9. HOTDQ - The Elturel Festival

9. HOTDQ – The Elturel Festival

LiquidAnalog

March 1, 2024

This is part 9 of my guide for Hoard of the Dragon’s Queen campaign. You can read all chapters of this guide here:

Episode 4 – Elturel

First off – Elturel is an iconic Forgotten Realms landmark, so you have the opportunity to describe a quite unusual place – first The Elturel Companion, the Hellriders and the Elturel temples.

You don’t have to get too deep on the details – firstly, because in three days time the heroes will reach Baldur’s Gate (which will deserve a major investment and time for the highly detailed tour), but mostly because as the heroes reach Elturel under the light of the companion, they find that Festival is starting tomorrow!

The Elturel Festival

This is a great idea from Hack & Slash – I also recommend FreeTheWeasel’s implementation of this idea!

Ontharr Frume is busy preparing and managing the festival, so will meet them only tomorrow night – which allows the heroes time to forget their troubles for a while, and participate in the events. I recommend you create a detailed two day itinerary (with hours) that fits your group, with some thinking on which modifiers will impact each competition.

Initially you need to decide which kind of events will be a good fit for your group – and make sure everyone has more then a single event they would like to do.

The events themselves will require different attributes and skills from the characters. For example:

Foot Race – Con
Arm Wrestling – Strength
Wrestling – Athletics
Archery – Dex
Talents:
- Balance – Dex
- Sing, Dance, Entertain – Cha
- Hold Breath – Con
- Animal Handling – Wis
Storytelling – Cha / History / Religion
Horse Riding – Dex
Drinking – Con
Pie Eating – Con

For me – on the backdrop of the arm wrestling and foot race, all of my players competed in the storytelling competition, the wizard participated in the archery competition (and almost won!), and the priest took the first place in the beer drinking competition – which was a tense and close one!

Once your players get to the finals you have the opportunity to describe the main contender on this competition – so you can introduce fun and memorable one-time NPCs. I like the ones FreeTheWeasel wrote in his post:

Arm Wrestling – A hugely fat and short farm woman with splotchy red skin
Archery – Shifty eyed, tall man. Thin. Greasy hair and smells of dried blood
Storytelling – Old man, flowing beard, hacking cough (bard – Tall Tale Telling)
Drinking – Young child (8). Curly blond hair
Pie Eating – Strapping farmer, red neck, dirty fingers, ripped pants
Riding – Willowy girl of 15, black hair, wearing oversized mens clothes, white horse

Regarding how to actually compete on the challenges – I used d20 challenges with ability modifiers, but you should completely give tons of extra points for convincing role-play and ingenious ideas.

As prizes for the competition go, I devised the following:

Blessed arrows – practically a slightly enchanted +1 dmg arrows.
Blessed feathers of speed – A few single-use magical feather that when broken gives an extra full movement for one turn
Blessed luck stones – A thin stone that when cracked gives an immediate inspiration point

You can come up with your fun prizes that are not too powerful but give a sense of achievement.

For my players this was a wonderful evening where everyone and their characters had a blast, and forgot the chase and mystery for a day.

Meeting with Ontharr Frume

Eventually, the festival is over and we get to business. Ontharr Frume is now willing to hear the heroes out (possibly accompanied by Leosin).

Ontharr is here as a the next authoritative and trustworthy figure, which will guide the heroes on their next steps. Ontharr needs to provide the heroes with a few things.

1. A contact in Baldur’s Gate

Onthar will tell the heroes about his trustworthy contact in Baldur’s Gate – Ackyn Celebon, that is crucial to provide the heroes with carts and info when they get there so they can blend in with the caravan. This is also critical to direct the heroes to reach their next place – Baldur’s Gate.

2. A sage in Baldur’s Gate

Ontharr should direct the heroes to gather more information from a sage he knows in Baldur’s Gate – Adrian Trent – a knowledgable and respected sage that the heroes can visit, so they can share and discuss some of the more troubling discoveries they have. This is important so they can uncover more lore and mystery as they reach the city.

3. Some means of communication

I had Ontharr give the heroes one side of his Sending Stones. I thought it would give them some sense of connectivity with a higher power. Sadly for the heroes, they later found that the stone they had was one-sided – they could only send messages but not receive any. You can decide that it sometimes do work – so this can provide you with means to inject some directives in case the heroes get stuck or on the wrong path.

4. A boat to reach Baldur’s Gate

I think that this is the best way to reach Baldur’s Gate – Ontharr can supply the heroes with a small fishing boat from the docks – which will allow them to easily reach the city in three days time.

Next: 10. HOTDQ – Episode 4 part III – A boat ride to Baldur’s Gate