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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 6071626" data-attributes="member: 7635">Its pretty typical of my gaming style: adventure seed, investigation, mini dungeon at the end. To be honest, I was trying to emulate 4e's style which came from those early awful 4e modules. (The DCC was worse; it was a module written for 3.5 and then retrofitted for 4e; it had ogres in rooms too small for them and a combat that involved facing two sets of duergar AND a trap without a short rest between them at 1st level. It was nearly a TPK.) 4e didn't handle KotB very well. It didn't handle my own stuff well, and it didn't handle its OWN stuff well (two modules written by the company that designed the bloody thing and one by one of the best module companies at the time). 4e in 2008 was something that nobody had learned to write for. Which creates a weird situation for me; 4e can't handle realistically proportioned dungeons. It sucks at dungeon crawls. Its amazing at set-pieces (one of the best adventures I ran was a white-dragon solo in an abandoned banquet hall, with tables and windows and stuff) but not every dungeon room is 160 by 160 foot with pits and traps. The learning curve for dungeon design was horrible coming from 3e, and most, if not all my design philosophies apparently no longer were valid. The map was culled from Heroes of Horror, published by WotC in 2005. Funny how they're idea of dungeons changed in 3 years? BTW: I don't think there was a single map in WotC's Map a Week gallery that would have been better. Yet further proof WotC released a half-baked edition? The MM1 is bad. Horrible. I'd wager half the monsters in there are unusable do to poor math. Yet that was all I had when this module was written.Technically, the corruption zombies were artillery  but why argue details. Yeah, the dungeon had a lot of melee creatures. IT WAS A 2nd LEVEL DUNGEON NEAR A POPULATED CITY. There wasn't a lot of options. Ghouls, zombies, skeletons, bandits, bats, rats, oozes, wererats and some spooks. All stuff I could glean out the of the Monster Manual. My options for keeping them within 4 levels was fairly limited. In earlier editions 90% of that stuff would have been cannon fodder, quickly cleared away. In 4e, there is no such thing. Again, I was using what the DMG told me to do. Skill challenges were the "kewl" new thing and I wanted to try them. I'm 90% certain we dumped them with a session after this. If you were looking for why 4e started out a glaring failure, I can think of no better adventure. Using only the three core books as they were printed in October of 2008 (Halloween adventure) a veteran DM of 16 years (at the time) couldn't make a playable adventure. The 4e Monster Manual was a train wreck, the DMG offered NO usable advice, and trying to build adventures "like the designers did" created a boring grindfest. WotC had no business releasing 4e in the condition it did, from the nonexistent DDi support to the books so errata-prone the three Core Books were practically unusable. And 4e did get better. I'm sure you could redo the thing today using the Monster Vault, Essential's treasure, and a redrawn, 4e friendly map to make it a great adventure. The fixed rules for skill challenges, the revised monster math, the revised PC powers, all would make that thing great. However, those tools and insights weren't there when a group of players some (like myself) so wanted to this thing to work (seriously; search EnWorld for me @ 2008, I was an ardent 4e supporter). It just failed me on so many levels. The fact this module could probably be rewritten for D&D, AD&D, 3e, Pathfinder, or a score of retroclones with little change and work, yet fail so spectacularly in 4e I think says volumes.</blockquote>

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