Deep Horizon

Just wondering - is Deep Horizon part of the WotC adventure path series?

Yes.

Unless of course there's another company putting out deadly modules with horribly mismatched encounters for the proposed party levels...

(not bitter, no...)


Wulf

Okay, I have to throw in my opinion. Spoilers, folks, so scoot if you don't want to hear them.

I ran Deep Horizons several times at Gencon last year. I didn't think that the combat encounters were badly mismatched for the recommended levels. In one fight, I had the PCs take out two beholders with nary a scratch (I rolled pitifully).

Any specific gripes, Wulf?

Piratecat's spoiler warning also applies to this post, and is extended to cover Wulf Ratbane's story hour, and the other WotC modules.

As Wulf said, yes, it is. Deep Horizon is the sixth in the series of eight, and is for 13th level characters.

As for Wulf's difficulties -- I've read the story hour, and read the modules, and Dinkledog seems to occasionally . . . enhance the experience, shall we say? For example, Wulf's latest posting reports an encounter that seems to have a couple of extra batguys. And Forge of Fury didn't have any drow, and the orc bodycount seemed double the adventure's.

Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that; I occasionally beef up the adventures, too (buff characters from my powerhungry mob o' players, plus a large group), though I usually just make the individual critters tougher (stats & hp above average, thus better matching the PCs; shh, don't tell my players ;D).

Plus, Dinkledog's dice roll well at (in)opportune times. Me, I roll strings of 20s for goblin goons, but the dragons are always rolling to avoid fumbles.

It's one of the adventure path modules, but IIRC, it had nothing to do with the metaplot line that runs through them (involving that dragon).

I bought it used sight unseen because it was really cheap. I have to say, it is perhaps the dumbest, most pointless adventure I have ever read (or, close to it). (I never used it, ended up trading it for a Deadlands dime novel...)

Why on Earth (or Faerun or Greyhawk or any planet) would you want to explore a lost city of bat-people? They're not even interesting bat-people.

Now I actually like bats (I actually normally have bats around me, that I throw food to, and bought a bat house for them), but I have zero interest in bat people. Neither did my players.

Granted, the bat people society is fairly well done. But they're still bat people.

There's also no real plot. Basically, a crack in the ground mysteriously appears, and the players simply decide to look because it's there.

I wrote a review for it, but it wasn't in the database (last time I checked) and I think I lost it. Probably not a big loss, I think I just wrote "I can't believe they wrote a module about bat people" over and over and over.

SPOILER ALERT!!

In terms of "why would the party go down a big hole and look for bat people", I think it's cool that the author (Skip Williams, right?) left a lot of that up to the DM and used the space to just talk about something else.

I'm running the Adventure Path and lo and behold, a single desmodu (or a sergent, depending on how many times your players died in Standing Stone) makes a great centerpeice for a side trekish type of thing right before they get into the Heart of Nightfang Yadda Yadda. I ran a mini-adventure last Sunday featuring a desmodu who had wandered up to the surface through a recently opened hole in a cave system who formed a cadre of dire bats, using them to spread havoc throughout the countryside (he's part of the war faction). It went pretty well... the PCs killed the stray desmodu after fighting through the obligitory subterrainian denizens, found the hole he came up through (along with said desmodu's cool gadgets and gizmos), and alerted the proper authorities on their way to investigate rumours of vampires stalking the foothills, thinking the encounter was nothing more than filler. Needless to say, when they get out of HoNS they'll find out how important their discovery was and be asked by the ruler of the land to explore the possibilites of rediscovering a supposedly lost civilization. The way this fits into the campaign is pretty taliored to my party's various areas of interest, and I like the fact that I'm free to construct the motiviations for the PC's delve into the Underdark without worrying about whether or not it's going to screw up anything later in the module.

Personally, I prefer this "create yer own motivation" style over the railroading nightmare that is, for example, the Freeport trilogy. God I hated that series. But that's off topic. It's my opinon that by thirteenth level, the DM of whatever campaign is going to be far more capable of addressing the motivations of his PCs than the writer, and bully to WotC for realizing that.

So...

Why on Earth (or Faerun or Greyhawk or any planet) would you want to explore a lost city of bat-people?

Click to expand...

I think that's actually best left up to the DM.

Should my PC's ever survive to reach those heady levels, I will have an excellent tie-in with an adventure that took them many sessions to complete at low level - "Caves of Rage" or some such, from Dungeon - barbarian goblins throughout a trembling cave system (locally known as the "unsteady cliffs" in my campaign. Of course, halfway through *that* adventure, there is a big quake. Beautiful tie-in with the Deep Horizon setting for me.

Plus, I like the way that Deep Horizon isn't a simplistic "kill all the bad guys" adventure - it gives good opportunities for the PCs to think their way through a situation and get to the real villains.

Cheers

TranceJeremy, I hate to disagree with you, but Deep Horizons was tremendous fun for me to run. The desmodu are great fun to roleplay - I placed my fists on the table to the right and left of me, so that my arms (both making inverted "L" shapes) looked like wings, and rocked back and forth; it's a great way to imitate a bat! - and the combats are cool. There's way too much combat for my personal taste, but that's easily fixed, and I had players do more heroic things in that module than in any other RPGA adventure i had run in years.

LOTS MORE SPOILERS!

Cool thing #1: PCs enter room with two beholders. One is hiding in a well. PC flies DIRECTLY over the well, getting shot at by all 10 eye beams. Dead, right? Nope. My dice failed me, and only two out of ten ranged touch attacks actually hit. This was made up for the other time I ran it, when a beholder had the party fighter charmed....

Cool thing #2: in the initial encounter with the desmodu slavers, I managed to convince one group of PCs that the slavers were the good guys, and that the innocent desmodu that they had captured was an escaped criminal. The slavers were going to drug the party and deliver them to the beholders. Instead, a 12 year old player at the table figured it out at the last minute, turned the table on the slavers, and totally kicked their butts.

Cool thing #3: in the final part of the adventure, the PCs get to adventure in a volcano. They were making their way through it and roleplayed an encounter with a salamander. They demanded to be brought to the leader; the salamander insisted that they leave their weapons behind. Stalemate. Finally, Lidda's players suggests that they put the weapons in her bag of holding.

So out come the +4 and +5 weapons, and in they go. Regdar was one of the last, and his player mimes unsheathing his +5 greatsword and drops it point-first into the bag without any sheath! I goggled. "Are you sure you want to do that?" Uh huh, he did, and POOF! The sword pierces the bag, and no more weapons.

The group spent a full minute banging their heads on the table.

So I figure I have them dead to rights. They're meeting with the big bad guy, and they make demands. "You demand something of me?" he asked. "You're in my home, surrounded... and you have no weapons," he says ominously.

"You know why we have no weapons?" spouts Mialee. "Because Regdar there pierces the bag of holding with his stinking greatsword! I wish he hadn't done that and that we had our weapons back..." the player looks at me with a twinkle in his eye... "in a limited sort of way."

He had just cast limited wish, and I hadn't even noticed. Their weapons appeared in their hands. And the battle was joined.