Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Chapter 1 Saltmarsh

The first chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons 5e book Ghosts of Saltmarsh is not an adventure but is brimming with background about the town and surrounding area. Plenty of resources for both the DM and players. You will be coming back to Chapter 1 throughout the adventure because the characters spend most of their time there. The town should be the central focus of the campaign.

Welcome to Saltmarsh

My players came to love this town. It helped that most of their characters were born and raised there. The town becomes a character in the story. When a new player joined the party, he made an off-hand remark about threatening the shopkeeper when they got back to town. The rest of the party members all immediately said to leave Winston alone.

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 There is plenty of intrigue throughout the town. Whether the characters get embroiled in the conflict between the traditionalists and the loyalists. Or get caught up in the backstory of one of the townsfolk. There are plenty of hooks to get caught on. There is also plenty of room to add your own NPCs to flush-out areas within the town.

 If you have Tales from the Yawning Portal, there is a section with suggestions for adding the adventures found in that book to the Saltmarsh region. I found that my players didn’t have the time to get too far off track, nor were they interested in side adventures. One of the characters was hiding from an unknown enemy that was killing tabaxi in hopes of finding him. This created a ticking clock that kept this player and another that knew part of his secret on task.

Player Resources

There are no new player races or classes, but there are four new backgrounds (Fisher, Marine, Smuggler, and Shipwright). Plus, updates to the existing backgrounds to make them specific to Saltmarsh. I strongly suggest working with your players and letting them build their characters with either these new backgrounds or the updated existing ones. My party started with two smugglers, a fisher, and a shipwright, then a marine joined the party later on.

 What’s Missing

The focus is on the land that surrounds Saltmarsh and not out to sea. The characters in my campaign only left Saltmarsh by the City Gate to go to the Haunted House. Every other time they left, they left in the Sea Ghost (which they renamed Monkey’s Carnage). There are plenty of hooks to pull the characters out into the surrounding area, but none that I used. They were too busy with the Chained God and his minions.

 The provided random encounter tables lack much uniqueness. There are some nice pirate ships, but they would be deadly encounters for low-level characters. Take time to come up with encounters while the characters are out at sea. I had a small patrol of sahuagin attack Monkey’s Carnage, which was a nice bit of connectivity to The Final Enemy.

 I have created a voyage system that should make for more interesting voyages from the adventures and back to Saltmarsh. The system allows for more player involvement as there are roles for the characters to take up.

 DM Advice

I created handouts for each of my players with information about contacts their characters had in the town. This jump-started opportunities for role-playing and also gave the players a nice understanding of what Saltmarsh had to offer.

My biggest mistake was not making Anders Solmor a more central NPC to the characters. This would have started the characters as neutral actors in the conflict between the Loyalists and Traditionalists. It also connects them more to Skerrin Wavechaser. I moved Skerrin’s role to Aubreck Drallion’ butler, the half-orc Vertheg. Aubreck is an important NPC in Chapter 4: Salvage Operation and was the former employer of one of the characters. I will get into the details on the changes I made to that adventure in my Chapter 4 review.

 The reason why I put Anders farther from the characters, I was worried about making the characters suspicious of Skerrin too early in the campaign. By placing Anders farther away, the characters only met Skerrin once, when he opened the door when Mac visited Anders about something else. As the DM, this was a big moment to me, but to the characters, this was an unmemorable meeting.

 Xolec is a great addition to the campaign. I tried very hard to introduce him early on but my players stubbornly refused to go to the Crabber’s Cove despite several clues I gave them about there being answers there.

 The information about the areas surrounding Saltmarsh is great and allows for quite a bit of homebrewing, but I wanted to play in the Azure Sea. How often do you get to be on the water and encounter all that it has to offer? I would have appreciated more resources for the nearby islands, underwater environs, and different ships and boats. I’m not saying those things are not in the book, but there is more of a focus on the land surrounding the town and not the sea. Make sure to spend time in your prep time building out the Azure Sea and the islands there.

 There is a section on how to run downtime and what the characters can do in Saltmarsh. Make sure to provide a map of the town to the players, so they have the lay of the land. One quick note, the maps on p.15 and p. 23 are facing in the exact opposite direction. Make sure to check which way north is facing.