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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron_Chef" data-source="post: 942774" data-attributes="member: 4530">Well, another session done and my opinion of CotSQ is that it is pure drivel and sucks as both a dungeon crawl and a would-be epic, which is the same opinion I had going in, only now it's backed up by fact, rather than reviews and gut instinct. Pure uninspired hack-n-slash that is practically no fun at all, because instead of CHOOSING to brave Acererak's Tomb of Horrors or some such peril (knowing you can quit whenever you like in search of easier loot), you are railroaded into an endless SAVE THE WORLD meatgrinder with no hope of escape. Shame on WoTC. This module stinks worse than anything I can remember in recent D&D history.I charmed a demon ghoul, who is great at tagging along and obediently devouring the life essences of our victims so they can't rise again as anything but minor, mindless undead (we delighted in torturing a drow with this knowledge before letting the beast eat her alive for our own personal amusement). We posted "Lolth Lives!" in her blood on the cave wall and defiled the bodies of the other Kiaransalee drow sentries. We've taken surprisingly little damage (most of us only lost about 50% of our hit points due to an ice storm and a few other spells), and only a couple of us barely escaped death, which is not to say we didn't feel challenged. We did. But a well-timed/placed cloudkill that beat the SR of every single drow in its path (most of whom instantly died) made the battle to take Szith Morcane a bit anticlimactic (first time I ever cast it and it killed about a dozen drow on two different web levels, directly or indirectly (some chose to jump off the path and became webbed-up spider-food or splat-burgers below. The gargantuan spider was driven off. We made it to the Bazaar but that sucked, too. Wussy duergar and a mind flayer trying to sell crap no one would ever want to buy. We didn't attack them, though their crapy merchandise almost made me kill them all out of spite! Treasure has been limited to a four magic mithril shirts, four magic rapiers, and nothing else, though I just have my imp cast detect magic (at will) on bodies and we don't bother to loot them if nothing lights up as magic... We'd be more thorough, but there's this nagging issue of "MUST SAVE THE WORLD IN RECORD TIME" ringing in our heads. What good is treasure to the dead? So anything we can grab right away that looks magical is what we are limiting ourselves to. Plus, all that mithril armor is filling up our heward's handy haversack faster than we thought (about 30% full).I'm trying to negotiate with the mind flayer in the bazaar to plane shft our group to Maerimydra so we can bypass much of the garbage encounters along the way, but the DM seems opposed to the idea. We could plane shift without the illithid, but I'm not sure how that works, whether we could arrive at our target destination accurately or not, as we've never been there.GAWD, this module blows chunks. I can't wait for it to be over. XP and treasure are meaningless if they come from this kind of torture. The priest of Bane and my wizard were so upset and frustrated over the way events were unfolding that we started arguing, insulting and then casting dominate person on each other (we made our saves, so it was a draw). We promised to try another such duel tomorrow if the situation didn't improve to our liking. The DM seemed surprised that we were behaving this way, almost childish chaotic evil, he said. I said, the duel had rules we abided by, so it was LE, lol. He's lucky we weren't calling down flame strikes. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />We don't care about doing this adventure at all and just want to leave, but of course, we've been railroaded into it, so now we are nihilistic and willing to die stupidly at each other's throats if that will end the torture of going through this lame adventure (it's certainly more fun attacking each other than playing the module as written). The DM promised he'd "shortened" it, but it's not short enough for us. Sucks, sucks, sucks. And it only keeps getting worse, with no end in sight. Apparently, you guys are saying the end is almost impossible short of godlike power, so either we will all die horribly, or we will get so sick of it we will jump ship and switch sides to Kiaransalee and become undead, or the DM will introduce some lame-o deus-ex machina to save the day. The DM doesn't believe in giving us full XP for finding ways around killing our opponents (either through outwitting, subverting or driving them off) in most cases, so I'm sure we will be jacked when it comes to leveling, which means we're dead when it comes to beating the bad guys at the end. How are we supposed to get through a meatgrinder without going up many levels? First, the DM complains about how we're advancing too fast, then he puts us through a total hackfest and jacks us on the XP. Don't get me wrong, I love my DM, he's my best friend for many years now, but he's lost his mind. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> We're trying to put on smiles and go through the motions to please him, and trying to inject some enthusiasm into our characters, but it's hard when a module is so completely incompatible with our playing style. He can't even call it off now or it will be even lamer than going through it. The only thing to do is shorten it drastically (a few more sessions), introduce some crappy deus-ex machina from Bane, and teleport us home so we can go back to having fun again.</blockquote>

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