I love your videos so much! The nothic one for LMoP is my favorite. At 3:40 you began talking of its deception tactics - where’d you come up with that? I heard another creator mention running venomfang the same way and I’m curious as to where everyone gets these really cool ideas for dnd! Thank you and hopefully you post again soon!

I would love to keep Tiamat a secret, but in this day and age it's just not possible to run this module without everyone knowing it's about Tiamat.

Thanks so much I have been meaning to play this for my party but couldn't figure out how to run it 🎉

Wait wheres the bit where you sacrified a black dragon egg to Hadar dressed as Guy Fieri? ...Was that not in the book?

Yeah, really appreciate this video! I've been revamping so much in this module. Your thoughts are spot on, and I'll likely be incorporating some of them!

Venomfang is only a young dragon, Greens usually stay with their parents until they are adults, so Venomfang could have run away from home and his parents might be looking for him.

*"I smell human."* ("I'm a halfling!") *"All the same to me. You'll make a very fine lunch."* _"Cryovain swoops to a great height. Everyone roll initiative."_

The players didn't decapitate Strahd, so he can come back...

We awoke in the Stonehill inn; Walked around the streets looking for Redbrands, and made our way to the Sleeping Giant. Half orc throws a dead goblin (he's been carrying) at the two outside and hits the sign. The others come out, we burn all but one and ask him a few questions. (party let him go) Walk into the under-mansion, smash the guards, free prisoners, secret doors to Iarno, grab his arm, cover his mouth. break his ankle. take him back to Sildar and Town master. With the letter from black spider, and his familiar ran off.

Still my favorite module to play, still my favorite module to run, but I'm DMing a fresh OOTA game for a new group of players who have never played it before, so I'm super interested in how I can spice things up for myself. Looking forward to the series!

Ohhh, I love this so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I ran Out of the Abyss as written. it was aight. I'm about to run some mini campaigns that exist exclusively in the Gracklstugh chapter. I'm super hyped to explore all of the aspects of the city OOTA conveniently ignores!

🤣 I felt that!

Im about to run Dragons of Stormwreck isle to intro my friends to dnd. When we finish it im making it the prolouge for ToD. Ive rewritten the end of DoSI to make the ritual something for Tiamat

This campaign was amazing. I was a player from start to finish. I love the characters in this my DM presented. Though it will always bother me that Ireena is called Ireena..For our campaign it was Irina. Which feels a lot more like a real name. Outside of that Vallaki was incredible. I love all the political intrigue.

I wouldn't mind watching you talk for hours and hours about every aspect of the Tiamat's Return encounter! This is good stuff!

Great video, thanks ^^ !!!

our group recruited the nothic to be their pet and found out about her from mind reading.

Just letting you know your setup is still inspiring people.... thanks for sharing this

Just fucking AMAZING! thank you!!! I read all of Salvatores drow novels years ago AND you took me right back!!!! more please

Loved this xD you got a sub from me

Awesome video series and really helpful. I wanted to get your advice on something. I am building the roll tables right now and started to create a hex crawler based on the encounter, and terrain tables. Have you ever explored this and if so what was the experience of your party?

I'm running this in a few days and I'm so glad this is here

Just finished the caravan convoy section this evening with the group. Since leaving Baldurs Gate it has taken us one year and 3 months to complete. We have one session a week for 3 hours. This was without a doubt the absolute favorite part of the campaign so far, the party absolutely loved the daily work of being guards and being met with challenges every day and talking out certain parts as they happened. I added in quite a bit as well (obviously) including side sessions with members to do one on one parts as well. This section as you've described is awesome to run but you do have to be creative and you have to be able to handle it otherwise it'll be lethargic to run. My crew loved but thought id call out we played one chapter for just over a year!!

Thanks for this overview! Very helpful!

I think with the mindflayer one, a way to up the paranoia is to have 1 player before the game starts agree to be a hidden mindflayer/minion, either a mindflayer that escaped the slaughter and is now hiding among you to slowly speed up your transformations so he will be safe again and in charge of a new small hive, or a willing servant of the old masters who is now trying to magically augment your ceremorphosis so he will have new masters once more. The player in question must be ok with this idea, not forced to do it so it’s still fun, but if so then the players will have that much more to worry about. Because now a physical threat in the form of the predator lurking the halls hunting them but also an unknown traitor that will sabotage their efforts to leave and not change.

Is there any lore for the dragon masks??

Yeah, that has happened to me as well. Usually, leaving the tides on the table helps.

Very late to the party. First of all, thanks for the video series. It's been incredebely useful to plan the outline of my take on ToD. I completely agree that the way Ch. 2 and 3 are built, they make not a lot of sense and have contrived hooks. So I'm all for merging them (and cut Elturel, or my version of it). I have just one question. The cave dungeon is the first occasion for the PCs to have a confrontation with very high ranking members of the cult like Frulam and Langedrosa. How do you handle that if the main point of the dungeoun is to just escape? Beside the fact that Frulam and Langedrosa must be pumped at least to CR 6-7 in order to become a little bit more scary and should crash a low level party if fought together. Ok, the PC can decide on their own to return to the dungeon later but in that case, I think the two "mini villains" should have left together with the rest of the cultist and mercenaries (only kobold stay).

Interesting. Here's my take: the players are dead: they don't know it.

Am I......crying right now? In all seriousness, this is fantastic. It's simple, yet effective. So much emotion without being horribly distracting. Can't wait to use this in upcoming sessions!

My players decided not to show up until after the dragon left.

A wonderful story in an excellent performance! In another time and place, this villain could have become a hero. I wish you well.

Thank you!

This is pure gold content. I'm glad I came upon your channel again. I hope you and family are safe and well.

Great rundown. This was very useful, both for the module, and for running the Underdark in general.

My party finally arrived at Venomfang and we were all so excited for this long anticipated moment. Your video helped me as a dm as well

i like this idea!

Thanks for the inspo! I'm doing a solo campaign and I'm expecting the PC to end up in the Lord's Alliance. Doing some research and finding out that they are at odds with Zantaran, I thought it might be interesting to have him at odds with her and possibly take her out or something. So thanks for the inspo!

I actually use my ableton push 2 to launch clips inside ableton - amazing for adding one shots to scenes

Oh man, I'm having some problems with this chapter. Until now I was able to pilot all the previous chapters thanks to your advice, but this time I'm a little lost. I have multiple interesting plot points that could work, even more so with the ideas the comments gave me, but I'm not sure which one to use. It's like having a can of pressure springs and if I uncover it wrong it's going to burst in my face. Is there any advice you can offer a DM in trouble?

We just finished this adventure using your guide, and was awesome!! So many memorable moments, I don't know why boomers say this aventure is trash, it's full of lore, mystery and dragons!! It just needs a good DM that ties the adventure with all PC's bagkgrounds to encourage them to keep going.

1st time DM here and this is such a big help. Thank you so much for the guide ❤️

My players decided to keep the egg for themselves and kill thaumberchaud... I want there to be consequences for this but I'm not sure what they should be. any ideas?

Very interesting takes in this one. What are your thoughts on Matthew Perkins’s changes to this module? One thing this video helped me realize is that you don’t need to add some macgufin “enchanted puzzle box” into the story. Instead, the map can just be enchanted, like you suggested.

Cut the mission with Varim the white, combined him into the quest with Maccath and also made her the foremost scholar about the ancient dragon empire which crafted the masks when dragons last ruled- about to run it this weekend and your guides have given me a ton of useful tips on all the weird off-beats in the adventure - oh and I am making them fight Varim and the ANCIENT white dragon together as a boss fight (module has a adult dragon but I got carried away with an interlude in Baldurs Gate with a whole seige and raid since the party managed to mess up with the whole subtle approach in the first half of the campaign and raided a bunch of the cult cover businesses they were using to move gold…) I thought it was pretty stupid to make all the cult leaders irrelevant to the battle encounters, or have them already defeated by someone else

My PCs got the black dragon mask by making a forgery themselves. So I can't wait till they get to the blue one.

These are really great, but did you not continue these? Thnx 👍

It’s my very first time DM’ing. And Iv really just thrown myself into the deep end choosing this campaign lol. I’m really excited that I found your channel! And so grateful that you made these guides thank you so much you’ve really saved me here