Red Hand of Doom Part 1 Actual Play Update

 Howdy folks!

It's been a little bit since the last updated, for two main reasons:

1. Scheduling has been, rough the last couple of months. We just had our first session in several months two days ago (they took down Skull Gorge Bridge!), but hopefully we'll be able to be more consistent now that we've changed up the structure (more on that below).
2. I've been really perfectionist about things I post! I think I need to let go of that, because ultimately this isn't a published, professional thing, and as long as it's functional to anyone reading it has served it's purpose. With that in mind, I'll try to be posting more frequently.

RHoD as West Marches (ish)

In response to the scheduling difficulties, we're going to be adopting a slightly different structure. Basically, we are taking two things from the West Marches style of play:

1. Each session will be a self-contained, episodic thing, where the players make as much progress as possible before they run out of session time daylight.
2. The players will choose what they want to do for next session at the end of each session, which might be making progress on the actual adventure or following other threads.

Obviously, it won't turn into a strictly West Marches game - we're sticking with the same 5 players, will be sticking to a consistent time (though folks might be missing more often), and there is absolutely a central plot/tension, rather than the free-form exploration that style is known for, but hopefully adopting these two elements will make it so that, even if we only have 2 or 3 players, we can at least do something, as the players head off to do sidequests, mini dungeon delves, or exploration that would feel like a waste of time with the whole party.

For the purposes of this blog, this means that, in addition to the actual conversion posts as I've been doing, I'll also be writing brief posts about other things that I am adding. If all you want is a strict conversion of RHoD to Pathfinder 2e, you'll still get that! But if you want to open things up a bit, and introduce other threads for the players to chase, hopefully you'll get some ideas from my other posts, too. I'm going to try to post at least once every two weeks (that's how often we play) to keep things at least somewhat consistent.

Part 1 Retrospective

After months of scheduling delays, we finally finished Part 1 of the adventure!

For the most part, things went relatively as expected! Marauder Attack! (p14-16) looked scary for a round, but ultimately wasn't a huge problem, they began building relationships with folks in town, and they quickly went looking for Jor, who guided them to Vraath Keep. The only thing about these early sessions that I regret is not giving them more to do in town before they headed into the forest to deal with the hobgoblins. As it was, they cared a little about a couple people, but mostly saw them as strangers (the several month gap didn't help, of course). I highly recommend spending a level or two in town to get to know folks better.

The biggest surprises of Part I were the storming of Vraath Keep and the Battle of Skull Gorge Bridge.

When the party arrived at Vraath Keep, they immediately and loudly announced their presence (they were trying to sound like Giants, so the Hand would be scared away, but ultimately the hand just, looked, and saw a bunch of normal sized people standing in their castle). The ensuing battle was, chaotic, to say the least, and spanned significant portions of two sessions. In the first, the party took down the goblins, the wargs, the minotaur, and most of the hobgoblins (the rest retreated to stand with Koth). The fighter was wounded 2, and hit points were overall pretty low. They heard Koth rallying the survivors on the other side of the wall... and elected to continue the fight. I'm honestly surprised no one died! It came down to 1. Jor helping out, and dealing a bunch of damage to Koth, despite initially not wanting to be a combatant, 2. some very lucky rolls, and 3. me intentionally playing down Koth slightly to avoid a TPK. They won... barely. And then immediately opened the door to the manticore, failed to sway it, and two of them were eaten while the rest of them fled below.

The second surprise was how well they handled Skull Gorge Bridge! Not just compared to that clusterfuck, but also in general. They scouted ahead, made a pretty solid plan (take out the hobgoblins in the tower and the first hell hound under cover of darkness, and then send the alchemist forward to blow the weak spot), and got some pretty lucky rolls! When the dragon came to play, their attacks were doing nothing, and it almost killed several of them. Then, at the last second, the alchemist blew the bombs (with a flaming crossbow bolt from like 40 feet away), crit on the roll, so I granted a bonus to allies saves and a penalty to the dragons, and then the dragon failed the save and ended up taking 88 damage! The bridge collapsed, the dragon flew away, a smoking wreck, and the party managed to get out alive!

I ran Rumors of War, and had Teyani advise that they return to Brindol to give a full report and discuss next steps, but they decided to head North and go hobgoblin hunting in the Blackfens instead. They'll head out next session, and we'll get this not-quite-West-Marches started.

That's all for this update! I'm going to try to get the Drellin's Ferry update out in the next few days, and Part 2A: The Elsir War out either just before or just after our next session (in about two weeks), depending on how my prep for that session goes. See y'all then!