Game day adventure

[jfauch2]

In the game I ran today we lost 3 pc's out of a party of 6... They rolled really well, got the kids and went in the final fight. The animated statues came up and litterly stomped the 3 guys in the back into mush. Once prone they would kick them into a bloody patch. They lost 1 Wizard, the cleric and a fighter. They pretty handly dispatched the drow and skeletons but it was a close fight.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Yeah, those statues were SICK. I'm still having flashbacks of big statues knocking people to the ground and stomping all over them. I got to peek at their stats, those suckers had 86 friggin' HP! Each!

 

[Ruined]

The group I ran did great, with statues + last guy only a few rounds apart. But the group I played in nearly got pancaked by statues (I let the players around me decide where to go, since I had read the module).

Still, all-in-all, it was understandably heavy on combat and light on plot. So it could stand to be better.

 

[Obryn]

I played through it, and unexpectedly ran it with minimal prep.

I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it was a good bit of fun. I enjoyed playing it, but only wish that the end guy wasn't such a wuss. We killed him before he got a shot off.

-O

 

[Devlin Rainguard]

Personally, I really enjoyed the adventure - at least in part because my first action in my first 4E combat was to jump up onto a sarcophagus that collapsed around me and burst into flame, which I feel really set the tone for 4th Edition to come!

Yeah, I did the exact same thing. I thought I was so smooth rolling a 22 for my jump, too, LOL. However, our table had 6 people, and I ended up playing a Tiefling Warlord (from DDXP I believe), so the Fire Resist 5 really saved my butt. Still, I played the last 3 rounds of that combat at 1 HP!

We didn't trigger the statues initially, but we killed the elf in the first round without the ghosts help (both me and one of our fighters hit him with our daily powers, which dropped him like a rock). Our cleric proceeded to turn the skeletons, and we smacked them down like nothing. We got cocky at this point though, and didn't rest to replenish our encounter powers before we ended up triggering the statues, which nearly killed us. We pretty much spent 3/4 of the combat with over half the party prone. My warlord managed to deliver the killing blow on both statues, although I had 0 healing surges left when all was said and done.

Since we had no ranged attacks, as someone else pointed out, our DM fought with the dragon on the ground. Still, he almost tore us apart. I managed to get an unbelievable lucky streak with my dice in that encounter, and the DM rolled really bad (I managed to get two crits, and he missed me like 5 times, never once managing to get his bite attack in). Still, we ended up losing one of our fighters when the dragon's bloodied attack went off, and the other fighter was unconscious most of the fight. I felt bad for our wizard though, I swear almost 3/4 of his attack rolls were 5 or lower. I don't think he even hit the dragon once!

All in all, I had an absolute blast with the module, and I'm really looking forward to my group hopping on the 4E bandwagon (as soon as we finish our Living Greyhawk and Xen'Ex campaings).

 

[Rechan]

We bypassed the statues for the boss. The ghost didn't help us out at all, so we all ended up being slowed, trying to hurt the boss on the platform that gave him a +4 to his Defenses.

Then when we got the kids out of the circle, the escape tunnel collapsed; which I and an NPC was standing in. I died.

 

[EvolutionKB]

I ran both adventures(mausoleum and dragon) Both ended in TPKs. Out of the players, only one had so far picked up and read the new PHB. Eveyody seemed to catch on pretty quick. The first encounter went pretty easily. the dwarf got caught in the fire trap and the hobbies retreated back. However before both could get away, the pcs caught up and downed them with little trouble. They disarmed the trap on the kids, and left them in the room while they went to finish everybody off. The first thing the BBEG did was summon the statue, which proceeded to beat down the wizard and rogue. The fighters were up front handling the skellies and elf and the cleric was in the middle trying to heal/buff. The party seemed to roll really bad, only one hit with their daily and between the whole party only one crit was rolled. I rolled at least 5 on them. Those statues were tough, PCs only bloodied one of them. They also didn't want to use their dailies until the last second. The difficult terrain made things tough, not being able to shift was huge. There other error was tactics. Instead of sending a fighter to defend the squishies they let them take on the skelies/elf.

The dragon battle was over before it started. 3 PCs (including the cleric) went down after the dragon recharged it's breath 3 rounds in a row. The dragon never got it's "free" bite attack off or it's bloodied breath weapon off(party did around 70 damage before TPK).

Overall everybody said they had fun and agreed the PCs could have had "better" powers. I think they needed another leader character.

 

[Nine Hands]

Sounds like you got a bad deal, at my FLGS (the Game Castle in Londonderry, NH), we had 2 TPKs out of 5 tables. I really thought the adventure was well written to boot. It wasn't the greatest thing in the world, but I really enjoyed running it.

I had so much fun knocking people to the ground with the animated statues

I only killed one character, which I think is a victory since he went off on his own and deserved it.

 

[Ealli]

I was roped into running the adventure when I arrived and we found that there weren't enough DMs for all the people who wanted to play.

Two players insisted on making their own 1st level characters and I never checked those characters to make sure they were created correctly. In fact, I'm rather certain they had errors.

The hobgoblins went down quickly enough, even with the first two sarcophogi lighting up by characters jumping on them.

The party found the elf at the end and triggered a fight with him and drew him and his skeletons into the cave chamber. My reading placed that as difficult terrain and that did all sorts of bad things to tactical movement by the party -- they were constantly provoking opportunity attacks from the skeletons. The statues hit the party's flank and tore them a new one. By the time both statues were down, three out of five of the characters were down too. The fourth went down the next round.

The remaining fighter threatened the kids and I let them run out towards her setting off the collapsing cave. The resulting cave in killed the remaining skeletons and then the elf necromancer too. The one fighter escaped with the kids for the reward. Funny too, the pregen she selected was the one with the motto about partaking if the reward was good enough.

The players seemed to mostly enjoy the minicampaign.

 

[Eldorian]

At my table, we found errors in the rogue premade, and our jerk of a DM acknowledged this, but refused to change them. I'm glad I don't play with that guy regularly. Also, we didn't fight any statues, but we did disable the magic circle before encountering the elf at the end. The rest of the party (not me) wanted to just leave with the kids without stopping the kidnapper, because the reward was for the kids, not for the kidnapper, so the DM had us get attacked by the elf and skeletons in a different room, and the encounter was cake. The white dragon we fought later was much more fun.