Yesterday I ran "Cross City Race" from Dungeon Magazine #176.
The Adventure is written for lvl 1-3. So I ran it for my level 8 group as written with some minor changes and tweaks. It was really fun and the player enjoyed it. Except when the "wrong player character" won (read not theirs).
Only thing I would change how to run it, would be having an easier table to see what route has what skill rolls as I had to scroll back and forth in the pdf.
So definitively an adventure that I would recommend to everyone that wants to have a change of pace in their game.
I put a write-up of the race from yesterday and the changes i did in a spoiler block.
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The race took around 1 hour from start to finish with 4 players at level 8. (Cleric, Warlock, Barbarian|Cleric and Ranger). So I am happy with the changes that I made to speed the race up.
The Race Track:
There are 5 parallel Tracks that lead to the tower (rich roof route, rich street route, main street route, poor street route, poor roof route). Each route is split into 3 parts with different situations/skill challenges. You can always move to the next adjacent route on your turn. At the end all routes come together to the final part. climbing a tower.
Changes:
-there are some NPCs that should participate in the race, but I winged it completely. No rolling for them. this helps a lot with speeding up the race
-Reduced the amounts of success needed to clear each stage to 3 instead of 4.
-changed the "Dog Encounter" from aggressive Dogs to Puppies that want to play. Each with attacks that either Jump at the player (knocking them prone) or a playful bite attack against their shoes, grabbing them
-Natural 20 gives you 2 successes, a 1 will knock you off the roof, you fall into the water or sth like that
No changes made to the DCs. Even though it is written for lvl 1-3 characters, my players dice rolling luck made it clear, not to increase the difficulty for this
Before the race, the group did some research on the available routes.
Cleric(Milli) -> rich street route
Warlock(Lars) -> poor street route
B|C(John) and Ranger(Marc) -> poor roof route
The only real threat for them seemed to be an Half-Orc Athlete that I named Unseen Bolt who wanted to power through main street, which was buzzing with people going along their average day shopping/work.
The Race went extremely well. Lars took the lead early on, while John and Marc fought for balance running through a flock of pigeons.
Milli got the worst luck. In the rich street some alchemical experiment went wrong, so the street was filled with sparkly violet Fog. After inhaling some of that stuff, she decided to climb onto the roof, only to find out that this one is hot. Burning her feat, she decided to jump down and head for main street, only to land face first from the jump.
Meanwhile Lars arrived at the river and tried to get onto one of the present barges that were transporting goods up and down the river to get over.
John and Marc had a head to head race, only for John to take the lead when they arrived at the old city wall that was their way to get over the river. So John, in all his elegance, made the path behind him crumble causing Marc to fall of the wall and into the river.
Meanwhile Milli made it through the crowed main street, arriving at the bridge only to get an excellent idea. Using her boots of waterstride (or whatever they are called). She ran over the river and thereby avoiding the chaos on the bridge where two carts crashed into each other and were stuck.
In the meantime Lars made it over the river only to get lost in halfling town but being the closest to the tower.
At this point the order was Lars-Milli/John-Marc.
And the finish couldn't have gone better.
Lars still had trouble in halfling town and John tripped and thereby collapsing the wall, falling into the river.
And Marc went on a crit streak. In his next 4 rolls he rolled 3 20s allowing him to be the first at the tower, right before the others arrived.
This one turn of early arrival lead to Marc winning the thing. With Lars/Milli in 2nd place and John right behind them.
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