HoH Timeline SPOILERS!

[Narl]

I'm a couple of sessions into HoH. I'm feeling like the 30-60 day spelling out the name timeframe for completing things is far too long. I just don't think like it will be a deadline at all for my group. I'm considering making it 1d2+1 days between letters for a 20-30 day timeframe (which still seems like a very long time). I may even go with 1d3 for 10-30 days.

Anyone have thoughts or experiences on this?

[rashiakas]

My group completed HoH in less then a week and I even added many extra quests and content. Rolling for it is something I would not do personally, just paint the letters when you feel it adds to the game.

[Trinite]

I agree with Rashiakas. Unless your players are incredibly risk averse or lazy, they won't take nearly the full time.

If you accelerate the letter thing too much, your players might just skip Ravengro and rush the prison. Which in my opinion would be a shame. There's a lot of great RP fodder in that town.

My advice: pretend to roll for days, but really just have new letters appear when it's going to generate maximum narrative tension.

[Trinite]

After rereading your question, I see that I misunderstood you. You want to speed the letters up to generate a greater sense of tension.

I could see that being a good idea.

Another idea might be to have each letter's appearance be accompanied by something else really horrific. Maybe the next letter is scrawled with blood from a dog's severed head, found near the monument? The next one with a severed human hand...

That would give the players a big incentive to stop the letters from appearing, without actually shortening up their periods of appearance.

[Victor Zajic]

What I ended up doing was starting out with the normal pace for the letters painted on the monument. But as the party learned more and more about what was going on, the letters started showing up more and more frequently, which just happened to with their final push into the basement of the prison being the night before they expected the final letter to arrive. I found starting the pace and tension slow, and then starting to ramp it up more and more as the PCs discovered the terribly things going on really helped set the mood to where I wanted it to be.

Although I feel the same way about my decision to ban the cleric class.