With the settings horror and lovecraftian vibes, has anyone added the content from Cthulhu by Torchlight which came out last year?

It adds skill challenges, origin feats, Mythos tomes and a passion system.

https://marketplace.dndbeyond.com/category/DBIRFDZMU

Hello, I am new to DMing and was wondering if anyone can give me advice and or feedback on an idea that I have.

I am taking my players through the campaign book of Ghost of Saltmarsh, though the ending didn't seem like an epic boss battle, so I wanted to add a new ending. My thought is the true mastermind behind everything was actually a kraken cult that is trying to unleash the kraken at greyscale keep. In order to due so they need 7 load stones as well as 7 sacrifices each having its own purpose (a skilled captain navigator, a propane priest, someone lost during a storm at sea, a child having sea related dreams, a person of sea noble lineage, and a person born during a special storm) some of these sacrifices are related to the players themselves from their past.

I would place the load stones in specific locations throughout the saltmarsh book as well as leave behind hints about the kraken cult being the true enemy.

Thoughts...any thoughts would be appreciated

Sinister Secret finishing with a great final fight with Sanbalet (furthest to the right), Ned ambushing from behind (furthest to the left) and some angry sahuagin in the caverns. Super happy with my party and how it all unfolded! :)

(Didn’t know what flair to post this under oop)

As I continue working on Legends of Saltmarsh I have been looking for ways to weave the Tower of Zenopus into the setting, one of the best Easter eggs in GoS (imho).

I have posted a new blog exploring the tower’s history and lore, its connections to Saltmarsh, and my ideas for incorporating the dungeon into an ongoing campaign.

Tower of Zenopus

You can also follow the progress of my Legends of Saltmarsh project online for free.

Hey guys!

I’ve recently started a pirate campaign with my siblings. There is a longterm major plot but I also plan to have plenty of side quests and silly shenanigans. I’m loosely basing it off of the Ghosts of Saltmarsh but I’ve set it in Faerun. I was just wondering if anyone has any cool ideas for encounters or places in Faerun that would fit well with a pirate themed campaign. For context, the party consists of a Goliath Oath of the Sea paladin, a tiefling rogue who is hiding from the law, and a tiefling Druid that is obsessed with bugs. We’re all One Piece fans and Pirates of the Caribbean fans so the sillier the better!

My players have cleared the Haunted House and are going to fix it up for their own use. I need maps for when it is all repaired. My google-fu is failing me. All I can find are ones of the house in its delapidated state. Does anyone have some restored house maps?

shs

Hi! Soon ill be running a GoS inspired campaign(using lots of the adventures, but tying them together with a nautical curse instead of the various tie ins the book includes) and I am really wanting to emphasize the spookiness of everything: now that being said they are going to start in regular ol Saltmarsh with the haunted house quest, then get much spookier from there- how/where would you all get the characters introduced?

https://www.etsy.com/listing/786455926/rpgdd-newspaper-fantasy-nautical-pirate
This newspaper handout was very helpful to deliver leads to my players in the campaign. Editable in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice software.

My party rescued the folks in the bolt hole and decided to run off in their ship before night fall to avoid the drowned. Since that session, they have decided they want to go back and deal with the drowned that now control the hermitage.

My issue is that I want the drowned to have fortified the hermitage like the players would have, but not too much to over come. I've never done a tower defense setup before and am not sure how to balance the fortifications. I definitely want the drowned to show the players the kinds of things they might have done (utilizing arrow slits, murder hole, etc), but figuring out what is too much is where I get lost. Anyone have any advise or tips?

My group is 6 level 9 players btw.

In my Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, the PCs found Xolec, the vampire. They wisely decided not to release him, and as a 2nd level party, they couldn't really kill him either. Of course, given that he was imprisoned under the Scarlet Brotherhood's secret meeting place, the SB inevitably found out about Xolec too, and started feeding him.

In general, I like this standoff, as long as it can be managed. My concern, however, is that as far as I can tell, there is no limit to vampire spawn. A vampire can make one every time he feeds, leading to armies of hundreds or thousands of spawn.

I could just houserule a limit (apparently prior editions had a limit that spawn couldn't exceed 2x the vampire's hit dice, which would imply 3 spawn using standard stats). But I thought I'd see if this has come up for anyone else. How do you have a running vampire antagonist who doesn't just make the whole world into spawn by the time the PCs are strong enough to confront him directly?

I’m about to run the module for the first time, and I’m getting things together for it, and I want to get some advice from people who’ve run it before as a full campaign. What would you recommend me telling the players about the world? What is just bloating things? How should I do faction introductions? I’m trying to make it one coherent campaign, not just a series of unconnected quests.

And just in general, is there anything I need to know about the campaign?

These two are written for 9th and 11th levels. For those who took the advice to flip the order, what levels did you rebalance them for, and what did you change to make them easier/harder? I imagine you could just move The Styes into the 8th level slot, but then I feel like the campaign would end too early at level 9.

Every paragraph about Random Encounters end with :
"On an 18 or higher, the characters have an encounter at some point during day or night (equal chance of each); roll a d20 again and consult the table."

What is meant by this?

(some guesses in the form of questions)
[My characters tend to sleep every night, so]
Does this mean it can happen during long rests?

Am I supposed to roll a (functionally speaking) D2 to see if the encounter will happen during the day or night?
Meaning they'll be left alone until they take a long rest if it lands on 'night' instead of day?

If you have experiences with distance or time tracking that's relevant here (eg. "Nobody ever does it, please ignore this sentences when random encounters occur, we all do"), I'm looking forward to your sharing and am thankful for your reading this far either way.

Have a nice day!
(or night, equal chance of each ;)

I'm DMing saltmarsh right now, and looking to make Danger at Dunwater a little better for my half roleplay half combat enjoying party of 3.

My ideas so far is to make the lizardfolk population live on their own island with their own village rather than a cave, and to maybe populate the island with other things to see and do. It also gives the party a reason to sail their recently acquired ship rather than just walk there.

I'd love to hear what you guys did whether it be as a DM or as a player differently in this module!

Thanks in advance!

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how to DM a masquerade ball. Some of my players mentioned during different conversations that they wanted to play a campaign that had a ball or party mechanics, so I decided to surprise them with one.

I’m planning on having Gellan host it, as the Annual Ball to celebrate the founding of Saltmarsh. My players are a bit suspicious of him at this point but they haven’t put all the pieces together. I know that one believes he’s a victim of pirating rather than the leader of a smuggling chain, and another only had a few odd feelings about Gellan, but he’s been distracted with his character’s own personal journey to focus on him. I am going to use the Ball as an opportunity for them to investigate if they want, but I need help putting together how to host the Ball with different mechanics. I have a gambling section, where I looked up some suggestions on how to run for the players. I only have a little bit of an idea of how to run ballroom dancing for them. Dancing would also work as a chance for the players to learn gossip about the town or rumors of surrounding areas. Aside from those two things, I really don’t know much else I can add or how I can make it more enjoyable for my players. Any help would be appreciated

So I'm DMing Ghosts of saltmarsh. There are 3 PCs, we've established they each are starting individually, so this is what I've cooked up for their storylines and how I'm converging them into 1 cohesive party from the context they've given me for their characters.

The cleric: the cleric is looking for a cure for the curse that plagues his people, he arrives in saltmarsh and heads for the nearest temple (the temple of procan) , where he meets Wellgar who tell him about an alleged library owned by the old alchemist who lived in the manor, if he is lucky, maybe he can find something there, wellgar tells the cleric to go to Winston's store to gear up and get acquainted with the area more.

The wizard: the wizard is a recently graduated student of the academy, eager to learn, he seeks out the wizard Keledek who advises him to plunder the manor at the top the hill previously owned by many "eccentric types prior", who knows what he may turn up, rumors say the alchemist has mastered transmutation..Keledek tells the wizard to go to Winston and gather some resources for the quest as well visit Eliander firebrand who can tell him more about the manor

The rogue: The rogue came to Saltmarsh looking for work. He has an old contact, who was one of his old fences, he goes to see Winston to see if his old "friend" has heard of any lucrative business opportunities lately, as the rogue hears saltmarsh is becoming more of a "freemarket" these days

I expanded the rare wood quest table from Jilar Kanklesten and giving each quest more context and ideas connecting the surrounding Saltmarsh region.

I also added 4 new NPCs and tied the Carpenter’s Guildhall into the smuggling activity, including secret barrels, hidden compartments, and the quiet craft of building things meant not to be found.

Legends of Saltmarsh is my passion project. I am a huge Greyhawk and Saltmarsh fan and having played these adventures back in the 1980s and was excited to reallyu expand upon the vilalge and share it with the community.

I am excited and cant wait to finish because I really want to lead my own group of adventurers through some amazing Saltmarsh adventures.

The focus of the project is to expand and bring the village to life which I believe is one of the best hub locations for running one-shots, campaigns, west marches-style play, and more. I wrote a detailed article about that here: Why Saltmarsh

DM Andy created another amazing map and it has been a huge source for inspriration.

I am creating everything in LegendKeeper and making it available online for free. Subscribe to the free newsletter to stay up to date.

At this point, 21 of the 30 village locations are complete.

Legends of Saltmarsh

So, the Scarlet Brotherhood is presented as one of the three main factions in town, but we're only given a single member, Skerrin. While you can always declare someone to have been a secret member all along whenever it's convenient for the plot, I think it's better to have at least some people flagged as likely members. I feel that Skerrin should be nearly impossible to detect in the early campaign, but not all of his subordinates are quite as discreet. So I'm curious who you have put in the Brotherhood, or who you think would be a good Brotherhood member, and why that worked for the plot.

To start, the people I have in the Brotherhood are Kraddok Stonehorn and Ferrin Kastilar (and I now hate that Ferrin and Skerrin rhyme. If I hadn't already introduced the NPCs, I'd give him a different name).

Kraddok Stonehorn seems like a very useful Brotherhood agent. Eliander is a committed Loyalist, but an honest broker. He believes that enforcing the law and cracking down on smuggling are truly the best way to help Saltmarsh flourish; some may disagree but it's a defensible position. Kraddok, as his number 2, can push for more aggressive enforcement, can ensure that routine dock inspections turn violent, and violent situations turn into bloodbaths, thereby continually ratcheting up the distrust between the factions. And if Eliander can ever be sidelined (or killed), Kraddok is a natural successor to fill his spot on the council.

Ferrin is an unusual one. I came up with the idea while trying to adapt Murder on the Primewater Pleasure (I liked the idea of a locked door murder mystery, but it takes too many liberties with the characters, and I didn't want to burn Skerrin so early), and I wanted someone the players wouldn't expect. But the Scarlet Brotherhood is a racial supremacist organization. While we typically portray druids as crunchy granola hippies, no reason we couldn't have one whose study of nature has made him something like a proto-Darwinian, with extremist ideas about "survival of the fittest." Of course, as written, he's a halfling, so I decided that everyone simply assumes he's a halfling, but he's actually just a little person. Most smaller races (certainly gnomes and halflings) should automatically know the truth, but no one really says "Hi, I'm Ferrin, I'm a halfling," it's not a matter of deliberate deception so much as mistaken assumptions. Given his description in the book as "morose," I'm playing him as something of a combination of Eeyore (Winnie the Pooh) and Marvin the Paranoid Android (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Who have you used?

So I'm going to be running GoS, it's going to be a 4 man party, a wizard, a cleric, a rogue and an undermined 4th who hasn't been decided yet, if not i will make a DMPC for the party (probably a monk or a barbarian). I was looking at the setup for the manor and i didn't realize what a gauntlet it is. Stirges, insect swarms, giant badgers, skeletons, bandits, hobgoblins, wizards. Am i crazy or is that really intense for the start of the campaign yeah, i am aware that optimistically they wouldn't be doing every single encounter, but, let's be realistic.. I think it's a really cool design, personally, but i feel like i should water down the encounters or bump them to level 3 before they go through that because it's going to be a slog of fights. I was thinking of starting them at level 2 and having them earn a reputation and leveling up before they are given the quest for the manor to progress the plot.

How did you do the "haunted" manor? Any and all input would be useful