Welcome
In the last post, the party arrived at the village of Oakhurst, where they met the mayor and were asked to go to the Sunless Citadel to stop goblin and kobold raids at their source.
Because I ran the adventure from a published module, this instalment is going to be half about what the players did, and half a kind of mini book review to give you an idea of what it was like working with the book.
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
Working With The "Tales From The Yawning Portal" Book
Working with a pre-written module is a relatively unusual experience for me. Normally, I run adventures I've written myself which makes it much easier to keep in my mind what is where and how each encounter fits into the overall story.
I have to admit I found this module relatively hard to work with. There are two maps; the Fortress Level, and the Grove Level.
The Grove Level map fills a page and although complex is easy enough to understand. The Fortress Level map, on the other hand, only uses about a sixth of a page, and is frankly too small to be easily used for such a large and complicated dungeon.
The actual text is relatively easy to follow, and having shaded boxes for descriptive paragraphs you can read out to the players is a helpful feature.
Because you're working with a dungeon split between two warring tribes (kobolds and goblins), it's designed to work as a coherent and somewhat dynamic whole. It is well worth reading through the whole dungeon and getting really familiar with it before starting to put your players through it. Even with that, you'll find you're doing a lot of flicking back and forth between pages to remind yourself of the fine detail of each encounter !
As I work through the dungeon, I'll focus on describing what the players did (and what was done to them !). But because the book itself is copyright, I'll have to avoid showing the actual maps or quoting directly from the text.
Descent Into The Depths
The journey to the Sunless Citadel was an easy one for the party; they only needed to follow the Old Road east for half a day. Passing through the Ashen Plain made them a little wary; they rightly guessed it was the work of a dragon, and it took them a little while to realise that it wasn't recent.
The Sunless Citadel itself, according to the description in "Tales From The Yawning Portal" was built by a dragon cult and then swallowed up by a cataclysm, surviving to exist in an underground cleft. The surface clues are a ravine running parallel to the old road for several miles.
At it's closest point to the road, it widens with several broken pillars around the edge. One has a knotted rope tied around it, hanging down into the ravine. A nice obvious clue for the characters !
Climbing down the rope, they find that the bottom of the ravine opens up to the cleft. The rope allowed them to lower themselves down onto a ledge, where they made quick and bloody work of three giant rats who lurked there.
From the ledge, a rough hewn stairwell zig-zags back and forth down into the darkness. Following it down, the heroic adventurers found themselves in a crumbling courtyard in the darkness just outside the citadel.
In the next episode... into the Citadel !
Previous posts in this series;
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-introduction
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-lets-meet-our-characters-
@alonicus/the-second-dandd-tarak-campaign-arrival-at-oakhurst