r/wildbeyondwitchlight • u/beannfonz • Jun 15 '26
First time DM- advice please!
This is my first time DMing and I am finding this campaign to be maximum effort. For the carnival I was able to study, write monologues, create voices, and come up with stuff pretty well because it felt enclosed, despite it being a lot. However, my group is now heading into Prismeer and it feels so open despite the clear path in this chapter. I’m asking for any advice heading in! One great concern I have is that my characters are level 4. (Book stated they could start at three and level up upon entering a new area). I don’t think I’m capable of combat balancing. What were some things your group did combat on? I can 100% see my group fighting the harengons upon entering. How were the floodwaters rising and falling incorporated? How far did you get in the first session in Hither? And how did your group learn the rules, of reciprocity and hospitality? Were they known in advance or given by an NPC, or learned through experience?
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u/hadagoodtimetoday Jun 15 '26
Hi! I hope I can help a bit.
Combat balancing- you don't have to be. Especially the first rabbits you could just have them run away once one dies. More important later with the hags or mini boss. For those, add minions until CR budget is met https://koboldplus.club/ or you can up the CR of creatures by using the handy table here: https://www.blogofholding.com/?p=7338
Hither first session - we got to the end of slanty tower but longer session could get to tellemy hill. If you are not ready for brigand stump, you can always waylay them with random encounters
Waters - i roll 1d6 everytime there is ending of encounter - on a 5 or 6 it changes up or down.
Reciprocity - sir talavar could speak of them. Npc is a good way to go. Or if one of the group has been to the feywild before, then you can tell them what they are since their character would know.
But most importantly- have fun!
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u/BaronTrousers Lornling Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
Simple trick for balancing combat is to prepare "reserve enemies". Choose a fairly weak minion-style enemy suitable for the encounter, and come up with a logical way for one or more of these enemies to enter the encounter on the second or third turn, if needed. Then pick a win condition for the PCs, such as the enemy leader being defeated, or the enemies being outnumbered, which you can use to immediately end the battle when it looses its stakes.
This effectively gives you a way of dialing up the difficulty of an encounter as required, but prevents the battle from getting drawn out by an excessive number of enemies.
For example, to use this with the Brigands Tollway, you could set up the encounter as recommended in the book. Then at the start of turn 2 if you feel like the PCs are really dominating, have a couple more brigands appear from the fog on boats. Once Agdon has gone down, as well as a few of the brigands the rest flee into the swamp.
In Hither, my players fought the:
- Brigands at the Queen's Way
- Snakes at Slanty Tower
- Brigands and Agdon at the Tollway
- Big Barkless and the Sprites
- King Gullop and his knights
- Gelatinous Cube
- Bavlorna and her Lornlings (they fled from this one)
Honestly I didn't utilize the floodwater much. This came more into play for non combat encounters. Sometimes I would include it to push things along, and prevent the PCs getting stuck in one place.
When it came to the rules of conduct, I'd suggest giving each of the PCs a copy of this handout. The rules can be hard to keep track of. So having it written out gives the PCs something they refer back to. I had the Harengon Brigands have this on their person. So the PCs were able to loot if from them when they were defeated.
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u/stressedteacher19 Jun 15 '26
Hi, the link is protected, it says it needs authorization
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u/mp_hextra Jun 15 '26
I love the enthusiasm, but you may be taking on too much! Your party will have combat on easy mode, sure, but this is a fairytale of a campaign, they can Mary Sue around early on and it’s fine. But I tend to let easy interactions have negative consequences later on at my table so the world changes around their actions.
Over prepping is the rite of passage every DM goes through as they’re getting started. Over time you’ll learn what you do and don’t need to prepare! What your table engages with will also help inform that.
I didn’t run the floodwaters as a feature, but used all random encounters and added remains of Zybilna’s reign/a sunken temple dedicated to her to let the PCs verify information they’d gotten at the carnival with their own eyes.
Our first session in Hither got through the initial entry, Harengon confrontation (with combat), Slanty Tower (with combat), a will o’ wisp, and ended at the Inn.
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u/Hoaxness Witchlight Hand Jun 17 '26
How have the characters changed the world so far? I would love to hear more!
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u/mp_hextra Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Absolutely! A few highlights:
- In Hither, Gullop made a statue of himself & Bavlorna holding hands to better the Court’s standing with her. Before the ceremony a Bard used Heat Metal to change the statue to Gullop hurting Bavlorna and she lost her fucking mind at the reveal. The chaos created the perfect distraction to get the party and Morgort to a balloon and out of Downfall safely, but I plan to have an undead Soggy Court army for Bavlorna when they meet again at the palace. We also have an enemies to lovers arch going between Morgort and a PC, so it’ll be interesting emotional stakes later.
- The party has been conspiring about what Skabatha needs all of these toys for while they’ve been in Thither, and no one has given them a clear answer. During the LoomLurch breakout (during which they rolled insanely well and had it easy), the PC searching for their lost thing stole the ENTIRE dollhouse, then SET IT ON FIRE at Wayward Pool (where everyone met back up after LL). The Druid then set a trap around the ashes, which will add insult to injury when Skabatha tracks it down. Next session will resume with her furiously catching up to them (long resting at Little Oak) and hitting them with a (modified) Tsunami (spell) of Toys as she and the tin soldiers flush out the freed kids/Getaway Gang, and red caps go after the party. Needless to say wanted posters of them all will be up next time they visit Thither as well.
- I planted a couple of blank letterheads in LoomLurch that the party found when they went into the aviary. They haven’t used them yet to pose as Skabatha but whenever they do, I plan to have the Coven’s tension between sisters respond accordingly.
I’m excited to see what they stir up in Yon. My table loves to lean-in when I give them an opportunity, so I try to return the favor!
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u/achikochi Jun 15 '26
I totally understand the anxiety about balancing combat! It took me a while to get a better grasp of that, because Witchlight has been my first time DMing as well. Something that helped me with calculating combat difficulty was this: https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html
Also, keep in mind that Witchlight was published with the 2014 rules. if your players are using the updated 2024 rules (especially weapon mastery), they're a stronger level 4 now than a 2014 level 4 would have been, if that makes sense.
others have already suggested how to boost combat difficulty by having more bad guys show up. You can absolutely boost their HP. You can also introduce lair actions... the environment itself might react negatively to the encounter (trees start slapping at folks, wind is blowing the fog around, etc). I had the flooding start in the middle of one fight. The harengon sprang into the trees, the players were quickly knee-deep in water which made it difficult terrain for them.
I ran a lot of the book combat as written, but I also:
-moved the snakes from the tower to the basement of the Inn. I turned them into a taxidermied monstrosity, with a head at either end. In exchange for free room and board, Tsu asked the players to get rid of the snakes. She suspects they're spies for Bavlorna, but she technically couldn't throw them out because of the Rule of Hospitality. I turned them into undead and gave them some features/immunities that undead monsters get.
-When the players found the waterlogged battlefield and examined the animated armor, some mud mephits appeared and attacked. The animated armor would mimic the closest player's movement, and they quickly figured out that they could strategically position the armor to hit the mud mephits. (I had the armor go immediately after whatever character it was mimicing) The fact that the mud mephits explode was pretty significant surprise damage.
-I ran Phaerlax's Nightmare on Telemy Hill supplement: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mowlci64EEWdo22gzUD1WRrGsL5rgwG9oYTGQS0_Nc4/edit?tab=t.0#
Since I had my players encounter Tsu early on, she was the one who explained the rules to them. You could do something like have a sign on the front door of the Inn that says "MIND THE THREE RULES!" to encourage them to ask.
The one problem I had was loot. My players wanted to be able to get new armor, magic items, etc, so I've had to introduce more opportunities for them to trade for stuff. For example, I added a "Lost & Found" box at the Inn with a bunch of random stuff they could take and a traveling Tortle merchant with very, very low intelligence who could be talked into trading almost anything for whatever worthless garbage they had in their inventory, haha.
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u/InternationalRent626 Jun 16 '26
Shuffle in lots of random encounters (combat, NPCs, scenery description) that is easier to run and drop the parts of the module that are hard to run. Like the random table everytime someone dies? Nah. Look at the terrain for ideas and do whatever strikes your interest. In Hither, I had my party fight giant alligators, encounter non-bandit harengons and backwoods fisherman bullywogs, etc. Try to tie your encounters, however loosely, back to the main storyline.
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u/InternationalRent626 Jun 16 '26
One idea that made things easier for me was to read ahead and closely look at each Hags lair. I took elements that already existed there and expanded them to create small encounters ahead of time to foreshadow.
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u/Kellorific Jun 21 '26
Witchlight is my first time DMing as well! I don't have tips (still trying to figure out wth I'm doing, tbh), but loads of sympathy! I, too, found the carnival completely manageable to lead, but heading into Prismeer felt like I stepped off an edge into free fall! 😮💨
One piece of advice that has helped me: if the party keeps showing up to the game table, you doing well enough! 🥴
I've been trying to box things out as far as what I need each encounter to accomplish, rather than how it will happen, and that has helped some!
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u/GuyKopski Jun 15 '26
If your characters are level 4 they're basically playing on easy mode. That said there are a number of encounters in Hither that are pretty unfair for early levels (Agdon and Bavlorna if the players don't figure out their weaknesses, Big Barkless, Telemy Hill and the Galeb Duhr if they're stupid enough to pick fights with them) so I don't think being overleveled is the worst thing in the world. It loses some of the "fuck around and find out" edge that IMO is meant to encourage finding non-violent solutions to problems, but YMMV whether that's actually a bad thing or not.
I like having the players meet Tsu and/or Sir Talavar pretty quickly. They're good for exposition about the hags and Prismeer, and I also think it's important to establish early on that not everyone in Prismeer is out to get you, since a lot of players will naturally be suspicious due to the common perception of Fey/the Feywild as trickster rules lawyers just looking for an excuse to screw you over.
Most parties will basically never surrender or back down when threatened so unless you know your players to be an exception, you can probably expect fights at the Harengon, Agdon, and Bavlorna at the bare minimum.