Your Experience With Red Hand of Doom

[DM_Jeff]

It was fun to DM. There were times when I wished there was a little break in the action -- the players immediately saw the need for speed and did cool things like push their mounts past the normal travel limits, but then cheesed out by using a wand of cure light wounds on them.[/url]

LOL! This nearly mimics my experience as well. We all had real great fun running/playing it out, but the breakneck speed meant a lot of personal player quests didn't ever come up (no time, you see...) and there were loads of great nights, but when it ended, the group was like, that's it? There's no more? Not that it wasn't a great ending (they liked that too) but the time playing their characters...well, they hardly got to know them. The weeks flew by while playing it!

-DM Jeff

 

[HugeOgre]

The RPGA adapted this adventure for its Living Greyhawk campaign, and as players our team has now reached the first major objective of the adventure. I like it so far, though we have a full table (6 people) and a couple over the average party members (9th instead of 6th) so the adventure heretofore has gone pretty easy, almost to the point of being underpowered. The DM assures us though that it will come up to speed very quickly, and we neednt worry about it being boring.

 

[Seeker95]

Early returns indicate this adventure is a Go!

 

[Obergnom]

LOL! This nearly mimics my experience as well. We all had real great fun running/playing it out, but the breakneck speed meant a lot of personal player quests didn't ever come up (no time, you see...) and there were loads of great nights, but when it ended, the group was like, that's it? There's no more? Not that it wasn't a great ending (they liked that too) but the time playing their characters...well, they hardly got to know them.

That was the reason why my group did not finish it. (I was a player in it). No possiblility to do something you planed for your character because of the fast paced plot. I felt like being unable to contribute to the game world, there was that plot, some cross roads where we had to decide what to do, but in the end, we (the players) where there to solve the encounters, that was all. (Which were to easy for us, a party of 3 characters one level above the sugestion)
Oh, my DM failed to make us want to win that battle, we were thinking about leaving the valley quite often.

 

[Bavix]

Too Much Too Fast

That was the reason why my group did not finish it. (I was a player in it). No possiblility to do something you planed for your character because of the fast paced plot. I felt like being unable to contribute to the game world, there was that plot, some cross roads where we had to decide what to do, but in the end, we (the players) where there to solve the encounters, that was all.

This is the exact reason that I will never run any of these new mega adventures or adventure paths as serious, long-term campaigns. They advance WWWAAAAAYYYYY to quickly, which is a problem with the core 3E advancement system in general. As a DM and as a player I hate having 20-year old 20th-level characters. As I've read it, all of the Dungeon Magazine adventure paths (1st - 20th level) take place in less than a year's time and Red Hand of Doom (6th - 12th level) is actually on a timeline that's less than a few weeks or less. There's no way to create a memorable campaign with character depth, goals and discovery when players don't even get a chance to use all of their newfound class features before they've advanced again.

 

[RangerWickett]

*shrug* I'm playing in RHoD, and the fact that it's taking us 8+ months to finish the thing (playing every other week) means that it feels long enough. The point of the adventure is to defeat the horde, and so within that framework we're enjoying ourselves. If the DM had sprung it on us and hadn't told us, we might have had very different character character goals that would've been disappointing, but as is, we're thrilled.

The encounters are nicely designed, and it's really not a huge bump in power level from 5th to 10th. We've gone from being experienced warriors to awesome warriors, but still no one has vast cosmic powers. It's not too different from the Lord of the Rings. Now sure, the books take, like, 70 years from start to finish, but in the movie it feels like a month or two at most, and so the pace of Red Hand feels fine.

 

[RangerWickett]

By the way, this was a concern for me when designing War of the Burning Sky. My intention is that the campaign takes at least a year, and maybe as many as four or five. The first two adventures are over the span of just a month, kicking the PCs from 1st to 5th. Then each adventure thereafter assumes at least a month. You can make it go that fast if your players don't want to take their time, or you can stretch things out significantly by having the PCs sit around and train, or go on small side missions while they wait for important intelligence to come in and point the way to the next adventure.

However, lots of important events are going down, and you may find it hard to justify taking so much down time. In such an event, I recommend putting in side quests, and slowing down the rate of gaining XP. Otherwise, I mean, you're in a war. If fighting things in the real world garnered XP the way they did in D&D, we would have a fair number of high-level bad-asses in their 80s and 90s right now, veterans of World War II.

What is the recommended training time for characters gaining levels? A week per level? If so, we're looking at like four or five years. That's a little shorter than how long World War II lasted, but they didn't have teleportation. They did, however, have the Manhattan Project.

 

[Rauthik]

My group played RHoD and we had a great time. Some of the fights were difficult for us because our party was so unbalanced for some sessions (no cleric or arcane spellcaster) and so we found ourselves getting slapped around by Greenspawn Razorfiends and Giants here and there. We had several deaths in our run of it, but that's common for our parties, as they are usually never balanced and some of our players will throw 'the plan' out the window in the first round of combat and charge. So, it was difficult but we brought that on ourselves.
My only complaint about the adventure, and this goes for most published adventures, is that there tends to be no treasure for the PCs to use for later in the adventure. At tenth level, you don't need another half dozen +1 short swords or cloaks of resistance +1 for the party treasure pool. You need a better sword than what you were using or magic boots (or whatever). It seems that with this adventure (and say Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil) that by the end of it you have gone up six levels or more and have the same equipment you started with... but now you have to fight Tiamat or an Elemental Prince. Somehow the +1 short swords you were collecting all along don't seem so good. This adventure at least had the halfling in town that you could buy stuff from but we couldn't afford anything because there wasn't a lot of loot from fights.
All in all, now that I've rambled a bit, I'd say it was a good adventure but as with most published modules the DM should consider adding in some rewards here and there for the players. It just sucks to face the BBEG with only a +1 sword and no magic armor, when your 10th level.

 

[RangerWickett]

We carried everything we looted from the hobgoblins, so each horse had just a bag full of +1 short swords. When we finally made it to the place with the dwarf mercenaries, we offloaded all that stuff, to the tune of about 40,000 gp, and were able to get nice gear for each PC.

 

[Nightfall]

Hobbys deserve to be vampires.