My First 5E Campaign

We recently finished the Hoard of the Dragon Queen.M
It took us forever (as compared to everyone I read about online), and we even somehow skipped some parts (role-playing, lucky rolls, and choosing not to attack everything in sight).

Next we’re onto my first campaign. We just played this past Friday and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

I’m going to be relatively loose in my game setups compared to my previous campaigns.
I actually wanted to run a different campaign, but our lack of players caused me to delay that one. It was going to a PC backstory driven one, and with only 3 players, that kind of uses up the stories pretty quickly.

This world is sandbox type one. It will be split up into overall regions where the party goes in and takes care of various quests and other issues. When that region’s quests are completed, the next batch of quests will send them to a new region.

The start involved the party preparing for a horde of goblins that they had to keep blocked at a pass.

The history: The goblinoids were confined to their own continent, which worked well for a long time.
Then someone managed to stop them from fighting one another and become organized. They left their continent and attacked the one the party was on.

The goblinoid armies were very successful.

The PCs’ jobs were to “hold the line”; to keep the goblins getting through the pass as long as possible.
The remaining people were fleeing the last unconquered city. For every 5 rounds the party delayed their location, another 50-100 people on another boat to the only remaining free continent. (That means bonus XP.)

The party did quite well. They lasted longer than expected by using the terrain and a proper conga-line-of-death setup.
But the goblins numbered in the thousands. After round 15, it was obvious the party was holding the line well, and it would take all night for me to roll enough damage to put them down. So I called it a combat and moved forward.

The party was vanquished, but they woke up an unknown number of days later in an old wooden cabin. They had been saved by a very old druid.
He told them they had much work to do, and his time was coming soon.
He gave them some training in the month they spent there (leveled up to level two and a free skill a druid would know).

He never gave them his name and when he passed on, his last words were “Aja is outside”.
The first thing the party sees outside is a bear in a charging position. The party prepares for an attack but they never attack. Then Aja, a dryad, introduces herself and tells the party what she knew of the druid.
While this is going on, the druid’s cabin is rapidly reclaimed by nature, and a pair of pixies plays tricks on the party.
Aja tells them that the druid never gave his name and they thought he might have been mad, but he probably was just affected by things he saw. The party had given up their lives for a noble cause, and he needed a tool for some prophecy.
When they stopped they were at the edge of a forested area and another, but darker forest that felt “wrong”.

She gave them some replacement gear (they had very little on them), and asked that they took care of whatever darkness that was creating the “wrong” feeling in this part of the forest. This darkness was starting to attract other dark creatures and none of their scouts could report anything.

It was really a test by Aja to see if the party had potential. If they did, she left some gold and better gear for them to take.

First they had to defeat some blights that had been attracted to the area, then climb down a hole in the ground hidden in a dead tree.

30’ below was a large cleared out space and a sleeping beholder (spectator with an illusion).
On the opposite end of the room was a large chest. And spread throughout the room were wire traps with bells attached to them. The wires were easy to see, but there were so many.

The group got halfway before they woke up the beholder and it verbally berated them.

They attacked it first, and it toyed with them. Instead of hurting them, it used its eye rays to fear them and paralyze them. They tore that thing up enough that I doubled its hit points, actually I just kept the fight going until they realized it wasn’t trying to hurt them.

Then it disappeared and left a feast in its place.

They ate and checked out the chest. It was trapped with an explosive (loud bang, nothing more), and the hinges were rusty and creaking.

Inside it was some potions, a magic dagger, and gold.

With that we stopped for the night.

Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Characters:
Dale – Rumi, woof elf monk, level 2
Aaron – Rhoanel, elf bard (with plans to become a paladin, or at least impersonate one), level 2
Justin – Cedraic – half-elf ranger (two weapon version), level 2