*thread necromancy*
Last night, my group finally finished off the Complex of Zombies.
I modified things a bit, since I'm not running a standard d20 game. If interested I can look back over my notes and explicitly list what I changed for the game.
My group has 2 humans and a golem/warforge in it. The golem was immune to the nasty effect (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here), but the humans managed to get pretty jacked up.
This particular mini-adventure came right after the Wicked Fantasy Factory module #1, Rumble in the Wizard's Tower. They went through that with relative ease, with a nice big action fight scene for the climax. I simply appended this complex to the tower, by the simple expedient of having a small trap door in the top of the tower that lead straight down below ground another 200 and some odd feet. Since the tower was 80 foot high to begin with, they immediately got that this area was a "big deal". I tried to play up the age of this underground part, letting them know that it clearly predated anything they'd seen in the Wizard's Tower.
I actually dropped them into the area behind the pool (bottom part of the map). It wasn't exactly clear (to me at least) _where_ the adventure should start, but based on the room numbering and all, I simply made that decision.
I ran it more on the "Resident Evil" side of things than "Night of the Living Dead". In fact, if I was actually going to be staying here instead of moving, I'd probably expand this out a bit into a full "lab" kind of thing much like Resident Evil, and then have it go a bit wrong and lead into the plague module that was done (The Black Mist).
There was some serious, "What the...oh crap, where is it?!? Ok, fallback and send in the golem, we need to figure out where it is!" that happened here.
They didn't find the first one, and retreated rapidly. They didn't clue into what was the source of their problems until the end of the 2nd one and as they were going into the third one.
Then they started to worry.
I gave the critters max hit points, 5 DR/energy, and hit points lost from the PC went to heal the critters. Top of the round, every round a single Fort saving throw. If they made it, it covered them for however many there were, for that round. If they failed it, then all the critters got to do their Blood Sheen. Rather abruptly the game shifted from "Bad boys" to "Aliens". I played up the look and descriptions of zombies, but having them move at the same rate as the PCs and appear to have at least a rudimentary cunning really gave them an "Oh, crap!" experience.
The group went in about half way, got the snot beat out of 'em, and retreated back above ground to recover. I'd given them the Healing Disc from the Wizard's Tower (1d6 HP, unlimited uses, user has to speak the command word), so they got themselves a bit in over their heads I think.
They finally managed to work their way through the complex, although they wound up requisitioning a Rune Bomb (12d6 magic damage, "exploding" 6s, meaning that on a 6 add and reroll) in order to deal with the large group.
One of them they killed not using energy, so I decided it had managed to regenerate enough to escape. Another, "Oh, crap!" and the group went through and beheaded and burned/energy blasted everything.
I almost killed one of the characters, because he just couldn't make his saving throws. I took pity on him and let him not have to make a saving throw after his last failed saving throw took him from 1 HP down to -9.
The other player had an extremely concerned look when he rushed into where he shouldn't have, and I whipped out 10d4 and tossed 'em. 26 points of damage later, he was in full retreat, firing his blaze pistols. They barely managed to survive this (there were 2 of the critters loose, 1 of the stronger and 1 of the weaker), and it was at this point that they beat a hasty retreat back to the surface and trying to figure out how to get some heavy weapons.
I want to try and work these things through the Grim Tales CR calculator, and see what I come up with, including the slight changes I made to 'em. The CR is listed as 1 and 2 for them, and I think it's a bit off. The group was 3 (no cleric, but a free unlimited d6 per round healing device), one of them was basically immune to the Blood Sheen and totally ignored by the critters (the golem) which meant she attacked with impunity, and there was almost no damage actually inflicted by claws.
It seems like having guns is worth a +1 CR, and the golem/warforge is worth another +1. Since the group is already 4th level, that means they were operating at basically 2 level 5 characters and 1 level 6 character.
Sooo... yeah, I want to double-check things and see.
On the whole, I say Complex of the Zombies rocks. The group had fun, there was some hard thinking that they suddenly had to engage in, and I was able to bloody them up some while they still rocked out.
I'd say that a GM should be careful to make sure that healing is available, as this thing can go deadly with just a bit of bad luck and some over confidence on the part of the party. Fast Healing, and the Blood Sheen combined with DR/energy makes for some critters that are rather harder than you might initially expect.
This worked well for the kind of action game that I run ("Aliens"), but I can certainly see how it could be used for a lower action game, and even going more for the horror ("Alien") if that's what you're looking for.
