The first four blog entries have been dealing for tips and tricks for first-time players and mostly DMs about where to start when you want to play D&D. This supplementary blog entry is for players and DMs that have already played the first one-shots and maybe a starter campaign like Dragon of Icespire Peak, Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. The first dragons have been killed and the players are somewhere between Level 3 or 5 (depending on the milestones of the adventure). What should you do now?
Let’s Continue
Depending on how your players feel comfortable with their characters, there’s the obvious first idea: Let’s press forward and continue with the current characters and let them advance further and further. But since the adventure is either already finished or close to finished, the question for the DM would be: How do we continue and with what adventure? There are a few threads to go further:
- Continue with a (official) adventure module
Since the initial release of the Fifth Edition, Wizards of the Coast has released multiple books that can be put into one of these categories: Rule Extensions, Campaign Settings and Adventure modules. Rule extension books are for example Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything or Monsters of the Multiverse. These either extend the given rule sets, add new monsters or give new player options. Most of those extensions and changes have already been included into the new 2024 rule books. Campaign settings are mostly lore books on specific settings and planes of existance. These would include campaign worlds such as Strixhaven, Dragonlance, Ravenloft or have dedicated focus on groups of creatures like giants or dragons. Recently, there have also been large packages for Planescape or Spelljammer worlds that have a setting book, adventure books and dedicated monster books within a big package. Those books usually also contain an abbreviated mini campaign but are mostly having only 5-6 large chapters. With adventure books there are mainly two different kinds of books: The long campaign that usually has around 10+ chapters that tell a coherent story in a given environment or have a specific tone and then there are also anthology one-shot collections that have loosely connected adventures that could be played separately or with a very loose background story that could be filled by the DM. However, since those adventures have a complete storyline, you’d have to be careful not to have the adventure module to feel „rail-roady“, meaning have the adventure on a direct linear path without giving them the option to branch out and see stuff off-road, so to say. But in general, most of them are already pre-pared adventures where the GM could mostly run them out of the book as-is (ok, some need to have some research and rework by the GM to be completely fair.) But that’s just the official stuff, there’s way more… - Continue with third-party content
There is a *huge* additional market place namely the DM’s Guild and DriveThruRPG. Both are market places where third party developers can sell their own material. In general, you can distinguish both pages in a sense that DM’s Guild has only material that’s based upon core-D&D worlds and campaign settings such as Forbidden Realms, Eberron, Dragonlance or Barovia. If their material touches any of those properties, it’s placed on the DM’s Guild. If they are creating material based on an own IP or self-developed campaign setting, those can be sold via DriveThruRPG. For example there are lots of settings based on ancient mythology like the Odyssey or historic places like medieval Jerusalem. Some of them are also Kickstarter-based expansions that they would sell on their own pages, but let’s just say, if you want to find stuff, there’s tons available. - Convert other material for older editions
I think one of the most daring, but also rewarding things is the translation and conversion of adventures and stories from other systems. It’s definitely something that you should only do if you’re feeling more confident about the rules and maybe also about the history of the game itself. But as I mentioned in a previous entry, I tried to convert the 1e adventure „Against the Cult of the Reptile God“ to 5e. It’s an adventure from 1982 and was basically a story about a city where inhabitants are slowly turned one by one into a follower of a giant snake. Cult members would sneak into the houses, kidnap the inhabitants and they would only return after turning them into acolytes, so you have a strong conspiracy vibe throughout the adventure. Of course most of the characters, monsters and rules are described in 1e notation, so you’d have to update and scale it accordingly. So for example, take the progression of your characters up to that point and extrapolate their state at the end of this adventure. Will their level be good enough to fight against a Bone Naga or Spirit Naga? Does the campaign make sense for a Bone Naga to be their final boss or do you need a Spirit Naga? If your characters are not prepared, maybe you should scale it down or scale it upwards. (Special Hint: The HP denoted are only averages. If you really want to test out the capabilities, you might the HP values or take the maximum potential values). If you don’t know what to do here, maybe take the statsheet of another monster at the intended challenge rating and transfer their values and maybe adjust their special attacks. - Create your own campaign setting
Now this is the stuff where you can really be creative from start to finish. This one is truly if you want to go all in into your storytelling, because this might expand into lots of things that need to be considered. Here are some potential questions:- What does your average city look like?
- What kinds of people inhabit your world?
- What does the pantheon of gods look like… or have gods being slayed in the past?
- What has happened in history? Have their been significant events in the past?
- And these are just some ideas that might pop up in the creation of your campaign setting that would eventually pop up at some point. But the main trick is: Don’t think about it from the start. If you don’t want your campaign end with a brutal decapitation of your main god of the pantheon, don’t think about them in the first place, let it progress from time to time and only consider what you’d need for the next few sessions of your campaign. In general, you can think about your campaign to fight against local brawlers up until your player characters are around level 5 and would only increase, until you’d reach level 15-20 when you’re basically only could fight against gods anymore. This is also where most third-party campaign or homebrew settings from groups like Critical Role or Dimension 20 started from. First, fighting against local bandits and only at the end of the campaign, they’d fight against gods and Vecna. Sometimes, these would also include dedicated homebrew character options where new classes or species are created, so again, that’s just for those who want to invest a lot of time creating an own world for your players (Let’s say it like that, I haven’t done it myself yet, but I’m thinking about my own setting for quite some time now).
- Overall:
So, there are a lot of options to continue your first adventures in D&D and these have just been options if you want to continue (some options already mentioned different worlds, which we will cover in a few moments). But if you have started in the Phandalin region and want to continue… *cueShamelessPlug* I have two modules on the DM’s Guild for that thing, one stand-alone adventure named Final Contact and a Connecting add-on adventure that you can place at the end of your starter campaign and already tease the next adventure, if you choose to use an official adventure released before 2022 (yeah, that’s when I released that module). Final Contact is sort-of inspired by Star Trek Picard’s first season and The Wolverine, dealing with a veteran of the past who had fought against Wererats until he was turned himself. Eventually he managed to end the curse and had to deal with the stuff he did as one of the Wererats and that’s when he’s meeting the player characters. The Cleric & The Wyrmling is introducing a small wyrmling that finds themselves lost in an old and forgotten cave. While you’re looking for that wyrmling, some attackers will await you and they would give you a first hint what would happen after you’ve finished the starter campaign proper and serves as a set-up for the follow-up adventure. I’ve tried to find a hook for each of the adventures up until Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden (for some it worked quite well, for some it’s rather difficult, unfortunately, like the anthology books or books like The Wild beyond the Witchlight or Acquisitions Incorporated), but if you’re intending to consider books like Tyranny of Dragons or Stormking’s Thunder, there are some connective tissues that you could use in order to bridge from the starter campaign to the longer campaign settings. (oh and I forgot to mention that if you’ll follow those links, you’ll get a better deal for those adventure modules).
Shameless Plug Links:
Final Contact ($1 down from $2)
The Cleric & The Wyrmling ($0.5 down from $2)
So… shameless plug over, but there’s also the note that the book Phandelver and beyond: The shattered obelish has been released after The Cleric & The Wyrmling and has an updated and expanded story for Lost Mine of Phandelver and also takes place in the Phandalin region if you want to continue in that area. But let’s continue with other things that you can do. - Collaborative ideas
By the time you’ll continue, ask your players if they want to continue to play as their current characters or in a new campaign. This gives them the possibility to choose a new character or flesh out the existing one. Anyway, let the players also finalize their character, because their backstory could offer you hints for potential expansions (see also the last blog entry about making the campaign memorable). - Preferred playstyles and your own growth as a DM
The first session have been full of anxiety, rules, combat mechanics and other things. But once you got the ball rolling, it’s probably been running great, I hope. So, with the expansion of your campaign, you could have an additional session with your players to think about the focus of the follow-up campaign: Do they want to experience a story? If yes, you might just stick to one of the adventure books. If they want to explore a region and setting, you might stick with one the campaign setting books and use them sort-of as a sandbox or open-world setting with one hub place like a city or fortress, where they can go on and off to adventures from. If they want tactical combat situations? Maybe it’s just enough to place your characters in a deep dark area and have a dungeon crawl with lots of monsters and lots of hidden dangers. Try to find out what your players want, and let’s just say there are books for each of those styles. But if your players have focused expectations on one of those playstyles, you might also include any of the others just to make you more accustomed with those playstyles and learn from that how to run those scenarios. - Try out other TTRPG systems
Look. D&D is basically a generator system for high fantasy scenarios with monsters and different species. But if you want to try out other settings, playstyles and ideas. There are tons of different systems for your group’s preferred scenario. If you want a Cyberpunk 2077-like experience, there’s Cyberpunk Red. If you want an Alien-like horror experience, there’s Mothership. If you want to play as old grannies solving crimes like Murder, She Wrote, there’s Brindlewood Bay. There are a lot of systems out there and you could try them out either, for example when your group has to cancel or if you want to play something different for your boardgame night. Some of them have different approaches to role playing and set their tone differently. But you could use those experiences for your D&D settings yourself, in order to get more comfortable as a game master.
So, that’s basically it for this month’s theme. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope I have given some of you, struggling with DM anxiety, some motivation to actually DM a game and run it long enough to continue for some time. Next month will have a different theme, and I hope to publish my next game soon, that’s all about movies and the love for movies. Hope to see you next month again.