|
The Dead Roads are part of the Boneyard. It applies to everything.
My party had an oracle, so they were good on healing. If you don't have a healer, you'll want to provide some options for your PCs. Some of the fights in the castles are pretty brutal - looking at the glass angel and the big bug - so you'll want your PCs to be able to heal up before they tackle each one.
Yes, I used the timeless planar trait for the whole book. The PCs noticing (eventually) that they didn't need to sleep or eat provided clues as to where they were.
Add to what Yakman said, the most brutal part of the module was that so many encounters did ability damage and the party had no way to recover from it until they hit 3rd level and the cleric could get the lesser restoration spell.
I think it enhanced the game experience as it pushed my players to their limits. BUT I'd taken the time before we'd started to emphasize how critical a healer would be.
|
|
Yes, I used the timeless planar trait for the whole book. The PCs noticing (eventually) that they didn't need to sleep or eat provided clues as to where they were.
oh, and when they finally emerge from the tomb, have someone from the town looking for them. someone that they know and trust - where were you? and why are you out here?
they are all bewildered about why the PCs vanished... and if you can, maybe do what I did, and end the session with everyone rolling a Wisdom check... lie about the DC, and tell the one player who rolled highest that they look up to the sky and on the moon, they see a laughing skull...
let'em cook on that 'til the next session.
I didn't use all of the timeless trait, but I did note to the players that they didn't feel the need to sleep or eat or anything, which was disconcerting for them, but they only got really really hungry and sleepy when they got back and no immediately starved or dehydrated or died of sleep deprivation. I let them have the natural healing because, for my table at least, I think it would have felt a bit of a slog at early level.
But, if you wanna increase the survival aspect, you could totally go full timeless trait and/or full Strongly Neutral Aligned. (I used the latter one too, mostly because my two good-aligned party members are religious, and I wanted to sort of express to them that their connection to their deities was far more distant/smothered here than was comfortable.) As the others have mentioned, I'd absolutely look for alternative options for them if you did wanna use the planar traits and touch base with your players about what it means/requires from them and how they're feeling about it.
Another point (kinda unrelated to planar traits but related to prepping for book 1 not being in the material plane) - if any of your players have some sort of animal companion, you might wanna decide how best to handle that. The book kinda just says "they're dead, but you can find a new one in book 2 and onward," but I wanted to tweak it a bit. My wizard player had a jerboa familiar. They loved that lil guy. His name was Buttons. I didn't wanna just kill the poor thing off immediatly - "soz, he's gone now, get a new one later", so I had the familiar still be around for the whole book, right up until Barzhak appears to help them get to the Material Plane, and was like "unfortunately one of you must stay - the dead cannot return" and the Jerboa hopped off the wizard's shoulder to go stand by the psychopomp and - surprise - was a ghost. He just wanted to help his wizard get home.
(I think someone else wrote this idea in the main book thread, so I can't take credit for it, but we were all weeping. You know how hard it is to DM when you can't see your notes through the tears?)
|
|
I didn't use all of the timeless trait, but I did note to the players that they didn't feel the need to sleep or eat or anything, which was disconcerting for them, but they only got really really hungry and sleepy when they got back and no immediately starved or dehydrated or died of sleep deprivation. I let them have the natural healing because, for my table at least, I think it would have felt a bit of a slog at early level.
But, if you wanna increase the survival aspect, you could totally go full timeless trait and/or full Strongly Neutral Aligned. (I used the latter one too, mostly because my two good-aligned party members are religious, and I wanted to sort of express to them that their connection to their deities was far more distant/smothered here than was comfortable.) As the others have mentioned, I'd absolutely look for alternative options for them if you did wanna use the planar traits and touch base with your players about what it means/requires from them and how they're feeling about it.
Another point (kinda unrelated to planar traits but related to prepping for book 1 not being in the material plane) - if any of your players have some sort of animal companion, you might wanna decide how best to handle that. The book kinda just says "they're dead, but you can find a new one in book 2 and onward," but I wanted to tweak it a bit. My wizard player had a jerboa familiar. They loved that lil guy. His name was Buttons. I didn't wanna just kill the poor thing off immediatly - "soz, he's gone now, get a new one later", so I had the familiar still be around for the whole book, right up until Barzhak appears to help them get to the Material Plane, and was like "unfortunately one of you must stay - the dead cannot return" and the Jerboa hopped off the wizard's shoulder to go stand by the psychopomp and - surprise - was a ghost. He just wanted to help his wizard get home.
(I think someone else wrote this idea in the main book thread, so I can't take credit for it, but we were all weeping. You...
I'm not crying, you're crying.