This post is part of a series. Read the previous post here!

Table of Contents

• RHoD Weaknesses
  • Clumsy Railroad
  • Missing Classics!
  • Obscure Villains
• Goals of a RHoD Campaign
• Remix Overview
  • Structural Changes
  • Plot Changes
  • Enhancements
  • New Locations and Adventures
• Summary

Skip to the Remix Overview if you just want the juice!

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Art by Grace Cheung

RHoD Weaknesses

Red Hand of Doom is a great adventure straight out of the box¹, but we want spectacular.

Clumsy Railroad

RHoD has a traditional linear structure. The PCs are expected to travel through the different chapters and locations in order. This meant the designers added some clumsy transitions between the chapters² to keep the players on the prescribed tracks. They’re awkward and ham-fisted, but once the adventure is remixed into a sandbox they can just disappear!

Missing Classics!

One aspect of RHoD’s greatness is that it is unapologectically achetypal. It’s got 4 dragons, an invading hobgoblin army, elves in the forest, a wizard in a tower, and a big siege battle.

But the page count means it can’t fit everything. Some things get mentioned in passing, and so we can expand on them: allying with the local dwarves, joining an order of knights, helping war refugees as they clog the city! But some things are just missing, and so we’ll add them in: A white dragon! Orcs! Druids! Good dragons! Cults in the city! Hags! Field Battles!

Obscure Villains

The breakneck pace of RHoD means a lot of the lore about the villains is obscured from the players. There is no chance to learn anything about the main villain until you show up at his house at the end of the adventure and kill him 3 rounds later. The backstory of Ghostlord is entirely unrelated to the Red Hand.

Instead, we’re going to make sure the villains are fun to hate!

Goals of a RHoD campaign

All of the changes will be guided by a few core principles:

• Less filler, more setpieces: Red Hand of Doom is an action movie that stars the PCs as legendary heroes battling villainous foes to save helpless civilians. It’s thematically not about dungeoncrawling, or getting lost in the woods, or tracking torches and rations, or random encounters. Let’s cut everything but the setpieces — with all the content we’re adding, the campaign will be plenty long even without filler.
• Variety in enemies and situations: Most scenarios in the published adventure boil down to a combat against a bunch of hobgoblins and a dragon. That’s fun! But if we’re adding stuff, let’s create some different types of problems to solve: negotiations, puzzles, political dilemmas, stealth missions, and new enemies to fight.
• Information is interesting: Information allows for informed choices, and informed choices are the basic building block of player agency. Every location the players visit should give them many different clues and options about where to go next and what they can do to stop the horde.

Remix Overview

Art by Pavel Shut

Structural Changes

We’re changing Red Hand of Doom from a linear structure into an open world sandbox. After the players leave Drellin’s Ferry, they’ll have tons of locations across the valley they can visit in any order or even some not at all. Each place they visit may have knock-on effects. But the horde advances relentlessly, and after 35 days the siege of Brindol will begin. At the conclusion of the battle, we’ll tally up all the victory points the players have accumulated over the course of the campaign. Finally, the players must destroy Azarr Kul at the Fane of Tiamat in an epic denouement.

We’re going from this:

To this!³

As the PCs gain levels fighting the Red Hand, Azarr Kul sends his most elite forces across the map to counter them. This keeps the challenges exciting as the heroes barrel towards the adventure’s conclusion.

Plot Changes

The two plot-related changes of the remix increase verisimilitude and help Azarr Kul’s plan make more sense.

• Azarr Kul has a plan: the Battle of Brindol does not actually need to be won, but instead generates the bloodshed and souls necessary to power his infernal ritual at the Fane of Tiamat.
• A variety of minor logistical adjustments to the invasion timeline, army sizes, marching speeds, and regional demographics to more closely model historical medieval warfare.

The two background narrative changes increase the interconnectedness of the characters and enrich the narrative.

• We’re giving the Ghostlord a new backstory to more closely tie him into the events of Red Hand of Doom.
• We’re giving the Ruins of Rhest a new backstory as we add history and a religious prophecy to the rise of Azarr Kul.

All four of these plot changes will be covered in more detail by a future post.

Enhancements

Enhancements are sets of small tweaks like cooler magic items, additional links to other pieces of the remix, the removal of filler content, and short scenes to heighten the player experience and make the campaign run more smoothly.

• Drellin’s Ferry and Vraath Keep.
• Skull Gorge Bridge.
• The Witchwood and the Blackfens.
• The Elves and the Ruins of Rhest.
• The Warzone.
• The Ghostlord.
• The Fane of Tiamat.
• The Battle of Brindol.

Each enhanced location will receive a future post.

New Locations and Adventures

This is the good stuff. We’re going to add 8 brand new adventures to the module that will each take a session or two to complete.

• The Dwarves: Their thane kidnapped, the dwarves have been blackmailed into remaining neutral. Some of the dwarves want to stage a rescue, others sit out the coming war, and a few would be happy to see the thane killed.
• The Orcs: The orcs have received the Red Hand’s emissaries, and their horns announce a conclave to decide whether to join Azarr Kul. The heroes attend as guests of a chieftain and must convince the confederacy to vote no — perhaps by challenging their fearsome opposition to ritual single combat!
• The Druids: Beneath the trees, the Circle of Eth convenes to address the sudden rise of dark forces in the wood. Little do they know that Azarr Kul has planned to wipe them out and set the forest ablaze.
• The Cult of Tiamat in Brindol (pre-siege): A classic mystery as the Cult of Tiamat infiltrates the leadership of the city!! Assassinations, investigations, and intrigue!
• The Knights of the Coal: This order of knights harries the advance of the Red Hand as enemy scouts fan out across the valley. Join them in epic field battles to slow the march of the horde!
• The Red Hand Horde: A silver dragon bound and chained for ritual sacrifice. The golden Ark of Tiamat. Wyrmlord Kharn’s command tent. Levied hobgoblins looking for a chance to escape. The heroes will have to mount a daring raid into the belly of the beast!
• Hags: A trio of hags is always willing to bargain with the desperate, and our heroes are desperate indeed. But it turns out Azarr Kul is looking for a bargain as well…
• Barrows: The site of a battle against the Red Hand a century ago. Azarr Kul has sent an expedition to unearth a buried superweapon from the graves of the unquiet dead.

Each of these new adventures will receive one or more future posts.

Summary

Art by Antonio J. Manzanedo

Running the remix is simple.

The path from Drellin’s Ferry to the discovery of the Red Hand Horde the same as in the module.

Then the world opens up, and the players might go anywhere. This is the juice of the remix! Wherever they end up, open the relevent remix adventure or module adventure and run it. Each location is designed to push the players onwards to new places, accelerating the adventure towards its conclusion.

After 35 days, the horde arrives at Brindol and the siege begins! Then we’re right back on track with the module (plus a few enhancements) as the heroes save the city and head to the Fane of Tiamat to confront Azarr Kul in an epic final battle.

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Footnotes

1. If you have the time, check out Saintheart’s 3.5 Red Hand of Doom Handbook to see some of the commonly agreed upon weaknesses of RHoD and interesting ways to patch them. ↩

2. To get the players from Drellin’s Ferry to the Ruins of Rhest, an NPC goes “I hear the roads to the North are blocked. You guys should go check that out.” To get from Rhest to the Ghostlord requires several clues and some non-obvious digging by the PCs. The link is weak enough that the adventure explicitly states “There’s a chance the PCs simply don’t find these clues” and suggests having the local NPCs show up and hand them what they missed. To get from the battle of Brindol to the Fane of Tiamat, we have the local NPC lord hit the PCs out of the blue with “My spies have discovered …” ↩

3. See this excellent series by the Alexandrian on why we want to move from a linear structure to an open world. ↩