[Fred Brackin]

I have started a new D&D5e campaign based on The adventure that came with the set. It will probably be shortish. It's also the first time I've run 5e but I've lost count of how many systems i've run. in my almost 43 years of gaming.

The adventure is written to be run for characters who are clueless groundlings presumably so they can be amazed by the wonders of Spelljamming but I offerred the option of being crew on the ship in the adventure and ended up with no groundlings.

It's also written for characters of 5th level and I offerred the possibility of starting at 1st and quickly working their way up but got no takers on that either.

It seems clear that it was the new character creation material and the starting at 5th level that cased this sesion to have the energy and enthusiasm it did. They may need to freshen more in D&D One than they think.

The adventure also said that it could start out in any familiar world but the Forgotten Realms were obviously out as this is a world-threatening plot but the realms have god-like mages and an oversized and overactive pantheon of actual gods who deal harshly with the plot's originators..

So I created a new world of clueless groundlings. When humans first got to it they found Elves there before them. The humans asked the elves what the world's name was (mostly through the "shouting and waiving their arms" system). So the world is called "So'ille' (from the ancient Elvish for "Dirt") and has two continents named "Hiriya" and "Thariya".

After a couple of rounds of this the Humans gave up on asking the elves for information (which may be what the Elves wanted) and started making up their own names (and creating their own oddities).

One such being what started out as "Puerto Nuevo" and grew to have an "old town" and a "new town" until the new town got eaten by a sea monster and ending up as just "Old Nuevo".

The PCs were not strongly interested in defending the Old Nuevans from the suddenly arising crisis. In fact they were really only interested in fleeing it themselves.

There were a couple of big fights but I had to start giving the npcs Wisdom Saves to run (I have no idea if 5e has a Morale mechanism).. There could have been a problem when the PCs kiled all of the npcs without interrogating them first but that was why the Cleric had Speak with Dead.

There was also a situation where the adventure effectively said "An NPC will appear and tell the PCs an obivious lie which will decieve them for at least 3 encounters". Eh, not so much thanks to a 23 on an insight check and a telepathy spell or ability. I don't issue Plot Armor to NPCs. It's too much trouble to even try. So he didn't make it to 3 rooms over.

Even with a playing session cut short by charactter generation it seemed that everyone had fun and they amde level 6 (milestone advancement).