Red Hand Of Doom Maps

The Red Hand of Doom is one of the classic D&D 3.5 adventures released by Wizards of the Coast back in the far-off year of 2006. It’s been hailed as one of the best adventures for D&D 3.5 and it certainly sold the best for the system. Incidentally, if you want to buy it, there’s a great watermarked PDF copy of it available on the DM Guild (and I really recommend the purchase!) I recently suffered a bit of DM burnout on a high-level 5e game I’ve been running of the past two and a half years or so and wanted to run something a little more low-key yet with the same kind of epic feel. Enter Matt Colville singing the praises of this adventure on one of his YouTube videos. After hearing him talk about the Red Hand of Doom and lay out its premise, I got really excited about running this for my group and put the question to them: do you guys mind if we take a break from high-level antics and do something in the lower levels? My group agreed to take a chance with it and I got to work.

Red Hand of Doom is a 128-page adventure module for the 3.5 version of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). It is designed as a generic D&D adventure that can be dropped into any campaign world, including a personal one. Instructions are given in the first pages of the module on where to place it in the worlds of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron (the three primary campaign settings of D&D at.

I bought the adventure from the DM’s Guild and began my prep work for it. I always read through the entire adventure first and then begin taking notes when I’m working with published adventures. This technique was suggested by the awesome DM, Troy Lavallee of one of my favorite Pathfinder live play podcasts, The Glass Cannon Podcast, and it really works well for me.

The Red Hand of Doom is a fairly long adventure set for levels 6-12 in D&D 3e. My first thought when I started reading through the adventure was, “How am I going to convert this whole thing to 5e?!” Then I realized… I don’t have to. The adventure uses some standard monsters from the Monster Manual like hobgoblins, goblins, hydras, and giants. I don’t actually have to do anything with those monsters to make them work in 5e because they’re already in the manual with all the work done for me! So with that worry out of the way, I opened up Google Drive and began the actual prep work for running a published adventure.

Since I run all my D&D games in Roll20, there’s a lot of front-loaded prep work which makes the game run a lot easier for me once I get it done. For Red Hand of Doom, the first step was to re-read the adventure but concentrate on Part One. In this part of the adventure, the heroes are introduced to the Elsir Vale and slowly begin to learn that there’s a hobgoblin horde that is about to sweep over the vale. There are a lot of fun encounters in Part One and these encounters do a great job of introducing the players to the character of the vale and its wilderness which is important because the entire adventure takes place in the vale. That means that there has to be a lot of player buy-in for it to work.

Once I’ve reread Part One, I open up my “Session Notes” document in Google Docs and begin taking notes about the various NPCs and encounters the players are going to come across during the first session of play. I play once a week for 3 hours each week and I’ve been playing with my group for long enough to have a pretty good idea of how fast the group moves and what kind of pace will be set. We don’t have a whole lot of out of game table talk which leads to a more focused and generally quicker-paced game than longer ones I’ve run in the past. For my group, I know that they enjoy having the first part of the session be social, get some good combat going in the middle of the session, and then finish off with some more social interaction. That’s pretty rough and I mess around with that formula quite a bit, but it gives me a good yardstick with which to measure how to pace the adventure.

After fleshing these aspects of the game out from the notes in the published adventure, I then have to start making my assets in Roll20. This is fun for me because it involves how I’m going to organize my campaign in Roll20 and it makes things a lot easier to play around with once you have a plan in place. For any Roll20 DMs out there, the image to the right shows how I’ve organized my notes in Roll20. Each of the Encounters subfolders has monsters in them which use either custom NPC sheets or OGL monsters from the D20 SRD on Roll20. I’ve also purchased the Monster Manual and the Tome of Beasts extensions in Roll20 so I can have some extra variety without sacrificing time (because it does take time to fill in those NPC sheets on Roll20 and I like to save as much time as possible). Also included in my encounters are individual handouts for treasure from the encounter. The treasure includes an image of the item as well as a short description (which includes when and how the players found the item) and some GM notes about the item (like if the cool new +1 mithril armor they found is obviously of hobgoblin craftsmanship and how that will play with the NPCs when one of the heroes starts wearing it around town).

This kind of prep work makes it very easy to just navigate to the next encounter when the players come to it and have everything I need right there in Roll20. I can simply open up the monster NPC sheets and roll for initiative! Or if it’s a social encounter, I have notes about the NPCs involved and what’s at stake in the encounter. One of the key things is to make sure that your Encounter entries match up with the map names you make in Roll20, so if you have a combat encounter called “Marauder Attack”, you should have a map called “Marauder Attack”. It makes finding things so much easier as you go on which means less time spent searching through notes and more time playing the game.

On the actual maps, I make sure that I have maps that look good (either cut from the adventure PDF, purchased from Roll20, hand-drawn by me, or purchased from my favorite map-maker 2 Minute Tabletop) and that are aligned with the grid. For overland maps (not tactical battle maps), I ensure that the map is to scale so that when the players use the Ruler tool or when I use the Ruler tool in Roll20, it actually corresponds to the distance specified on the map. Why go through that trouble? A map that’s to scale makes tracking travel distance–and therefore travel time–a breeze. As Matt Colville (and Gary Gygax) said, you need to have a calendar for your game or it loses some of that reality, that verisimilitude, that makes the game feel “real”. In the Red Hand of Doom, knowing your travel times is that much more important because there’s a timeline of events outlined in the adventure and the players’ actions have a big effect on when things happen throughout the adventure.

For tactical combat maps, I make sure that the map resembles what’s in the published adventure and make sure that I have all my monster tokens positioned on there where I want them to be. Some of the monsters will be on the GM layer if they’re hidden and some will be visible. I like using the Dynamic Lighting feature in underground or indoor locations (I’m a Pro subscriber on Roll20, so those features are available to me–if you’re a free subscriber, you can’t use Dynamic Lighting), but for outdoor locations, it’s pretty straightforward.

In the image above, you can see my setup for Skull Gorge. I’ve made this a pretty huge map on the sides by stitching together a couple of maps I’ve repurposed from 2 Minute Tabletop, but it ends up coming out really nicely. You can see all the monsters on their towers or in their camp and the only thing that’s left is for the party to come in and have their encounter.

Once the maps and notes are written, I spend a tiny amount of time looking into the soundscape for the game. Some DMs really hammer on the soundscape, but for me, it’s not quite as important as the other aspects of the game, but I’m a bit of a pragmatist. For me, the soundtrack of my games is typically ambient noise. For example, for my first session, the text specified that the adventure takes place in the summer. So I did some searching in Roll20’s jukebox and found a looping track for cicadas and birdsong. That was the thing that was playing for most of the first session just to give a bit of subtle flavor that it was hot outside.

Next, I’ll talk about the party and how Session 1 went. Stay tuned!