So as the adventure began, the group had made it to Silverymoon, waay up in the northeast corner of the map. Silverymoon is a town of learning, filled with Eladrin, but also somewhat cosmpolitan. There are three universities in town, and a bustling harbor business. Various tombs and such are scattered throughout the region as well as in the Nether Mountains.
The adventure doesn't provide much subtext for things so I embellished a bit. This worked out quite well. I'll go into where I embellished things:
The adventure starts out with the player group being packed into an alehouse called the Son of the Goat. There's a lot of merriment and celebration going on, and the players are kinda stuffed into a booth somewhere where they meet a morose warrior known as Halaskar. Halaskar needs to explain that his own adventuring party was ambushed, and he is the last survivor.. and offers to pay the party to help recover the bodies.
The adventure itself recommends a few "illusionist" (lol) techniques to try and encourage the group to talk to Halaskar, including if they refuse to engage him, he stumbles outside and gets jumped, and they can either rescue him or he comes back in and begs for help. Consequently it ALSO suggest that Halaskar is reluctant to talk. I saw right away there was a better way to fly this thing.
So, how I ran it:
Knowing Silverymoon (it's a college town!), and having the general idea of being stuck together during a party, and needing to get Halaskar on stage immediately, I set it up so that another adventuring party- a rival group was buying free drinks for all as the adventure opens.
This let me intro the tavernkeeper quickly "Hay new adventurers! Welcome! That group over there by the good tables is treating everyone to a free round of drinks after their big score bringing back another tomb-find for the university!"
So I got the tavernkeeper up and running really quickly. Then we went around the table and had people introduce their characters. And at the end I introduce Halaskar, who is grumpy but drinks all the free alcohol he can get.
Then Halaskar starts grumbling about the other adventure group getting all the breaks, and as soon as the players engage (which was quickly) he starts to tell his story about his own group getting ambushed during a tomb expedition for one of the sages in town. As he gets more angry, he curses his employer (the sage Yatagan), eventually tears off the copper pin which identifies his group ("Fellowship of the Shining Spear") and slams it on the table, along with the crumped map. He declares an end to all adventuring and staggers out.
My son immediately took the pin and put it on just in case it was magical (no way). he's kind of a goof that way, but this became important later.
After some discussion and examination of the crumpled map, the group agreed to visit Yatagan in town and try and pick up on Halaskars old contract. In the module, as written, it is Halaskar that begs the group to take up the contract, but I have never had to do this.Once the players have the map, and see how much gold the rival adventurer group is spending, they usually just go where the fun is. They also did some quick shopping in town.
The Yatagan scene is not in the module, and not every party opted to visit him, but this group did, and I ran it the same every time.
This section was completely improvised but I highly recommend it:
The party visits Yatagan, who is disappointed to hear that the Fellowship of the Shining Spear is no more. He explains that he is in a competition with other sages to build a great exhibition of an ancient short-lived elven kingdom that once existed in the area called "Earlann". He is specifically interested in the armor of an important elven warrior princess known as Tarnruth. He has a wooden mannequin already mocked up wearing a golden-haired wig, and various other details.
He makes it very clear (this is important for later) that this exhibition will go on display at the university (in a museum hall) and his main motivation is showing up the other sages.
He offers to pay the party what is left of the Shining Spear's half-up-front fee (what is listed in the module is what Halaskar was willing to pay, but I shifted the gold to Yatagan). He also opens up a big tome in his office and goes into explaining who Tarnruth is, and showing off a partially completed map of the borders of Earlann before the spell-plague, and before the High Forest overgrew it's boundaries. He makes it clear that he is also interested in someday "completing his map".
This is also important for later.
So the group roleplays with the sage for a while, and then goes back into town to do shopping, and then makes plans for the journey out to the tombs. The module lists a 10 day walk, but every single time I ran this, with no prompting, the party simply looked at the map and said "Can we hire a boat to go down the river here?-- then we will trek our way into the forest" and I let them do it every time. I also chop the travel time in half for going by boat and give them a free skill success on the "journey" part of the skill challenge. It's hard to get lost on the river.
(to be continued)