Speaker in dreams advice

[Pielorinho]

Wizardru, I know about spoiler tags, but decided not to use them in a thread titled "Speaker in Dreams Advice" -- I figure anyone who opens such a thread expects spoilers about the adventure .

[edit: just reread what you were saying and realized you were talking to people who had included spoiler alerts in their posts, not to folks who didn't bother with spoiler warnings. Sorry!]

The wyste encounter is indeed pretty tough -- in fact, when the PCs assaulted the head sorceress during the attack on the bookshop, she summoned another wyste, and it resulted in one of the few deaths in my campaign (I'm a real softie of a DM). However, the Wystes are real easy to run away from, and a simple protection from evil renders them entirely impotent. (The death resulted from a PC taking a boneheaded action: knowing that the critter had tons of tentacular attacks, the sorceress stepped 5' away from it to cast a spell. It then got a full round of attacks on her, ripping her to shreds).

Glad you like the ideas, Daniel Knight! The monkey-demons were definitely campaign specific -- my game is set in a semi-middle-Eastern world, and I wanted the demons to seem exotic but thematically appropriate, so I decided they were from a neighboring country with a semi-Indian aesthetic. I modeled them heavily after the Hanuman figure in Indian mythology:

It worked in context.

Daniel

 

[Pielorinho]

Oh -- and I haven't run any of the other WOTC adventures. I tend to do better coming up with my own stuff than adapting other folks'; given the style of adventure I like to run, it's actually less work for me to start with a clean slate.

Daniel

 

[MerakSpielman]

Interesting. I think my group bypassed that encounter. We did investigate the bookstore, and I have fond memories of slaying a gibbering mouther that had a hold on my wizard with a well-rolled Chill Touch, but "wystes" doesn't ring a bell... Maybe it's because we broke in through the back door in the middle of the night...

 

[Pielorinho]

Merak, I don't think the wyste is a preplanned encounter there -- but the head cultist can summon them, and they're all kinds of nasty (except for the aforementioned weaknesses). Had the fight not been happening in a small house, she would've summoned more than the one.

Ooh, one more change: if you have Tome and Blood, slap the Alienist template on the head cultist. It's a perfect fit, and it's pretty fun describing the uber-oogy creatures she summons. Don't make a dire weasel look like a weasel with tentacles, for example; make it a six-foot-long leech that scuttles on hundreds of little legs and emits a high-pitched keening.

Daniel

 

[Shadowdancer]

I thought the tough encounter he was referencing was the ambush in the alley following the banquet -- the event that kicks off part II of the story. That was the encounter that proved toughest for our group. They got seperated into pairs or individuals, and had to face some pretty tough foes working usually in tandem.

I made the adventure fit into our overall campaign better by making the mind-flayer a recurring unseen villian that the group had encountered before. They had foiled some of his plots, and an assassination attempt aimed at the party as well as an assassination attempt against a party member's mother.

 

[WizarDru]

Merak, I don't think the wyste is a preplanned encounter there -- but the head cultist can summon them, and they're all kinds of nasty (except for the aforementioned weaknesses). Had the fight not been happening in a small house, she would've summoned more than the one.

Ooh, one more change: if you have Tome and Blood, slap the Alienist template on the head cultist. It's a perfect fit, and it's pretty fun describing the uber-oogy creatures she summons. Don't make a dire weasel look like a weasel with tentacles, for example; make it a six-foot-long leech that scuttles on hundreds of little legs and emits a high-pitched keening.

Ummm, eeeewwwwww.

 

[Pielorinho]

Ummm, eeeewwwwww.

This adventure has real potential for Cthulhuesque imagery (by which I mean, really freaking nasty stuff that makes you say, "dude! That's so wrong!") My feeling is that you should run it as such: things should start off just a little bit wrong, and progress creepier and creepier until the players realize that they're facing a full-on Creepy Invasion of the town. They'll be wrong -- rather than invading the town, Creepy is planning on annexing it -- but you can still get some good dread going on that way.

Shadowdancer, I bet you're right about which encounter he was talking about. I rant he encounter a little differently, however, and it wasn't nearly so tough.

I figured that the bad guys wouldn't know whether the players were going to go, and so instead of all being together, they were situated at various outposts on the map (actually, isn't that how it was written?) That meant the players got to deal with the bad guys in little groups instead of all at once, making it a lot more manageable. Add to that their immediate instincts to take to the air via flight spells, thereby gaining rooftop-cover against archers on the ground, and they had a pretty easy time with the encounter. The ogre mage managed to call up some darkness and shepherd the survivors away, but only barely.

Daniel

 

[Shadowdancer]

Shadowdancer, I bet you're right about which encounter he was talking about. I rant he encounter a little differently, however, and it wasn't nearly so tough.

I figured that the bad guys wouldn't know whether the players were going to go, and so instead of all being together, they were situated at various outposts on the map (actually, isn't that how it was written?) That meant the players got to deal with the bad guys in little groups instead of all at once, making it a lot more manageable. Add to that their immediate instincts to take to the air via flight spells, thereby gaining rooftop-cover against archers on the ground, and they had a pretty easy time with the encounter. The ogre mage managed to call up some darkness and shepherd the survivors away, but only barely.

Daniel

Yeah, the bad guys start out spread out all over the alley maze area. If my players had stayed all in one group, they could have handled them easily. But they didn't, so they got what was coming to them.

 

[D+1]

And what was the too-high encounter, D+1?

It's an ambush. The module assumes the PC's to be 5th level, perhaps 6th by the time this encounter occurs:

Spoiler

The party has ostensibly discovered the source of the problems in the city as being the secret cabal whom they have defeated. They are given a feast where they are celebrated as heroes and the DM is encouraged to put up the pretense of this being the end of the module. When they leave the party to go home they face an Ogre Mage 15' away as they enter an alley. It looses a cone of cold at them. According to the author this, "probably cannot affect more than one character," because, "the narrow alley shapes the effect". Mind you this is a 9d6 effect 45' long. Anyone not in view of the alley would be missed by the effect but the author assumes a great deal, thinking only one character would or should be visible when the intelligent Ogre Mage - the one lying in wait to assassinate the PC's - does not seek to maximize the effect of it's most powerful attack. Set that point aside for the moment though. It runs further into the alley, turning invisible and flying upward when out of sight around a corner.

That's the initial setup for the encounter. If the PC's pursue into the alley (and why wouldn't they?) they are faced with a rgr3/asn3, two rog5/asn1, two rog4, a clr4, and a sor4, all hiding in various places in the alleyways ahead, in addition to the Ogre Mage which assumes position behind them blocking their withdrawl back the way they came.

The Ogre Mage ALONE has a CR of 8 and should be a decent if not dangerous fight for a 5th level party. The total number of opponents they'll face here is 8 ranging from 4th level at lowest to the CR8 Ogre. The described tactics for the remains of the encounter are that, "when melee erupts all the assassins converge... acting to ensure that no character escapes..." If they leave the alleyways onto the main streets they will not be pursued. The likelihood of anyone getting to the street alive seems nonexistent since they'll have to fight their way out past foes intent on preventing them. Foes who outnumber them, and half of whom exceed their character level.

Party: 5th level. Encounter: 12th level. The author notes that the goal of the PC's for the encounter "should be to escape alive." If a DM puts any effort at all into running this encounter capably as written it's a TPK. The EL derived from the creatures faced is in itself manifestly insane when the purpose of the encounter is simply to lead into the second part of the module that deals with the true cause of all the problems going from covert subterfuge to open manipulation.

 

[Pielorinho]

D+1, I think you can safely assume that anyone who's read thus far is unworried about spoilers . As I said before, although this encounter looked tough on paper, in play it was a cakewalk for my PCs: the enemies described are generally incompetent at 3-D combat (excepting, of course, the ogre mage), and once the PCs get off the ground, there's very little they can do to even the odds.

I played the bad guys as smartly as I could, but absent the ability to get quickly onto the roofs, they had to run.

Note that they did use their rope of climbing to get up, and I made the PCs make spot checks to see them doing this; the PCs decided to sacrifice a potential treasure by cutting the rope. That was teh point when the bad guys decided discretion was the better part of running away.

Daniel