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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack99" data-source="post: 5138767" data-attributes="member: 53135">Yeah, we evaluated right after the wipe, and they all agreed that 99/100 times, they would have survived that fight.See below <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />------------------The new party is as follows:Arpametan (Human Tome wizard)Yurk (Half-orc Barbarian/Assassin)Elron (Human Bear Shaman)Wrek (Goliath Tempest Fighter)River (Elf Archer Ranger)[sblock=A very short introduction][/sblock][sblock=Comment]I normally don't start off with a brand new party like this, but one of my players is getting married in 10 days, so weekend was kinda booked by his bachelor party, and since all from the group were participating, we just didn't have the time to work on backgrounds and all sort of fluff. Several of the characters weren't done until right before the game. Such is life.[/sblock]Freeday 4th Nauvambor, Year 599At the Alehouse, the 5 heroes met for the first time. No sooner had they introduced themselves to each other, before an aging halfling named Viktor approached them. He hired them to carry and protect 10.000 gp north to a small village called Sirena. There the party should use the money to buy an item from a fellow named Jaspar, and then they should return with the item.Lordday 5th Nauvambor, Year 599The next morning, they set off from the northern harbor, in a boat provided by Viktor. They sailed throughout the day, handling naval obstacles with no problems, and when the darkness fell, they found a spot to stop for the night and made camp. No sooner had they made camp, before our heroes noticed that they were being watched. It turned out to be five Grey Wolves, xenophobic elves living in this area of the Forest of Nine Songs, and they hadn't come to talk. A short and bloody fight later, and the elves were dead.Sonday 6th Nauvambor, Year 599The next morning, the party moved on, sailing north towards Siren Lake and Sirena.  Again, the day went without any problems, with the party just sitting in the boat and freezing, At night, they once again made camp next to the river. The snow had started falling quite heavily, so they used the boat to cover them against the worst of the downpour. The night went uneventfully, and while they were just about to leave, River suddenly got the idea that he should check the surrounding area. He snuck out of the camp and quickly found some tracks  near the camp. He quickly alerted the others and then followed the tracks. Suddenly the tracks stopped, and for a second, they thought they had lost whoever had made them. Then River looked up and saw a cloaked figure suspended in the air, almost obscured by the heavy snowfall.Battle was engaged, and while their foe was alone, he quickly showed himself to be a formidable opponent. And the stakes didn't get lower when the heroes that they were fighting a mind flayer! 5 against 1, but it still proved a tough fight. After the fight, the party talked a lot amongst themselves. Some knew what a mind flayer was, and they thought it was very odd that it was here. The most prevalent theory was that it hadn't intended to be seen, that it was following them in order to get the item the party had been sent to pick up.[sblock=Thoughts]The encounter with the mindflayer was a test. I have been pondering about using higher level monsters against low level players while still creating interesting and balanced combats. What I do is that I remove 5 levels from the monster and switches it one category (minion->standard->elite->solo) up. Repeat until the monster is in the right level range. Then tweak it's attacks to match it's newfound category. So the level 14 mind flayer becomes a level 9 elite (which is too high still) and then a level 4 solo. So, I end up with a monster that can actually be hit, but still can stand up to a party. I sorta like it, as it enables me to have my low-level players encounter and battle stuff like drows and mind flayers who are on their own. It worked decently with the mind flayer, but it was sorta of last minute addition, and I should probably have spent more time (that I didn't have) tweaking it's powers and abilities.[/sblock]After throwing the corpse in the river, they continued north. Towards the afternoon, they finally arrived to the Siren Lake, and soon found Sirena.When they arrived, they found it odd that no one came down to the harbor and greeted them. As they approached the village, they noticed that most villagers were busy fortifying their houses. Talking with a few villagers informed the party that the village had suffered several attacks from some winged drakes, and that the leader of the village was called Mavros.Soon enough they found Mavros and via him, Jaspar, who turned out to be the village's baker. They made the deal, buying the item (which turned out to be a magical rod of some sort), and also making a deal to escort Jaspar back to Fallcrest, along with all his newfound money.After having concluded their deal, they decided to give a  hand with the fortification of the town, which was suddenly interrupted by screams caused by the sudden arrival of several drakes.[sblock=Thoughts]Not much to say. In general it was a very quiet evening, with semi-easy combats (none higher than n+1) and a fairly straight-forward story. I usually make sure that I do not make things too hard on the first night after a TPK (or semi-TPK as this was the case). New characters, new powers etc means that a party will only operate at around 80% efficiency or something like that, which means they would break under too much pressure. And nothing kills a campaign faster than 2 TPK's in a row.The adventure I am running is actually a rip-off of an official adventure (Remains of the Empire, Dungeon 165), although it is changed to introduce one of the future recurrent enemies of the players, the Sons of Winter, an evil organization who wishes to acquire the ancient evil artifact(tm) buried beneath Fallcrest, and to set the players on the trail of the artifact as well. I might introduce another evil group, the Seekers, although I am not quite sure yet how I will introduce them.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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