|
There are tons of opportunity for roleplaying in Brindol! I started my PCs at 1st level and ran other adventures before starting RHoD. One of these was Speaker In Dreams that I tweaked to be in Brindol. I introduced all the major players and had the PCs get pretty invested. I really encourage this approach.
RHoD does certainly have a lot of fighting in it -- but it's a war after all. :) As for RP opportunities, the main thing I've tried to do is to play up the different personalities of various NPCs. The PCs in my group took to Captain Sorannah immediately, as I portrayed her as the one professional fighter in Drellin's Ferry, trying to organize the local Keystone Cops into a viable militia -- she was eager and grateful for their help. Jorr Natherson, I portrayed as a hillbilly who likes to whoop and holler, especially when he makes a good shot ... and so on.
I figure, the way you make players care about a campaign area, is by making them care about the people in it, so I try to make most of the NPCs fun, likeable characters so the players will be sympathetic or even outraged when bad things happen to them. (In my game, Captain Sorannah eventually got immolated by dragonfire in the Battle of Brindol -- you should have seen the players rush to make sure she got taken to the temple so their cleric could raise her in the morning!)
-The Gneech
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
|
I've run Red Hand twice now, and will probably run it again this spring, when my strange home game gets to an appropriate level.
One feature that can be easily lost when reading through the module is that it begins as a series of mysteries, that is only gradually solved.
The hobgoblins are massing: why? The map references people and events that are unfamiliar to the hereos: how do they fit in? Dragons??
There are all manner of wheels turning within wheels. (The entire army invasion is a feint, for example.)
I've also added several side adventures. The first time I ran Red Hand, the party brainstormed things they could do to stop an invading army: buy mercenaries (side trek to find and recover a hoard of trasure, which the party donated to buy more dwarves), find a powerful item useful for defense (side trek, a race to recover the long-fabled "Crown of the Earthlords" before the hubgoblin's team can do so).
There were complications: mercenaries got waylaid (side trek to free Prince Thorgrim, leader of the dwarven mercenaries), criminals in Brindol were setting themselves up to profit handsomely from the war (side trek to discover who's behind that and put a stop to it).
Advice: play up each of the Highlords' personalities. One of them is the hope and paragon of goblins everywhere. Another is a scheming bard able to get away with the most outrageous lies. After the party succeeded in the first two sections, the army starts devoting some portion of its resources to finding out more about them and wiping them out.
A couple of suggestions: as things stand now, not a lot really happens in Brindol. That section could be beefed up quite a bit. As Dithering Fool suggested, starting the PC's there as an urban campaign makes it more like their city being attacked.
And after the big battle, the PCs are simply told by the leaders of Brindol "Oh, the real threat is over there." No hints, no discovery. I tried to drop hints throughout the adventure that something serious was going down out west, and the PCs decided to go on yet another mission --to consult a sage on the Astral Plane-- to uncover who was really behind the invasion.
Red Hand of Doom is one of those adventures that while easy enough to run and straightforward to the casual glance - I ran it "out of the box" so to speak that way - it is also VERY easy to build upon the lean body. A number of suggestions above are solid and will be interesting to hear about: playing up the personalities of the High Lords, the onion-layers of the whole thing from the get-go and so on.
Depending upon your personal take on dragons, one could also do something along the lines of:
The dragons that are mutated into the various spawn are those that are divined before hatching to be doomed to not survive. Rather than waste such stillborn offspring, they instead are diverted into the mutation process that eventually results in the many varieties of dragonspawn clawing their way into the world.
|
RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
|
I have only briefly read it once but how does the whole horde end up as a feint?
The army invasion is intended to occupy the attention of the heroes while Baruk Khah summons Tiamat.
Indeed, somewhere around 3rd Level, I introduce the party to a band of retired adventurers whose big claim to fame was routing a coven of human and dwarf Tiamat cultists. (It's the reason that dwarves aren't much trusted in the valley, even now, decades later. Dwarven mercenaries saving Brindol has enormous PR repercussions.)