Hey gang, the DZA here. My group and I are about to finish up Tides of Dread and I've been looking ahead to the LD and checking the boards to see what people thought. I've seen that some people had problems with this installment of the STAP and that some people recommend skipping it, or at least altering it in certain ways. I know the STAP is a little passe these days, but what are your opinions on this adventure? I'd really like to hear from the community.

Lightless Depths is one of the weaker adventures in STAP. But it still a good adventure; STAP is just so much above the norm that this one fell below the standards the adventure path has set.

Its pretty railroaded, and the motivation for some to the things you do at the end is pretty weak. If you do anything, it should be to give your players the information and lassitude to figure out their own solutions to the problems presented - particularly which targets to hit at the end.

I just finished going through this module as a player and found it to be quite fine. We had a couple of near tpks but we got through it.

After many discussions with our DM about the module (I'm also running another group through STAP but they're in SWW at the moment) we felt that the worst section was the endless trip into the depths which really needed to be more glossed over.

Also the Black pudding was deadly and should just be removed especially since it doesn't further the plot in any way.

We managed to handicap ourselves by one of our party deciding that the lizardman prisoner didn't deserve to live.

But regardless of this we managed to ge through and we had very little trouble deciding after a recconaisance flight around Golismorga that we needed to take out the pyramid and then have a look at the bottom of the crater.

At the level your party should be by this stage they should have no trouble making a surgical strike on the pyramid at a time of their own choosing. We only had difficulty in the final room, mainly because the BBEG was another grappler with improved grab. God that is the most broken thing about the rules and this path in particular, the amount of grapplers with insane skills and bonus attacks for improved grab. Ahh rant over, I feel better.

Overall though I think this mod doesn't need too much changing whereas we felt that SWW needed a major overhaul.

good points about the adventure:

Decent encounters in there. Dragon Turtle, Bilewretch, Devourer, Intellect Devourer, Aboleth.

Plenty of space in the middle for some Underdark/Darklands type encounters...driders, etc, whatever you want.

Some really good info re: the history of the Olman people and the Savage Tide, if the party pays attention (tip: when they go through the curtain, fill em in a la flashback telepathy)

a decent change from the overland/city-type adventures of the previous 3 episodes.

Downsides:

Aboleth + touchsight/blindsense/etc = useless RP encounter, go straight to combat. Underwater combat, nonetheless. Not superfun in my opinion.

Destroying the tear seems unreasonably stupid, especially if you figure out the history / purpose of it.

Kopru & Troglodytes are nothing but speed bumps at this level, basically giving free treasure and xp to savvy parties. The Behemoths are a bit more challenging, but still are fly potion dispensaries.

-t

Conceptually, I *really* liked TLD. An abandoned, living city... an artifact that keeps the whole ocean out... a lesser of two evils situation...

I felt this can actually be one of the most open-ended adventures in the whole series, if you let it. Ideally, I felt the PC's *should* try to take out the pyramid before destroying the tear. Best case: they manage it, but have the fight of their lives. Worst case, they get stomped, maybe leading to a tense scene where the surviving PC's flee to the tear to destroy it.

hhmm, my group is about start LD, we just had the "talk" with Lavina and to be honest I was really looking forward to run this. I guess everyone has their own opinions.

...but what are your opinions on this adventure?

Beyond that, I can't think of any major changes.

-Skeld

Worked fine for my party. :D

Thank you so much for the input! I think I might try to rework some things in the adventure, but everything is relative. What works for us may or may not work for you guys. Thanks again!

I had a huge amount of fun running this, although I agree that it was weak in some areas. My party is neutral expedient, which leads to some highly hilarious moments.

The Aboleth in the ruins manages to negotiate with them, and for an expedient crew they're also incredibly trusting. Convinced that destroying the Tear is what they need to do, they venture fearlessly into the depths on a mission of destruction.

Now I admit, I had a GRAND time when they reached the city itself.

For a party that is systematically hunting down the named monsters of the island, it doesn't take much to rattle their chains in here. I actually had to tone it down as they were seriously considering turning around and going home 'RIGHT THE HELL NOW' as I was describing the scenery. Apparently houses that give their own windows tongue baths and one tower that picked up its roots to shift six feet to its left squicked them out. Who knew?

In the end, the tear is destroyed, they ignored the other half of the adventure down there, despite me doing everything short of hanging a neon sign on it with "Adventure continues here" in blinking pink lights, and headed home. We stopped for a hiatus here, but when I pick it up again they're headed to the central plateau, and I need to determine if multilimbed friend from the city swam his way up the connecting channel.

This thread addressed a number of the issues that people have had with the adventure. Much was made about the incentive to destroy the tear.

I thought it was a great adventure personally. The trick, I think, is to play up the absolute weirdness and spookiness of the city of Golismorga. If your PCs can't get a little freaked out by living buildings and the like, they're way too jaded.

As for the "railroading" aspect, I didn't pick up on that at all, really. There are a number of ways to deal with the threat posed by the city and end shadow pearl production (or at least delay for long enough that it doesn't matter for the purposes of the adventure), and each have their own drawbacks and advantages.

We had a GREAT time with this adventure! Then again, a bunch of Lovecraft fans would... I would like to echo the comment above about the black pudding though.

Nah, it has plenty of reason to be there, just as much as any ooze ever does. It's their environment. It's supposed to be tough, and it's good because it makes people think instead of the standard "I hit it with my sword" method of attack.

I think most adventures need more jellys, oozes, molds, etc, not less. They're an under-appreciated monster type. Just because they are mindless doesn't mean they're not dangerous, challenging, or fun to have to try to deal with.

And if you do get TPK'd by a CR-appropriate creature with 0 INT, what's that say about your party? :)

as far as the puddings, they were pretty much a non-threat for my party.

The conjurer had a "favorable wind" prepared, as always (he was ships mage and always had stuff like detect ships, raise from the deeps, and the like prepared, or at least on scrolls) so the poison gas was a non-issue

the rest of the party stayed back while the ranger put about 6 or 12 arrows in the critter, splitting it a bunch of times

the warmage, pyrokineticist, cleric, and nomad all hit the (much reduced HP) remaining critters with area affect spells, and after a couple rounds of combat it was all over.

kind of a let down in my opinion, but most parties don't have touchsight or blindsense in effect all the time. from my PLAYING with my group, I have taught them that perception, communication, and transportation is what magic is all about. Feel free to replace the word magic with psionics in the previous sentence.

-t

I should be running the encounter with Vanthus tomorrow night, which will hopefully wrap up ToD (we've spent the last 3 game sessions running the Battle of Farshore). I definitely enjoy being able to see other peoples thoughts and opinions of adventures before I run them for my players.

Makazu - thanks for that link, that was a great help!

Yeah, my PCs breezed past the pudding too.

The scout/barbarian (with boots of striding & springing, base move 70ft...) got past the ooze, and then pelted down the corridor heading away from it, just keeping far enough ahead to keep it following him. Pudding is mindless, so just kept chasing him even as the rest of the PCs followed along behind it and fireballed it into a little spot of grease.

Didn't lose even a single hit point in the encounter.

Yeah, my PCs breezed past the pudding too.

Problem my group had was that they didn't have Knowledge (Dungeoneering), so no one knew about the Split ability... barbarian won initiative, full attacked, all suddenly all four of them are getting attacked by separate puddings.

Looking at the side view map and the conclusion of the adventure...

Kirth Gersen wrote:

Problem my group had was that they didn't have Knowledge (Dungeoneering), so no one knew about the Split ability... barbarian won initiative, full attacked, all suddenly all four of them are getting attacked by separate puddings.

Neither did mine, but they learnt all about Split under Dark Mountain Pass in Here There Be Monsters...

Looking at the side view map and the conclusion of the adventure...

Did anyone else think that it should have ended with

Looking at the side view map and the conclusion of the adventure...

** spoiler omitted **

I know of a couple groups that completely dodged the first fight though in Dark Mountain Pass, either because they never checked that side of the complex, because they spotted the pudding and saw no need to fight it, or because they they went within 10ft. of it.

*Which ironically, I did in my new group recently when we were playing Crypt of Lyzandred. We fell into a room with Big D, and when I saw him, I sprinted as fast as possible away from him. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as we thought though ;)

Looking at the side view map and the conclusion of the adventure...

** spoiler omitted **

Ok, I know this is sort of an old thread but I'm currently running LD in my campaign so I thought I'd share my experiences with it.

My PC's decided to negotiate with Emraag, then go into the depths and are planning on coming back and killing him afterwards. They're all chaotic, they have no problems lying to an evil dragon turtle.

I quickly saw that if I ran the adventure as written my group would seriously balk at destroying the tear. One of the party is a Paladin of Freedom (Unearthed Arcana chaotic good paladin variant.) He views mind controllers such as aboleths as not something to help out at all. Of course kopru are also dominators, so he is a bit more likely to do it but...

They saw through N'Glothnoru's illusions easily (the party wizard has Arcane Sight permeated.)

I also saw that my group would not have much trouble destroying the kopru menace in Golismorga even if they didn't destroy the tear. So I beefed up the kopru considerably. They had a major fight with one kopru scouting party then retreated for rest and came back. By this time Ulioth had put all his kopru minions on alert and when they came back they faced an even tougher fight. I added in some kopru with warlock levels and the party faced a near TPK, with one character dying and two others almost dying. At the same time, a ghost aboleth magic jarred one of the trog slaves and worked on convincing them to destroy the tear. They decided that was the way to go. They retreated, raised their fallen comrade and are going to go back to Golismorga and destroy the tear before trying to take out Ulioth and company.

My party includes a druid, and that has led to some fun roleplaying. Since druids would almost never help aboleths out, regardless of the cause, the party met with the druidic circle for advice. The druidic circle's suggestion was that if there was no other way to stop the production of the shadow pearls then perhaps the aboleths were lesser of two evils, at least for now. But their condition was that the party druid would return to Isle of Dread after her adventuring career is done (i.e. after she finishes STAP) and train a group of aboleth hunters. This group will pass down their knowledge, always watching for a return of the aboleth menace.