Ghosts of Saltmarsh - The Premise. DREAMS OF THE RED WIZARDS AN ADVENTURE FOR CHARACTERS OF 2 ND -4 TH LEVEL TITO LEATI MATT SERNETT CHRIS SIMS. Finally, Saltmarsh Backgrounds provides four new background options (Fisher, Marine, Shipwright, and Smuggler) which are useful additions for GoS specifically but also great new options for any character in any campaign. A storm, fog, or sandbars might fit here. The End of a Trilogy. As part of the review, Ill break down the contents of the book, summarise the adventures and other content within, and highlight any issues I might perceive in the content. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is an adventure module anthology for the 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game. I would start at level 2 with no adjustment for Saltmarsh. We can describe the locations of Saltmarsh, letting players jump in when they hear of a place about which they want to know more. Sanctum islands are inhabited by creatures that want to protect themselves from raiders or live in isolation. Empowering Warlocks: Alternatives to Eldritch Blast. For the majority of my Saltmarsh campaign I had 3 players, PHB beastmaster ranger with . The notes in chapter 1 recommend placing it in an isolated harbour city on an island in the Azure Sea. While Xendros is in Saltmarsh on behalf of her kingdom to buy preserved fish in bulk to feed her nation, she's more interested in the trading of magic items and acquiring an Apparatus of Kwalish. This is one of the memorable encounters Ive seen, as it includes a decommissioned ship held aloft by a crane in the warehouse yard. I recommend this product: I think your DM will get a lot of value out of the content and should enjoy running the adventurers within for you. Chapter 17 of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master describes the value of running a "session zero" for a new campaign. The traditionalists see it as meddling by the outside iron gauntlet of the king. The D&D Beyond version of Ghosts of Saltmarsh includes high resolution versions of both of these maps along with high-resolution maps of all of the locations in the whole book. In Tammerauts Fate, the characters travel to the nearby village Uskarn (a choice of hooks are provided to help you get them there from Saltmarsh), where they accept the request of a druid to investigate the hermitage on nearby Firewatch Island. Im mentioning that now so I dont keep repeating myself in my summaries of the following chapters, though I wont mention it again in my descriptions of the following chapters. Each also has a collection of ready made encounters that use the map, and each of these encounters has a hook that you can use to tie it into the. Whether Saltmarsh is invited to join the alliance depends on the players actions throughout the adventure, and is resolved by way of a point system. Isle of the Abbey introduces evil cultists who worship a deity of your choice. Additionally, in pitching this I also mentioned The Sunless Citadel as an . | Ghosts of Saltmarsh Arcane Arcade 101K subscribers Subscribe 3.2K 181K views 3 years ago We begin our adventure on the high seas! It was an oddity in its time and is still a bit of an oddity now: if played smart the adventure requires absolutely no combat. As with other official titles, two covers exist: the limited edition cover (available for pre-orders and limited quantities in local game stores) and the regular cover. The degree of success also affects the rewards granted to the characters by the Saltmarsh council at the end of the adventure. [1][2][3] The adventures included, in the order of presentation and including original publication year, are: Additionally, the book contains rules for ship-to-ship combat, character backgrounds and includes details on the port town of Saltmarsh which anchors each adventure. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The hazards section has been significantly expanded, and now includes rules to govern a number of specific types of hazard. Ghosts of Saltmarsh also introduced new rules for ships, including full statblocks for several kinds of boats and naval vessels. [10], Cameron Kunzelman, for Paste, wrote that the book is "geared at more veteran players" and that he "found it very cool to read through". . Action to cast, 10', instantaneous. slot level above 1st used to cast it), and the next attack against the target before the end of the lizardfolk's next turn has advantage. An alternate art cover was available exclusively in local game stores. These are adventures, and theyre good, but theyre good for very specific things. As things stand, I would probably wouldnt useSalvage Operation. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". Causing the kraken to flee avoids that horror, but taking the long view it may be a worse result: hidden in the ocean depths the kraken can grow to adulthood unopposed. That's a fine option too but you might have to do some story-yoga to figure out why a githzeri makes sense in Saltmarsh. Following this, it provides recommendations for where within the region of Saltmarsh you could drop in adventures from Tales of the Yawning Portal! Encounters at Sea provides Open Water Encounters tables for ships travelling out on the deep blue. These are the Charm of Plant Command, Cursed Luckstone, Helm of Underwater Action, Pipe of Remembrance, Pressure Capsule, and Sekolahian Worshiping Statuette. Ghosts of Saltmarsh is an adventure module anthology for the 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game . These tables are paired with more complex adventure sites in an effort to make them more manageable. Honestly, I think the standard cover is more attractive and the alternate cover looks too dark. Session 13: Chapter 6 from the book (conclusion/assault). In play, Id suggest using these numbers as a baseline but introducing a small amount of variance to the price and construction time for upgrades slightly based on current market conditions, availability of materials and skilled workers, rarity of the technology, etc. Ghosts of Saltmarsh for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons* Last modified: 9/4/2019 8:47:00 AM . If not dealt with, the drowned ones will spread to skarn, Saltmarsh, and beyond, continuing to seek new victims and build an undead army. Alternatively, these locations can be used as a starting point to inspire adventures: each location has a section of guidance for generating adventures that might take place there. The adventure ends with a dramatic timed scene in which the ship is torn apart during a sudden attack by a giant octopus. This first adventure is APL 6 designed to be run before chapter 6. No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming. This avoids the oddball character who comes in with a clearly different motive and drive that never quite fits either the group or the adventure. A sidebar provides recommendations for where a DM might place the adventure if they choose to use it in one of three other settings. See Full PDF Download PDF. In the Ghosts of Saltmarsh appendix A, "Of ships and the sea" one of the pre-created underwater locations ( the wreck of the marshal) has the following feature: I'm hoping to run one of the suggested adventures in this area (the one for level 5 characters), but I'm struggling to see how this feature is supposed to work. When the characters arrive, diplomats from several groups of aquatic races are present for negotiations to join an alliance against the sahuagin. The expected level for this adventure is 11th, and its once again designed for 4-6 characters. The map of Saltmarsh is full colour, but the majority (including the hex map of the region) continue the trend of recent Waterdeep products to return to a more old school line art style. The juvenile kraken must be slain. Completing both parts is expected to take 4-6 characters from 1st to 3rd level. If the characters forge on and fight the clerics, the abbey ruins are essentially a straightforward dungeon crawl. If played in order as a seafaring campaign, it takes characters from level 1 through level 12. While these entities are different enough that its not easy to tie them together into a single conspiracy, perhaps the connection is simply that the power of evil is waxing. A Pressure Capsule is a consumable that allows you to ignore effects of swimming at depths greater than 100 feet (if youre not aware, these effects are described in the Underwater section of Unusual Environments in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Yet while the ghost forests may evoke graveyards, the salt marsh plants that advance into dead and dying stands of trees are themselves valuable. For DMs intending to run the whole sequence of adventures as a full campaign, there may be some extra work to be done here to tie things together more cohesively and bring about a satisfactorily epic conclusion. Oceanus (Sea Elf) those who own Storm Kings Thunder already have stats for a sea elf warrior, but Oceanus is slightly stronger so you could use this statblock for leaders of sea elf patrols. Theres potential here, but its a shame there are holes that need patching by the DM. Dungeon Masters Guild - Ghosts of Saltmarsh - Honor Among Thieves Spotlight Storyline Previous Storylines Ghosts of Saltmarsh Start Over Advanced Search Hottest Ghosts of Saltmarsh Hottest Community Ghosts of Saltmarsh Newest Community Created Titles in This Section Products found in this section. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. However, its the perfect place to add such links. Download the Ghosts of Saltmarsh Player's Guide. The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh feels like two short adventures, rather than one: its divided into two parts, The Haunted House and The Sea Ghost. These arent given names, you could use other tables for that: theyre meant to be sailor nicknames. It takes a lot of work to mesh singular modules into a cohesive adventure, but [Mike] Mearls and Kate Welch (who served as the lead designers on this one) did a fantastic job. This is a slightly surprising omission, as this downtime action specifically resolved finding a crew which many DMs would no doubt find helpful. [11], For Bleeding Cool, Gavin Sheehan wrote that "Ghosts of Saltmarsh is one of the best put-together books in the entire run of 5th Edition. If used carefully, this still might be considered worthwhile. Its further broken down into the following sections: a brief introduction to the town, followed by Politics and Factions, Saltmarsh Overview, Downtime Activities, Saltmarsh Region, Adventures in Saltmarsh, and Saltmarsh Backgrounds. This one-page guide, influenced heavily by Matt Coleville's video on the value of player guides, is intended to give the players everything they need to understand where the campaign is going and how their character might fit into it. The region of Saltmarsh is a classic D&D setting. . While the events of this adventure are very exciting, it has significant problems. This was the perfect time to start fresh, take a deep breath, get together with our friends, and learn about the world and the characters who will sit in its center. (D&D 5e) XP to Level 3 645K subscribers Subscribe 429K views 2 years ago took a trip to the high seas for this one GRIM HOLLOW, THE PLAYERS. The seven adventures can be played through for characters 1st through 11 th levels, not exactly as a single campaign, though advice is provided for how to do that. Here they may defeat it, make a deal with it, or perhaps succumb to its psychic enslavement. It includes the Ghosts of Saltmarsh broken into individual booklets for each chapter, physical props (such as amulets and tea stained in-world letters), a custom Dungeon Master's screen for this book, thirty hanging encounter cards, laminated ship maps and other handouts (such as regional maps and setting art). It looks like quite a lot of tracking, but the result seems like it should be a lot of fun! Like my post from the Sea Ghost Loot, I went through the first half of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and labelled where all valuables are located at in the mansion. This table is a fun idea but only moderately useful in my opinion. [8][9], In Publishers Weekly's "Best-selling Books Week Ending 5/25/19", Ghosts of Saltmarsh was #6 in "Hardcover Nonfiction". One group is loyal to the king of Keoland and uses imperial authority to exert its influence, while another is connected to the sinister Scarlet Brotherhood, a classic group of Greyhawk antagonists. The Saltmarsh village and regional maps can be printed on 17x24 for about $3 each at your local Staples or Fedex print center and they look great on the table when you're running your session zero and describing the locations. Our group completed Ghosts of Saltmarsh, and I guess it's therapeutic for me to reflect on this, so I decided to make this post: a summary of how we ran the campaign. I recommend both a color map of the village of Saltmarsh and a black-and-white map of the Saltmarsh region. Though it starts out simple, the adventures slowly get more complex and. Personally Id not use the race tables very often (with perhaps a few exceptions Id rather crews be of mixed backgrounds) but your mileage, or nautical mileage in this case, may vary. If this happens, the adventure is reduced to the level of an old school dungeon crawl of seemingly random monsters dropped into a location without context (in this case a Lolth-worshipping half-orc druid, spider-themed monsters, and a random group of ghouls which are somehow aboard the vessel). They may or may not be willing to entertain visitors. The total number of the . This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. I could wish for more specific types of mysterious island because I think theres a lot of untapped potential still, but perhaps well see a collection of additional types on DMsGuild one of these days. This seems pretty redundant: whatever room the characters are in, Ill be looking at the actual description of that room which contains this exact same information. If the characters allow them to do so, many may not survive. Some are republished from Volos Guide to Monsters for convenience. The adventurers only ought to end up in a fight if they fail to act diplomatically, or if they end up helping the lizardfolk with some local problems in order to earn goodwill. Wild islands are those on which nature and wild magic reign. Although those tables are intended specifically for the Saltmarsh region, theres no reason you couldnt use them every now and again to add variety to any other nautical campaign. If the characters can find signs of the single clear path, they can follow it safely through the dunes. Someone might recognize her as one of two adventurers, brother and sister, who came to town with dreams of finding the alchemist's gold at the haunted mansion only to never be found again. It has a recommended retail price of $49.95 in the US, and 38.99 in the UK. The appendix starts with rules governing ships. Be wary that determining the clerics follow Orcus or Tharizdun make a diplomatic solution to the adventure even less likely, if the characters figure out who exactly the clerics worship. The first, Avernus, fell apart. Have a question or want to contact me? Its hard to know if theyre actually in the book, or whether theyve slipped in during the transfer of content to DnDBeyond. Naturally, GoS is also available on DnDBeyond, with the usual variety of purchase options: all content, compendium content only, and cherry-picking individual content. But if the adventurers favourably impress the lizardfolk and the visiting diplomats of other races, then they may be able to forge ties between the alliance and the town of Saltmarsh. They can pick up some rumors at the docks. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. This latter advice is honestly one of my favourite parts of the book: in a few brief paragraphs, it massively increases the play potential of a campaign set in and around Saltmarsh for anyone who also owns TotYP. Time to turn back if you dont want spoilers! In my case, I am combining Tales from the Yawning Portal with Ghosts of Saltmarsh (which is suggested as an option at the start of GoS) to give the players more choices and . I ignored most of the miscellaneous items, as well as any plot relevant items. During The Haunted House the adventures investigate the abandoned cliffside abode of a long dead alchemist, which seems to be haunted. Each sample ship also gets a detailed description as well as a statblock, including a breakdown of a typical crew (including which statblocks to use if necessary). However, a sidebar does provide the necessary information to run a sahuagin attack on the way to the adventure site. 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