Treasure & experience in Gardmore Abbey (minor spoilers)

[darkbard]

Greetings, gang. I'm preparing to run my players through Madness at Gardmore Abbey and have some questions. Has anyone prepared a list of the treasure rewards in the adventure? I've heard the allotment is low, below the recommended treasure parcels of either the original DMG or the RC. I suppose I can go through each encounter in the adventure books and then match the published rewards against the parcels, but why reinvent the wheel if someone has already done something similar?

Also, since I plan to replace many of the monetary and item rewards with items from player wish lists and fanciful creations of my own devising anyway, does anyone have a rough idea of how leveling may progress according to the published material? Though I certainly love the freedom of the sandlot approach of this adventure, it does make anticipating leveling, and thus reward placement, difficult.

The adventurers will enter the adventure with the "Knight of Mithrendain" quest should that help anyone anticipate answers to any of my questions above.

Finally, I run all my skill challenges these days using the "iserith" method. While some of the skill challenges in this adventure are closer to what he has discussed on these boards many times, I wonder if anyone has sketched out some replacements along these lines for what's published.

Many thanks!

 

[Jan van Leyden]

I'm using a different approach to treasure. Having decided upfront that Madness will cover two levels, I prepared the treasures from a very old wish list my players handed me (and have completely forgotten about in the meantime). Now I completely ignore the treasure info from the adventure but drop the items whenever appropriate. This means that I can react on the way the players are approaching Gardmore Abbey, which is hard to foresee.

So no, I can't give you hints regarding the amount of treasure.

 

[Neil1889]

If it helps XP wise, I ran the scenario (with some tweaking for this particular campaign) with six players (plus invariably a Companion Character) pushing from upper 5th level to midway through 9th level. The PC's pursued most major leads and gathered the deck (now they're off to destroy it!).

Treasure-wise, I gave a few of the interesting miscellany items out as extras, counted some art objects as part of the expected wealth levels but loosely stuck to the plan generated by the parcel system, though I did hand out some of the money due from the next higher level as it seemed more appropriate that certain monsters should be richer than others. Sometimes the PC's encountered the richer one first. It was all very fluid, but the PC's were committed to finishing the adventure.

Some monsters will move about due to events in the scenario, but they also made for 'random encounters' in the wilds later when the PC's were traversing back and forth to rest areas. Some times monsters fled one battle to turn up later.

 

[Tobold]

If you add up the xp of all the encounters in Madness at Gardmore Abbey you end up with over 50,000 points, which you have to divide by the number of players. In my campaign I switched all quests to "minor", because otherwise my group could have gained 4 levels in that adventure, and I found 3 levels quite enough.

On the treasure side I did more or less stick to the adventure as written. There are treasure descriptions like "The hoard includes a suit of level 7 common magic armor, a level 9 uncommon magic weapon, and a common magic head slot item of level 9 to 11." where you have to select the actual items yourself. I didn't give out more magic treasure than that because I considered that finding the cards of the Deck of Many Things was like finding magic items, especially once the players learn how to control the card effects.

 

[darkbard]

Thanks for the feedback, folks! I'm leaning toward running the adventure with utilizing inherent bonuses (which will cut the magic items in half) and not tracking experience points but just leveling up characters when it seems appropriate, maybe two or three times throughout based on the feedback here.