So I plan on running my players through this as if it was a normal campaign but now I have guildlines to help me along. So after clearing out the Haunted House and taking care of the Sea Ghost. I plan on giving them the Sea Ghost and The Haunted House.

Do y'all think this is a good idea? They will have a base of operations but also have to pay to get it fully repaired. They can use the caverns to run a smuggling operation if they choose that path and can dock their new ship there.

Suggestion about me going down this path would be very helpful and welcomed!

I'm a 22-year old DM who ran a campaign over the summer for my friends to give our forever DM a break and ended up really liking DMing. Outside of a few one-shots, we haven't played since and I got the itch, so I wanted to try out running some short adventures for strangers starting with The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. The most important thing is that we'll be using Discord for voice chat and Roll20 for maps and rolling, so you need a stable internet connection and a good microphone if you want to join this game.

You'll be playing a level one adventurer with a class or sub-class from the Player's Handbook, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. In terms of races, you can be a human, dwarf, elf, genasi, gnome, goliath, half-elf, half-orc, halfling, or triton using a sub-race or variant from either the Player's Handbook or the Elemental Evil Player's Companion. You can change which Ability Score your race increases in accordance with the Customizing Your Origin rules from Tasha's. Lastly, you can use a background from the Player's Handbook or customize one yourself as explained here.

At the start of the adventure, the party will be just outside of a haunted house four miles east of a fishing village called Saltmarsh. For two decades, rumors have persisted of a great treasure hidden in the house's walls, but few have explored it for fear that the spirit of the house's former owner, a practitioner of black magic, still haunts it to this day. You are a group of brave souls willing to explore the house in hopes of finding the dark wizard's treasure at the risk of your own lives.

If you're interested in the game and free on Saturday nights, DM me wth the following information:

• Name, age, sex, and time zone.
• Your character idea(s).
• Your familiarity with Dungeons and Dragons, esp

Hey everyone,

I'm a new DM (just finished running my 11th session), and I'm currently running the Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign. It's a homebrew setting, and my players have dealt with some business in town, and are now at the Haunted Mansion. I wanted to share some changes and additions I've made to the quest that my players are really enjoying so far.

This is by no means a "look what I can do! Aren't I awesome?" kind of thing. This is just me sharing some things that are working well in my group, in hopes that it may help another DM out there or at least stir up some conversation.

Also, this is a six-person party and the characters are level 4.

Giving the PCs a Better Reason for Visiting the Mansion

I had the PCs run into Skerrin. He asked them to clear out the mansion for Anders who recently acquired the property after a bidding war with Primewater. Having a mission to clear out the entire mansion of any baddies gives the PCs a purpose to search each room, making the run-in with Ned inevitable.

A Sad Story

I created a backstory for the former mansion owner, an alchemist named Avonti Hemsh. Hemsh was a gnome alchemist married to a human woman. Together they raised his daughter Budguinett for several years until Hemsh's failed experiments landed him in a large amount of debt with one of the Sea Princes who were funding his work.

He sent his family away to live farther inland while he stayed at the mansion, toiling with his experiments in a final effort to repay the Sea Prince. Alone, and depressed, he started acting desperate. He attempted to fake the ability to turn mundane objects into gold, however, he didn't have enough time. After a fight with a crew sent by the Sea Prince, he managed to kill many of them, but they came back as undead, and forced him to hide in his lab.

Determined to see his family again, he built a container that could perhaps preserve his body and mind, since he hooked it up to jars and other things containing ingredients and plants that may nourish and maintain him for many years. Sadly, in his self-induced coma, he failed at that too, and died...kind of.

The PCs learn more about this story as they explore.

Puzzles and Clues

I wanted to include a Resident Evil type of puzzle in the mansion, so I created different keys around the property that would be needed to enter the hidden lab in the basement. The lab door itself is magically sealed within an old mural of a gnome and his daughter playing in the garden wh

Ahoy hoy!

I'm three sessions into my Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign. I'm planning on tying all the modules into one overarching adventure, loosely centered on one Big Bad (likely Orcus) whose evil influence is behind all the villains in the individual modules. The campaign will culminate in the party closing the underwater rift in Tammeraut's Fate. To foreshadow Orcus's malevolent influence seeping into the world, the town of Saltmarsh will be rocked by supernatural storms that whip across the sea with an unholy fury. Which brings us to our first adventure:

The biggest thing The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is missing, in my opinion, is a good inciting incident. I think a D&D adventure should start with a clear call to action that introduces the threat and asks the players to step up and do something about it. Here's how I started The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh:

>The sailors of Saltmarsh have a well-worn saying: "Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning." The eastern horizon was crimson this morning. The older and more superstitious sailors found excuses to stay on dry land: repairing nets, sewing sails, or simply retiring to the tavern after breakfast.
>
>But the young, the daring and the desperate set to sea with no regard for the old wives' tale. By mid-afternoon, it appears their boldness has been rewarded. Fisherman return to the docks, nets heavy with the day's catch, telling of clear skies and calm seas.
>
>Yet the fishers speak too soon. As if rising to their taunts, the Azure Sea begins to churn, darkening from indigo to slate, gnashing at the ships in port. The sky blackens and the wind turns furious. Sheets of rain rattle windowpanes and slash at exposed skin.
>
>The storm besieges Saltmarsh all night. When the rain finally relents at dawn, a single vessel remains afloat on the horizon. The fishing boat drifts into the harbor, tossed on the waves, barely above water: mast splintered, sails shredded, deck flooded.
>
>An unconscious man is tied to the stump of the mast.

At this point, my party springs to action, drawn to the docks by the cries of the townsfolk. They help rescue and revive the unconscious sailor, bringing him into the Snapping Line to dry off and warm up. The sailor is Sol Oweland, a middle son of town matriarch E

Has anyone decoded all of them yet? Which ones came true? Which ones are still upcoming?

Hi there! Thought I'd share something that made me chuckle today.

So I'm that English teacher who tries to be cool and use occasional pop culture shenanigans to reach these kids, dammit. I have introduced D&D into my lessons, however, because I go back to 3e and I have plenty of painful memories of the one time I brought that up to a girl I liked in gym class.

I have to head out of town for a long weekend at a friend's wedding, so I'm scrambling to get everything done ahead of next week. There were two big items on my to-do list:

1. A lesson plan for a review of active and passive voice
2. An outline for a session of the Saltmarsh-based West Marches-style campaign I run.

At some point during the day, I crossed the streams completely. It was like a trance. Before I knew what I was doing, I had rewritten a bunch of lore from The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in the passive voice. The intent? Give the newly-terrible text to the kids and let them figure out how it's *supposed* to go. We will see how it goes, but it was a kick bringing my teacher and DM worlds together. It's essentially the same skillset anyway.

My favorite part was citing Ghosts of Saltmarsh in APA style. Does anybody want to weigh in on that? I went with Wizards of the Coast as the author, but would it be better to credit Mike Mearls and Kate Welch? Or Kim Mohan, since she was lead editor? It makes one wonder.

- - -

If anyone wants to brush up on their active voice skills, take a stab at a rewrite. No using the book, or we have to do a whole academic integrity thing

Four miles east of Saltmarsh stands a haunted house. Until twenty years ago, it had been used by an aged alchemist of sinister reputation. Even then, the owner's mysterious activities had been avoided by the locals. Now, long after his disappearance, the house has an even greater air of mystery.

Crumbling and long-abandoned, an unwholesome appearance is being presented by the house. Decaying chambers and monstrous perils were seen according to tales by those who have entered the house. Untended weeds are being overgrown in the farmland around the house.

For years, the tales of the haunted house near Saltmarsh have been circulated through the region. Nobody knows what relics and other valuables could be hidden in the creaking floorboards and cracked plaster walls of the alchemist’s home. The house is avoided by most people. Is anyone brave enough to discover the sinister secret of Saltmarsh?

Just about to start Saltmarsh as a campaign and have some ideas for plot threads to run through the modules, but in SSoS, it hits pretty hard that you're not to tip off the players that the haunted house is anything more than that. However, one of my players took Smuggler as his background and is writing that into his backstory. It seems crazy to me that his character wouldn't know about the haunted house as a grounds for smuggling. Has anyone run into this, and how did you keep them in the dark as well (or maybe you didn't)? Thanks!

Looking for 4-6 players interested in an adaptation of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh for Pathfinder 2nd edition.

1st level characters.

This will be a play-by-email with roughly three posts per week. I'm hoping to get people that don't have time to post three times a day because of work or family or life in general.

If you are interested, please send a completed character, with a short character history to: veiledlands(at)gmail.com

I'll accept submissions until October 1st. Game begins October 4th.

Hey all,

Soon I’ll be running SSoS for a group of new players. All is well, but I’m wondering what are some ways DMs have gone about starting off the players in the setting.

I ran this adventure twice and the first time was a near TPK with the PCs just barely scraping by for a club at the school I work at. The next was today, when my usual DM for AL asked if I wanted to run today's game, since I had pretty much done all the T1 modules at that store and I was the only one who ran an adventure from the book before.

I think the big thing is that both parties alerted the guards with the magic mouth in the West room. Then they both found the secret door leading to the room with the rot grubs. Both parties went to extremes to rid themselves. The first had the dragonborn breath fire on them and the swarms to kill them. The others used their torches and tinderboxes to get rid of the grubs--the sorcerer and wizard of each party were the ones to investigate the corpse and both got hit by the grubs.

The skeletons were especially brutal. Six skeletons with something on them to essentially make them have double resistance on the first melee attack. The first group barely pulled it off. The second just noped out of there, especially when "Randy Savage, the skeletal alchemist" began to come from the other room. If anything DANGER is written for a reason.

The differences in the parties are here and in their levels:

Club party: 4 level 4 PCs. Took a long rest after the skeletons. Divine Sorcerer, 2 Paladins, and a druid,

AL party: 4 PCs. Level 1 Druid, Level 2 Wizard, Level 2 Rogue, Level 2 Barbarian. The Barbarian was a trooper with his Rock Skin saving his hide--even from the rock grubs. Took a short rest before the skeletons.

When they entered the caves, this was when things got bad. Due to the alert nature of the smugglers, there were more of them, and Sanablet was ready. In the tabletop club, the first hobgoblin was terrifying. Then we have 2 more. The club party scraped by with the skin of their teeth. AL crew had a mixture of bad luck and poor enemy match up. They ran out of spell slots and got TPK'd at the end.

This was also my first experience DMing at AL. While they had fun, pretty much all of us were kind of like, "This was a level 1-3 adventure?" I know that the top floor was more reasonable encounters, but holy crap.

http://nancybilyeau.blogspot.com/2018/11/from-sir-walter-ralegh-to-samuel-pepys.html

Any reason to disallow it? As they're exploring it, they're literally talking about how to furnish it, lol.