I'm thinking of taking out the stirges and just having some bat swarms instead.
I've thought about an otyugh. I suppose I could do that.
That sounds cool! I might do that!
My group argued their case with Governor Nighthill and were persuasive enough so I had three guards go with them. During the ambush, the guards fared much better than the PCs due to the randomness of the dice, and the players joked that if their PCs all died they should just start playing the guards instead.
The cultists in the camp aren't the entirety of the cult. They're just one small cell plus some hired mercenaries and such.
Some of it has to do with the unfinished Perception rules. The adventure doesn't railroad you into the rearguard ambush, though. It actually comes right out and says that the PCs would be better off avoiding this encounter all together, so the DM is encouraged to make sure the PCs know it's there ahead of time.
Some of the placement of traps was a bit silly (in commonly travelled areas - also unguarded) ...[/url]I agree that the placement of some traps is silly but the text does account for how the cultists and kobolds bypass them.
Partly it's because there is not internet in the Forgotten Realms. People aren't going to find out what's happening elsewhere as quickly as they might these days. Another part of it is that everyone is rather parochial. They don't really care what happens to someone else if it isn't also happening to them. Although that brings me to my next point, which is that the cult is all over the place, not just around Greenest. So maybe people seem like they don't care about what happened down south because they've got their own troubles.
That explains a lot actually. Despite what WotC might have wanted, the Tyranny of Dragons modules aren't really all that new DM-friendly.
Baldurs Gate is a city founded on trade. It seems highly implausible to me that it would just rest on its laurels while raiders sacked their trading partners in the region.
Then it borderlines' on absurd that the Dukes are just going to let cultists cruise around in treasure wagons on their door step. If a bunch of low level characters can figure out what's going on, they certainly can.
Also note the time it would take runners on horse back to go from town to town, raising the alarm, is much faster than the pace that those caravan wagons travel at.
Maybe its our DM, but I haven't had the sense that there are cultists everywhere. If that was the case however, then I'd expect the towns of the region to at least be taking more action, and the Flaming Fists at least stepping up security around Baldurs Gate.
The fact that everyone seems to be sitting back doing nothing, and letting a bunch of low level chars ters sort it outc strikes me as a contrived scenario. Whether that's a module issue, DM issue, or both, I am not privy to.