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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DJINNIMAN" data-source="post: 5490448" data-attributes="member: 6670984">I just ran this as well, and I changed it fairly significantly.  I decided that Yisarn and the Spider together was a bit much, and wanted to spice the encounter up a bit by giving them an alternate objective than just "kill everything".I told the group that Yisarn was protected by four skeletons instead of two.  In the webs, they saw the dessicated corpse of a huge spider.  Yisarn, who knew the PCs were coming due to a creepy eye that appeared on the wall of the adjacent room as they fought the goblins, was attempting to reanimate the dragon bones with his lightning energy.I told the PCs that they could disrupt his work by doing damage to him.  If they let him go three rounds without damage, the dragon bones would animate as a level 4 version of a skeletal dragon from the Monster Builder.The group burst in the door, and the Knight promptly fell into the pit.  He eventually got out, and the Thief jumped right over, but the skeletons moved up and bottlenecked them.  The mage and shaman kept back behind the pit, too scared to attempt a jump.  They helped whittle down the skeletons, a bit too easily, I think.  I should have had the skeletons crack their own ribs and throw them as missile weapons at the casters or something instead of concentrating on the Knight and Thief.  The paladin decided to go around and try the other door.  Sure enough, he fell in as well.  He did get up eventually and took on Yisarn toe to toe.  The necrotic burst was pretty strong here, but I found that the pushback actually helped the PCs stay alive somewhat.  Yisarn only got one round without damage at all, so the dragon bones weren't animated.  He eventually fell, but the release of his necromantic energies animated the spider.  I took away the annoying blindness to speed the combat up.To sum up:+ giving the PCs the chance to affect the outcome was great.  The spider was much easier than the dragon would have been.+ Yisarn was really tough but keeping his attention focused on animating the bones for a couple rounds made it a more fair fight.- Not enough significant output from the casters.  I felt they were frustrated being stuck behind the traps.  They didn't want to risk entering since their skills for that were so low.- Way too easy to disrupt Yisarn.  I wanted to deemphasize "kill everything" and I did that... by making them kill ONE thing.  I could have killed two birds with one stone by requiring Arcane, Religion, etc. checks to counteract Yisarn's casting instead of doing damage.  Thus the casters would have had a chance to shine.I'm really learning a lot by running these pre-made adventures.  I'm sure this experience will be invaluable as I attempt to make my own encounters soon.</blockquote>

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