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View Full Version : No Quests, Out of the Abyss OotA



Philip Poe
January 25th, 2022, 04:33
So just purchased Out of the Abyss for FGU, I've been reading the book, boning up to start the module. Now I'm perusing through the module on FGU. I've noticed no quests in the quests section. I'm posting this to make sure I'm thinking right. Throughout the campaign there are experience points awarded for completing tasks. i.e. quests such as at the end of 06.14.21 Drow Statues "XP Awards , If Ogremoch's Bane is banished back to the Elemental Plane of Earth, award each character 150 XP." Shouldn't those be entered as Quests, that you can then drop on the party sheet? Are we expected to cut and paste each one of these and create quests as we go? Am I missing something, that just seems like that would slow the campaign up quite a bit and should already be part of the module? Is it because the XP is based on the number of party members. Why are there no quests at all in the Quests section? LMoP has the Quests section full of all the various quests, why not OotA?

LordEntrails
January 25th, 2022, 06:28
OotA is older, perhaps Quests were not around then? Don't know, but I'll move this to the 5E section and maybe someone there (Mr Z?) will have more info.

Zacchaeus
January 25th, 2022, 09:58
Yes, I think the main problem is that the XP awards are per party member (at least the ones that I've seen). They're not quests as such since the players don't get to know that their actions will get an XP award. In LMoP and other modules where there are quests the party is being tasked with doing something and the quest is there to assist them (and the DM) in what they are doing. The idea being to share that with the players so they have a note. So I can see why the author of the module didn't include any quests, and because there's no real way to know in advance how many party members there are it's difficult to add anything that would facilitate the awarding of the XP. However it's a matter of a moment for the DM to bring up the party sheet and create an entry directly in the XP section for the award and do the necessary distribution.

To be honest I think for OotA I'd be using milestone XP awards rather than XP for levelling up (in addition to starting the characters at level 3 or higher). It's very sandboxy and so the players can go anywhere missing out large sections and/or getting into areas that are too high for their level etc - unless you somewhat rail road them a bit.

Philip Poe
January 25th, 2022, 17:07
Thanks Zachaeus,
You are a gentleman and a scholar.
I'm digging everything your laying down. It is a sandbox! I think I'll just take them straight from LMoP to OotA, so they have those higher levels. If I want to incentivize my players, with certain quests, I'll just cut and paste it those entries to quests.