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The dry hilltops danced with fire.

Throughout the heart of the wild badlands the humans called the Wyrmsmokes, great bonfires had been kindled atop the ridges overlooking Elsir Vale. There thousands of warriors had gathered—hobgoblins in armor dyed scarlet, thick-thewed bugbear berserkers, goblin worg riders and skirmishers and archers, and the scaled ones as well, who often towered over the rest. For so long they had fought each other, tribe against tribe, race against race, engaged in the endless test of battle, feud, and betrayal. But tonight . . . tonight they stood together, hated enemies shoulder-to- shoulder, shouting together as brothers. And they saw that they were strong, and together they danced and sang and shook their blades at the smoke-hidden stars overhead.

“We are the Kulkor Zhul!” they shouted, and the hills shook with the thunder of their voices. “We are the People of the Dragon! Uighulth na Hargai! None can stand before us!”

One by one the tribes fell silent. Armor creaked as thousands turned to look up to the Place of Speaking. There, a single champion emerged from the assemblage and slowly climbed the ancient stone stair cut into the side of the hill. A hundred bright yellow banners stood beneath him like a phalanx of spears, each marked with a great red hand. The warpriests holding the banners chanted battle-prayers in low voices as the champion ascended.

On the hundredth step he stopped and turned to face the waiting warriors. He was tall and strong, one of the hobgoblin chieftains, but dull blue scales gleamed along his shoulders, and jutting horns swept back from his head. “I am Azarr Kul, Son of the Dragon!” he cried. “Hear me, warriors of the Kulkor Zhul! Tomorrow we march to war!”

The warriors roared their approval, stamping their feet and clashing spear to shield. Azarr Kul waited, holding his hands aloft until they quieted again. “The warpriests of the Doom Hand have shown us the way! They have taught us honor, discipline, obedience—and strength! No more will we waste our blood fighting each other. We will take the lands of the elf, the dwarf, and the human, and make them ours! Under the banner of the Red Hand of Doom we march to victory and conquest! Remember that you stood here this night, warriors of Kulkor Zhul! For a hundred generations your children and your children's children will sing of the blood spilled by your swords and the glory you win in the nights to come! Now, my brothers—to WAR!”

The burning hills were too small to hold the shout the Kulkor Zhul gave in answer to their warlord’s call.

This is copy and paste from another A5E game I’m in. Everything I said there applies here as well.

So it’s come up enough and I feel like it’s a significant enough departure from Pathfinder to warrant a bit of a rules exposition.

In A5E (and largely in 5e for those that care to track such things), there are three common types of rolls that a Narrator might ask a player to make. Attack rolls and saving throws are pretty cut and dry. Attack with a melee weapon that lacks the finesse property, and you use strength as the modifier (excluding class features that are more specific exemptions). If you’re proficient in the weapon you add the proficiency bonus. Need to make a Con saving throw to avoid a poison effect, the modifier is in the name and your class determines if you’re proficient in that save.

The section “Elements of Play” near the beginning of the book has this to say about the core interaction between players and Narrators:

“The basic structure of play in Level Up is fairly simple and typically involves a cycle of three main activities:
-The Narrator describes the current scenario.
-The players describe what they want to do.
-The Narrator determines if any rolls are needed
and describes (or has the players describe) the outcomes, which takes us back to the beginning of the cycle.”

This kind of reinforces the understanding that attack rolls and saving throws are pretty easily understood. Skills are much more nuanced. In fact there’s no such thing as a “skill check” in A5E. The third type of D20 roll the narrator may ask for is an ability check. The rules state the following as the order of operations for these checks:

Just a little further down, we get to skills:

Here is where the Elements of Play comes in handy with regards to adjudicating the intentions of players and the arbitration of the Narrator. It’s intended to be an ongoing conversation where the Narrator sets the scene, players state intention, Narrator decides whether a roll is needed and what ability it might be. Skills add your proficiency bonus if they apply to the roll. The same logic is extended to tools. A check with a tool is nothing more or less than an ability check which allows the player to add their proficiency bonus to the roll if they have it on their person and possess the requisite proficiency.

All that works well at a table where that interaction can happen quickly. In PBP that can take a day or two to resolve. My personal inclination is that the Narrator should look over a characters skill proficiencies and reaffirm what ability scores the typical check looks like and let that be the status quo. Once the die is cast, it’s easy enough to reverse engineer the new total if the Narrator feels strongly enough about modifying the roll. This is one of those realms where a little trust and agency goes a long way to streamlining the game.

Greetings all!! There seemed to be enough interest for this to put out an official call for adventurers to save the Elsir Vale from the invading hobgoblin forces.

A5E is a system published by EN World that builds some mechanical complexity onto the 5th edition framework. Just about the entire rule set can be found free online at A5E.tools. I’ll be providing the drive link below with the actual Adventurers Guide PDF as well as the current issues of Gate Pass Gazette, which has character options (steampunk or options suitable for the Zeitgeist setting aren’t appropriate for this one). The Elsir Vale is located in Greyhawk, although the only lore relevant to the campaign is going to be the pantheon.

Players will need to create a level 5 character to start and intend on ending the campaign around 10 or 11. Stat generation will be point buy 27 or you can roll 1 set of stats using 2d6+6 in any order. HP is as written for first level and one number greater than average for each subsequent level (ie a D12-er would take 8 HP per level instead of the average of 7; D10 would take 7, etc).

Because this campaign will only go from 5 to 10 I will allow you to commit to your level 6 class selection before taking a feat at level 4 instead of the Ability Score Increase. This will allow you to take one of the synergy feats if you multi class and intend to take the remaining class level at 6. When we hit level 6 I will expect you to follow through on that commitment.

This campaign has a pretty spritely mixture of exploration, social encounter, and combat. As a military oriented campaign you can expect to have your fair share of combats. I might handwave the less exciting ones for time and just summarize them narratively so that it still feels like a complete run through. As a forward, I’ll be utilizing some homebrew rules that I’ll detail in the discussion tab once we’re into character creation. They were originally tooled for 5e, so I need to reread them for applicability before presenting. None of them drastically affect the core rules of A5E, and might even feel familiar to pathfinder alumni.

I intend on starting the adventure in a week or so and will spend the interim time corresponding with everyone on character creation questions. I might even drop a little FAQ if I have the time to do so.

A5E Player Resources

Greetings fellow adventurers! I’m putting some feelers out for running a Red Hand of Doom campaign converted to EN World’s Advanced 5th Edition (A5E). This rule set is a crunchier take on 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. The free rules are available at A5E Free Rules. I also have the up to current issues of Gate Pass Gazette, which is the monthly e-zine for A5E released by EN World.

Red Hand of Doom was one of the more highly lauded adventures released for 3.5e. It takes adventurers from level 5 to 10 against an invading hobgoblin army backed by sinister extraplanar forces against the citizens of the Elsir Vale in the world of Greyhawk.

I’m ordinarily a 5e GM, so A5E isn’t much of a shift for me. The ideal player for this game is available to post once a day at least and is interested in creating a character that has a vested interest (doesn’t have to be an expressly noble one) in the Elsir Vale and protecting it against this invading threat. This adventure functions much like a sandbox with bumpers. You can explore a bit and accomplish goals in any order, but there is a narrative thread and a timeline to accomplish it in.

If enough interest is expressed, I’ll post an actual recruitment thread for folks to sign up.