Modifying KotS

[Serpens]

I'm going to soon (hopefully, RL keeps getting in the way of our group's table time :/) going to be DMing for the first time for our group. To keep things simpler for me, I suggested that we jsut do Keep on the Shadowfell, and the group was quite happy to go along with that. However, I've heard that that module is not quite... balanced, to put it nicely (I've read horror stories about the Irontooth encounter in particular).

What changes can i (or should I) make to the module to make it run a bit smoother? In particular, the party will only have 4 PCs (2 players with 2 characters each). If the combats are already hard when they are supposed to be tuned for 5, 4 is probably really going to be pushing it. Can anyone give me some suggestions for retuning various bits of the enounters or otherwise changing the module? Or link me to somewhere where that's all already be done would be great too, no sense re-inventing the wheel

 

[hong]

It's really only the Irontooth encounter that's problematic, and that because he's likely to be one of the first big fights they have. One fix is to have the guy in town send the party to the keep first, rather than clearing out the kobolds.

And this should be in General Discussion, really.

 

[Wrathamon]

First, are you running the store bought one or the free one off the wotc site?

If store bought... goto wizards.com and grab the free one. They updated it and changed some encounters, adjusted some of the stats and fixed the premade characters.


The Iron Tooth encounter can be rough only if the outside encounter and the inside encounter merge into a mega encounter of badness.

I ran it with 4 PCs and it was tough but they handled it.

The blue ooze thing is also very tough

The main thing I did was cut a major portion of the dungeon crawling out... I saw my player's getting a bit bored with the crawl and I only used the interesting encounters and moved the magic items around in the keep.

This helped a lot, but that depends on your group's play style.