The Second D&D Tarak Campaign - Introduction

Welcome to a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign write-up ! This campaign was a follow-up to the previous Tarak campaign, and took place in the same area of my Homebrew D&D world.

I hadn't realised how time had flown by since I ran this - it feels like only yesterday, but when I checked my records, it actually started way back in 2019 !

I hope you enjoy my D&D campaign write-ups, and the commentary I add to them. Questions, comments and feedback are welcome !

Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

After finishing the previous campaign with a super-dramatic finale that involved blowing up the underground naphtha reservoir as the enormous undead army passed above, I took a short break from Dungeon Mastering. You can read the final post of that campaign (which includes a chronological list of all the posts which preceded it) HERE

The plan was for someone else to run a campaign, to give me a chance to do some actual playing and get time to plan the next adventure.

But then real life happened and the chap who was setting up to run a campaign found he didn't have time to plan it out and I was asked to step in at very short notice. As in, a message on Monday night to say "can you run the game on Wednesday ?"

This didn't give me time to plan anything, and I don't like to just re-use adventures I've run before. But having a Homebrew world has it's advantages ! So what I decided to do was to run a pre-written module, but drop it into my own setting.

This is a technique I've used before with great success. Most pre-written modules tend to be very railroad-y in their approach, presenting relatively linear storylines with a defined path for adventuring parties to follow. I'm totally happy to subvert this, and if the players do something the module doesn't plan for it becomes a basis to take the whole thing off in an exciting new direction.

Serendipitously I had recently acquired a copy of the official 5th edition D&D supplement Tales From The Yawning Portal.

Photo by me, of my copy of the book

The idea of the book is that it's a sequence of seven adventures designed for characters of increasing level. The theory is that by the time a party has finished one module, they've gained enough experience and loot to be ready for the next.

Each of the adventures is a 5th Edition re-write of a standalone module from previous editions of D&D. In some cases this is an improvement, but sometimes the original has a magic about it that can't be recaptured by a committee re-write.

The first thing I did was scrap the way the book is intended to be used. It's supposed to be set in a tavern with a mysterious portal that characters can venture into to seek adventure. I wasn't sure that it was a good fit for my world, and it risked creating considerable initial set-up work, so I decided to drop the first adventure straight into Tarak, a part of the world the players were already familiar with.

To make things easier on myself, I asked my players to create first level characters. Nice and easy to DM for, although also nice and squishy and easy to kill !

This meant running the first adventure in the book; The Sunless Citadel.

Next time; We introduce our new characters !