DreadPirateMurphy
Explorer
I'm almost done running my son through the Speaker in Dreams...which I posted about in another thread. Now I'm looking at The Standing Stone, and...ooh, boy.
We've got a new monster and a new template, the hobyah and the gravewight. I mean...is there really a shortage of evil outsiders and undead in the game? The first can go away in favor of either quasits...or maybe mephits, depending upon how much I decide I want to play the misdirect built into the module's premise. Gravewights gain energy drain and...a slam attack? Why? My initial thought is to go with the Fiend Folio swordwraith template instead, but I have to look at it again.
My real problem is that the villain again has a completely stupid scheme. Bad guy needs minions to "infiltrate society to prepare it for a fiendish invasion." Sigh. So what does he do? Move to the middle of nowhere and start turning chipmunks and squirrels into first-level humans...because, why? At least the illithid in the last module had mind control and recruited minions to do the same thing. This is almost as bad as the first module's druid trying to take over the world with twigs.
My thought to fix this is to make the real goal of the evil group some treasure inside the barrow of the warlord (which I also intend to redesign to not look like a maze on the back of a box of Raisin Bran). They replaced the folks in Ossington as a way of securing their base. When the PC's show up, they decide that letting the party go into the barrow to take care of the threats is a better idea than risking it themselves. Then, when the PC's get the prize, they can get ambushed on the way back to the village. The ghost and the elves don't have to change much under this scenario.
Any suggestions...especially from folks who have run through this adventure already? I'm really looking for some good ideas as I rewrite swaths of this module.
We've got a new monster and a new template, the hobyah and the gravewight. I mean...is there really a shortage of evil outsiders and undead in the game? The first can go away in favor of either quasits...or maybe mephits, depending upon how much I decide I want to play the misdirect built into the module's premise. Gravewights gain energy drain and...a slam attack? Why? My initial thought is to go with the Fiend Folio swordwraith template instead, but I have to look at it again.
My real problem is that the villain again has a completely stupid scheme. Bad guy needs minions to "infiltrate society to prepare it for a fiendish invasion." Sigh. So what does he do? Move to the middle of nowhere and start turning chipmunks and squirrels into first-level humans...because, why? At least the illithid in the last module had mind control and recruited minions to do the same thing. This is almost as bad as the first module's druid trying to take over the world with twigs.
My thought to fix this is to make the real goal of the evil group some treasure inside the barrow of the warlord (which I also intend to redesign to not look like a maze on the back of a box of Raisin Bran). They replaced the folks in Ossington as a way of securing their base. When the PC's show up, they decide that letting the party go into the barrow to take care of the threats is a better idea than risking it themselves. Then, when the PC's get the prize, they can get ambushed on the way back to the village. The ghost and the elves don't have to change much under this scenario.
Any suggestions...especially from folks who have run through this adventure already? I'm really looking for some good ideas as I rewrite swaths of this module.
