pukunui
Legend
To be honest, a big part of it may have been due to the fact that we were playing with a bunch of pregens, so my players weren't as invested in the characters' survival as they might have been had they made the characters themselves.
Also, I made a few small changes, as mentioned upthread: I took out the grick and replaced it with a rug of smothering (same CR), which I put in the master bedroom (the tiger rug). That killed one of the PCs, although that was partly because a) we accidentally skipped the smothered PC's one and only turn while in the rug and b) the other players didn't realize that if they stabbed the rug, it would only take half damage and the trapped PC would take the other half. So in a way, the other PCs helped to kill that one PC.
Anyway, I also replaced the shambling mound with a vampire spawn (again, same CR). It killed another of the PCs, and it was only at that point that the others realized (despite my having told them that they were allowed to run away) that this was not a fight they could win, so off they went. By this point, they'd taken two short rests but no long rest, so they were still fairly beat up. Even though they'd found the trapdoor leading back up to the den, they still had two smoke-filled rooms and three sets of scythe blade-filled doorways to get through. Three of the PCs dropped to 0 hp due to the attrition damage. One got three failed death saves and was gone. The other two got three successes and both lay unconscious in the foyer for four hours. They both managed to get through the last doorway without taking damage, and I left it up in the air as to whether the mist got them or not.
The guy playing last two PCs decided that there was no way they'd make it out alive, so he had them climb back the secret stairs up to the attic, where they sat with the ghosts of the dead children, waiting to die of starvation themselves! So I suppose they could potentially have made it out alive. I thought that was kind of weird. But as I said, they were pregens, so the players weren't as motivated to keep them alive as they might have been.
Again: very experienced.) We ended up blowing through the first floor with basically no real time investigating it since it was clear by that point what was going on and they'd already figured it all out. Going in reverse still worked, though: they got the shocking stuff all up front, very quickly, instead of the slow build, but it was still effective. The trick was to go quickly through the rest of the house, since it was no longer build-up, but backstory at this point. They only fought the armor, but it was enough to make them paranoid about all the other objects in the house (a good thing). Next session they'll head to the basement. I've condensed this area a bit as well; area 24 is pointless and like others I nixed the grick. Too much fighting just drags the horror down, in my opinion.
