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I'm running a new campaign, starting in the Chaos Scar.

It's a small group - only three players - and as a result, it looks like there's more than enough content for us to pick and choose, play about a third of the adventures published, and still stay level-relevant.

My players decided they wanted to play with at least one Kobold Ninja Team Leader (mobile rogue|warlord), and as a result we now have a team of kobold ninjas, working with stealth and trying to get surprise on everything and kill it before it gets a chance to act.

So far it's working well. We've played through the Brothers Gray, and everything there died very rapidly. The final fight was a little more challenging - they actually had to use a heal for the first time - because not only is it harder as written, but I added the priestess of Torog from Den of the Slavetakers. She was meant to flee from the fight and be a lead-in to the next adventure, but she didn't manage to get away.

The next adventure is likely to be Elves of the Valley and/or Eyes in the Forest, and then we'll be done with level 1 already!

As a result of playing a party of Kobolds, we've had to change some things around - they won't have the normal adventurer experience of interacting with townsfolk at either the Keep on the Borderlands or Gardmore Abbey, but I might use some of Bedlam.

The kobold ninjas are all "born under a bad sign"  - their background is that the chaos shards have caused random mutations in the local residents, and the adventurers are mutated from the Fireclaw kobolds who are mentioned in some of the adventures. At the moment they're quite happy killing halflings and elves, but at some point they'll come up against other kobolds and dragons, and then we'll have some more development of how they fit in... (I leave a lot of the background and societal stuff up to what happens in play, rather than try to set it in stone beforehand.


I'm running this game in Maptool, and as it moves forward I'm creating as many of the adventures as we need as a maptool campaign file. I'm happy to talk about my experiences if anyone's interested.

Our level progression by adventure

Level 1

• The Brothers Gray
• Eyes in the Forest
• Elves of the Valley

Level 2

Eyes in the Forest was next, and then Elves of the Valley. They dinged to level 2 after the first encounter of Elves, and we still haven't come up against anything with a chaos shard involved, so the players are still scratching their heads as to what's going on. I missed those steps of the metaplot, and just picked the adventures that looked cool to me for level 1!

Suddenly, thinking about why there is no link between the adventures, I realised that I avoided the giant ants, giant mushrooms, giant frogs etc; and only later did I realise that those mutated creatures ARE the link between adventures, or rather they're the symptom of it. So now, rather than pick up the adventures with kobolds and dragons, I'm going to look more at the story of the various chaos shards.

Having done Eyes in the Forest (the first Goblin adventure), it seems quite appropriate that we pick up the goblin adventure in level 2 as well, and keep a bit more continuity.

There seems to be a lot of adventures with dragons in them, for a heroic arc, which is cool! But sadly, their plots seem to compete with each other and overlap rather than make any kind of sense. Oh well, more homework for the GM. (dammit. that's me!)