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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6245095" data-attributes="member: 5143">I can tell you that in my longest run campaign, the one I talk about above where I ran Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil followed by Return to Maure Castle (and then started running a converted Labyrinth of Madness before we decided to end it when 4e came out) this is what happened:Spolers for Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil:[sblock]The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is almost entirely one big dungeon divided into sections by elemental faction.  The adventure spelled out that the different factions of the dungeons hated each other and wouldn't work together.  They were happy to see the other factions get killed by adventurers, confident that they would succeed where the other factions failed and therefore inherit all of the other faction's space and power.There were also monsters that lived in the buffer space between the temples.  They were not affiliated with any of the temples and didn't care for the plight of any of the temples.The leadership faction who was in charge of the whole "temple" didn't care about any of their followers.  The lesser factions were there as a buffer...as fodder.  Their work was too important.  They were going to free their god, Tharizdun and he was going to destroy the world and them with it.  They were happy to be destroyed in his honor...so were all their underlings.  The underlings were there to buy them time until their ritual could be completed and the world destroyed.Most of the time the adventurers came back the next day whenever they'd leave and attack.  The temple's didn't really have the resources to made new defenses in 24 hours.  Most of the factions only have 12-20 members.  The adventure even spelled out that the guards guarding the outside gates would be replaced but generally took a week or so for them to recruit new guards and put them on guard duty.Heck, the first couple of times the PCs attacked I made it so that the temple residents were so confused that these adventurers showed up and left again that they wrote it off as a one time thing...they had successfully repelled the adventurers who were afraid of their vast magic and power(they were standard villains and way too full of themselves).After it happened a number of more times, they were a little more wary.  They tried their best to be on the lookout for random adventurers wandering their way into their temples.  They put people on watch, but they still had to go about their daily lives and couldn't watch 24 hours a day.  They had no idea when the PCs would show up again.  Especially because the PCs would take random days off.  They made one trip to Greyhawk City and back again which took nearly a month and made the entire dungeon think the incursion was over.Because the temples didn't really talk to one another, news of the PCs didn't reach the other temples who were just as confused the first time the PCs showed up and attacked them.  When the PCs got to high enough level, they'd often teleport back into the temple behind their defenses.The residents of the temple had lived there for years before the PCs showed up with no problems for the longest time.  They only had to defend themselves against attacks from the other temples.  Those happened rarely.[/sblock]Spoilers for Return to Maure Castle:[sblock]In Maure Castle, the point of the adventure was that no one had entered or left the place in a couple of hundred years.  Almost every monster in there didn't have contact with any other monster.  They were either mindless or lived in their corner of the dungeon and didn't care about the other residents having a couple hundred years ago stopped even leaving their rooms.There were a couple of small compounds of intelligent beings.  However, most of the time the PCs teleported in and without being seen or heard opened a door, killed the occupant and then teleported out before anyone even noticed.  The other residents would look around for whoever killed their friend, couldn't find them and then went back to doing what they normally did when the problem was written off as unsolvable given that none of them had magical powers.[/sblock]They split the party?  You never split the party.  Rule number #1.  No one in our group would leave if the rest of the party stayed.  They'd suggest that leaving was the best option, if they were outvoted they'd stay and risk their lives.  Though, they normally weren't outvoted because the rest of the party didn't care if they stayed or left.  They wanted to get the treasure from the monsters but whether they did it today or tomorrow was all the same to them.</blockquote>

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