When I first ran Tyranny of Dragons 10 years ago, no chapter provided as many headaches as On the Road. Back then, I was running the module almost entirely as written – we added a handful of optional things over the course of the entire campaign, tied into the character backstories (as I often do at my table), but that was well after we got through this chapter.
For the uninitiated, the fourth chapter of the module asks the players to follow the Cult of the Dragon all the way up the Sword Coast, from Baldur’s Gate to Waterdeep and beyond. During that trip, your party of heroes is expressly meant not to hinder the cult. Their mission is to discover where all this stolen gold is going; not to prevent it from reaching its destination. It suggests they should hire on as guards, gives you a handful of resources for NPCs and events (with a couple it states must take place), and tells you this trip should take about 2 in game months.
Now, unless you choose to abstract almost all of this travel, it’s unlikely you’ll get through the whole thing in one game night. And, if you do skim over it, you’re cutting one of the eight chapters in the Hoard of the Dragon Queen book (remember: these were once sold separately), and 10 pages of content of a 94-page module (including the pages of appendices). You are cutting characters that have more information on their personality in their sole paragraph than some of the cult’s villains possess (i.e. Frulam Mondath). You’d be disengaging with one of the module’s few opportunities to interact with cultists without the threat of imminent violence. (Probably. We’ll get to that.)
All this is to say, I don’t think you can really afford to cut it, but … it’s also one of the most boring adventure beats ever written?
This module begins with a dragon attacking a village that your level one heroes drive off. Then it asks them to spend two months on the road to follow the stolen gold? And it doesn’t save any of its interesting characters introduced to the party in Greenest for this chapter? Only two named members of the Cult of the Dragon* exist in this chapter: Rezmir and Azbara Jos (*allied to the cult, technically). Rezmir is meant to remain in their wagon and unseen, and the module explicitly says Jos does not mingle with other travelers and seldom speaks to anyone.
So … what’s supposed to happen, exactly? Is the tension of this chapter meant only to be “are your players going to forget that they’re not meant to screw with the cultists?”
Let’s Talk About the Events
On the whole, the events the module provides are pretty good. Of the twelve “optional” events, I used 4 pretty much as written, one with a change to its enemies, and another that I made a major change to and turned into a whole dungeon (more on that later). I think any of them could provide a decent hook for a session, or at least half of one. However, of these, almost none of them feel like they mean anything to the module’s “main quest.” Like, only Contraband and Payback wrap back into what the party is doing in any way whatsoever. That’s not necessary, of course, but it does mean that these can’t fill the void left by an utter lack of central tension in this chapter.
As for the “planned” events, there’s Recognized! (which isn’t one of the “mandatory” planned events), which is triggered as a consequence for the party being blasé earlier in the adventure, skulking about the camp long enough that someone in the caravan recognizes them. The module considers a failure state of this event being that the cultist shares that information, and says that it can’t be permanently solved without murder. (It even has the gall to say if your good-aligned PCs don’t like that option “that’s roleplay.” Uhh, maybe finding an entirely different solution is roleplay?)
Then, it has three events that happen after Jamna Gleamsilver (an agent of the Zhentarim) joins the caravan. The first is Unwanted Attention, which is less of an event, and more of a Perception check that tells the players the new gnome in the caravan is being a little odd. Then, there’s Who’s Your Friend? where Gleamsilver plants a bone sliver in their oatmeal to try an create a relationship with them by pretending to save their lives. Lastly, there’s Murder Most Foul, where in the morning, the camp awakens to discover a dead body (belonging to a cultist), where the party gets accused of the murder given an assumed animosity, but it was actually Jamna Gleamsilver who couldn’t stop herself from trying to steal some of the gold the cult is transporting.
On my current run of the module, we made major changes here. First, there was no need for Recognized! because, rather than pretending the cult wouldn’t recognize the heroes of Greenest who stole their hostages right out from their camp, we had both parties entirely aware of each other the entire time. The cultists would’ve loved to have the party removed from the caravan, and they were looking for any excuse to force them out. The party, meanwhile, had reason to interact with the commonfolk of the caravan, building up their reputation among them, and each event we ran built them up as heroes of the caravan, making them more respected with each success. Additionally, we had preserved Frulam and Cyanwrath (as slightly/greatly altered characters, check out the previous post in this series), and allowed them to be the mouthpieces of the cult on the road, which let the party interact with characters during the two months they’d be traveling.
Then, we didn’t end up having Jamna Gleamsilver murder someone for treasure, though I ran her other two events as written. Instead, the party’s own actions gave us a moment of confrontation with the cult, and led to some emergent moments where they were able to deal a blow to the Cult of the Dragon without being ejected from the caravan.
And, genuinely, I think that mattered a lot. When I ran this module previously, my players were absolutely dying to do something against the cult. We had a PC try to steal some of their gold, get caught, and publicly punished and ostracized for their actions. Over the real-life months we were working through this road trip, the players itched to do something against their enemies; they didn’t like that their goal was to sit around and wait for the module to progress to the next step. The module hadn’t given us a central tension – and I hadn’t diagnosed that issue when I first ran it.
The Event That Became A Dungeon
I mentioned briefly that one of the events I changed and expanded into a dungeon. I knew I wanted a dungeon in the middle of the road trip from the beginning, and I wanted to throw a wrench into the event, too. So, I adjusted Roadside Hospitality, which has two doppelgangers join the caravan and try to lure someone out and potentially replace them, into one of my favorite enemies in D&D: a hag.
An unassuming old lady joined the caravan and took immediate interest in a pregnant mother traveling alone to live with her sister in Waterdeep after her husband’s recent death. Now, my table knows me, and they clocked this from a mile away. However, I was able to employ my NPC, who berated the party for their rudeness. That got them to back down long enough for the kidnapping to occur and the dungeon to materialize.
From conception, I’d had a plan for this dungeon. As I mentioned in the last post in this series, I’d expressed in session zero that some members of the cult could be rescued from it. For this dungeon, I’d known from before session 0 I’d be attaching either Cyanwrath or Jhos as an ally to them for the duration, depending on who they had more affinity for. Alternatively, if they’d entirely rejected the possibility of saving either, I thought it might be fun to attach Frida (edited Frulam) or Rezmir to the party as tense allies for the dungeon. Given the events of our game, Cyanwrath joined them, committed himself to pursuing heroism, and that all led to further events in the campaign. Our party rescued the mother and that grew their renown yet again, which built them up in the eyes of the caravanners which made it harder for the cult to–you get the gist.
The point is this: with a couple of small changes earlier in the module, we were able to salvage this months-long road trip into something engaging by simply finding a central tension. We spent ten sessions from August to December traveling from Baldur’s Gate to Waterdeep, and it wouldn’t have worked half as well without these changes. This video from Matt Colville dives deeper into central tension, and it’s something I’ve kept in mind for adventure building and fiction writing ever since.
As always, thank you for reading! I genuinely think so many of the adjustments I made to this module were in pursuit of making this chapter better. It nearly killed our table when I ran it originally; I guess I felt challenged to find a way to salvage it. At least for my table. And, well, that’s who I’m running the game for!
Anyway, good luck out there, heroes.
Ben Stovall Blog 
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