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I bought the Emerald Spire dungeon and I am going to run 5 friend through it. I've never done any GM'ing before but I am pretty familiar with the rules of the game and the people playing are good about not taking advantage of the rules.
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any tips or suggestions when playing through Emerald Spire.
One questions that I did have for anyone who has played through it before is how much prep should I do for "in town" based things? The players know that it's a dungeon and not a "Fix the town" based thing but I can't help but feel that could potentially be a big time sync for them. The book doesn't really go over the nitty gritty details of the town either.
I just thought that this could be a good thread to start with ideas or any experiences that people have had with the Emerald Dungeon to help give my players the best experience I can muster :)
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at the very least, detail a magic item shop, potion shop, and scroll shop, or combine them all. remember that its a frontier region and not likely to carry everything the players want. ES has ways to fast travel so expect your party to want to use their "Town Portal" (to steal from Diablo) in order to resupply occasionally. To prevent them from over abuse, its a good idea to have a fully fleshed out shop including a list of exactly how much gold is on hand, and what items are in inventory, with a low % chance that something new comes in from time to time. Also you could allow players to place orders but be sure to have stiff time costs to prevent them from having too much downtime.
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at the very least, detail a magic item shop, potion shop, and scroll shop, or combine them all. remember that its a frontier region and not likely to carry everything the players want. ES has ways to fast travel so expect your party to want to use their "Town Portal" (to steal from Diablo) in order to resupply occasionally. To prevent them from over abuse, its a good idea to have a fully fleshed out shop including a list of exactly how much gold is on hand, and what items are in inventory, with a low % chance that something new comes in from time to time. Also you could allow players to place orders but be sure to have stiff time costs to prevent them from having too much downtime.
Good ideas! I'll definitely have to layout the shops with a lot of detail like you mentioned.
Any advice for the potential of getting sucked into the clash between the seven foxes and Hellknights? After reading some other posts, it kind of sounds like a lot of the town based stuff is left up to the GM to decide how to proceed with all of it.
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Personally, I'm in favor (if you have the time and energy) of a fleshed out setting where major players have defined stat blocks, (whether you want to go out and get the relevant source books for Thornkeep & Fort Inevitable or stat them out yourself is up to you) and minor players and supporting cast use a generic stat block appropriate to their role. Keep this environment going. Each NPC has his/her own motivations. One trick I use is to develop a time line of events that would occur assuming the PC's never existed. Then I keep a campaign calender so that I can mark the passage of time while the PC's are dungeoneering. It helps lend credence to the setting when the pc's emerge after a week under ground to find things in the city have moved along without them.
Along with my calendar, I keep a log of major events the pc's interacted with or caused to happen. That way I can revise my timeline as I go to write in the pc's actions and their outcomes. and mark new events on the calendar. Using Google Calendar is great for this sort of campaign time keeping.
As for getting sucked into existing clashes outside the confines of the spire? Well be prepared for it to happen. The best laid plans never survive first contact with the players. Using things like a campaign timeline and calendar can help refocus your party on the events inside the spire, Its hard to spend a week waging an espionage campaign outside when you know if you don't stop the lich in the next 48 hours he'll unleash disaster on the countryside (example not spoiler). And if they do ignore significant events inside to take actions outside, the consequences of that can also take your campaign to interesting places.
Ultimately, my approach to GMing is not to force my players down a linear path, but to present them with a living environment and plots to choose from and see where they take the world.
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Do yourself a favor, try not to get pigeonholed on any single specific plot or outcome. Your players will always find ways to surprise you. The best GM's find ways to roll those surprises into their stories by allowing the world to react naturally to their players actions shaping its history for better or worse.
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Looks like some good tips are coming in so far. You have picked an amazing superdungeon for your first time GMing! I would recommend getting the flip-mats, as they make the GM's job and the entire experience much better for everyone. As far as your question about Fort Inevitable, I found it very useful to develop it in segments throughout the campaign. My players spent the most time there during the first session, as that was their initial introduction to the Hellknights, Audara, and local personalities. There are lots of little suggestions for mini-adventures in the keyed descriptions if you need to break up the superdungeon-sessions a bit.
Naldred's Farm (area 4) lets you work in a Night Hag encounter, and you could have it take place in an exciting location outside of the dungeon. Night Hags can be a challenging encounter for a group of 5 PCs that are level 6-7 with full resources, and usually one they won't forget easily.
The Hellknights might need help with the ghost/spectre on the City Wall (area 10), and you have some flexibility there as to what CR you toss at PCs. Depending on who they are allied with, you could even team up the PCs with some Hellknights for a larger fight on the wall at night vs. a surprise group of spectres when they were only expecting one.
The Stonde Homestead (area 2) gives you a chance to take the PCs out to Echo Wood and get a healthy taste of the outdoors to break up any monotony in their Spire delve. Maybe Ilyana is having such a hard time getting by with what little money she has these days, that she seeks out some adventurers and offers what her son says he saw in exchange for 50% of any treasure found there? This one lets you play around with any variety of creatures and CRs, as the ruin could be occupied by just about anything you desire.
My group created a thread and wrote up our Emerald Spire delve for the purpose of providing a resource to GMs that are looking to run (or are already running) the Emerald Spire. It has lots of tips, suggestions, etc. Hope it helps you in some way.
Here is the thread:
Best of luck in your Spire run! If you need anything else, feel free to PM me as well.
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I hope that I am not going to pigeonhole my characters into one certain outcome or path. The world is their to explore, I just have to try and plan out what they might do to make it as detailed as possible :)
I definitely bought the flip mats as they are beautiful and saves the players from my awful artistic abilities.
I also bought the cards too, and I will hopefully be able to use them. If not they weren't that expensive. Oh well...
I'm definitely learning that I need to expect my players to want to explore Fort Inevitable quite a bit. I think most of my time preparing will be for things for them to potentially do while being bored of dungeon diving the spire :) That is one area that I wish the book went into more detail about (Fort Inevitable) but I suppose it could be good as it leaves it open for GM's to do whatever they want with it.
I've briefly paged through the PDF that you made during your play through of the Emerald Spire, and wow! I'm definitely impressed with the detail that you went through. I will going through it with much more thoroughly once I have more time.