Death Frost Doom - too lethal?

[Zak S]

Death Frost Doom was my current campaign starter...

Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Death Frost Doom Review/Play Report

I don't know about y'all, but my girlfriend got through it with 2/3rds of her party intact.

 

[Grymar]

Death Frost Doom was my current campaign starter...

Playing D&D With Porn Stars: Death Frost Doom Review/Play Report

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 S]

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.

 

[Grymar]

I thought I'd follow up with a post-game report.

5 PCs, all 3rd level started the night.

1 made it home.

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.

 

[Uder]

Sounds fun. Did you end up running it as a one-off, or are you going on from here?

 

[Grymar]

It's part of the ongoing campaign. Things are going to be a bit different with 4 new PCs and the...ramifications of the adventure, but it should be fun.