Homebrew one-shot adventurer, please help me critique or edit it

Nezkrul

First Post
Hey, this is my first adventure that I've ever DM'd for 4th edition, and I would like some help editing and critiquing it to make it just plain better. I will be running this adventure this Thursday for a party of 12th level characters. We have a minotaur fighter, deva cleric, deva wizard, and dragonborn barbarian, with the possiblity of an elf ranger and something else that I have yet to see from the potential sixth player. I just need some help with intro, flavor text, and the scope of fitting the encounters together.

View attachment Skaarg Pits.rtf

Thanks for the help,

-nezkrul
 

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Interesting.

Some debugging: it's possible a PC won't fall for the bed trick, and those that do don't seem to get a saving throw or a skill check to avoid it. My suggestion would be to tell part of the tale in "flashback format" (eg how you got here). Generally players will let you do anything to their characters before play starts, but once the game starts...

In other words, if you tell your players "you will all start without equipment and shackled" they will probably accept it, whereas if they're captured by fiat, they probably will not. That would pretty much leaving out the skill challenge though. You know your players better than me, so I'm basically projecting what would happen if I did this to my players.

While 4e is far less item-dependent than its predecessor, players should be told they'll lose their equipment before it's taken from them. Again, player management issue, and also ... so many 4e players use Character Builders, but sometimes they're using a PDF printout, and those can't really be modified (such as by having equipment removed). The logistics alone are worth considering.

For encounter 4, I would increase the "cheating" damage to something dealing an average of 20 or even 24 damage. Don't hold back. 8 damage is nothing, and paragon-level PCs can sometimes resist that kind of damage anyway.

I like the specialty loot, plus the haunting.
 

thanks for the suggestions, I guess I could come up with a flashback narrative, where they wake up in the cage remembering what happened to them (the narrative) but I can include their actions in the narrative with the skill checks prior to them waking up. I can handle the logistics of missing equipment but the theme of the adventure is to take away non-combat essential wealth/gear (like a bag of holding not holding any gear relevant to combat, money, etc). Handling that is easy since it is a one-shot. I guess I could make a random table for what exactly gets thrown at them each time, with equal odds of 1d6+4 (hand axe), 1d8+4 (spear), 1d10+4 (large rock), 1d12+4 (large spear), 2d8+4 (two spears), and 2d10+4 (a magical blast of energy)
 

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