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Since I'm planning to run my home group over, er through, the 4 scenarios, is there an order folks would recommend them to be run in to maximize survivability?
I only went through two (Frozen Fingers and Silent Tide), but from what I've heard, survivability depends a lot on group composition and intelligence, REGARDLESS of the order played. We breezed through Silent Tide but struggled a little through Frozen Fingers. Since encounters can be based on what the party does, one module ranges from extraordinarily easy to extraordinarily hard depending on whether the group meets part of the encounter or not, and the same goes for the more undead heavy games.
Silent Tide had two major undead encounters which were turned into cakewalks with a well made cleric. The weapons used by the enemies tend to be lower-end lower-damage weapons that really don't threat insta-kills (even with crits) any characters. There were overall more encounters in Silent Tide than Frozen Fingers, but they seemed to be a little easier. The dog in the final encounter can turn the whole thing into a CF if not dealt with properly as well.
Frozen Fingers had one major undead encounter (which is fully bypassable) which was made into a cakewalk via our cleric. My biggest concern about Frozen Fingers is that I had heard of at least two TPKs with the module, which I can believe since nearly everything you fight involves barbarians wielding two-handed weapons. We had one person at -5 and one at -7 in one encounter because of this adventure factor. Even the major bad-guy in the adventure had an AC of 16 (which made it fairly difficult for our group to deal with him).
Personally of the two I'd put Silent Tide before Frozen Fingers.
I think #3, #4, #1, and then #2 would be ideal.
Murder on the Silken Caravan (#2) is going to be tough for a party that isn't 2nd level, and melee oriented.
Murder on the Silken Caravan is actually #3, and I agree that it should be the last one. I'd say that the rest were pretty even in overall difficulty, with ample oportunities to bypass or mitigate some of the encounters through certain character types and well thought out plans. I'd say that Hydra's Fang Incident (#2) has 2 encounters that could be quite hard if the dice don't favor the PCs, so would probably suggest going in the following order:
#1 Silent Tide
#4 Frozen Fingers at Midnight
#2 Hydra's Fang Incident
#3 Murder on the Silken Caravan
