Red Hand Of Doom Maps

Red Hand Of Doom Guide
Red Hand Of Doom Review

Posted byDM1 year ago

So I'm starting up a RHoD campaign somewhere this month. I really love the maps they've made and would like to use them for my pbp.

Archived

Matt Colville just talked about the Red Hand of Doom. A few folks in the chat asked 'How can I do a sandbox leading into the Red Hand of Doom?'

I'm doing a sandbox adventure from levels 1-6 in the region of Red Hand of Doom. I have a hex map of the region (plus Brecka, which is homebrew); the source hexographer file is here. In hexographer, Elsir Vale is in the middle, everything else is randomly generated nonsense.

Red Hand Of Doom Guide

So, here's how I seeded the sandbox: Jaguar xkr navigation update.

I drew up the Red Hand of Doom map in hexographer, and added the Keep on the Borderlands (I called it Fenward Fastness) and Welton to the map.
Neither Orlane or Hommlet felt right in Elsir Vale, so I added a human Barony to the north, and put Orlane on the border.
As the PCs travel on the road, they'll learn of Kalarel the Vile and his Keep on the Shadowfell. If the PCs just ignore this, I'll make it be Fenward Fastness.
Deep Carbon Observatory lies upriver from the Witchwood, in case the PCs want a weird offshoot, while there's definitely a chance to go Sailing on a Starless Sea in the Blackfens.

That's now all seeded. I'm excited to run any of these adventures..but how do I make this a 'sandbox'?

I had the players meet in Welton, but they'll only learn of the wolf problem if they ask around.
I gave different PCs leads to different adventures. Some of them learned of Kalarel the Vile, others met refugees from Orlane, and one knew there were soldiers sent to Drellin's Ferry. On top of this was a bounty posting from the Castellan of the Keep on the Borderlands.

Red Hand Of Doom Review

PCs ended up going to Orlane, but not before the hobgoblin forerunner Zatar met them a few times and earned their ire. This gave me a breadcrumb trail into RHOD.

Anyhow, this is what I did so far, and it's going well! Hopefully something similar works for you. Figure I'll drop this here and on the regular dnd subreddit.

Edit: Formatting & content. Substantial edits, actually. Some apologies.

8 comments

A great module. Haven't played all the way through it yet, just getting past part one, but my players are having a blast. Its fairly easy to run if you have some DM experience, however, this is a higher level adventure for higher level characters, so don't expect it to be as easy to run as a starter set module. It's taking me a bit longer, due to the fact that I'm running it using 5e monsters and converting the big baddies to 5e stats as well. Its very well done, the quality of the copy i received was amazing, and the pictures and details are outstanding. Love it.