City Of the Spider Queen first impressions (SPOILER WARNING!)

[Swack-Iron]

NOTE: THIS POSTING AND SUBSEQUENT REPLIES MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR WOTC'S NEW MEGA-ADVENTURE. PLAYERS READ AT THE RISK OF THE WRATH OF YOUR GM!!


My friend returned from GenCon with a shiney new copy of City Of the Spider Queen for me, since I run the Forgotten Realms game he plays in. As far as I'm aware, this product wasn't due to hit store shelves for about another month. I guess WotC had a few cases of it for sale at GenCon. I'll try to give my first impressions, and answer questions as I can.

City Of the Spider Queen (CotSQ) is a 160 page softbound book, similar to Lords of Darkness, Magic of Faerun and Silver Marches. In the back, where Silver Marches had a big fold-out map, CotSQ instead contains 16 one-page maps and hand-outs that can be individually torn out.

CotSQ is designed to take a party of 4 10th level characters up to about 18th. Most of it takes place in the Underdark, under the Dalelands. It details the Drow city of Maerimydra and environs, including approaches to Maerimydra and its inhabitants.

The book starts with an Introduction that has a summary of the adventure, some background, suggested character hooks, a list of NPC characters, and assorted other useful introductory bits and pieces.

Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 contain the guts of the adventure, and take up most of the book. The layout is identical to the various mini-adventures already published in other FR 3rd edition works (such as the two short adventures in the FRCS). It's big. It's epic. It's not what you think. Beyond that I'll not say, unless folks really want to hear it, to spare major spoilers.

Appendix 1 and 2 contain information and statistics for a variety of spells, monsters and magic items. This includes new stuff, as well as reprinted info for relevant items from MoF, LoD, and MCMF. This way, the only required books to run the adventure are the core rules and the FRCS. It doesn't hurt to have the other books, but the minimum info from those books is reprinted as needed in CotSQ. It isn't too much, in case you're worried that you're buying a reprint of stuff you already have. And there's a lot of new stuff in here too, including new monsters, templates, and magic items.

I've only skimmed, so I can't give a thorough review. But I can say that my first impressions are very favorable. I'm not planning on using the adventure in my already-established FR campaign, but I can already find plenty of stuff to rip out of CotSQ for my own use.

 

[Orco42]

I played the first part at gencon. It seems like it will be fun if you like big (Undermountain like) dungeon crawls but there was very little NPC interaction.

My friend won it and will run us through it so he will not let me read it but from what I have seen roll players will like it but role players will not.

 

[Piratecat]

Agreed. From the piece I ran, it was a solid adventure with WAY too much combat for my taste. By too much combat, I mean all combat. Everywhere. Everyone. With no one helpful, and everything you meet trying to kill kill kill you!

It might have made a fun home game, but it was a little iffy for a four hour con game.

Roleplaying can be added without too much trouble, though, so I think it has great potential.

 

[drowdude]

all combat. Everywhere. Everyone. With no one helpful, and everything you meet trying to kill kill kill you!

Sounds perfect for an adventure set in the underdark

 

[tf360]

I also ran the prologue for the City of the Spider Queen twice at GenCon. It was a pure hack and slash adventure with practically nothing in the way of role playing. I'm certain that for a home game it would be a solid adventure but did not suit itself well for the convention, especially considering the characters that were provided. Most of the combats were easily avoidable in the early section, resulting in long spans of time with no interaction or action, just lots of empty rooms and long corridors. Of course, I only saw the first part of the adventure and had no feedback on the adventure as a whole.

 

[Telor]

I'd appreciate some spoilers...

I'm a DM running a campaign in FR that is nearing its first anniversary. As soon as I heard about an epic FR adventure I got excited. (I'm a busy college student who doesn't mind running modules to give myself a break from the workload of plot creation.) I asked the level what to what question a few weeks ago and got the answer Levels: 10-18.

Unfortunately, my group is level 14-15. How difficult do you think it would be to adjust this module to make it fun for my players? They can have some easy sections, as long as they have some difficult sections as well. I would like to scale it so when they come out they're level 20.

I haven't given them a large dungeon crawl yet in the campaign, they've mostly been protecting the innocents from bad guys.

My players are roll-players so a combat intensive module will be enjoyable for them.

I'd like to know what the module suggests as plot-hooks so I could start dropping subtle hints over the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Telor

 

[Piratecat]

SPOILERS!


------------------------------------------------------------

Don't worry about upgrading the challenge; that'll be a snap.

Basically, the clerics of Lloth have stopped receiving spells. As a Goddess of chaos, is Lloth dead or just yanking their chains? It's unclear, but the clerics of Kiaransalee are doing their best to make sure that the Lolth worshippers don't recover....

 

[Celebrim]

Swack-Iron: I haven't seen the module but in my experience, all modules can be scaled up. Scaling down is hard, but scaling up is just time consuming.

Always scale up before running the module, and have the new stats for every encounter wrote up and printed out beside you. That way, when there is combat, you just flip your notes over and run the combat based on the upgraded stats. I've tried scaling on the fly and it just doesn't work as well.

Things you can do to increase EL satifactorly:

1) If there is only one or two opponents double the opponents. This is quick and easy but not always satisfying and can make for long and uninteresting fights or reduce the fight to one spell expenditure (Ok, I just fireball the grunts and go.)
2) Add a template. Fiendish is one of my favorites, but if the monster is solitary Fiendish probably won't up the difficulty enough. Consider Half-Fiend or Half-Dragon instead. Also nifty are Air Elemental Creature, Psuedo-Natural, Ice Elemental Creature, and Shadow (from MoTP).
3) Double the HD of the creature. This is alot of work, but can be real satisfying. A 15 HD creature probably won't intimidate the party much. You can bet your bottom platinum that a 30 HD Gargantuan _whatever_ is going to make for an intense fight.
4) Add 2-4 character levels to the creature. If the fight is against 8 4th level drow, bumping it up to 8 8th level drow will restore the fun. This is of course time consuming, but particularly fun with creatures that they don't expect to have class levels - like Manticores (Cleric), Chokers (Rouge), Huge Vipers (Bard), Yellow Mold (Psion, gotta love that one), or Worgs (Warriors).

So, imagine for example that the original fight calls for 6 Carrion Crawlers. The fight is going to seem alot more interesting against 6 9 HD Huge Half-Fiend Carrion Crawlers. You might have to make the room a little bigger though.

But the plot is the same.

BTW, each 9 HD Huge Half-Fiend Carrion Crawler in theory has a CR 5 higher than a regular carrion crawler, so we've scaled up from 10th to 15th.

 

[Celtavian]

Re

The module is set up to start off in the Dalelands? Dang, I was hoping it would start in the Silver Marches.

 

[hong]

So, imagine for example that the original fight calls for 6 Carrion Crawlers. The fight is going to seem alot more interesting against 6 9 HD Huge Half-Fiend Carrion Crawlers. You might have to make the room a little bigger though.

Nonsense! You should know that cramming 40-foot-long monsters into 10-foot-square rooms is an ancient and hallowed tradition in D&D.


Hong, who still remembers the huge ancient red at the bottom of G3, who was too big to get out of his cave