Free updated adventures with maps: Stolen Staff and Tallinn's Tower

[OnlineDM]

After more playtesting and some work to improve the formatting and usability, I've released updated versions of my first two adventures on my blog (they're free). The releases also include maps, scaled to a 50-pixel grid (for ease of use in MapTool and similar programs).

The first adventure is The Stolen Staff (formerly known as The Staff of Suha, which is the name I'm now using to refer to the trilogy of adventures). Adventurers are hired by a noble to recover a staff with rumored magical properties from a band of orcs who stole it. It's a mostly straightforward dungeon delve into the orc stronghold.

The second adventure is Tallinn's Tower. In this adventure, the PCs are hired to take the recovered staff to a wizardess to see if she can divine its true nature and figure out who would have hired orcs to steal it in the first place. However, the wizardess is reclusive and will only give an audience to adventurers who prove themselves worthy by navigating the puzzles and hazards of her tower.

More details and maps are available on the blog, or you can directly download the PDFs at the links above.

Feedback is welcome! I want to make these adventures the best they can be.

 

[Lindeloef]

Awesome work again and this time I can grant you Xp by myself.

I really like that you got the monster stat blocks for different level in them.
One small note: In Tallin's Tower on page 5 at the blink spider stat block. You wrote trEiggered action.

 

[OnlineDM]

Good catch. And in looking over that encounter again, I realized that I've never run it at low level... and the Blink Spider didn't seem like it would be a very fun monster for that particular encounter. So, I created a new monster to take its place, one that I think fits very well in that particular encounter: the Shimmering Swarm.

 

[Karmic_vegeance]

I had played around with Tailinn's Tower at Level 2 at one point and I will agree that for the average low-level party that first fight is not fun. At all. I liked that the encounter forced the party to make the choice between a high chance of triggering the trap or summoning more monsters, but the blink spiders made it so oftentimes the party couldn't hit any of the runes, whether due to ranged grabs or being large enough to block passageways. This just made things worse as the party could discover the next rune to trigger was behind a full HP monster and every PC had to set off a trap on their turn or summon more of those monsters.

As for this new monster replacement, it fixes every one of those problems, but seems a little generic.

 

[OnlineDM]

Yeah, the fact that I wrote these with inspiration from the current season Living Forgotten Realms format is both good and bad. It's good that it means the adventures can be run at any level in the heroic tier (2, 4, 6, 8 or 10). It's bad that it means this requires a lot more work (more stat block) and play testing.

I've only run these adventures at level 6, 8 and 10 so far. A leveled-down Displacer Beast sounded too rough for 1st-4th level characters, so I rejiggered another creature into the Blink Spider and then forgot about it until the typo was pointed out.

I do NOT want these creatures penalizing PCs for moving around in the tower, so the Blink Spider had to go. I'm with you that the Shimmering Swarm is a bit generic so far, but I also want to keep the monsters in this encounter simple since the real action is on the runes in this room.

However, I do still want the monsters to be a threat, so I'm thinking of giving the swarm a standard action double-attack, and also make the swarm attack auto-hit for a creature that it's already attached to.

I'm open to suggestions, as I obviously just threw the Shimmering Swarm together in a brief fit of inspiration last night.