Which module in WotC's Adventure Path Series is the deadliest?

[Barendd Nobeard]

The DM will have to put quite some work into that module to make it fun (and not just an endless queue of very repetitive (and tough) h-n-s encounters). Otherwise, my recommendation is to skip this crappy module and rather spend your time in a more enjoyable fashion.

Bye
Thanee

Good advice, Thanee. It is *very* repetitive.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I've only run the first two, but having read all of them except Deep Horizon, my vote goes to Heart of Nightfang Spire. For the given levels that's total TPK material. And pretty badly designed on top of that. Lord of the Iron Fortress is probably the next toughest.

My sentiments exactly. I was just about ready to vote LotIF, with steel predators on my mind, and then I remembered HoNS and the simple joys of a monkey knife-fight-- err, I mean getting ripped to shreds by gorillons and unlimited hordes of shadows.

Wulf

 

[VorpalBunny]

For my group, it was Heart of Nightfang Spire. My players had a blast with the adventure, but the tower racked up 4 kills in the process. The next deadliest for us was Forge of Fury (2 kills).

 

[WizarDru]

Nightfang Spire, definitely. Poorly conceived, lacking in variety and death dealt out in arbitrary fashion. Citadel and Spire had variety and challenges, and held together very nicely. Spire was just a bataan death march of the undead. It definitely reads better than it plays. Check my story hour and Wulf's for examples of how it played out.

Second place goes to Bastion, with its nasty CR21 to EL26 creature that is defeated with the help of a CR22 deus ex machina, i.e. the designer's 'savior' NPC. Talk about a railroad of death.

 

[slingbld]

I selected Lord of the Iron Fortress. I ran a group through the entire path. I was torn between this one and Heart of Nightfang SPire. 3 Characters (out of 6) were killed at some point in Nightfang.
but in Lord of the Iron Fortress, 2 characters dies twice & every character had at least one death. As a result, I had to create a side trek adventure to get thier levels up enough to finish this module

 

[Aristotle]

I've run the first two adventures in the path, so I can't accurately answer the poll. I did have one character death in the first adventure, and two character deaths in the second adventure. The first adventure was a combat death, but one of the characters who died in the second adventure fell while climbing. I gave him two attempts to save himself, but the dice were not on his side.

 

[Kershek]

I have a campaign that is currently about to start Nightfang. They are min-maxed 40 point characters and have had a death in Forge (cleric, against a brown bear that critted with both claws), Speaker (wizard, against The Speaker), and Standing (same wizard, against the sorcerer). I've been trying to prepare them for a deadly future by dropping hints that the "Gulthias" quest is very difficult, so we'll see how it goes.

I didn't vote since I haven't finished running all the modules in the series.

 

[Gotterdammerung]

Nightfang Spire, all the way.

I've just finished running my group through (a moderately altered) Nightfang Spire. It certainly lived up to its reputation as a meat-grinder, but my players really got into this adventure. They worked together better than they ever have before, simply to survive. We all came away from it very, very satisfied.

To keep up the level of horror-suspense, I filled many empty rooms with random apparitions of former cultists, victims, and adventurers who perished within the Spire. The more my group could learn about the history of the place, the more they despised the villains waiting at the end of it.

In a party of 6 characters, 4 of them died (one even died twice...). But surprisingly, the deaths were the result of combat going against them, not from the Spire's (many) horrific traps.

-eric

 

[Falling Icicle]

I played in the Forge of Fury more than two years ago now, and I still haven't forgotten it.

Here is an adventure supposedly designed for low level characters and there is a Sucubus, Roper (!!!), Black Dragon, horrible molds, and let's not be forgetting the animated carpet...

It was only through the most intense caution, extreme luck, and insidious cunning that we managed to survive. And even then we survived only barely. Our only way of killing the roper was to have the Wizard's owl familiar do bombing runs where it would fly and drop alchemists fire on it and keep doing that until it died. And that was after we very nearly lost a character that got grabbed by it. Luckily we had a rope tied to him. It took a warhorse and 4 other party members engaged in tug of war with the Roper to pull him free. And he came within one round (and a few HPs) of being eaten. The Succubus drained levels from one party member and nearly killed all of us when we retaliated. The mold drained double didgits of Con from the poor rogue. Heck, we were actually relieved to see that the boss at the end of the dungeon was "merely" a black dragon.

And don't even get me started on the animated carpet...

It was fun, I won't deny that. There is a satisfaction that comes from being able to say that our 4-5th level characters actually survived the Forge of Fury. But we have been extremely skeptical of the "Designed for 4 characters of X-Y level" on the back of adventure modules ever since.

 

[Kershek]

Falling Icicle, it sounds like you just described a great adventure. It was very difficult, but survivable, and you still remember it 2 years later.