Hi everyone, new DM here and I would like to start soon with a group of new players.
I most likely do prebuild adventures and will start with LMoP. If everything goes well, I would want to put story hooks for the others prebuild adventures (mainly: SKT, PoA, ToA and HotDQ) and let the players "choose" which one they want to do.
Is there anyone that have done that and is it easily feasible?
Any tips or suggestions for this kind of project? I have already read a lot of story hook for each one individually but putting everything together seems quite a challenge.
Usually, by the time players finish LMoP, they will be comfortable making choices rather than relying on the DM to put up the carrot and stick for them.
What I generally do is to put them in some sort of Hub, a place where things, stories, people, and events tend to migrate to. Be it a wayside stop for weary travelers, a tavern in the local barony, or the kingdom's guild hall for adventurers, it's a place for those options to be presented in a more natural setting. Then, as the players rest for the evening, you have NPCs start chatting over an ale about the stories they heard. A group complains about the cities past the Frozen Fingers, where giants were starting to go crazy, the bartender complains about shipments missing, strange wagons pull out in the middle of the night piled high with freight and robed figures.
Present the stories and wait for the players to bite, if they don't, well you can always have the messenger with an arrow in his back fall through the tavern door the next morning...
Thanks for your suggestions, maybe I am trying to hard to find a way to introduce the other adventures and I just make my job more complicated if I let this choice open. But I think it would have been clever to have more tangible hooks and this kind of choice for my players.
The problem with clever is that it's all too often missed by the players; what may seem like a giant neon sign pointing (---> That way!), will be missed by the players due to the NPC who commented about a lost kitten and has no real place in the game other than a generic commoner. That is not to say you shouldn't use foreshadowing, dropping clues and hints about potential adventures is good DMing. Just be prepared to give them the obligatory ! above the quest giver's head when the players seem to have overlooked all of the foreshadowing and the blinking (Quest here!) signs you put up in your narrative.
I followed LMoP with Princes of the Apocalypse, and managed to seed to a fair amount of stuff in the earlier adventure. Swapped out the dragon cultists for elemental cultists at Thundertree, made it so that the elemental weapons were forged at the spellforge and that's what burned it out, etc.
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Hi everyone, new DM here and I would like to start soon with a group of new players.
I most likely do prebuild adventures and will start with LMoP. If everything goes well, I would want to put story hooks for the others prebuild adventures (mainly: SKT, PoA, ToA and HotDQ) and let the players "choose" which one they want to do.
Is there anyone that have done that and is it easily feasible?
Any tips or suggestions for this kind of project? I have already read a lot of story hook for each one individually but putting everything together seems quite a challenge.
Thanks a lot
Usually, by the time players finish LMoP, they will be comfortable making choices rather than relying on the DM to put up the carrot and stick for them.
What I generally do is to put them in some sort of Hub, a place where things, stories, people, and events tend to migrate to. Be it a wayside stop for weary travelers, a tavern in the local barony, or the kingdom's guild hall for adventurers, it's a place for those options to be presented in a more natural setting. Then, as the players rest for the evening, you have NPCs start chatting over an ale about the stories they heard. A group complains about the cities past the Frozen Fingers, where giants were starting to go crazy, the bartender complains about shipments missing, strange wagons pull out in the middle of the night piled high with freight and robed figures.
Present the stories and wait for the players to bite, if they don't, well you can always have the messenger with an arrow in his back fall through the tavern door the next morning...
Thanks for your suggestions, maybe I am trying to hard to find a way to introduce the other adventures and I just make my job more complicated if I let this choice open. But I think it would have been clever to have more tangible hooks and this kind of choice for my players.
The problem with clever is that it's all too often missed by the players; what may seem like a giant neon sign pointing (---> That way!), will be missed by the players due to the NPC who commented about a lost kitten and has no real place in the game other than a generic commoner. That is not to say you shouldn't use foreshadowing, dropping clues and hints about potential adventures is good DMing. Just be prepared to give them the obligatory ! above the quest giver's head when the players seem to have overlooked all of the foreshadowing and the blinking (Quest here!) signs you put up in your narrative.
I followed LMoP with Princes of the Apocalypse, and managed to seed to a fair amount of stuff in the earlier adventure. Swapped out the dragon cultists for elemental cultists at Thundertree, made it so that the elemental weapons were forged at the spellforge and that's what burned it out, etc.