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<blockquote data-quote="Krensus" data-source="post: 4337293" data-attributes="member: 59340"><p><span style="color: White">I just finished running this adventure tonight with my party, and I agree with you on a lot of points. My party consisted of a Human Cleric, Dwarf Fighter, Half-elf Warlock, Elven Ranger, and Human Rogue. At times some were either replaced with other players or not present, but that's pretty much the static party. </span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">As you can see, the party had a lot of strikers. This led to some interesting twists on the encounters, often times they were either dominating or winning only be the skin of their teeth. The blue ooze, for example, they killed in 4 rounds due to the ranger wailing on it with an action point and 2 crits. The cleric seemed to pretty much hate his job the entire time because there were so many mobs and no wizard in the party, leading to 2-3 people getting damaged per round, most of which really shouldn't be taking hits. </span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">My favorite monster was the little clay humunculous, which I'm sure I'm misspelling. He tried to escape into the next room once the zombies were getting diced, but the cleric cast Sanctuary on himself and ran full tilt through all the remaining zombies to chase it. At this point, the players had already figured out not to let things escape into other rooms, as they had triggered as many as three encounters at once by letting a hobgoblin run to the east in the first encounter on the second floor. He caught up to it and used an action point to try to whap it, but missed. The monster cast his daze spell on him to become invisible, then saddled up to the cleric and waited for the ranger to go to town. He made the arrow hit the cleric instead, then ran up the steps to stand in melee with the ranger. The fighter tank ran up and...well, long story short, it was a rare attack that didn't hit an ally that encounter.</span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">As for Kalarel, I think he's probably a bit too tough. All of his defenses are incredibly high compared to the rest of the module, especially his Will. The tentacles from The Thing in the Portal are almost certainly going to hit players and heal him, and he's not taking all that much damage to begin with. The fighter tank ended up dying pretty early, and he was lucky he was wearing that scale mail that gave resistance 5 to necrotic damage or he would have died even sooner. The players didn't understand that the tentacles healed him, they believed it was the magic circle he stood on, so they all backed off after the fighter fell for the second time and tried to just range him to death or force him from the circle. </span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">At this point, I did something kind of cheesy. The fighter was the only target in range of the tentacles, so it kept attacking him and dragging him closer. Kalarel left the circle to pursue the party, but the tentacles kept attacking the dead fighter to give him a heal for 5 per round. Before he finally died, the only people standing were the warlock and the ranger, the cleric was on the ground out of surges, and the rogue was one save away from death. I can't really judge the encounter objectively because the party did something retarded to trigger it. I told them that there was something going on inside the pit while they stood in the room above kalarel's, with enough xp to level, talking about taking an extended rest because the fighter only had 3 surges left, when the ranger decided to clean up the place to rest and started throwing bodies in the pit. At that point, I triggered the encounter and said they needed to intervene or the ritual would be complete, so I can't really say I didn't give them ample information to avoid the encounter until after a rest.</span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">I actually added some treasure to the Kalarel encounter because it was pretty bare, I went through and selected some 3rd-4th level Rituals to put in his book as a reward to the casters, one of which was Enchant Magic Item. I think that if this edition is going to readily encourage item creation, I might as well go along with it and see if it works well.</span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p><p><span style="color: White">I've pretty much put the game on hold at this point until the next module comes out, as I'd like to see how they fit together. Overall, I thought the dungeon was well designed from a tactical standpoint, but I was underwhelmed by the amount of actual plot development. I thought it was a good dungeon crawl, but lately my group has moved towards more story driven campaigns and this really feels like "omg there's a guy doing bad stuff down there...go stop him, this is your hook, bite it." </span></p><p><span style="color: White"></span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Krensus, post: 4337293, member: 59340"] [COLOR=White]I just finished running this adventure tonight with my party, and I agree with you on a lot of points. My party consisted of a Human Cleric, Dwarf Fighter, Half-elf Warlock, Elven Ranger, and Human Rogue. At times some were either replaced with other players or not present, but that's pretty much the static party. As you can see, the party had a lot of strikers. This led to some interesting twists on the encounters, often times they were either dominating or winning only be the skin of their teeth. The blue ooze, for example, they killed in 4 rounds due to the ranger wailing on it with an action point and 2 crits. The cleric seemed to pretty much hate his job the entire time because there were so many mobs and no wizard in the party, leading to 2-3 people getting damaged per round, most of which really shouldn't be taking hits. My favorite monster was the little clay humunculous, which I'm sure I'm misspelling. He tried to escape into the next room once the zombies were getting diced, but the cleric cast Sanctuary on himself and ran full tilt through all the remaining zombies to chase it. At this point, the players had already figured out not to let things escape into other rooms, as they had triggered as many as three encounters at once by letting a hobgoblin run to the east in the first encounter on the second floor. He caught up to it and used an action point to try to whap it, but missed. The monster cast his daze spell on him to become invisible, then saddled up to the cleric and waited for the ranger to go to town. He made the arrow hit the cleric instead, then ran up the steps to stand in melee with the ranger. The fighter tank ran up and...well, long story short, it was a rare attack that didn't hit an ally that encounter. As for Kalarel, I think he's probably a bit too tough. All of his defenses are incredibly high compared to the rest of the module, especially his Will. The tentacles from The Thing in the Portal are almost certainly going to hit players and heal him, and he's not taking all that much damage to begin with. The fighter tank ended up dying pretty early, and he was lucky he was wearing that scale mail that gave resistance 5 to necrotic damage or he would have died even sooner. The players didn't understand that the tentacles healed him, they believed it was the magic circle he stood on, so they all backed off after the fighter fell for the second time and tried to just range him to death or force him from the circle. At this point, I did something kind of cheesy. The fighter was the only target in range of the tentacles, so it kept attacking him and dragging him closer. Kalarel left the circle to pursue the party, but the tentacles kept attacking the dead fighter to give him a heal for 5 per round. Before he finally died, the only people standing were the warlock and the ranger, the cleric was on the ground out of surges, and the rogue was one save away from death. I can't really judge the encounter objectively because the party did something retarded to trigger it. I told them that there was something going on inside the pit while they stood in the room above kalarel's, with enough xp to level, talking about taking an extended rest because the fighter only had 3 surges left, when the ranger decided to clean up the place to rest and started throwing bodies in the pit. At that point, I triggered the encounter and said they needed to intervene or the ritual would be complete, so I can't really say I didn't give them ample information to avoid the encounter until after a rest. I actually added some treasure to the Kalarel encounter because it was pretty bare, I went through and selected some 3rd-4th level Rituals to put in his book as a reward to the casters, one of which was Enchant Magic Item. I think that if this edition is going to readily encourage item creation, I might as well go along with it and see if it works well. I've pretty much put the game on hold at this point until the next module comes out, as I'd like to see how they fit together. Overall, I thought the dungeon was well designed from a tactical standpoint, but I was underwhelmed by the amount of actual plot development. I thought it was a good dungeon crawl, but lately my group has moved towards more story driven campaigns and this really feels like "omg there's a guy doing bad stuff down there...go stop him, this is your hook, bite it." [/COLOR] [/QUOTE]
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