Frostmarrow
First Post
GreatLemur said:
This adventure will feature the new SWELL encounter system making it easier for the DM to run a 3D-game.
Barrow of the Forgotten King- NOW WITH PLAYTEST
This adventure will feature the new SWELL encounter system making it easier for the DM to run a 3D-game.
Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
I picked this up back when it came out and have been debating working it into a campaign. The time to do it would be now but I cannot seem to pull the trigger. It just seems like I would not be getting full use out of it because this campaign is being played without minis and with limited combat. Thoughts?
kensanata
Explorer
Playtest Review
Here's the review from my website:
This review has not been posted on EN World because those reviews must be at least 500 words long and I don't feel like repeating what others have said, and it hasn't been posted on RPG Now because I didn't buy it there. Oh well.
As noted by other reviewers, the adventure is very linear: Follow the grave robbers from one room to the next, all the way to the bottom. There is an interesting back-story to this: The grave robbers are looking for something, their chaotic servants have alerted the villagers, and now they're in a race against the PCs to the bottom of the tomb.
Unfortunately, it took my players until room 12 out of 23 to figure this out. That means, half of the adventure they just assumed the tomb was filled with zombies and skeletons without understanding why. As more dead grave robbers and broken doors are found, the pursuit gets a bit more interesting. The players started to realize that all the monsters they were facing had been left behind on purpose!
My players had mostly 3rd level characters at the beginning of the game, but it was no problem to add a few more mooks to every other encounter to maintain the challenge.
LIKED: An incredible variety of combat encounters with interesting terrain features and often some interesting notes on tactics. My players were shocked when the varags ran up to them in pairs, one of them readying an action, waiting for the second one to flank, and then both attacking with a flanking bonus and one of them doing sneak attack damage. Later, when they realized the varags were using Spring Attack to avoid attacks of opportunity from 10ft reach weapons, they were again surprised.
There was a non-combat encounter involving lots of Climb and Use Rope checks. As I had prepared a big battle map with skill checks, altitudes, and potential falling damage in different colors all over the map, this proved to be an interesting challenge.
DISLIKED: Too many combat encounters and practically no choices outside of combat to be made. It got to the point where my players immediately attacked two not necessarily unfriendly creatures on sight because they had gotten used to it. As a DM who likes interaction, this combat focus was boring. I tried adding some interesting elements but failed in the prep time I had available. It would have required me to do a lot more, maybe because there are hardly any story hooks provided.
There was a door with an Arcane Lock on it. As low-level characters, it required battering down the door (or going back to town and organize a scroll of Knock). That was disappointing, specially since the very same door has a hint for the riddle in the next room. Obviously my players thought for the longest time that the hint was in fact a riddle and that solving it would open the door in question. It took a lot of prodding and hinting to move things along at this point.
The last room has a hook for the next adventure in the series which I won't run. I would have had to make up the rest of the grave robbers destined to escape into the Underdark and the treasure they had looted. Luckily my players had decided to lock themselves up for some undeserved rest a few rooms earlier and so I decided that the grave robbers managed to escape while they slept.
Here's the review from my website:
This review has not been posted on EN World because those reviews must be at least 500 words long and I don't feel like repeating what others have said, and it hasn't been posted on RPG Now because I didn't buy it there. Oh well.
As noted by other reviewers, the adventure is very linear: Follow the grave robbers from one room to the next, all the way to the bottom. There is an interesting back-story to this: The grave robbers are looking for something, their chaotic servants have alerted the villagers, and now they're in a race against the PCs to the bottom of the tomb.
Unfortunately, it took my players until room 12 out of 23 to figure this out. That means, half of the adventure they just assumed the tomb was filled with zombies and skeletons without understanding why. As more dead grave robbers and broken doors are found, the pursuit gets a bit more interesting. The players started to realize that all the monsters they were facing had been left behind on purpose!
My players had mostly 3rd level characters at the beginning of the game, but it was no problem to add a few more mooks to every other encounter to maintain the challenge.
LIKED: An incredible variety of combat encounters with interesting terrain features and often some interesting notes on tactics. My players were shocked when the varags ran up to them in pairs, one of them readying an action, waiting for the second one to flank, and then both attacking with a flanking bonus and one of them doing sneak attack damage. Later, when they realized the varags were using Spring Attack to avoid attacks of opportunity from 10ft reach weapons, they were again surprised.
There was a non-combat encounter involving lots of Climb and Use Rope checks. As I had prepared a big battle map with skill checks, altitudes, and potential falling damage in different colors all over the map, this proved to be an interesting challenge.
DISLIKED: Too many combat encounters and practically no choices outside of combat to be made. It got to the point where my players immediately attacked two not necessarily unfriendly creatures on sight because they had gotten used to it. As a DM who likes interaction, this combat focus was boring. I tried adding some interesting elements but failed in the prep time I had available. It would have required me to do a lot more, maybe because there are hardly any story hooks provided.
There was a door with an Arcane Lock on it. As low-level characters, it required battering down the door (or going back to town and organize a scroll of Knock). That was disappointing, specially since the very same door has a hint for the riddle in the next room. Obviously my players thought for the longest time that the hint was in fact a riddle and that solving it would open the door in question. It took a lot of prodding and hinting to move things along at this point.
The last room has a hook for the next adventure in the series which I won't run. I would have had to make up the rest of the grave robbers destined to escape into the Underdark and the treasure they had looted. Luckily my players had decided to lock themselves up for some undeserved rest a few rooms earlier and so I decided that the grave robbers managed to escape while they slept.
kensanata
Explorer
Limited Combat? No way.
I suggest you don't buy it. As I wrote in another post, this module is about 90% combat, and combat is made interesting on a tactical level: Of the top of my hat some interesting encounters featured charging mounted skeletons (and avoiding that by taking cover behind corners and the like), skeleton archers behind difficult terrain preventing charges, or walls in a room allowing varags lots of flanking options while slowing down the party.
Mark CMG said:
I suggest you don't buy it. As I wrote in another post, this module is about 90% combat, and combat is made interesting on a tactical level: Of the top of my hat some interesting encounters featured charging mounted skeletons (and avoiding that by taking cover behind corners and the like), skeleton archers behind difficult terrain preventing charges, or walls in a room allowing varags lots of flanking options while slowing down the party.
DM_Jeff
Explorer
kensanata said:
I'd have to agree, about the minis part. The module takes full advantage of the D&D tactical options and gives terrain and rooms to maximize player involvement and keeping them frosty with detailed foe tactics and the like. That may be lost on a non-mini game.
-DM Jeff
Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
kensanata said:
I already have it.
We do some combat and it works well enough. It's easy enough to draw a general room, and some furniture or obstacles on a white board and run the combat like laying out a football play, without any exact measurements.
For a little background, I played wargames and minis games for a few years prior to D&D coming out in 1974. When my friends and I started playing, we did it as a minis battle game for combat but jumped right in to the RPing aspects. It has almost always been about a 50-50 mix, or close to it, except for a few games in the 80's that I played or ran without minis or some equivalent. Now I am running a full on no-minis campaign, though I am cheating a bit by using a white board for mapping, layouts, record keeping and such. I think it is a nice compromise and so far it is helped keep things moving at a good pace. Three good hours of RPing the other night followed by a final hour with three combat encounters. I wouldn't want ths for every type of campaign but for this one it is working well. As far as the time divisions, some other campaigns where we focused on combat wound up with hour long combat encounters with a few minutes of RPing in between each. For this campaign I feel that would not work out so well.
I'm looking for some thoughts, though, on anything that might be particularly hard to convert from one method of running combat to the other. Which combats do you feel were less fun or unnecessary? (I could replace the lesser ones with other types of encounters.)
DM_Jeff
Explorer
Mark CMG said:
OK, here's the biggest thing. It might be better for a group like yours to cut out the undead encounters and the Hobgob cleric who is raising them all as delay tactics. Instead, leave clues to their passage, maybe a tuft of fur from a varag. If they need the prompting, have the hobgob cleric appear earlier on, lowered in level, raising one or two skeletons and giving the party a verbal cue: "Here they are, my walking bones, keep them at bay for the greater hunt!" and then the party will know there is more deeper on.
There's a room with caltrops, another with pits, and another with runes that all rely on mini positioning (and so may need a little reworking), otherwise "difficult terrain" can just be featured in the description, Creature tactics usually involve which spells are prepared, and who they target, that's not a big deal. Flanking and AoO's are both mentioned sometimes, don't know if they come up in a verbal game.
And I'd begin the roleplaying possibilities more towards roleplaying instead of combat. In other words, the wererat rogue may have been left behind injured, and he's not having any love for the group than went on without him, nice a ripe for parley!
-DM Jeff
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kensanata
Explorer
Mark CMG said:
The combats at the beginning could easily be made as interesting if you throw a quick glance at the map at the start of the encounter and announce how many PCs get to fight; usually one or two only.
I feel that single creature encounters are rarely a problem without minis, so I would run them as described.
The varags are interesting because of the Spring Attack feat. That means they move in, attack, and move away without provoking an AoO. If your players are ok with it, I'd just describe that in words and rule that your players never get to do a Full Attack. If you don't want to deal with these things, you should probably replace them with hobgoblins and increase their number somewhat.
The hobgoblin cleric + his undead minions is interesting if you don't have a cleric that turns or destroys the skeletons. Without skeletons, it's just a cleric and a minotaur zombie, ie something that can be handled without minis. The room has two narrow corridors. A simple handwaving of how many people can fight at the front might be necessary. In my game, the cleric cast fear, half the party ran, and when they recovered, they took the other corridor and appeared at the cleric's back. That was interesting, but would not really have required minis.
So basically, with a little common sense, all combats can still be interesting without minis.
At first I thought you didn't want that much combat encounters, though.
