Allied soldiers in Island at the Axis of the World

[Tobold]

At the start of chapter three of Island at the Axis of the World (4E) the players acquire a military escort of one allied soldier per player. And I wonder what they are in the adventure for.

• I don't see them as necessary for the labyrinth encounter, as the party already outnumbers the single opponent, and adding a group of allied soldiers is only going to crowd that encounter further.
• In the final encounter they appear to be downright counterproductive: Using the high-level version the PCs can only hit the opponent with a natural 20, which statistically won't happen all that often, while the allied soldiers land automatic hits. Thus if I play that high-level encounter as written, the allied soldiers will be the heroes, while the PCs will be the "grunts", which is probably bad story-telling.

I have two solutions in mind: One is to simply remove the allied soldiers from the adventure (why are they even in it?), the other is changing their damage to requiring an attack roll, so they need to roll a 20 too to hit and deal less damage than the players. What do you think? If you already did that encounter in high-level mode, how did you handle the allied soldiers? What is the allied soldiers role in the story and the encounters?

 

[Elfshire]

I just used the low-level version of Asrabey; I saw that 'guards outshining the PCs' eventuality a mile away.

IMHO, the guards are there to show the PCs the sort of help they can draw on using the Prestige system in future adventures, kind of demonstrating the difference between being a normal adventuring party that's entirely on their own, versus being part of a government agency that can assign them some backup if need be.

 

[Tobold]

Okay, that sounds plausible as the story justification of the allied soldiers. I checked and in the Pathfinder version the allied soldiers don't have the automatic hit capability. Which means that there in the high-level Asrabey fight they can serve as dummy targets, giving the players a few more turns to try and land a hit. So I'd best keep the allied soldiers in my adventure, but change their powers to require a to-hit roll.

 

[ediz]

One should also take into consideration that from a story telling standpoint, the players should probably negotiate with him. I have run it twice in PF and it seemed to make sense there. Asrabey is designed to be taken down by a musket or a magic missile or splash weapon.