Welcome
In the last post, I introduced the various characters who made up our party of valiant adventurers. Or money-grubbing murderhobo rogues, depending on your perspective 😉
I hope you enjoy my D&D campaign write-ups, and the commentary I add to them. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome !
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
Our party of heroic hopefuls started off at the University of Tarak, in the city of the same name, which happens to be in the Principality also of the same name... imaginative chaps these Tarakians.
We started the adventure with them as first level characters, nice and squishy and acutely aware of just how fragile they were in relation to all the monsters they could meet.
They'd been asked to go to the village of Oakhurst, to help solve some local problems there.
Although the adventure was drawn from the "Tales From The Yawning Portal" Dungeons & Dragons supplement, I'd decided to drop the scenario of the tavern with a magical portal leading to all kinds of different dungeon and put Oakhurst directly into my homebrew world. Taverns with mystical portals is just a bit too weird for the more down-to-earth and gritty feel of my setting !
It actually fits with the original design anyway; the book is a collection of adventures from previous D&D editions re-written for 5th Edition and the whole tavern with a portal thing is just a way to shoehorn them into a coherent narrative.
The map below shows the local area of the Principality of Tarak;
Map Created by me in Wonderdraft
In the book, Oakhurst doesn't have a lot of detail. There's no map, and just outlines of six key buildings with the names of the main NPC to be found in each.
There's also a section with 6 rumours to be heard in town, and I chose to use one of those as extra background.
The party meet the mayor, Vurnor Leng. Mayor Leng want the party to investigate and ideally stop raids from small groups of goblins and kobolds based at the Sunless Citadel. His description in the book is limited to "a male human noble". That's it ! But I rapidly developed each of the NPC's a bit more as the party started to interact with them. He turns out to be a vain, corrupt and thoroughly incompetent individual, as well as remarkably ineffectual when it comes to administering the village.
More useful is Felosial, described in the book as "a female half-elf veteran". She's in charge of the village militia, so I played her as tough and competent but very much in retirement with standing instructions from Mayor Leng that her jurisdiction only extends to the village boundary. I had to do that, as the characters were very much angling for her to go with them bringing a party of militia, which would have unbalanced things nicely.
The characters are advised that the Sunless Citadel itself is half a day's travel down the Old Road to the east, which traverses the Ashen Plain. In the tavern that night, the players will hear the rumour that the Ashen Plain was created by a dragon many years ago, who destroyed the fertile farmland and settlements there in a rampaging fit of rage. Sounds like a good adventure hook for if the characters get to high level ! The book itself doesn't cover this, but writing adventures with dragons is always fun.
Refreshed by a good night of safe slumber, the characters set off first thing the next morning for the Sunless Citadel.... but that's for the next post.....
Previous posts in this series;
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-introduction
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-lets-meet-our-characters-