D&D 5E (2014) Keys from the Golden Vault play reports

[Zardnaar]

Just finished running Heart of Ashes. I'd changed Ghalasine to be an anchor barony in Thelanis, with Baron Jhaeros a minor archfey. The whole "everything goes back to how it was before if you succeed" thing fits really well with the storybook logic of Thelanis. Also, there aren't really any random little out-of-the-way kingdoms in Eberron. If you were to use one of the Five Nations, I feel like it would be a big, huge international event. Not something that the Golden Vault would handle quietly.

Naevys was an autumn eladrin. I had her seek help from Nafas on the Infinite Staircase instead of using the Golden Vault.

It took us two sessions to complete but only because the players didn't properly investigate the room where the Baron's heart is during the first session. This could very easily have been like a half-session adventure. Reaching a floating room is not difficult for my group. Thanks to Naevys' map telling them exactly where the heart is supposed to be, they made a beeline straight for that room. They saw the Baron's golem form but didn't see the heart, so they decided to look elsewhere first.

They could have killed the Baron's golem, found the heart, and then left without ever exploring any other part of the castle. They also had it in their heads that it wasn't worth looting anything because they figured that if removing the heart would reverse all the damage and bring everyone back to life, it would most likely make anything they'd taken teleport back to where they'd found it.

Luckily for me, they didn't find the heart right away, so they explored a tiny bit more of the castle than they might otherwise have.

Despite my best efforts to beef up Charmayne, she still went down like the glass cannon every NPC spellcaster typically is, especially since she's stuck in a tiny "tower" with only a 20-foot high ceiling.

Despite it taking two sessions to complete, I still found this adventure to be ridiculously easy. And the amount of magical treasure they got far outstripped the difficulty of the adventure. This is probably the most monty haul-esque adventure in the whole anthology.

My group just got a ton of magic items for very little effort.

The adventure includes two vials of Oil of Sharpness. I note that the 5.5e version has no duration. It's permanent! Wow! I went with the 5.0e version instead. No way I am giving them two permanent +3 weapons at this point in the game!

Same rarity as a +3 weapon. 1 in tier 2 is RAW and several in tier 3.

Running the level 8 giant one tomorrow. Refurbished as Jergals tomb.

Vault of Velsharoon as a prequel. It has a tone of clear thought in it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

My group talked there way past a lot of the encounters when I ran this adventure. I actually increased power of a lot of the loot, but I ran it at higher level with tougher monsters (about level 10 but this was a while ago so my memory is a bit hazy). I asked for skill checks to avoid being sucked into the void whenever the party crossed a gap, even when flying, and had walls and floors crumbling away when in the AoE of a spell, and enemies trying to toss PCs into the vortex. I also had the floating rooms move about relative to each other.