The 3.5 Red Hand Of Doom Handbook for DMs [Major spoilers!] - WIP, PEACH!

[Antariuk]

The trick seems to me, how do you insert VPs into the campaign? If you openly say to the players at the start or even during the campaign that there's 74 VP possible, and X benefit accrues due to accumulating Y points, and 40 VP is all that's required to stop the Red Hand at Brindol, then the moment they cross the 40 VP line all tension in keeping score disappears; at that point they're just playing for bigger benefits post-campaign, "hundred percent completion" style, when to me the main focus of the campaign should be stopping the Hand.

Maybe if you word it a bit more subtly -- "Assuming you can find some way to stop the Red Hand prior to or at Brindol's walls, 40 VP makes your victory there stick." But then that's revealing a pretty big spoiler; how does one set out a series of benefits at the start of the campaign without horribly breaking suspension of disbelief or revealing crucial plot information.

Maybe the trick is to just make a vague reference that the adventure keeps track of what the player characters do and that all real decisions they make influence the outcome on some level, the end. You might want to disclose that there's a timeline (but make sure to explain that they don't have to run like madmen all the time), but nothing else.

Here's another thought: maybe if one doesn't make the VPs automatic indicators of levels of victory or indicators of consequences but rather a resource to be spent post-campaign, with certain conditions requiring the players to spend hard-earned VPs accumulated by the end. One would have to come up with a pretty diverse set of rewards or post-game perks, things that players might actually want, for this to work, but this might actually be a better way of using VPs generally. You can still use them as a binary win/lose indicator.

I recognise this would have a double benefit since XP and gold is kinda meant to be for these functions anyway, but maybe if you specify at the start of the campaign something like "50 VP means you get a nice private holding (i.e. Vraath Keep), 25 VP means you get a nice house (Jorr's hut in the Witchwood, maybe)" or stuff along those lines, VP might be a more useful thing to provide.

That's a pretty brilliant idea! If you want RHoD to evolve into a kingdom-building game afterwards, you could directly translate Victory Points into Building Points with a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, depending on how many VP your modified version hands out (the link refers to Pathfinder's kindom building rules, which should be 100% compatible with 3.5). If you think that coming up with reasons for all these resources to suddenly show up, remember that an army the size of the Red Hand usually carries lots of stuff with it that you can recycle (boulders for fortifications, watchtowers, rams and whatnot; lots of tools and equipment to dig in or cut down trees; and so on).

The VPs could potentially be a measure of how well the region is able to rebuild itself after the Red Hand. Obviously the battle was huge and without the PCs the horde would've taken over the whole region but they've managed to forge alliances between the Elves and Brindol, evacuate most of the skilled workers from the smaller towns along the way and potentially show the mercenaries that there is work aplenty now the Red Hand is gone.

This meshes well with my clumsy attempt of an in-world explanation for the VP = BP translation after the end of RHoD, if you want to take the game in that direction.

We all work together and I did overhear a "Thank god we smashed those eggs, could you imagine fighting more than one of those things?!" so I think the uber-Razorfiends did exactly what they needed to :)

Nicely done! The last time I played the razorfiends didn't really have a chance to hurt our party (mostly due to spectacularly bad rolls on the DM's side and some good tactics on our side) so they became something of a joke.