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The West Marches of Solasta (Level 1-20)

In the spirit of the “West Marches” style of play popularized by the Alexandrian and Matt Colville, the campaign is a total sandbox, with each location being a self-contained adventure. It is a 100% combat focused module, designed to truly test your skill as a 5e player. In the manner of an old-school hexcrawl, it has an array of bite-sized locations and dungeons sprinkled throughout a wild, desolate land. Every region has at least one dungeon to discover, and almost every single magic item in Solasta can be discovered somewhere within the game. The party chooses the difficulty of their adventure by how far they stray from the hub city. In the center of the map you will find doable, low-level content, but around the periphery, great challenges wait. If you clear all the content, you will reach level 20, and you will finally have the mettle to take on the epic dungeons, which involve the harrowing battle gauntlets of the Temple of Ordeals, the castle of an ancient gold dragon, and the citadel of the god Sorr-Tarr. There are many attribute-increasing book rewards in the endgame to encourage epic-level play; you won’t run out of things to do at end level! You can “win” at any time and export your characters by exiting through an archway in the main hub city.

Another note is that Unfinished Business is highly recommended if you’re going to play this mod. This is because UB lets you advance to level 20 and use a few crazy-powerful level 9 spells. It’s also because UB has other great quality of life issues, like having a button to speed the game up. This is indispensable because this module will contain some encounters where you face vast throngs of foes.

6 player parties are fully supported. If you have trouble finding the 6-player exit, hold down the alt button and look for a doorway. However, the campaign is balanced for 4 players, ultimately, so if you play a 6 person party, the campaign will be far easier. If you would like to preserve the challenge to some extent, I recommend changing the XP gain to 67% in UB to mimic a 6-way XP split as opposed to the default 4-way split. You will still have ample XP to reach level 20.

Tips for playing:
>Useful skills:
Stealth, Perception, Survival, Athletics, Arcana, Medicine, Thieves Tools, Crafting
>Useless skills:
History, Sleight of Hand, Nature, Animal Handling, Religion, Insight, Deception, Intimidation, Performance, Persuasion
>If you are getting TPK’ed a lot, start moving around in cautious mode. Scouting is a very good idea. Otherwise you may pull monsters from far away.
>AOE is pretty much a hard requirement to survive. Some of the battles involve lots of enemies.
>One big issue is the way that the snow biomes look. In the middle of the day, the whole screen is basically all white due to the snow’s glare, which is a real eyesore. If you are playing on a snow map and it feels like you’re staring into the sun, I recommend doing five or six short rests until the ambient light is at a decent level.

Rough Level requirements of content

Tier 1 (Levels 1-3)
-Royal Preserves
-Eastern Steppe
-Gakbolg Swamp

Tier 2 (Levels 4-9)
-The Direwood
-Bleakhaven
-Western Steppe
-Aarlad Woods
-Poolplglup Swamp

Tier 3 (Levels 10-12)
-White Dragon Baruvex
-Tower of Khaal
-Northern Ornon Rainforest
-Southern Ornon Rainforest

Tier 4 (Levels 13-16)
-Black Dragon Odalrang
-Tower of Kra
-Fralorne Steppe
-Hrorlad Craglands

Tier 5 (Levels 17-19)
-Green Dragon Oghrigaal
-Tower of Oros
-Forsaken City

Tier 6 (Level 20)
-Gold Dragon Ur
-Citadel of Sorr-Tarr
-Temple of Ordeals