Heart of Nightfang Spire help sought

[frankthedm]

Since the place needs rescaling according to current opinion, I've redone the outside image of the tower that i found, only real difference is the outer hut, is more barn size now.

The #1 thing i suggest is ditch the sunglasses the lead vampire wears and make them some other type of magic item. WTF was the module desiner & artists thinking. Some type of jab at Vampire:tM? All i know is it ruins any chance of using the pic in the modual as a hand out.

 

[DragonLancer]

When I ran the module for my group a year or so ago we had great fun with it. Its tough but its not as nasty as all that. Sure, the levels are a little repetative but hey, thats dungeons for you in general.

As for your party, I think they are too split. They need to be more organised by class if they hope to survive.

 

[Rackhir]

They are going to need easy access to some sort of raise dead magics. Girallions can rip a character to pieces in a round or two. The mooncalf at the begining is also quite deadly. There's also an assasin who has a pretty lethal death attack and I think will usually attack while invisible. The characters sneak attacks are not as useless as some people are saying as there are a number of living creatures like the Mooncalf and the girallions.

They will need access to a lot of restorations. The tower is crawling with undead that have drains.

The final encounter unless nerfed will most likely result in a TPK.

 

[Harmon]

Shadowdancer, you are the GM on this, so first thing- alter the Girallions back to 3e size (tall and requiring only one five by five space), and get another cleric in there. When we ran it we had one 10th that got to 11th during and he was hard pressed to get through a day.

We did the adventure one level per day, using teleports so we could retreat to rest. It was dammed tough, in fact after eleven levels of playing with that group of characters it was the first one we lost a character.

Two feats your cleric will need- Empower Turning and Extra Turning, trust me. Oh, and Mass CLW doesn't just heal your companions it hurts undead (We were surrounded on the verge of a but stomping when the Cleric Mass CLW and got a few PCs up in hp and cause more then half the undead to drop (they were next in the line up to go)).

We had fun with it.

 

[stevelabny]

Most "logical" dungeon crawls have repetition since each monster needs its own living space.

Sure, there's a ton of undead, a few constructs, and a small army of girallons. But the unded come in all types, the Tombstone Golem is a cute twist to a monster, and the girallons arent meant to be hacked through one at a time.

Of course, every group is different. I had players who actually WANTED to hack through the girallons one at a time.

I thought this module had quite a few nice ideas in it. I particularly enjoyed the riddle room, where the puzzle isn't figuring out the answer to the riddle, but that giving the correct answer is the WRONG thing to do. Others have commented that they think this room is unfair. I think it depends how much information the DM gets across to the players to give them a shot at understanding.

I didn't like the Mooncalf as a monster, so I swapped it out for something campaign specific.

The main problem I remember is, as mentioned, the map doesn't fit for 3.5 sizes.