to a scene at the town center. Here we saw a statue being erected in honor of the (fallen?) heroes who saved Phandalin from the Red Brand menace and were a positive influence on the town.
This allowed any or all of the characters to come back for further adventures, or they could have died in the mine. If we ever want to play again, we have that option.
Hope you have fun!
I want to run The Lost Labarotory Of Kwalish after my party finishes Frozen Sick, so at the end I'm going to have the Gnome quest giver approach them at the Jolly Dwarf and say something like "you lot seem like adventurous fools. Wanna make some coin?" And scene.