Hoard of the Dragon Queen set in Blackmoor.

[finarvyn]

That is interesting Fin! I really want to keep my 5E campaign low-level for a long time. Even though I tend to enjoy high level campaigns, I am in no hurry to get there since this is a new ruleset both for myself and my players.

A couple more thoughts and comments about DRAGON HOARD and experience points:

(1) The first couple of "episodes" are broken in that you can't really award by-the-book XP or characters will level up too quickly. There are lots of low-level monsters to kill and it doesn't take many XP to advance early on. The "fix" they made was to cap out the XP early on. You cap out at 300 XP in the first episode no matter how many creatures you kill.

(2) An offshoot of #1 is that each episode typically takes several game sessions to play, and it's possible that you may cap out after only one session so it's possible that you many not earn any XP at all for a session or two. They do this for "Adventure League" play so that if someone missed a session they wouldn't be behind forever.

(3) Another factor to consider later on is that there may be almost no treasure. As 5E doesn't give XP for treasure any more, this can make some games a little odd. You kill stuff, move on, kill more stuff. Takes some of the role playing away in a few sessions.

(4) There are some episodes which can drag out forever. These are the "dungeon crawl" ones and I really enjoyed those because of the minimal prep needed for me to run each session. 8)

(5) There are other episodes with multiple missions one can try, and I suggest doing pretty much all of them. In "Adventure League" play the players sometimes were in a hurry to move on, but for a home game I'd want to explore everything to maximize the value of the module.

(6) Wherever possible, be stingy with allowing the party to take a short or long rest. Many of the classes can totally recharge with a short rest, then it becomes tough to challenge them. When they start to use up their resources, the game becomes more interesting in my opinion.

My advice to you would be to use a level progression system similar to that mention in my earlier post. HOARD OF THE DRAGON QUEEN is supposed to take characters from level 1 to level 7-8, so if you give a level for each "episode" you aren't far from the mark. I think they suggest you skip awarding a level somewhere around episode 5. You wouldn't want to slow things down too much more than that, or characters might be undergunned against some of the monsters. On the other hand, this is often a function of party size. Some of the encounters seem too easy for my group at the game store, so maybe slowing down level progression isn't a bad thought after all. We're in episode #7 and are 5th to 6th level, and I'm finding that the characters can do a lot of damage when rested.

Hope that helps.