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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dave0047" data-source="post: 5780579" data-attributes="member: 74305">Because I'm unable to make it to friends places or my FLGS that often, I thought I'd run an Essentials-Only campaign at home with just my wife using the Essentials adventures (Red Box, Kill the Messengers, Ghost Tower, Dungeon of Ghost Tower, Reavers of Harkenwold, and Cairn of the Winter King). She volunteered to run two characters to my one (I was DMing too) so that we're not walking into a "4+ players" series of modules at half-strength, and we started playing last week having her main character go through the Red Box intro, just for the back story of course.Well anyways, when we were inside the Twisting Halls, she decided our party should go straight east (towards encounter seven) and so we did. We skill-challenged our way past the dragon and beat down the Goblins/Bugbear only to appear in Malareth's room, a Level 5 encounter, as three 1st level characters:Keira (Lvl 1 Druid - Sentinel, Has Healing Word and a Bear companion)Lucan (Lvl 1 Ranger - Hunter)Brannus (Lvl 1 Fighter - Slayer, not exactly the same as the pre-gen)With three characters (sorta-kinda four with the Bear), we were doing okay until we met the masterful Necromancer and his mighty undead posse. About eight rounds into the encounter, with one fell swoop all of our characters were killed. We were immediately bottle-necked at the entrance to the room as the monsters rolled higher initiatives (A +6 Init ON THE SKELETONS!), and because we were taking the dungeon a room at a time, we only laid out a room's worth of tiles. We don't have the Red Box map, so laying out only one room at a time also hurt us I guess. The Hulking Zombie kept getting up with Zombie Rejuvenation which allowed him to actually kill my Fighter on the last round, Malareth recharged his area blast almost every time (okay, that was just bad luck for us), and the Skeletons just wouldn't drop with a 19 AC and 45 Hit Points. At the end, we had the Hulking Zombie dolphining, one Skeleton dead, one Bloodied, and a few hit points off of the rest.I mean, I hear that Irontooth is hard (the Goblin leader guy from H1 - Keep on the Shadowfell) but honestly the party of four I was DMing for at the time had zero issues with him. They gang-raped that fool. But Malareth? Wow, all together, those skeletons, the zombie, and the necromancer were all a bit too much for us.So what I'm asking is two parts: what did we do wrong, and has anyone else had  issues with the Malareth fight which is Encounter Seven from the  Twisting Halls in the Red Box?--Update--While I was typing this, my wife and I decided that we should make some new characters (ignoring the essentials-only restriction) and try again. Thoughts on this?</blockquote>

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