A little down time over the holidays, and copies of the Monster Manual and the DMG for 5e led t a little side adventure in the latest Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure. I added another Dragon Cult hideout form the player to find, hoping to try out some skeletons (not everyone has converted to Tiamat just yet), and some magic items. Since every good hideout (or in this case a merchant front for the dragon cult) needs a leader, I worked through the PHB to create a multi-class villain for the PCs.

Lessons learned:

Magic items were not as powerful as a higher level character. I created a Fighter 5/Rogue 3 Wood Elf with a focus on ranged weapons. He had multiple attacks and could move just about anywhere he wanted. His primary weapon was a set of magical darts with poison (slightly adapted from a poison dagger). Two attacks for poison with extra damage and a condition was deadly, but I still think that the class abilities were what gave the PCs fits. Some of the other NPCs (knights without their plate) had magic shields, but it was their attacks and hit points that were tougher for  the party.

Skeletons were a bad choice. A fourth level cleric can handle many of them.

Poisoned condition is pretty awful. Disadvantage on all ability checks sucks (but only for the players).

Game is still deadly. I dropped two players, and this was after the Cleric was almost out of spells. No one failed all three death saves, but it was close.

Combat is still fast. Five PCs and three to five NPCs made it through 10 rounds of combat fairly quickly. And, that is with me trying to remember all the rules for my multi-class fighter with extra abilities.

A break for at least a month while other folks run (we rotate DMs). Want to work on some more cleric additions – maybe Backgrounds. Also need to finalize events for GenCon, need to submit for the first round. More details on that later.