D&D 1E U1 Secret of Saltmarsh: Thoughts?

[Stormdale]

Agreed, and soon you'll be able to add a book or three from Candlekeep lying around as springboards to new adventures.

 

[Lanefan]

Another fun thing you can do with this adventure is to use the house to plant seeds for future adventure possibilities. The PCs don't need to find anything, but if they search a desk or look through old books, you can have a table of seeds with hints about factions, secrets, conflicts, treasures, etc.

Were this certain to be an ongoing party I'd be right with you here but I'm not sure what if any long-term future this group has; as it's something to tide us over during lockdown* and may or (more likely) may not be continued afterwards, I don't want to plant too many long-term hooks.

* - this is also why I'm not sure we'll get to U2 and-or U3.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Were this certain to be an ongoing party I'd be right with you here but I'm not sure what if any long-term future this group has; as it's something to tide us over during lockdown* and may or (more likely) may not be continued afterwards, I don't want to plant too many long-term hooks.

* - this is also why I'm not sure we'll get to U2 and-or U3.

If it's a one shot you are doing, then one way to make if feel unique would be to set it in the real world. It wouldn't feel out of place in 18th century Cornwall or New England.

 

[Lanefan]

If it's a one shot you are doing, then one way to make if feel unique would be to set it in the real world. It wouldn't feel out of place in 18th century Cornwall or New England.

It's not entirely a one-shot, in that it's set in my ongoing campaign world at a time contemporary with parties we were playing pre-covid; and what this lot are doing and-or discovering certainly has the potential for long-term effects on those other active parties once we ever get back to playing them.

 

[uzirath]

It's not entirely a one-shot, in that it's set in my ongoing campaign world at a time contemporary with parties we were playing pre-covid; and what this lot are doing and-or discovering certainly has the potential for long-term effects on those other active parties once we ever get back to playing them.

I don't know how far back the history of various PC groups goes in your world, but it could be fun to include some references to the exploits of earlier adventuring groups, especially if you have any overlapping players.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't know how far back the history of various PC groups goes in your world, but it could be fun to include some references to the exploits of earlier adventuring groups, especially if you have any overlapping players.

5 in-game years, almost to the day.

And while there's in particular one adventure I'd really like to refer to as it has the potential to stand their home-base city on its ear, there's just one little problem: it hasn't been played yet!

We got one session into that adventure and then it got put on hold.....and remains there.....sigh.....

That said:

Spoiler

The adventure they're currently doing (not U1) is an exact replica of an adventure done shortly after the campaign started, on the same site, with the same opponents, and so forth. The current PCs won't really become aware of this (right now they just assume the place has naturally restocked itself ovr the years) until they take a few specific "unique" things back to town to sell off and run across some exact duplicates...and some very curious shopkeepers!

I'm hoping that in the long run one of the higher-level groups takes on the challenge of finding out how this dungeon managed to exactly replicate itself over about a 4-and-a-half year timeframe, because there is an explanation; and if something isn't done it'll keep replicating itself every now and then once a certain individual realizes it has once again been cleared out.

The adventure that didn't get finished has a group of PCs sent into the town - which is the capital city of a faded empire - on a mission to either find out what's gone wrong with the Emperor (over the last few years he's kinda gone balls-nuts crazy) or, if they can't or if he really is irredeemable, kill him off. Completed play got those PCs into town and starting to dig for info, that's it.

This adventure would in theory have happened not long before the current low-level group got going, meaning the city might still be a hornet's nest. Oh, well...