Thread by @hexcrawl

Anybody interested in a Let's Read of CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP?

My POV here is someone with virtually no knowledge of Critical Role.

No sourcebooks. No comics. No animated series (yet).

I've watched the first episode of the current season, a couple dozen short highlights, and @mattcolville's incredible recap of the Season 1 finale (which still brings tears to my eyes).

Nonetheless, CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP is something I've wanted WotC to do for awhile now: Release a sourcebook for a campaign world (e.g., Explorer's Guide to Wildemount) and then support that with a full campaign book.

It's probably a bit silly to dive into NETHERDEEP without reading the sourcebook first. But I just haven't had time to dive into WILDEMOUNT. So... here we go!

Also, you can call me Tom Holland, because this thread is going to be just gushing with SPOILERS.

The background seems incredibly cool: Calamity. Imprisoned gods. Forgotten champions. Vestiges of a godwar.

By page 6, I am bought in.

What this actually reminds me of are the Dragonlance adventures I picked up in the early '90s before I'd read any of the novels.

(Not the original DL modules. Those were long gone by the time I showed up and it took me years before I saw a copy. DLE1 was the first one I found.)

Similar vibe of recognizing that there are these huge depths just beyond the text that I know I'm not fully grokking.

But, for me, that enigma kind of just cranks up the allure.

Assuming it's done right, of course. Which it is here.

One thing I am, in fact, left baffled by: Xhorhas.

It's "on the continent of Wildemount." Ah, it's a nation. Got it.

But then, "the Kryn Dynasty is the dominant nation in Xhorhas."

So I flip around and find a map of Xhorhas and... the Kryn Dynasty isn't on it?

I'm sure this all makes sense and three seconds of googling or flipping open the Wildemount sourcebook would clear it right up.

I've been prepping material from LEGACY OF THE CRYSTAL SHARD lately.

Said legacy being the remnants of an ancient artifact that offers power, but also corrupts its users.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4662…

So Ruidium - the crystalline residue of an ancient power that corrupts its users -- definitely feels familiar. But it's an aesthetically cool riff on a trope which is, of course, older than the crystal shard.

I love that the book itself is an artifact which becomes more corrupted by the ruidium as you turn the pages.

I'm not sure if that's Kate Irwin, Trich Yochum, and/or Matt Cole. But brilliant work.

The mechanic by which ruidium slowly corrupts you looks really cool. Seems to have nice pacing, very flavorful progression of symptoms erupting across your body.

Because it's so cool, I'd really like to see a greater temptation for the PCs to meddle with it. Spells requiring expensive material components are neither so common nor, really, all that expensive to tempt people into risking corruption.

I'd recommend letting casters use an ounce of ruidium to boost a spell so that it has an effect as if it had been cast with a spell slot one level higher than it actually was.

What appears to be the big gimmick of CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP is the rival group: Five NPCs who form their own adventuring party around the same time the PCs do and, hypothetically, end up being the PCs' rivals.

This is a Let's Read thread, so I'm only about 20% of the way through the book as I type this. But, to be honest, I've already gone from intrigued-and-a-little-excited to disenchanted to pretty cynical about the rivals at this point.

We'll come back and chat about the rivals a bit more in the future.

For now: They're cool characters. The book does a good job of giving them a lot of flavor and personality in just 3-4 paragraphs each (which makes the material very easy to digest, reference, and use).

Call of the #Netherdeep begins in Jigow during the Festival of Merit.

Confession time: After wading through dozens of new fantasy names in a handful of pages - Alyxian the Apotheon, Cael Marrow, Kryn, Catha, Sehanine, Avandra - my brain spent a non-zero amount of time trying to figure out who Merit was and why they had a festival.

Jigow is really cool. A literal jumble of villages which have smashed together as they've grown aroudn giant mangrove trees. The chaos of urban growth in real-time as large chunks of the town are literally mobile; built on the backs of horizonback tortoises.

I wish someone had told the cartographer.

Aesthetics aside (only three tortoises? more trees, please! that is not many communities, that is one community built around a central common area; etc.) the keyed locations are confusing at best.

Meatwaters dock district on the shore; the Wetwalks stilt-house district near the wetlands; and the Jumble smashed between.

But J2 is in the Jumble. And J6 is supposedly in Wetwalks. So where is Meatwaters?

J5 are the rice paddies on the edge of the wetlands, but J1 is also in the Jumbles... so where are the stilt-houses of the Wetwalks supposed to be?

Jigow, as described, would be a real challenge for a cartographer. (If nothing else, large chunks of the town are mobile.)

On top of that, based on the keyed locations, I would assume that they were given bad notes to work from.

So the campaign starts with the PCs standing in the middle of the Festival of Merit.

Locations J1 thru J7 are different festival games/challenges.

And the festival is introduced like this:

So the PCs are standing in the street between J1 and J7 and they're told, "Where do you want to go?"

Obviously they'll hit J1 and J7, but then the expected experience here is unclear to me. Just randomly walk around town and hope you run into keyed content?

Show the players the keyed map so that they can just point at keyed locations and ask, "What's there?" as they work their way down the checklist? That's not exactly "the town is yours to explore!"

What I would do: Latch onto "all around you, colorful signs and banners point toward festival booths surrounded by cheering people."

Collapse the festival down into a festival location. (Probably J6 on the map.)

Some of the competitions are specific to other areas of town - the harvest race (J5), the Ifolon River Plunge (J3), etc.

For those you have horizonback hawkers in the main festival square who ferry people to the other festival centers.

So you load up onto a horizonback tortoise and the hawkers sell you their wares (drinks, baked goods, trinkets, etc.) while the tortoise walks you through town.

This also reflects what I see as the motile life of Jigow.

There are clustered "villages" of static structures, but lots of people and even more businesses live and work on the tortoises.

https://twitter.com/_snipsnap_/status/1407971748952215552

You "commute" to work by having your tortoise head up to the paddy fields.

The bakeries follow you, arriving at the Wetwalks midday to sell lunch to laborers taking their break from the high noon heat. But then they head down to the Meatwaters for the mid-afternoon dock breaks.

Alternatively, worry less about keying stuff to specific locations on the map and instead organize the festival into districts.

Then use the Festival structure to run the event: thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4564…

In this case, I'd follow the natural divisions of Jigow (Meatwaters, Jumble, Wetwalks) and divvy up the festival games between them.

Meatwaters: J2, J3
Jumble: J1, J4, J7
Wetwalk: J5, J6

If you want to flesh it out a bit with stuff like topics of conversation, I'd look to seed those with stuff establishing the festival's big finale at the Emerald Grotto. Also rumors from afar to bring players up to speed on Xhorhas. And there's plenty of local color.

The key thing is that you communicate to the players that there's stuff happening all through Jigow's three districts. The meaningful choice for the PCs is now, "What district do you want to go to?"

And you can present that as, "The town is yours to explore - where do you want to go?"

Because whatever answer the players give, you can parse it through the lens of, "What district are they in?" And pull up the material you've keyed.

The key thing is to match scale of decision to the density of keyed material.

You can do street-by-street navigation in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord because there's content keyed to every single street.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/3654…

Street-by-street navigation doesn't work in Jigow, because there's not enough material keyed to make those decisions meaningful.

The Let's Read continues over here!

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1505676972927635457