How tough is City of the Spider Queen?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

In the adventure I was playing in there was plenty of magical swag, but we also had some very sweet magical item creators with us. The underdark should be filled with people willing to trade magical items, particular in this time of local strife. Picking up more greater magical weapon buffs would be really helpful to you.

Don't go bringing outsiders until you have more information and local allies. You are facing tough adversaries, and one of your biggest advantages is that it can be pretty easy to confuse them as to your source and nature as a threat. Sending down a bunch of good adventurer patsies could either help that advantage or negate it.

Certainly, you can always take Machiavelli's best advice and modify it for your situation. Guide the patsies down into an area where you know they will find and fight reliable witnesses for the enemy. Turn on the patsies and wipe them out in such a way as to impress the witnesses. Use this to ingratiate yourself within the ranks of the Drow city. Become their ally and confidante. Betray them and destroy the wand. Return to their surface. Feign having been held prisoner by the drow. Become local heroes. Take over local good township. Use them as cannonfodder when the drow come for you. Retreat to your Banish stronghold. Allow Elminster to take care of the drow invasion. Return with cowed and grateful settlers to occupy the resulting devastation.

Sounds to me as though your DM may have changed a lot of the context for the adventure, and that could be very bad since the context is really what gives you options. If your DM has significantly changed the story surrounding the adventure in order to make it more Bane oriented and is just using the adventure to give him a dungeon than you may have a situation that more than justifies your complaints, and for which my advice and most others is not too relevant.

I'm not certain about how to verify this in any way that wouldn't violate the common ethics of gaming. And I would never ever advocate such a course of action, particularly given the fantastic arguments against metagaming that have made ENWorld a shining beacon of RPG morality.

 

[jmichels`]

So we can't beef up jack. We have maybe 5,000 gold between the four of us (cohort included) and that's not until Zhentarim payday. Not enough to buy much useful in the way of magic weapons/items.

You need greater magic weapon badly. Try to have the Banite Cleric memorize that to buff your weapons before you wade in against these beasties. Try to retreat alot so you can try different approaches against some stuff.

Don't try to brute force through stuff if you don't have to. Alot of times, if you can pretend to be drow you can get pretty far without resorting to fighting. At the very worst you can ambush the baddies instead of them ambushing you. Try to get your hands on a wand of major images, hat of disguise or some other type of illusionary magic. Finally use some skill points to get someone that speaks Undercommon. This helps out big time to bluff through certain sticky situations.

Go to the Thayian Enclave in Hillsfar using your Sembian merchant cover. You can load up a bit here to help you on the magic poor side. If worse comes to worse try to do some tasks for the Red Wizard in exchange for some gear. Also try to find some good aligned folks and borrow money from. I would appoach the Church of Waukeen somewhere and try to get a decent loan. They will be very unlikely to rip you off or charge the outragous usury rates that the Zhents will.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

Iron Chef, there are a lot of good suggestions on this thread, but reading your responses I can't shake the feeling that you just don't want to play this module - period. If that's the case, sit down with the rest of your group and discuss it. This just doesn't sound like an in-game problem (how can your party succeed) so much as out-of-game (how can your group do something else).

 

[Iron_Chef]

I honestly don't want to play through it, but I might end up doing it if the DM can't come up with a suitable alternative... apparently, the poor guy's been hoping to run CotSQ for months now, just waiting for us to get to level 10.

I do appreciate the quality of the responses, however, and they may yet come in handy if I'm forced to go through with the adventure... some of them might anyway, even if we don't go on it. I really like jmichels` ideas in particular...

I just talked to the other player and he thinks it's a rotten adventure idea, too, as his PC isn't anymore built for a meatgrinder like this than mine, and if he'd known we were gonna do something like this, he'd have taken more levels of fighter instead of rogue.

It really was sprung on us out of the blue AFTER we'd blown all our money on other goodies and AFTER we'd gone to great pains to begin infiltrating Mistledale... the only good news about the latter is that we are mercenaries/treasure hunters, so we can disappear for long periods and show up again without arousing too much suspicion.

I was smart enough to get the SEEMING spell so we can all look like drow, trolls, ropers, whatever for 12 hours at a time, but none of us speak anything except common, draconic, abyssal, orc, infernal and celestial, so that's not all that helpful if we have to talk to anybody unless we bring along some real drow who can pretend to be our leaders.

 

[Iron_Chef]

Two of us (the Banite cleric and half dragon) have hats of disguise. I know Seeming (12 hour change self on 1 creature/level) and Mass Darkvision (1 creature/level).

 

[Numion]

Because that is what WotC believes sells best to their customers. Personally, I find meatgrinder dungeon hacks to be boring, unimaginitive, and lazy, but some people love them.

How come do you find them lazy? Considering the complexity of high-CR stat blocks in 3e and the high production values of the two large modules WotC has put out, I wouldn't call them lazy. For lazy DMs perhaps (guilty as charged, I like running stuff more than making it ), but not lazy in the making.

 

[Daredevill]

Ironchef, you obviously have issues with this dungeon. I don't think I've ever heard someone dump on something, they haven't even played yet, as bad as you have here.

Just forget it. Tell your DM to put the adventure aside and set to work on a D20 version of "The Mists of Avalon" or something along those lines.

Boy, do I feel sorry for your DM.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I was smart enough to get the SEEMING spell so we can all look like drow, trolls, ropers, whatever for 12 hours at a time, but none of us speak anything except common, draconic, abyssal, orc, infernal and celestial, so that's not all that helpful if we have to talk to anybody unless we bring along some real drow who can pretend to be our leaders.

Actually, you should have access to some cleric spells that can alleviate the language problem, but the big play in what you have just detailed is trying a bluff based on your mastery of evil outsider languages. Combined with your extensive summoning abilities, you are in prime position to continue your con as mercenaries within the City of the Spider Queen.

The drow of that city are at war, and IMC the place was crawling with foriegn mercenaries and arms dealers.

My group is commonly disguised as a bunch of underdark merchants and mercenaries, though we also have an alternate identity as the slaves of a travelling drow matriarch priest.

For any of this to work it is critical that you take the time to find one or two of the many safe spots. You generally have to clear fellow refugees out of them, but the nice thing about refugees is their rarely snitch.

Don't feel too disadvantaged by the levels of rogue, the adventure hurts a lot if you are rogueless too.

 

[Wormwood]

My group's recipe for CotSQ success (my favorite module, by the way)---

(there be spoilers here)

1. Get your butt handed to you in the Crypts and the first couple of areas of Szith Morcane.
2. Limp back to town. Buy a bunch of scrolls with various divination spells.
3. Wind Walk past the remainder of Szith Morcane, *all* of the Underdark, and *all* of Maerimydra.
4. Bypass all of the defenses and wind walk into the heart of Evil NPC Headquarters---creating the mother of all mob trains behind them.
5. Get lost and end up being barraged with area dispels. Bye-bye Wind Walk.
6. Find your 11th level characters surrounded by many hostile 15+ level NPCs...with *dozens* more charging up the stairs behind them.
7. Die screaming within 3 rounds, get turned into revenants, and decide to give that new Marvel Universe game a try.

 

[Nine Hands]

From what i've seen from running and reading City of the Spider Queen, there were several opportunities for diplomacy in the module. I remember this as I was pleasently surprised at it when I read the side bar during our playtest.

If you can not face an opponent head on, use stealth. Maybe you should pick up a copy of Sun Zsu's The Art of War and Machiavelli's (sp?) The Prince. The Art of War will cover all of the aspects of combat including the use of stealth, over whelming numbers, etc. The Prince is wonderful for political maneuvering, etc. Both of these works have made an excellent impact on my playing style (if I am playing that type of character instead of a dumb brick).

Just try taking the adventure intelligently, cautiously, and use cannon fodder. Banites need cannon fodder