I created maps digitally (because the image quality for the maps in Tyranny is not very good), and I would take entire days to digitally enter the tokens and stats for every monster that appears in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign.

Because I had already played a decent chunk of the story with another group, I had lessons I had already learned from my previous game. When we started running Tyranny on Roll20, I used that as a way to get used to using a digital tabletop. My book was full of post-it notes for ways to tie events into my characters’ backstories. Additionally, I scoured the internet for articles about ways to improve/revise the adventure (as the first published adventure for 5th edition, there were several resources, especially for the first few chapters). When I read Tyranny of Dragons, I was always several chapters ahead of the story, but since Tyranny is a railroad-style adventure, it was easy for me to work through the book that way. I have a shelf of published adventures I got from folks on Craigslist, and a few dozen more on my hard drive, and yet when I sit down to read them for adventure ideas, I can only get through a few pages at a time. I find them dry and difficult to parse through, like reading a blueprint and trying to imagine the building you’ll never quite get the full picture. It’s the second published adventure I’ve ever run, the first being Tyranny of Dragons (which I ran twice one campaign ended in a fizzle, and the other ended in a TPK).Īnd here’s my first confession: I have a really hard time reading pre-written adventures. Not because I’ve messed up any of the specific content, and not because I’ve made the adventure less fun – but because I’ve mishandled my approach to the text itself, and making the process much harder on myself as a DM.įor those who don’t know, Princes of the Apocalypse is a published adventure from Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of D&D).

I’ve been running Princes of the Apocalypse wrong. Every Thursday, our own Mike Christensen shares his stories, advice, and opinions on the subject of tabletop role-playing games.

Princes of the apocalypse