I just bought this adventure, what is your opinion?

I, as dm, work and go to university, I have not the time to write a big, and coerent adventure, so i prefer to run official one

Jesus just give the guy some tips, how fucking hard can it be. Haven't read it so can't help but fuck, this place

I've read that it has an Indiana Jones type feel. Kinda a cool story of crawling through the jungle investigating while figuring what exactly is going on. (Dinosaurs too for some reason, don't know how I feel about that part) Anyhow, turns out Baron Samedi or w.e has an artifact that makes it so people can't rez or anyone who has been dies of something from a D&D ebola or something. Seems like it could be fun

It's not the game, but how the DM run it

I ain't buying WOTC products as I don't feel they are worth the money... also the amount of Paedos MTG Judges, different product line I know, but fuck that noise.

Much rather buy other RPGs that have more complex and deeper mechanics.

like?

Do the dinosaur races, those are fun.

It's part-story and part-hexcrawl, but the hexcrawl and side quests are actually more fun. Don't make it all about saving the world from Acecerak.

Add lots of biting insects, tropical diseases and weird voodoo shit. That's what the random tables are for.

Stacking goblins are awesome, use them all the time.

Run less.
Also making an official adventure not shit is almost as much work as writing one from scratch.

Like this user said, having a physical, annotated book is much faster than having a PDF for every core book on your clunky ass laptop(which is what I have to do)

On that note, I'm DMing a ToA session and I want to buy a book for it. I already went over the PH a bunch of times, and the DM's manual seems more useful to read on your own time rather than refer to it during a session. I'm looking at either the Monster Manual for the quick stat blocks, or the ToA book for quick references and the player handouts. Which is better?

Fuck "complex and deep" mechanics, they just lead to autistic clusterfucks like Pathfinder.

Now games with FUNCTIONAL mechanics, or mechanics that reinforce what the game is supposed to be about in a fun and engaging way that offers freedom without becoming a chore in how to game the system... sign me up, because DnD sure ain't got that.

Well for one I'm preparing material for HERO System, the system is universal and requires tool kitting to your specific campaign, but not in the PTBA way of presenting you a half baked cake, it has many rules, presents variants and suggests tool kitting options. From what I've seen... GURPS is pretty similar as its also run on 3d6 base

Pathfinder ain't complex and deep, you are right that it is an autistic clusterfuck.

This is a hobby of Autists my friend.

>having more than one core rulebook
>not having pirated the bookmarked pdf
>not having a reference excel sheet with enemy stats at the ready
How can you do it so wrong?

The point is not organization. I have a system that works very well for me. The problem is having to switch between the books, the stats, and any notes that i don't have physically for whatever reason in one, laggy ass place.

I'm not saying that books are a must-have or anything, just that they're a convenience tax I don't mind paying.

Get a better laptop dude.
Mine is old as shit, but it can still keep up with 5 pdfs, two notepads and an excel sheet.

Not that guy, but I run a campaign over tabletop sim with a few buddies, and even with 4 monitors I have a hard time staying organized. I've started writing things down in an actual notebook and note notebook.exe just to cut down on the amount of windows I need to cycle through when I'm trying to find something.

I'm sure the books have their downsides, but being able to just write notes right in the book and leave little sticky note bookmarks on important pages sounds so fucking nice compared to "wait, wait, hold on guys, its probably on this file for sure just a sec, I know I wrote this down"

Why do you need so many notes and why do you keep them in separate files? (For once I'm actually not trolling I''m genuinely curious.)

Hey, back off. I'm a poorfag who works retail but I still save up for and buy the physical book. The only 5e books I don't own physically are the two Tyranny of Dragons campaigns, and that's only because my roommate bought them so I didn't need to.

I mean, I ALSO download the PDF for the sake of convenience - sometimes it's easier to open it up on my laptop than drag the book - but I much prefer having a physical book in my hands, too.

Protip: order them off of Amazon, even new copies straight from WotC tend to be cheaper than buying them in a store, nevermind if you're okay with used copies. My pre-order of Curse of Strahd only ran me $30, for example. Even with shipping, that's still less than a store charges.

>tfw you realize the true threat to the hobby isn't/pol/ or SJWs, its fucking poorfags

>being able to just write notes right in the book and leave little sticky note bookmarks on important pages sounds so fucking nice compared to "wait, wait, hold on guys, its probably on this file for sure just a sec, I know I wrote this down"

This basically. Part of it is definitely the shitty pc, and possibly suboptimal organization, but eventually it boils down to personal taste.

Since ToA is a sandbox campaign, I have a shitton of very basic notes for a shitton of encounters which I can improvise upon. Then there's also enemy stats so I don't have to open up the MM/ToA pdf, a shop list, a quick reference sheet for all combat actions cause I'm a casual who keeps forgetting them etc.

Basically anything I can't remember or improvise. It's not needed, but it gives me a sense of control.

If nothing else, a given encounter might be made up of, say, monsters/NPCs invented for the campaign and monsters found in the Monster Manual (running into this a lot in Out of the Abyss), plus if any of those monsters/NPCs are spellcasters you're going to want a copy of the PHB on hand to see what individual spells do, plus you might need to keep some significant trait of the encounter location itself in mind.

I like to keep track of my NPCs, so when I whip up new towns or villages, I figure out what every house is, who lives there, all that fun stuff,

I also like to draw maps for my campaigns so I tend to write my notes right on the map which tends to end up creating fairly large files
This is one of the earliest maps I made for my party (its sloppy but I don't want to post a newer one just in case one of my players reads this thread) Its just a sloppily modified village of orlaine since the first adventure we ran was a jumbled cult of the reptile god, but I have a tonne of reference maps like this and a bunch of separate notes that have the details on the people living in the town and things like that.

So the party might say they want to go see the blacksmith so I can read the notes right on my reference map for the blacksmith, but I also have a more detailed set of notes just for the blacksmith himself with some personality info, loot in his house, some of his background, that kinda thing. I try to be always ready, but sometimes its hard to find the right notes for what the party is trying to do, especially if i didn't expect them to try and do that thing

Well user you are a diamond in the rough and remind me of when i was a poorfag and would spend my pennies on suppliments for my games instead of eating. God speed user, hopefully you make it too one day.

What you said is like three files. Two if you combine the encounters with the stats. (Shop lists are fucking useless, if the players ask for something more exotic, quickly roll behind the scenes.)
Also the secret of sandboxing is that at the end of the session you ask the players what they want to do next and only prepare what you need for that.

That's why you have an excel sheet with all the monsters you want to use, with their spells conveniently listed right next to them. Make your own spell descriptions, preferably using shortening them down to a few lines each.
Excel also makes it easy to do track HP and initiative.

So wait, do you make 50-100 NPCs for each village, or do you only list the most important ones? I find that two or three NPCs per village is more than enough, the others can be improved on the spot.

Also I just looked at your map. I can't see what the boxes say, but like two of the bigger boxes seem enough for my notes for an entire session. Also there seem to be a lot of continuous text, which I try to avoid since it takes up space and doesn't add that much info compared to bullet points and the like.

Yep, still 2-3 files you need to scroll/click through, plus having the PH, MM and ToA pdf open just in case.

nice reddit spacing

Its part of wizards current hard on for the jungle/conquistador setting fitting in nicely with Magic the Jewening

Aside from that, this is one of those modes where its good to have a druid or a wizard/warlock with more survivalist/mobility oriented skills.

Omu presented an interesting scenario because we didnt do as much level grinding as we hoped to do mainly because my party had a beastmaster ranger that got shit lucky on a crit and charmed a T-Rex for half the campaign.

Avoid the raised roads in the main streets of Omu, sweep and clear building by building, block by block. Half the party nearly got killed in the crossfire between a melee of Kobolds, Grung and Yuan-ti

shoe horned diversity - but within reason due to climate [ jungle ].

furry cat folk and snake people (Yawn-ti).

omFgawD dinosaurs [thnkzplox wiz of coast]

ebil lich has artifact that prevents ressurection, fetch quest some spirit rocks to defeat baddie.

* watch tower thread woulda made a better book.

The setting I came up with is being fucked up by some magic death fog shit that is slowly closing in and choking the world, so there are few settlements and they're all smaller than usual, so that cuts down on the work.

I don't go as far as stating up kids and shit, and sometimes I don't even name them, but I do tend to name the people that the party would interact with if they went to that building and I'll use an NPC generator to grab some stats for them just in case the party decides they want to kill or recruit that dude eventually.

A lot of that text is descriptive as well. I like to come up with a few sentences for each building that describes
-the exterior of the building at a passing glance
-the exterior after inspecting it closely
-the interior at a passing glance
-the interior after inspecting
And I'll write up a little description of the NPC and jot down a few of their basic traits, that way I can remember enough about them to keep them consistent without always needing their detailed notes

And yeah, originally I was going to upload the actual map, but it turns out its like a 60MB png file

Its a bit more work than I'd like, but especially in a setting like this where I'm really going for a "points of light in the darkness" type thing, I'm expecting the players to be going back to villages and towns often, one of the players has even started fixing up an abandoned house in the village I posted. Hopefully the work pays off a few months from now, even if the players never really know how much work it was,
I might just stop hand making the maps though, the players have never said anything positive about them before, and the only time they've brought the maps up was to say "I think thats a waste of time man, just draw some lines on a white board or something"

>giving money to WoTC

I'd like to buy TSR's stuff though, but it's out of print.

because fuck scrolling through a damn PDF and using a laptop behind my DM screen when DMing. I'd rather be able to flip fast to where I need to be.

to be fair, 99% of the time you can just ctrl+f for the thing you need or click its name in the table of contents and get sent to that page immediately
I still don't like having to juggle all of the pdfs and word documents on one or two screens instead of having them all open and on the table in front of me though

Fist of all ctrl+f, second of all these files are not that big to scroll through. I'd still say it's faster than having to open a physical book and look for it.

Just write a random name generator, dude.
That said I find setting adventures in the same location boring, so when an NPC comes up again, the players don't usually remember much about them. Also A picture is worth more than a thousand words, so I just use pictures for the more important NPCs/places.

Strange, I find it harder to manage three open books+handwritten notes. They just take up so much space.

t.neet

Yeah lot of fags want to rain on parades up in this bitch

I don't know about the people out there, but for me running these beasts of adventure paths is an absolute fucking nightmare. It's nice to read, it's just far from useable unless you work like hell to make it useable right there, at the game table, where you need it.

Beyond that, the hexcrawl part in ToA is pretty boring because it combines vast space with defaulting every encounter resolution to combat. Also home base is lacking in flavor, although it's not bad. And I don't like the default hook, just doesn't sound like the problem some NPC would use 1st level characters for, and also hardly of interest to the players. Hook is the easiest to fix though.

I would recommend getting The Dark of Hot Springs Island instead or Spears of the Dawn to generate your own African adventure sandbox full of interesting stuff. The downside is converting it to 5e if you're interested in the system. The upside is everything else. Maybe mine it for some good ideas since you bought it already.

I am using our 5e campaign to train my players for WFRP2e