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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Festivus" data-source="post: 5318814" data-attributes="member: 34532">Sunderpeak Temple writeup (massive spoilers within)[sblock]This adventure takes place somewhere after the adventure in the red box (there are references made to the red box adventure within that it takes place after the Twisting Halls adventure).  A dwarf scholar has hired the party to escort him to Sunderpeak Temple, where the priests there have a ritual that can be used to destroy an evil artifact (a skull) that is in the dwarf's possession.  There hasn't been any word from the temple, hence the journey to find out.  Why he's bringing the macguffin with him I have no idea... seems an odd thing to do.  Did I mention it's set in the Nentir Vale?  I thought that was kind of fun to have a place where it was at.The adventure is split into two parts... the surface, which is two encounters and the dungeon, which is either 2 or 3 encounters depending upon time.When you arrive at Sunderpeak it is in ruin and orc can be seen in the courtyard.  The first encounter involves some orcs with a nasty area burst 1 within 20 "volley" shot, a pair of drakes, and a couple sneaking bandits.  The second surface encounter is inside the temple, where kobolds are busy wreaking havoc on the temple interior at the direction of an Orc boss.  The kobolds are mostly minions who had a neat trick, if hit with a burst or blast attack, they roll a saving throw and if they make it, shift 3 squares (possibly out of the burst) as an immediate interrupt.After clearing the surface, the players head down to a underground tunnel.  There are two doors, a wooden one (behind which can be heard some voices) and a stone door with a crude marking of "DED" painted on the floor in front of it.  The wooden door is what I called the "Rune room" because there were runes all over the place.  If a player stepped on the rune (even through forced movement) it reacted randomly.  Sadly, the players were smart enough to realize they were probably something bad, and avoided it.  Second time through I made the runes react in a close burst 1 fasion, which was overpowered.  I think if I run it again, they will react with a 25% chance of being a burst 1 formation.  There were some orc savages that if they got a run at you did some nasty damage, some human guards with reach weapons to trip players, and another orc archer who could volley.  I really think a controller that could slide things around would have been really nasty in that encounter as another way to fix it.  There was a skill challenge that could be undertaken during the combat to disarm the runes or turn them to your side.  New runes randomly appeared in the room at the end of each round.The undead room I didn't get to run, but I would have loved to see the faces of the players as zombies you thought you killed rose again.  You had to perform a standard action (I think) to damage them while they were at zero to keep them down.The dragon fight was the last fight, and it was interesting.  I heard tell of many TPKs from the shroud and the breath weapon combo... but my table won initiative and defeated him and his hobgoblins (the party focussed on the hobogoblins and orcs before focussing on the dragon).  I don't think this scales well for a table of 4, but with 6 is was challenging but still doable.In the end, the dragon was having the orcs excavate a wall in the temple, which exposed a hidden staircase that lead to a runic cicle, now inactive but aracana checks tell you it was designed to keep something IN... that is now gone.  So the party was basically too late to discover what the dragon has unleashed... but a fun plot hook.[/sblock]Feel free to ask questions, I happened to have it in my backpack today when I went to work <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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