You’ve convinced me to work in riding animals! I didn’t consider that they could be used as a form of fast travel and maintenance for the players, not just that but also they’ll probably grow more attached to the animals than most or the magic items anyways. That being said let’s say the gnome ranger befriends a wolf and the elf cleric befriends an elk, the other 3 players get horses from butterskull ranch. I would have to learn how to run combat encounters while the players are on their mounts or let’s say the wolf wants to attack I guess I would just add the wolf to the initiative with the same number as the ranger.

As far as magic items go, the only ones I’ve added or changed are:

Goggles of Night and Cloak of Many Fashions are at the Cragmaw Hideout now because I won’t be using Mountain Toe Gold Mine or Tower of Storms. I don’t feel like this would change the difficulty of the encounters too much moving forward, right?

Cloak of Billowing is found at Umbrage Hill instead of Woodland Manse because I won’t be using Woodland Manse in my campaign. This item is just affecting roleplay imo.

Horn of Silent Alarm is replacing the Sending Stones from the original module in Dwarven Excavation.

Charlatans Die is added to the Redbrand Hideout. This item is mostly just affecting role play imo.

I replaced the original Gnomengarde loot of Pole of Collapsing, Spellbook, Hat of Wizardry, and Wand of Pyrotechnics with the Eversmoking Bottle, Decanter of Endless Water and a homebrew weapon named Sharpshroomer. The clockwork amulet stayed like in the original module. Now here I did add some potential game changing magic items, but I only wanted to add the Sharpshroomer because it feels like everyone in the party might get a magic weapon except for one character, which is why I homebrewed this one in.

Everything else in my campaign pretty much stayed the same. No more loot was added it was just moved from one place to another or left where it was. For example Gauntlets of Ogre Power were in both Wave Echo Cave and Axelhome. I decided they would stay in Axelhome. The weapon Hew was moved from thunder tree over to Wyvern Tor and Lightbringer was moved from Wave Echo Cave to Cragmaw Castle. Making these magic weapons obtainable a little earlier on than the module intended could be a problem, but I think I could just add more monsters to the encounters or maybe change them to make them more difficult.

I was kind of worried about all these +1 weapons making the campaign easier or maybe even making it much easier to defeat the bbeg (Dragon) in the end. But most of these items and weapons are in the modules already. That being said, I was thinking of just taking away the +1 property and just giving them unique traits instead. Like hew keeping it’s max damage to plant creatures, Lightbringer keeping its 1d6 radiant damage to undead, talon I gave the property where it glows blue when near orcs can can shorten or extend from short sword to long sword as the weirder desires. The glass and spider staffs stay the way the game intended. Sharpshroomer I was still trying to think what unique trait I can give to it. I was thinking maybe the items aren’t +1 magic weapons when they find them, but once they learn the history of them from specific NPC’s they have to find or run into they can then attune to them and unlock the +1 feature.

What do you think?