Umbrage Hill is an encounter from the Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure in the D&D Essentials Kit* scaled for characters of third level or lower.
We’ve been running some of the quests from the Essentials Kit adventure on their own as our characters travel up the Sword Coast from Waterdeep to Neverwinter after wrapping up our group game of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
In this post, we cover some story adaptation ideas for the Umbrage Hill encounter and how it worked in our game. This tweaks, for us, followed the golden rule of, whenever possible, grounding the story/adventure hook in the PC’s backstory for extra buy-in from your player.
Adapting the Adventure
The Umbrage Hill quest is a relatively straightforward one where the party happens upon a manticore terrorizing a woman inside a windmill and intervenes to help her.
To adapt this quest to our own game from the Phandalin setup with Harbin Wester, we changed the initial hook and made it more personal for our characters, which also increased the stakes of the combat.
Story Setup
In the middle of the night, as our party was sheltering in Thornhold, a knight cantered into the fort on horseback and alerted the guard on duty of a manticore capturing travelers a day’s ride up the road.
In our game, my PC’s two brothers were traveling a few days ahead of her, which was an immediate spark of concern. You could repeat this tactic with an NPC the party meets on the road who they become attached to. When Persephonie overheard the report, she ran downstairs to the center of the fort to learn more. She then woke up her fellow travelers, and the party left in the middle of the night to see about rescuing her brothers.
Playing out the encounter
All but one character failed their Con save to avoid taking a level of exhaustion, so we weren’t in great shape when we arrived at Umbrage Hill.
Persephonie raced forward to get the manticore’s attention as it flew back and forth between the main entrance and the upper floor of the windmill. The woman inside called down for help.
We had just started to engage the first manticore when a second appeared from a cave to the side, complicating the combat further. (Our characters are of higher level than the adventure calls for, so we went ahead and brought in the second one.)
Reflection
What I really enjoyed about the changes Jonathan made to the adventure setup was that we needed to be able to engage the manticores in both RP and combat in case they still had my PC’s brothers or, worse still, if they had eaten them.
Manticores are really flexible combatants, especially with the range of their tail spike, which also increased the intrigue of the encounter. My PC’s brother’s exchanged their horses for their own lives, so they weren’t there or in the cave when we arrived, but don’t forget about the manticore accepting a tribute or sacrifice (probably of food of some kind) in exchange for sparing a creature’s life.
All in all, between arriving at the fort, riding through the night, taking on the manticores, and speaking to Adabra Gwynn afterward, I think the adventure took 2-3 hours for us to run through, and I really enjoyed it!
Notes For New DMs
One of our initial concerns for new DMs about the Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure was its modular nature instead of the linked narrative structure of Lost Mine of Phandelver.
If you’re having trouble with that, try to connect the story hook for each new part of the adventure to someone your adventurer cares about so they have an additional emotional investment in pursuing the quest.
Another strategy for this would be connecting the adventure hook to a concern, deeply held fear, or past experience of your character. How would they respond to the rumors of a rampaging manticore if they’d lost a family member to a manticore attack in their early years? Or maybe the group of bandits they’ve been hunting recently traveled in that direction, so they might be unable to exact their revenge!
We hope that this overview of the Umbrage Hill quest from the Dragon of Icespire Peak adventure* was helpful! Please feel free to leave any questions or comments you may have below!
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