D&D Gameday: Into the Shadowhaunt

[MortalPlague]

Here's my small suggestion regarding the riddle:
[sblock]Take the time to introduce the players to the deities. Make sure that you call Bahamut the "Father of Good Dragons" and make some sun-god reference for Pelor. This at least gives the players some background to solve the riddle. It would help if players were making notes, so you might want to give them some scrap paper on which to jot things down.[/sblock]

Also good advice. It might be a good idea to put something about about the gods on the obelisk (or at least describe the gods while mentioning what's written on the obelisk).

Overall, I'm feeling much better about the riddle situation with the various wording tweaks and putting minis on the board for the statues.

 

[maransreth]

A player's thoughts on the Gameday module. [Spoilers]

Mistress Dodo & I played in the WWGD today and had fun trying out the new edition. For us at this point we are only purchasing the PHB as we are not sure if we will be playing the new version, the old version or anything at all with twins on the way. But I thought I would put my thoughts of the module and the brief exposure to the game so far.

The module is called Into the Shadowhaunt and is for 1st level characters. There were two fighters, a rogue, cleric and wizard. For what combat there was, I think the mix was a bit off. Yes two fighters are needed to keep the monsters busy, but they have to be able to stay in their face and not be caught up by other factors.

It would have been nice if an overview of the new rules had been included for players to read, so they would have a bit of an idea of the differences. Unsure if the DM was meant to do that, but ours didn't.
For example, healing surges - what type of action are they?
When an encounter is over, can a player still use healing surges?

The first fight was great, I don't know if we just had bad luck or what but it took forever to kill the enemy. Plus attempting to jump over trapped sarcophagi was interesting.

We decided to forgoe saving the boys and went straight to the big boss fight, which was a bit of a let down. Again the fighters couldnt get too close as the elf was on a dais, and all they could do was take on the skeletons.

We didn't do well against the the statues and ended up bringing down the ceiling, leaving the dying rogue in with the statues.

Lastly, was there meant to be a way to get the boys out of the circle without activating the statues?

What I did find interesting was the flat saving throws. It was nice to have a few abilities to choose from, but as the cleric I had to get in close to use mine, and that never happened.

What did others think of the module?

(The following is added after spending some time reading the rules from the PHB)

Ok, after having read parts of the PHB I am able to answer some of my questions and I see that we boo-booed a few things while playing.

The only healing surge you can use in combat is the Second Wind. We were also using normal healing surges in combat to heal ourselves, whereas the rules state that you can use an unlimited number of healing surges outside of combat.

But this then leads to another question - when a cleric uses Healing Word (and I was the cleric in this instance) when it says the target can spend a healing surge to heal, what happens if the target is on negative hps?

Also why does my cleric have three At Will abilities - Lance of Faith, Priest's Shield and Righteous Brand? In the rules it says only two At Will abilities. Or was I meant to only use two of them?

 

[johnnyc]

Lastly, was there meant to be a way to get the boys out of the circle without activating the statues?

But this then leads to another question - when a cleric uses Healing Word (and I was the cleric in this instance) when it says the target can spend a healing surge to heal, what happens if the target is on negative hps?

Also why does my cleric have three At Will abilities - Lance of Faith, Priest's Shield and Righteous Brand? In the rules it says only two At Will abilities. Or was I meant to only use two of them?

OK, Editted for brevity..

Just ran this at the D&D launch event yesterday evening at the London Dungeon..
In response to the OP's original concern about the riddle... The Group I had found absolutely no difficulty with the riddle, still took them two tries to open the door though (statues in exactly the opposite order than needed).

In reply to the quoted bits above.
Yes, there are two seperate effects ont eh warding circle, each one needed a sepearate Arcana/Thievery roll to remove. My group still activated the statues though, comedy impatience moment on the part of the Thief.
Healing from negative Hits is explained quite clearly in the PHB. The magical healing first sets your HP total to "0" THEN you add the healing. Even if the recipient has no healing surges left the healing will still place them at a minimum of 1 hit points.
As to the at will powers.. IIRC the Cleric is Human, which means the Human Racial ability of +1 at will power was in place.

Someone also asked what mini's are in the pack..
There is one mini for each and every monster (including the 2 kidnapped boys) and PC, with one exception. There where supposed to be 2 Animated statues and only 1 mini was provided. I Wasn't about to complain though as a: It was easy to substitute a hobgoblin mini in that encounter and b: They put a large White Dragon mini in that wasn't required.

Willing to answer any other questions...
Am miffed I didn't bump into Morrus though

 

[MortalPlague]

and b: They put a large White Dragon mini in that wasn't required.

In the papers I received, there's an "Against The White Dragon" mini-module that follows the game day adventure... a sort of "if you have time, you can play a battle royale against this beastie".

 

[furthestaway]

huuge spoliers follow!

I played in this at the London Dungeon event as the Eladrin Wizard. The riddle was quite hard, even after we worked out that it was talking about Pelor & Bahumat. It was essentially chance that led to us moving the statues in the right way.

We had good fun fighting the hobgoblins, though we managed to trigger every fire trap . Icy Terrain came in use though, as it let me put out part of the fire.

We then bypassed the statue room and went straight onto the boss fight. first off, it wasn't too bad (I used Thunderwave to knock the drow off his podium so melee could wail on him) but having the statues turn up half way through was very tricky (somewhat delayed by another application of Icy Terrain, before I teleported up to the top of the podium to keep myself safe ). Thankfully, the spirit liked us, so it occupied one statue (which was far too stupid to realise that its attacks weren't hurting the statue).

After finally beating that lot up, we rescued the boys (well, we triggered one trap, but thankfully it was the statue one, not the falling ceiling one).

All told it was pretty good fun, and the Wizard certainly felt like a controller once I got to grips with my spells.

 

[johnnyc]

In the papers I received, there's an "Against The White Dragon" mini-module that follows the game day adventure... a sort of "if you have time, you can play a battle royale against this beastie".

There was a mention of the Dragon module at the back of the Shadowhaunt paperwork but no-one seems to have received that over here.
At least no tat the London Dungeon event yesterday.

 

[Agamon]

Yeah, I'm getting ready to go run this. Not sure who's got the White Dragon encounter, but I didn't get it. Nice to get a white dragon mini instead of a statue, myself, just had to go grab one of my own statues. People without access to other DDM minis are out of luck though. Huh.

Anyway, yeah, should be interesting teaching a game I've only read over the past few days. I'll try to keep it simple, use my own judgment instead of look things up, and try to be evocative and descriptive. Should be fun.

 

[andrew]

So let me get this straight: there were animated statues AND a riddle in the Shadowhaunt module?

I had a disappointing experience playing at the London Dungeon and now it sounds like I didn't even play the full module.

 

[Nate Jones]

So let me get this straight: there were animated statues AND a riddle in the Shadowhaunt module?

I had a disappointing experience playing at the London Dungeon and now it sounds like I didn't even play the full module.

The module is written such that it is possible to bypass the statues without ever knowing they were a threat.

I'm not sure how your group missed the riddle short of DM fiat, but the module listed a method to advance the plot if the player's get stumped by the riddle, so maybe your DM just jumped straight into that? Sorry your game was less-than-stellar.

 

[fba827]

I just came back from playing ...

SPOILERS

The now heavily discussed riddle was actually NOT a problem for us - but we had a couple random things that made it easier for us (for instance, the human cleric's character wanted to

Spoiler

pay respects to the fallen pelor-ites as we entered, so there was just that extra attention given to the order of the tombs to start with, so something seemed esp important (to me) regarding the order otherwise the DM would have just randomly picked things

). I will admit though, while I got the jist of what needed to be manipulated from the clue, I would have not gotten the clue on 'the order' in the riddle.


We made it through the main and mini adventure without any deaths (though there were three instances of dieing status (once the rogue and twice the sword fighter, but, still, no deaths -- the other tables around us at the store were not so lucky, i heard many tales of dead PCs).

All in all, it was good fun. We got a dungeon and a dragon for, well, dungeons and dragons