A friend of mine (who will be DM'ing our next campaign) asked me what I thought about taking the introduction from Out of the Abyss and then turning it into Curse of Strahd after the initial chapter.
I'd never considered anything like this, and I was really confused about it so I asked what exactly he meant. Apparently, he really liked the trapped in jail, no equipment, Dark Souls-esque beginning of OotA, but prefers the setting and storyline of CoS.
What would yall do? Would you just find a way to escape the jail and end up in Barovia, or would you not consider combining modules like this?
Yeah that sounds awesome. I'm running Tomb of annihilation but I found the early levels a little meh, so I've started them on sunless citadel (feeding that into TOA) . So far everything is going great, thinking of dropping some more premade stuff into TOA.
Feel free to remix modules however you like. It's worth having a good understanding of where the adventure goes and what the prerequisites for it are to make sure you don't paint yourself into a corner (for example, does a particular NPC need to be in a particular location at a particular time?)
I'm currently writing a homebrew adventure but I'm drawing from all of the available modules to flesh out NPCs and locations, etc. I'm hoping that this will also make it easier in future to segue into a published adventure with minimal tweaking if that's what we want to do.
Combining modules is great. Right now I'm using the starter adventure set to act as the trigger for both Princes of the Apocalypse and Storm King's Thunder, as two simultaneous events building off of each other, so that the players have alternatives to choose from and so that I can have background events show that there is a larger stage.
This is a great technique, which I use all the time, and lean on heavily in my DMing style. My players tend to love it.
Plus, CoS goes out of it's way to shoehorn a bunch of garbage introductions into adventure which nobody really likes. The "REAL" CoS starts at level 3, so as long as OotA gets you to around level 3, that sounds like a great plan. Depending on how much experience your DM has, I can even think of a couple of really good connections between the two that would explain some of the plot holes that can kindof occur in vanilla Strahd. The only caution I have is that running a prison-break as the start of a completely different adventure leads to the question of "well, that was easy. We sure are lucky that nobody ever bothered to mention we escaped from jail." which is it's own plot hole.
The only caution I have is that running a prison-break as the start of a completely different adventure leads to the question of "well, that was easy. We sure are lucky that nobody ever bothered to mention we escaped from jail." which is it's own plot hole.
I really hope this gets left as a plot hole, because I'm gonna use the line of, "At least they don't know we broke out of prison." all the time haha
A friend of mine (who will be DM'ing our next campaign) asked me what I thought about taking the introduction from Out of the Abyss and then turning it into Curse of Strahd after the initial chapter.
I'd never considered anything like this, and I was really confused about it so I asked what exactly he meant. Apparently, he really liked the trapped in jail, no equipment, Dark Souls-esque beginning of OotA, but prefers the setting and storyline of CoS.
What would yall do? Would you just find a way to escape the jail and end up in Barovia, or would you not consider combining modules like this?
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D&D Beyond FoundersTaking the material and combining it to create something unique sounds like a great plan for sure. :)
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Yeah that sounds awesome. I'm running Tomb of annihilation but I found the early levels a little meh, so I've started them on sunless citadel (feeding that into TOA) . So far everything is going great, thinking of dropping some more premade stuff into TOA.
Feel free to remix modules however you like. It's worth having a good understanding of where the adventure goes and what the prerequisites for it are to make sure you don't paint yourself into a corner (for example, does a particular NPC need to be in a particular location at a particular time?)
I'm currently writing a homebrew adventure but I'm drawing from all of the available modules to flesh out NPCs and locations, etc. I'm hoping that this will also make it easier in future to segue into a published adventure with minimal tweaking if that's what we want to do.
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ModeratorCombining modules is great. Right now I'm using the starter adventure set to act as the trigger for both Princes of the Apocalypse and Storm King's Thunder, as two simultaneous events building off of each other, so that the players have alternatives to choose from and so that I can have background events show that there is a larger stage.
This is a great technique, which I use all the time, and lean on heavily in my DMing style. My players tend to love it.
Plus, CoS goes out of it's way to shoehorn a bunch of garbage introductions into adventure which nobody really likes. The "REAL" CoS starts at level 3, so as long as OotA gets you to around level 3, that sounds like a great plan. Depending on how much experience your DM has, I can even think of a couple of really good connections between the two that would explain some of the plot holes that can kindof occur in vanilla Strahd. The only caution I have is that running a prison-break as the start of a completely different adventure leads to the question of "well, that was easy. We sure are lucky that nobody ever bothered to mention we escaped from jail." which is it's own plot hole.
I really hope this gets left as a plot hole, because I'm gonna use the line of, "At least they don't know we broke out of prison." all the time haha
You only THINK you broke out of prison brother. Barovia is it's own kind of prison.