Ghosts of Saltmarsh: Overview
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a collection of seven nautically themed adventures that can serve as the backbone of a 5e Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Three of the adventures (Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, Danger at Dunwater, and The Final Enemy) are narratively connected to each other and the town of Saltmarsh. The other four are not specifically connected to the story, but there are suggested changes that can be made to connect all the adventures to the town of Saltmarsh. There are a couple of extra adventures in the appendix that can be pulled into the story arc and have scaling mechanisms to allow you, as a DM, to pull them in at different times of the story.
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The book is a treasure trove of resources and ideas. The appendix not only includes those additional adventures, but also has ship stat blocks, random encounter tables, storms, a random island generator, and a random ship generator. There is a section with magical ship upgrades that the characters can have made to their ship. This is a great way to use up the player’s money and keep them in port as the upgrade is made. There are new rules for handling travel and combat at sea. There is a handful of new magic items and plenty of new monsters.
I pulled the connectivity of each of the adventures straight out of my party’s backstories. Need a reason to get the party to go and salvage a derelict ship? How about one of the party members who used to be a crewman on it. Need a reason to help solve a murder? Have one of the characters have a working relationship with one of the people involved. To get the most out of this campaign, a session zero is very important to create ties between the characters, to the town, and to the adventures. Before you go to the session zero, make sure to at least skim over each adventure so that you are ready to add hooks to the character backstories to help later on.
The Good
The town of Saltmarsh is the key to making a campaign work. It is important to get the players invested in the town and its protection. It is easy to get the party to go and help establish a lighthouse on a nearby island if that will help protect the character’s family and friends.
I’m going to break down the adventures individually and go over what works and what doesn’t work in separate articles for each. Along with a look at session zero just to give you an idea of how it worked with my campaign.
Homebrewers, there is some very good information in the appendices as mentioned above. These are good resources to add to your campaigns even if you don’t want to run any of the adventures.
New DMs might find it challenging to fill in the gaps between adventures. There are some good story ideas to mine in the book, but if you don’t know where or how to extract those nuggets this book can be a challenge. There are plenty of resources (including this one) that can help guide you through this campaign.
There are descriptions of nautical environs along with magical storms. I used a magical storm while the party was traveling to one of the adventures and it really added to the random combat encounter that they faced while in a wild magic fog. It is a very good world-building element to add the magical storms to travel and combat encounters.
The Bad
My overall opinion of this campaign book is very high, but the campaign is lacking a good central bad guy. I suggest you pull from the character’s backstories and the adventures to find threads that go all the way through the campaign. I took the advice of Sly Flourish and re-skinned some of the bad guys in the campaign and made them into followers of the Chained God. This allowed me to pull on the lore of the Chained God to add to the overall story arc. Now I know there is a bad guy that is introduced in the first chapter and he has the potential to open the door to intrigue but he lives in the shadows most of the time. If he is devoted to the Chained God then that pulls in a major thread from Chapter 8: The Styes. I’ll get into the details as I break down the individual adventures.
For a campaign that is supposed to be centralized around water, there is very little water in the actual adventures. I added water to different adventures where it wasn’t before. If your players are smart, they’ll take the chance that Saltmarsh provides and play races that excel in a watery environment. How many opportunities do players get a chance to play a sea elf and not have to worry about dying from dehydration? I also suggest that you work on the voyages that have to happen between adventures. Create pirate ships, random sea encounters, and combat encounters that can only happen while on the ocean. Travel is hand waved in many of the adventures because they were culled from stand-alone adventures and not created with a campaign in mind. This is an opportunity to start working on your homemade adventure-building skills and fill in the gaps between adventures.
The Opportunities
There is a level gap between Chapter 5: Isle of the Abbey (5th level) and Chapter 6: The Final Enemy (7th level). This is a chance to either create a new adventure, use one of the side adventures in Appendix A: Of Ships and the Sea, or use a stand-alone adventure from another resource. I used Book of Cylinders from Candlekeep Mysteries. It is probably a coincidence that the 6th level adventure in Candlekeep was a water-based adventure. I had just gotten the book recently and was excited to run an adventure from it. I changed the yuan-ti to sahuagin to make it more cohesive with my Saltmarsh campaign.
The opportunity to create something even better than what is provided in the book is amazing. I would not suggest this campaign for new DMs, but if you already have a campaign or two under your belt and are ready to try making some of your own adventures this is great place to start. So, grab your eyepatches and start calling your friends hearties and hoist the Saltmarsh banner, there is adventure to found in these thar pages.
