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I'm running Death Frost Doom this Friday in my Eberron/Pathfinder campaign and I'm a bit concerned about the lethality of it. I'm pulling it out at a last minute to fill a hole in our gaming schedule since I didn't have any standard stuff prepared and I've thought about a killer way it will blend into the campaign.
But...WOW. A TPK is almost a likelihood, isn't it?
It's an awesome adventure and I'm loving the idea of running it, but should I have everyone make up new characters and do it as a one-off?
It's an old school module meant for AD&D or OD&D or BECMI or one of the clones. I first heard about it at the Save vs. Poison blog and the D&D Podcast and the one other podcast that I can't seem to put my finger on just yet. I think it was the atomic cast that used to do the Kobold Quarterly cast.
Mearls mentioned in the D&D Podcast.
anyway it's more of a mini setting and from what I've heard very deadly.
I first heard about it from Zak from the DND with Porn Stars blog. It's seriously old school (save vs poison or die, many curses, etc), but it has a great flow and feel.
It's designed for AD&D but since the stats are minimal to non-existent, it really doesn't matter. (It will note a 6HD wight, or 2HD skeleton, rarely giving any thing more).
One tip and a couple clarifications about the adventure...
(mild adventure spoiler warning!)
North is to the right on the dungeon map (1 -> 1a is going north, the Tooth basins open the door towards #13). People miss that and it will be made clearer in the next printing. Another thing that wasn't too clear is that in the pit in the High Priest Temple, a falling body doesn't count towards the 10 points of damage for the trigger there.
Although the painting in the cabin is supposed to show where one of the secret doors is, I find that people don't remember it by the time they get to the room depicted in the painting. Perhaps prompting them that it's the same room, but with no opening in the wall there, would be an appropriate "gimme" once they reach the room to help make sure they reach the Greater Tombs... but make sure you only give away the location of the door requiring the ritual!
My experience with actual play is that the yellow mold trap is by far the deadliest bit in the module. I've only had one PC death happen after The Big Event of the module and that was because the other PCs thought he was possessed so left him to die.
There were three ways out explicitly built into the module. When I first used this during my normal campaign (before ever thinking of publishing it), they found one of those ways. For the first official playtest, another group of players came up with a way out that I never anticipated.
A TPK is a strong possibility, especially if the players are accustomed to normal "balanced" 3.5/PF play where it seems you're doing something wrong if someone loses a prized weapon, much less their entire character. If you do it as a one-off, give the players a chance to "port over" surviving characters - a PC that makes it through DFD deserves to go on to further adventures.
I've read through it a few times, haven't run it for my group yet but will soon.
I think it is a survivable adventure and has a unique Mythos undertone - slow creepy build-up that my group will enjoy.
Your players will only die if they play stupid. When it hits the fan they will know and hopefully act accordingly and look for a way to survive. Balanced encounter this aint, which is part of the reason as to why I love it.
When I ran it, it wasn't a TPK at all. Instead, players thought the big event so awesome several of them said this would have been an excellent campaign starter.
I don't know about y'all, but my girlfriend got through it with 2/3rds of her party intact.
Zak - it was your current city siege events that got me to want to run DFD. I loved how something that could happen at such a low level could be so world-altering. It's a far cry from ye olde rats in the basement of the towne inn.
Zak - it was your current city siege events that got me to want to run DFD. I loved how something that could happen at such a low level could be so world-altering. It's a far cry from ye olde rats in the basement of the towne inn.
Well, once it happened I looked on the (highlight text to read spoiler) undead plague as a way not so much to have a night of the living dead -type thing going on all the while, but rather to make a sort of limited-resources/post-apocalyptic situation in parts of the gameworld while still having fairly sophisticated and well-provisioned cities in other parts.
Plus it makes the wilderness encounter tables far more interesting.
Thinking about it now, I think it'd be kind of nice if more published adventures had failure conditions other than (that is, in addition to) simply "you die" which--if the DM chooses--affect the gameworld in far-reaching but interesting ways.
I like the idea of adventurews where, if the PCs fail their quest, it doens;t just mean the world's destroyed, it means that all the male NPCs become female and vice versa, or everyonein a radius becomes the opposite alignment, or something like that.
In the end, after a 90 minute brilliant debate about it, they rejected the deal. In the ensuing chaos, two fled and got away through invisibility, a potion of gaseous form, and flight. One of those two was caught on the surface. The other three died down in the depths.
So, to answer my question, is it too lethal? NO.
Every trap has a logic behind it. Every encounter can be avoided. And most of my players, who do NOT take PC death well, all contacted me today to tell me how it was one of the best session of any campaign, any DM, they had ever had. The atmosphere of the first 3/4 of the adventure is just perfect. The players were getting up and pacing the room because they were to tense. They trusted NOTHING and kept waiting for the crud to hit the fan.
All in all, it went better than I could have imagined.
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