Hacking Out of the Abyss: An Overview

I currently run three D&D groups. One is a 4^th Edition group going through Reavers of Harkenwold, one is a 5^th Edition group playing in Talon's Height (my Haughty Fantasy campaign setting, see elsewhere on this blog), and the last is a 5^th Edition group which has just started Out of the Abyss. There's a partial crossover between the 4e group and the Out of the Abyss group. These are all quite different campaigns with different feels, different strengths, different weaknesses. Technically, we've not started OotA yet; I've run three of the four solo prologue sessions, as well as the actual “session 1” which trapdoored the players into the Out of the Abyss campaign. They were captured by the Drow; this wasn't a foregone conclusion, though I suspected the players would be insufficiently cautious in a world/setting which is dangerous. (One of the OotA players has plenty of first-person CRPG experience, the other three are 4e veterans – neither Skryim nor 4e are particularly dangerous worlds.)

Let's talk about developing and running this campaign. OotA players, look away now.

Why Out of the Abyss?

Out of the Abyss is a really fun campaign book. In it, the PCs begin as prisoners of Drow (dark elf) slavers, must escape, and then travel the Underdark (the strange fantastical underground world of D&D), discovering slowly that the Demon Lords have escaped the Abyss and are causing havoc. It's up to the PCs to stop them!

The characters start in a fascinating situation, without gear and imprisoned by very dangerous enemies. They quickly gather a strange cast of NPC companions, who they are likely to travel through a variety of strange locations with. Those locations are great, particularly in the first half – a Myconid village infiltrated by the Demon Lady of Fungus, a Duergar city with a bunch of mad subplots and which offers a genuinely new (to me) look at Duergar society, a Kuo-Toa settlement with religious factions, and so forth. Players get to make interesting decisions between factions. Madness creeps at the edge of everything, with the Demon Lords unleashed on the Underdark.

I was genuinely excited when I started flicking through a store copy of this book. I felt my imagination expand. I thought the idea of putting players in an utterly strange and hostile environment, without the sort of adventuring infrastructure they are used to, was a great concept and sounded like enormous fun. It suits 5e's shift to a more traditional model of a dangerous world. Thematically, it is a clever mashup of traditional High Fantasy/D&D tropes (destructive Demon Lords, complex civilizations, etc) and the weirder side of the genre (the bizarre cast of NPC companions is the best example).

I knew I wanted to run this, and soon.

Why Hack Out of the Abyss?

It's hardly perfect, however. It requires an enormous amount of prep; it cannot, I think, be run as a great adventure straight from the book, though probably sections of it work alone (the actual escape from the Drow outpost, Velkynvelve, should more or less work on its own, though it does lazily suggest relying on a deus ex machina to give the players a chance to escape).

That's not my only issue, however. A disorganised book requires DM prep. But the setting and story aren't perfect. To begin with, the second half of the book is a lot less vivid than the first, at both a story and a setting level. Some of the locales are well-done (well, Gravenhollow is), but a lot of ground is covered with very little flavourful detail. The story becomes a lot more impressionistic, with some cool moments (Maze Engine, players playing as the Demon Lords fighting each other), but little else of supreme value.

More relevantly at the start of the campaign (who knows if we'll ever get halfway through the adventure as written!), the Underdark is a weird mix of fantastic environs and frustratingly generic setting-filler. Even the random encounter tables have that feel – oh, here's a travelling Orog mystic seeking to understand the madness encroaching the Underdark, here's an insane giant stuck in a tunnel, so far so good... here's some random Orc raiders. Haughty Fantasy doesn't require using literally the same tropes everywhere – indeed, part of the Talon's Height manifesto is having the players engage with familiar tropes (albeit refreshed) initially but increasingly engaging with a fantasy world they are not entirely expert with.

There are also some clunky or non-existent rules. Do I have to track combat actions and stats for the dozens of NPCs who might travel with the party? That's obviously impracticable. Tracking rations and foraging? Rules are very vague. The actual physical environment of the Underdark is barely described – are we talking semi-realistic cave systems, a bunch of gigantic caverns linked by linear road-like passages, or what?

All my – all your – games should be personalised and made situationally more relevant. Some of this is accomplished at a plot level, whether it's by adding factions or using PC backgrounds to create side stories or important NPCs. Another part of this is to do with enriching the setting – no published adventure exists that won't benefit from you adding monsters or cities or obstacles to it that you enjoy. Finally, as this is a game and it has game-ish - “ludic” - elements, rules improvements are an entirely proper part of you running the game. On this basis, I've turned to two resources – Veins of the Earth, the Underdark book for the Basic D&D hack Lamentations of the Flame Princess; and the Companion System, available at the DM's Guild.

Using the Companion System and Veins of the Earth

The Companion System (CS) is how I will be dealing with the myriad NPCs who may end up accompanying the party in their attempt to escape the Underdark. It's not a productive use of either my time or players' to administer potentially a dozen or more full statcards for NPCs, and that'd be a great way to make combats very long. CS provides a simple solution to this – each NPC, or group of similar NPCs, has a card with a very simple selection of information. They each have a generic ability that can be used by the player holding the card, and they also have abilities that become available if they are Loyal to the party or have been Inspired by a conversation with a PC (which encourages roleplaying!). They also have a number of Injuries they can take before being knocked out/killed – these Injuries are related to things like area effect damage and the PC they are attached to being seriously harmed. There is a full set of Companion cards available for Out of the Abyss, so this will be how players utilise the NPCs in combat and, where relevant, outside of it.

Where the CS is a “bolt-on” addressing one specific area of rules clunk, my use of Veins of the Earth is going to be a bit more thoroughgoing. VotE has two big take-aways: some amazing “monsters” and monster types, and some clever mechanical devices to make the Underdark feel more claustrophobic, more dangerous, more real and more fantastic at the same time.

Monster-wise, I'll be using (with some modifications): Alkalion, the Archeans and their Atomic Bees, Castilian Caddis Larvae, possibly the Civilopede (which veers a little farther to the wacky side than I am mostly aiming for), the Cromagnogolem, Fossil Vampires, the Knotsmen, Mantis Shrimp, Olms, the Oneirocetacean, Psychomycosis Megaspores, a Silichominid, maybe the Tachyon Troll, a Trilobite-Knight, and Ultraviolet Butterflies. Additionally, I'm adding Deep Janeen elementals and using some of the material from the Derro and Dvargir sections of the “civilised species” section. The colour in those monster names alone might be enough to convince you of their value!

I'll be using some of the above as additional civilised Underdark races. The players may come across Archean and Olm settlements (the Archeans of the Nucleid Apiary obviously tend Atomic Bees), and the Deep Janeen are power players in the setting (though one influential one, the Timeless Lumitor of All Knowledge, uses a Psychomycosis Megaspore as his steward, little knowing that the Megaspore has been subverted by the Demon Lady of Fungus, Zuggtmoy). There is a mysterious Trilobite Knight in the deep, who may be impressed enough by their virtue to join them and aid them in all extremities. Knotsmen slink between Underdark settlements, seeking their fleeing children so they might sell the souls of the young to save their own. They might even meet a Silichominid explorer – these silicon-based creatures from the fire at the heart of the earth have to wear pressure suits lest they explode, and are endlessly, innocently curious about the strange “world above” they have reached!

Other additions will be less...amenable to the player characters.

If you're wondering what on earth any of these are, the book (as PDF or hardcopy) is well worth it.

Rules-wise, I'll be using the following systems: Encumbrance, Lamp Initiative, Light-as-Currency, and possibly some version of the Climbing rules. The Encumbrance rules discard weight limits, and instead move to an item slot system based on the total of the Modifiers of 5 of the 6 Abilities (excluding Charisma). Being smart or having common sense might give you an idea of how to store your spare blanket roll efficiently. This is great. Lamp Initiative emphasizes the all-encompassing darkness – the only people who roll Initiative are those with light-sources; allies within the pool of light can use that Initiative value. Everyone else drops to the bottom of the Initiative order. Light-as-Currency posits that 1 hour of light = 1 silver piece; that is to say, oil which will last 10 hours is worth 1 gold piece. This is both immersive and sensible. Light is probably in many ways more fungible in the Underdark than money! It is also semi-rare. Lastly, there are difficulty rules for Climbing, including lowering difficulties by spending time preparing, which will probably sometimes be relevant – climbing complex chimneys, for instance.

I'll also add one or two of my own house rules, which apply more generally in my games. In 5e terms, the Wilderness is still significantly less threatening than in, say, 2e (and even 2e had the “cast spells at rest” fudge); guaranteed complete healing and the relatively low chance of a night-time random encounter under most systems means that even serious fights can be “slept off”. Emphasizing the importance of (more-or-less) “safe” lodgings, and their relative rarity, is key in any wilderness-focussed game, especially one in the strange and inhospitable Underdark. On that basis, I will be using the following house rule: PCs have “Sleep Hitdice” equalling their ordinary HD. They roll these at the end of a Long Rest. The result is the HP regained on that rest (which may or may bring them to full health). Healing spells and standard HD can also be used to top this up, though that then uses them (Spell Slot, HD) for the day, as per normal.

Anyway, hopefully this has offered some insight into “hacking” a published adventure. I'll post more as the campaign develops, with reflections on how I have run things, and on the use of new locations and monsters.