Tom Cashel said:
Wow...this thread kind of died, eh?
My PCs got through the first 9 encounters in a seven-hour session.
My guys managed to get through most of the Dordrien Crypt and the caverns during the first session, including the spider-kisser hide-out.
The first encounter nearly killed three people, but they got through it without any permanent damage.
They got a little paranoid after that, but the next couple of encounters were easy, and they got overconfident quickly, which led them to break into lady Quellen's (sp?) tomb without much caution (although they disabled the Slay Lving trap) - but then, to my disgust, they managed to make something like 90% of the resulting saves... Hate it when foolishness goes unpunished
The mold they bypassed altogether (spotted it, and decided no way in hell they're messing with it), but the Roper they failed to notice completely, until it acted - and then most of them lost initiative. I had
three people grabbed and being reeled in, two with low single-digit strength by that point, when the sorcerer got lucky with a fireball, pierced that SR 25, and rolled something like 40 damage, killing the Roper on the spot.
They rested for a day after that, found the illusory walls, and went after the Bebiliths... Which I actually toned down, slightly, and they still took a very heavy beating - and went into the Spider Kisser fight almost immediately afterwards. (I removed the Araneas, I thought they weren't an interesting encounter, and that there were too many encounters on top of one another already, each of which the party was expected to handle individually, which was completely unrealistic given how close together all the enemies were squashed before I made some changes...) They weren't quite preparred for the level of resistance, and ended up loosing one character to a well-placed Ice Storm before they were done cleaning the place out.
Things kind of went downhill from there - they got to the Chasm, did something unwise that announced their presence to the drow, fell back after encountering resistance, got ambushed by the raiding party at night, lost two characters, and had to pull back to town for reinforcements. (They nearly got TPKed and had to run for it, so they didn't have the dead characters' bodies, not that they were viable targets for Raise Dead anyway, not after getting dropped to -20 / -30 with Flamestrikes.)
They went back in, using more stealth, and cunningly made their first major surprise attack... against the Drow guard barracks. They won, and didn't alert the town this time because of a well-placed silence spell, but they took a lot of damage for relatively little gain, and they teleported to the surface.
When they came back the following time, their stealth tactics were even better, but they failed to do any scrying / divination, and fell into a really basic ambush made possible by a couple of Alarm spells... While climbing the chasm, they got jumped by a caster with Dispel Magic who afterwards went Improved Invisible and started to harass them, as well as the gargantuan fiendish spider... The party Paladin had his Spider Climb dispelled while on the wall, and got reduced to 0 STR by the spider, the Rogue and Druid also got mauled, but they managed to kill the spider eventually, as well as more guards - but just as it looked like they were going to pull off a (fairly) one-sided win, the Sorcerer, who was Spider Climbing the wall away from the central web (and the major concentration of strands that could have stopped a fall), got hit by Polymorph Other, turned into a fish, and fell around 300 feet...
Then they re-grouped again, went in again, actually learned a lot, but then got into a fight which I threw in to basically a) Give them an idea of the kind of enemies they might face, without making it overpowering and b) Let them make up some xp, because between all those deaths and close calls, they weren't doing so well - but through
ty luck they ended up with two characters dead.
They kind of lost their enthusiasm for the module after that, and I don't know if we'll be getting back to it...
