Is anybody using, or has used in the past, the section on Saltmarsh in the 3.5 DMGII? I always felt it was ripe with adventure ideas and very well done, and I recently started a campaign in and around the town, as described in the book, and fleshing it out with a few sprinkles of homebrew content.
More precisely, my campaign will pitt the PCs against the machinations of the cult of Vecna and the Lassiters, and for now Egan Lassiter is acting as a patron for the PCs (they don't know the evil bastard he is) and using them to foil the lizardfolk resistance against the Scarlet Brotherhood in the Hool Marshes (yes, in my campaign, the cult of Vecna in Saltmarsh and the Brotherhood are "allied" of sorts)...which allows me to use the original Saltmarsh trilogy in a slightly updated context, yipee :)
Lassiter however is letting the cultists of Gra'azt making attempts on the lives of the PCs, following the death of the cult's head daughter (the "Funeral procession" adventure in Dungeon). His reasoning is: they are tools, and tools are replacable.
Any ideas and feedback on how your campaigns went will be most helpful! And also, is it me or the Saltmarsh setting screams of a possible fantasy version of Innsmouth? :)
I used it quite briefly at the start of my last campaign, but the players never explored it. For reasons too long to get into, Keoland was part of a conquered 'evil empire' that hadn't gotten around to the Sea Princes, and the PCs decided to leave the area lest the Keolanders take interest in them.
Due to a variety of reasons, we never got back to it, which is a real pity because it is pretty well developed in the DMG2
Hmm...I just finished running the original Saltmarsh module, but converted to 3.5 edition on the fly. I own DMGII and it never dawned on me to use the Saltmarsh that was in there. Drats.
The DMGII Saltmarsh is a bit too 3e for my tastes and some of the temples feel wrong because they are based solely on core material rather than Greyhawk. I stuck with the original version as amended by later LG stuff. As for DMGII, I changed the temples to be a bit more seasidey and switched the location to Seaton, the regional capital of the Viscounty of Salinmoor. Seaton is close enough to Saltmarsh to cover some of the same themes but it feels like a better fit for a larger, more cosmopolitan town.
There was an article on Canonfire about intelligence reports form Keoland that also featured some interesting plot hooks, particularly for the Hool Marshes. LG also did an ongoing plot that featured the Black Dragon, Aulicus, known as the Prophet of the Hool, the politics of several lizardfolk tribes (Marshgrove, Fleshroast, Foulwater, and Deathcroak) and the rumoured resurrection of the Lizard King Sakatha. It was quite cool as the Charter of Niole Dra forbids anybody from harming or interfering with a herald on pain of death so the dragon presents himself as the High Herald of Sakatha, not only daring the Keoish to attack a dragon but also to breach their own founding charter.
I also used parts of the NPC list for my 576 game, though mostly so I didn't have to redo them. I started the game in 3.5 and have since moved to 4E, but aside from edition mechanics, not much else has changed. I also extended out all of the adventures. Now, at 7th level, my players are barely a third into U3's fortress.
I've also had to do significant ad libbing, as any GM does with creative players. For instance my U2 was completely self-made - the PCs captured and parlayed with the Lizardmen aboard the ship. There's an alliance with the lizardmen, especially after the PCs freed their religious center (a temple fortress called the Crocodile's maw) from Sahuagin control - that was their U2. :) I had SO many near deaths with that module - one PC (a goliath fighter-knight) got taken below 0, healed up so he could fight again, and taken back down another 3 times before he stood there, barely alive as the Baron laid at his feet defeated. I don't think there was a shred of healing left in the party, and well over 80% of party resources had been expended (not including HP, taking HP into it, you might be talking 90%). It was an AWESOME fight! :)
In short, no I don't use the material as presented, but I do cherry pick it quite a bit, as I do all sources. It has its place and bits and pieces can be put together quite well to create an interesting portrait of a fishing town that also does quite a bit of shipping Hool based commodities (from rare drugs/ingrediants to rice and wood). Not enough they are going to get rich, but enough to have a lot of intrigue.
That's the right philosophy I think. As a DM, you take anything and everything and make of it what you will. Saltmarsh from the DMG II has plenty of usable material to add to that which was in the original module. _________________ - Moderator/Admin (in some areas)/Member -
"I'm the one who wrote the Saltmarsh chapter for DMG II; the original outline asked for a super-detailed Large Town that could serve as a place for DMs to mine ideas for their campaigns. There werre a lot of choices (including making up a new town entirely) but I chose Saltmarsh primarilly for two reasons:
1: It had tradition, and was an established D&D location that had never been detailed before.
2: I had really fond memories of those U1-U3 adventures and figured that a lot of D&D players out there would get a kick out of seeing Saltmarsh's return.
Anyway, for the background, history, and locations, I did a fair amount of research into the region. (NOTE: It helps to sit across from Erik Mona at work when you're doing research on Greyhawk!) My original thoughts on the raiders of Seaton were that they were an offshoot of the Pomarj slavers who escaped south along the coast after some pesky PCs smashed their operation to the north. They eventually chose Seaton as a place to try to rebuild their power base. Of course, much of this went unsaid in the chapter since Saltmarsh had to not only serve as an updated version of a classic location, but also had to be fairly easy to adapt to other campaign worlds.
The important thing, though, isn't WHO raided Seaton, but that Seaton was raided and the refugees fled to Saltmarsh."
END
Before reading this, my first thought was that the raiders were the SB, but then, considering the time (CY 591?) I figured the reconstituted Slave Lords.
Q: I've looked around for canon on the raid on Seaton (nothing specific in Living Greyhawk). When was the raid? If it was after CY 580, but before 589, that would rule out the reconstituted Slavelords. I'm not that fond of the idea of the raiders being a breakaway of the original Slavelords. I might consider going with my first hunch, the SB in CY 584.
I might consider going with my first hunch, the SB in CY 584.
Any thoughts?
You could justify that, but I think it would require a bit of a stretch to explain why the Scarlet Brotherhood, who at that time is doing everything it can to stay 'under the radar' would launch a piratical/slave-taking raid on a village in Keoland - a major naval power - even a small, out-of-the-way, village like Saltmarsh was at that time.
A off-shoot of the Pomarj pirates that survived the cleansing by the PCs would be much more believable. They could have the power to pull off such a raid and pirates/slavers aren't known for their wisdom. They would be much more likely to ignore the potential for vengeance from the Keoish throne.
Heck! Maybe their success in this raid was the seed from which the Crimson Fleet blossomed.
I was just reading it myself recently - the text indicates that the sacking of Seaton happened around the same time of the U1-3 modules.
I had always made the assumption that the original Slave Lords sacked Seaton - it was always vague what attacks were severe enough in the original module to have the surrounding nations up in arms, but not enough for military force. That Salinmoor was quasi-independent of Keoland at that point would've made it a significant target.
I might consider going with my first hunch, the SB in CY 584.
Any thoughts?
You could justify that, but I think it would require a bit of a stretch to explain why the Scarlet Brotherhood, who at that time is doing everything it can to stay 'under the radar' would launch a piratical/slave-taking raid on a village in Keoland - a major naval power - even a small, out-of-the-way, village like Saltmarsh was at that time...
1) The raid was on Seaton;
2) ?! The SB was trying to stay "under the radar" by performing coup d'états in the Lordship of the Isles and the Sea Princes, by conquering Idee, Onwall and (briefly) Sunndi, and attacking Irongate and Keoland...
?!
I figured that a raid on Seaton might have been intended to clear the rear before heading for Gradsul.
blackmyron wrote:
I was just reading it myself recently - the text indicates that the sacking of Seaton happened around the same time of the U1-3 modules...
-Where?
blackmyron wrote:
...I had always made the assumption that the original Slave Lords sacked Seaton - it was always vague what attacks were severe enough in the original module to have the surrounding nations up in arms, but not enough for military force. That Salinmoor was quasi-independent of Keoland at that point would've made it a significant target.
-If the raid was in the CY 577-580 time frame, I'd go with that.
p.121 - "Recently, pirates and slavers from the north sacked the nearby city of Seaton, and nearly a thousand refugees flooded the streets of Saltmarsh. At about the same time, several bands of adventurers finished dealing with a large sahuagin threat to the southwest..."
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