So I decided to run Rescue at Rivenroar (the first adventure in the 4e adventure path) purely on the strength of the first two combats.
And in my first session today (with players that are mostly new to 4e and/or D&D), those two combats went great.
But according to comments in some of the other threads, the rest of the adventure gets boring quickly. How should I modify it while still retaining the basic plot and structure of the adventure?
We're about 1/2 through the first level, and my group is having fun with it. Yes, it's a bit dry, but you can spruce it up by making the NPCs interesting and adding some more gloom to the dress in the tombs. I used TTA's Bits of Darkness: Dungeons to help get the creative juices flowing.
It's a good adventure for new players to 4e, because it will help focus on the mechanics for this first adventure and then you can pick up the more nuanced aspects of gaming in the next chapter.
I was really concerned that one of my players would get bored with all the dungeon crawling so I made a bunch of the encounters easier so my players could move through it more quickly without it being too much of a grind.
I ended up leaving a couple of the rooms vacant where I found the encounters uninspiring. In one of those, the one with the dwarf, I just made up a Skill Challenge for the rogue. Basically, she had to find and disarm the trap or a bunch of ravenous Dire Rats would be released when they opened the door. I metagamed that the dwarf heard them as soon as they noticed the trapped door and could fill them in on the consequences.
It worked okay for a little change of pace in the tempo. Besides, I feel like rogues need to disarm something now and again to keep feeling loved. D*mn prima donnas. ;-)
There's a few issues with the design of main dungeon, and IMO the encounter design but that's a matter of taste. Heavy spoilers to follow.
Plot & Motivation
The warband's actions simply don't make much sense. IIRC, according to the adventure they captured the townsfolk to feed to the undead that they share the crypt with. But also according to the adventure, they've spent 4 days moving individual prisoners around the dungeon with bags over their heads, keeping them separated and confused. Which sounds more like a ransom scenario (because you wouldn't want the townspeople to know much about the place or its defenses when they get back home). They appear to be in no hurry to sacrifice their captives to the entities that want them (one is even chained up next to the wight, and guarded by ghouls & skeletons), but they gave the guard captain to the ettercaps to kill.
So issue #1 to deal with IMO is: why did they kidnap people? I think the easiest solution is to say "ransom" and add in a ransom demand that the town can't or won't pay. If you want to keep the "sacrifice" answer, you should figure out: why have they been keeping the prisoners isolated and disoriented? Why haven't any been killed by the undead? Why did they let the ettercaps eat one?
Why are the undead allied with Sinruth? What are they getting out of the deal? Why haven't they eaten any captives?
Attacking the Dungeon
The encounters are boooooring. You're in a crypt with no traps! Add traps to a lot of the encounters, especially those that take place in the actual crypts. There's also barely any terrain features in the rooms. Add cover, difficult terrain, pits, hazards, etc.
The ooze/specter room is often mentioned as being too tough, pointless, and generally out of left field.
How does Sinruth react to the players going in, killing some of his troops, and leaving? Do forces get repostioned? Do they start creating defensive structures to defend chokepoints? Do they threaten the remaining captives?
If a fight breaks out, can reinforcements hear the fight and arrive to help after some delay? What if an opponent flees and gets help?
Why is Sinruth sitting alone in a room, past a room full of combat terrain features that will never get used (he'd have to run past the PCs to bring it into play), down the hall from a room that was full of goblin guards (before the PCs got there)? His forces are under steady attack, and yet he's sitting in a room by himself while his guards get picked off.
Encounter Design
I found the grab bag selection of monsters present in the crypt to be nonsensical. Sticking a note at the end from some mysterious emissary commending Sinruth for having a bunch of random creatures following him doesn't fix that, it just calls attention to the silliness. Players might wonder WhyTF they're fighitng gnomes, ettercaps, and wererats when they're told upfront that it's a goblin warband attacking the town. Or they might not, depending on your players.
Campaign Setup
There is none. The next adventure, Siege at Bodrin's Watch, has absolutely nothing to do with this one. The town & one of the recovered relics don't return again until Den of the Destroyer.
My Solution
[sblock]I reflavored nearly all of the encounters to be either goblin-based (there's plenty of different types of goblins and hobgoblins in the MM, without even getting into reskinning) or undead-based. I added traps and terrain hazards to various rooms.
Ooze room: the goblins avoid this area - it's barred and has skulls painted on the doors. I'm reflavoring the ooze as some kind of shadow thing, doing necrotic instead of acid damage. The specters rise up out of gobiln skeletons, recently killed & picked clean by the ooze, the implication being that if this thing kills you, your spirit is trapped in this place. Removed the portal and replaced it with dark, cold, and wet-style terrain features.
I changed Sinruth to an elite, based off the hobgoblin commander, and gave him some hobgoblin aides guarding the room with the cold rock things.
Story-wise, the goblins are parcelling out the captives as food to the undead, in return for being allowed to hide out there. One captive has already been eaten. The others are being held where they're held; they haven't been moved around and the goblins don't particularly care what they see. The boy chained up near the wight's room is next in line, followed by the acolyte in the next area over.
When the players kill some stuff and leave, some or all of the dead goblins get reanimated as zombies (or zombie minions) by the wight. This requires an additional sacrifice, though, so one prisoner gets bumped off each time this happens. This information should be relayed the players somehow, maybe through the captured hobgoblin back in Brindol, or a message from Sinruth scrawled on the wall ("Keep coming back if you want more townsfolk to die!").[/sblock]
Looking back over the module, I honsetly don't see why there need to be any undead at all.
Instead, I'll throw a bunch more goblins in there, plus some drakes and dragonspawn--after all, this is supposed to be the remnants of the Red Hand, right?
