You know, I wonder if it might work better in 5E than it did in 4E. One of the big issues with KotS in 4E was that it was designed under a pre-4E mentality, where you fill a dungeon full of lots of little encounters. In 4E, that's a recipe for excruciating boredom, because every encounter takes 30+ minutes to resolve; there's no such thing as a quick encounter to grind away a few resources. But in 5E, the game has gone hard in the opposite direction, and minor encounters can be resolved very fast.
It'd be ironic if the adventure meant to showcase 4E turned out to work better in 4E's successor.
Yeah, I think you're right there. Irony, huh?
(Mike Mearls seems like a nice guy but he really screwed the pooch with the 4E adventures he designed.
Shadowfell and
Pyramid of Shadows really are rubbish for 4E but even Pyramid might work under an earlier ruleset. I wonder if he simply took some ideas from his OGL spambot days and slapped a cover of vaguely-4E-ish paint over the top? Oh well, we will never know....)
I will have to look at Ruins of Adventure again...that might be something I can take stuff from. The only modules I am currently in possession of, are Gates off Neverdeath, Crown of Neverwinter, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, and Lost Mines of Phandelver. Dragon Queen is right...just doesn't fit with the Neverwinter setting IMO. I think there are a lot of things in Night Below that could be ported to Neverwinter/Evernight....maybe post spellplague the flying city of the Aboleth Sovereignty has "gone underground" so to speak. The Rockseers could be replaced with the Eladrin. A lot of it could be placed in the Shadowfell/Feywild.
I have some things I would love to bounce off your head too. I converted the Neverwinter character themes to backgrounds. Now they are more powerful than the standard 5E backgrounds. I was trying to preserve the flavor of the originals, but am definitely open to the idea of toning them down a bit, if needed. I could email them to you to look at and critique before I go posting them here?
The good thing about
Ruins of Adventure is that you really only want the basic idea: get hired to clear an area of ruins. And that works perfectly in Neverwinter.
And, yes, I have to agree that
Tyranny of Dragons simply doesn't work in FR or, indeed, the wider Realms. It makes no sense in the context of existing FR lore... and yet it would work almost perfectly in Eberron. Maybe someone got inspired by the Daughter of Khyber idea from Dragons of Eberron and decided, "Wait there, we haven't used Tiamat since
Dragonlance,
Red Hand of Doom, and
Scales of War. We really need to use her right now! Oh look,
Dragons of Eberron has some good ideas; it doesn't matter if we use those in FR, does it?"
(I'm also thinking about Dausuul's comment about how
Keep on the Shadowfell will probably be a better adventure in 5E. On a similar note, I cannot help but think maybe one of the motivations for yet another Tiamat-flavoured campaign is because
Scales of War was such a dud in 4E, WotC wants to see if they can do it right with the new edition. But I am probably being cynical....)
As for the aboleth, not all aboleth are from the flying city (or cities). Some of them have been in FR all along. What I had in the Chasm was the lost city of Golismorga (stolen from Golismorga( filled with sleeping aboleth (aboleth that are without water eventually turn to stone and sleep: this was mentioned in 3.5E's Lords of Madness and used to excellent effect in Savage Tide).
The short backstory was that 3,000 or so years ago, the dwarves of Haunghdannar used elemental magic - specifically a powerful rune of water - to drain all the water out of the city of Golismorga and render the aboleth powerless. Some aboleth escaped and these are the ones found in the Chasm and other places under Neverwinter. Anyway, the PC dwarf was of the bloodline of Haunghdannar and able to absorb the power of the rune not realising that, in so doing, he was creating the conditions to allow water to return to Golismorga and for the aboleth to awaken.
Now, this was a really uncharacteristic act on the part of the player - we've been gaming together for 30 years - so I was really taken by surprise... but he's going to be even more surprised when they reach Paragon Tier (we play 4E) and discover that a city of aboleth has awoken beneath Neverwinter. Cue an update of Night Below which I think has so much potential here....
I'm really not the best person to ask about 5E rules (although I have agreed to run a game after Christmas, I don't like this new edition and am only running the game as a favour to help prepare a player to transition into being a DM) but am happy to look at what you've got. Just post here or PM me.
And now I really need to catch up on my session reports for my Neverwinter campaign....
