Mary Yamato's page

There is no way I will be able to run it and get anywhere near to completing it so I want to run a condensed version. I'm going to run 5 adventures from it and just fill in the group with back story on what happens between each episode.

So starting with Adventure 1, what 4 other adventures would you pick to run?

What levels does your group enjoy the most?

You could do a relatively low-level campaign with Life's Bazaar, Flood Season, Demonskar Legacy, Secrets of the Soul Pillars, and ending up with something involving Redgorge and Alex rather than with the Adventure Path continuation. Maybe wrap up with the attack on Oblivion, making Vhelantru the ultimate Big Bad Guy. I think this would make a reasonable arc for levels 1-14 or so, maybe even 1-12.

As a player this would be my preference; the later modules seem more problematic to me than the earlier ones. (If your group really craves high level play you'll want to go the other way, but I can't sketch that one out as we broke off the module line by level 13.)

Mary

My player is bound and determined to find the other six parts. The PCs became quite balky when Manzorian asked for the piece they had (they have decided that Manzorian is a bad guy, though one too powerful for them to oppose directly) and are now going to use Commune and other spells to try to find the remaining parts.

I told them about the pit fiend with part #6 and gave part #5 to the Vecna priest in _Library of Last Resort_. I asked for a rain check on the other parts....

Has anyone run this? Are there good published adventures that could be swiped for finding the other parts? (The PCs are nominally 13th, but very strong 13ths--an adventure for 13, 14 or 15 would probably work fine.)

I'm kind of regretting putting the first piece in. On the one hand, the PCs could really use more experience (there are too many of them, meaning not enough EXP to go around) and treasure. On the other hand, it's going to be a ton of work, and the reason I'm running an Adventure Path in the first place is lack of preparation time.

I guess it's a tip of the hat to older D&D material, but if I'd thought ahead, I would have made it a Staff of Three Parts!

Mary

The situation was a bit different in our campaign as five of the PCs were Shackleborn, and they found at least five more quite quickly. (Much later, a captured enemy sighed and said "Couldn't keep Dyr'ryd's lust under control...there are plenty more where you came from.") I think it's easier to understand the fuss over Terrim as Vhelantru thinking he's important and trying to retain him to use as leverage with the Cagewrights, rather than the Cagewrights thinking he's important. The Cagewrights are too good at what they're doing to leave things like that to chance.

(The other thing the captured enemy said is, "How did you guys get so powerful? Thirifane was supposed to keep an eye on you, and she never said anything about you getting so powerful--" which totally freaked out the PC who was Thirifane's daughter. Led to a really nice confrontation between them later. Apparently Thirifane had been playing both sides. I know this is a big deviation from the plot as written, but it worked great for us.)

Mary

Here is a writeup of our party's experiences on Occipitus. The game had diverged pretty far from the book by this point, but we used a lot of the material from this thread as well as considerable new material.

Fritz -- TN half-elf wizard 7/regnant 5 (custom PrC resembling mindbender,
related to the Spellweavers)
Charis -- LG half-elf paladin 11
Rael -- LG advanced celestial unicorn, Charis' mount
Lakos -- LN human cleric 12 of Wee Jas
Jules -- CN human rogue/fighter/scout/dervish, total of 12
Tillie -- CG human rogue 12
Bryce -- CG half-orc fighter 12
Shensen -- NG NPC half-drow druid (mostly, with other classes) 13
Elaine -- NG NPC human wizard 6

Fritz, Charis, Lakos, Jules and Tillie are all Shackleborn, and
by this point, they know roughly what that implies.

The PCs had just defeated Grahlia Cairnness at Vaprik's Voice, and
had tricked her into allowing herself to be Dominated. Fritz was
keeping her alive out of a combination of squeamishness (he does not
like to hurt people he's charmed), sexual attraction, and desire to
mine more information out of her. The rest of the PCs were reluctantly
going along.

Grahlia told them about Fetor at Karran-Kurul, beyond a mirror gate
in Vaprik's Voice. The PCs walked unmolested through Vaprik as
guests of Grahlia and went through the mirror gate, which Fritz was
able to control. They came out in a small chamber with Alec Tercival
and a demon whom they recognized, to their horror, as Nabrithond.

Fritz cast Tasha's Irresistable Laughter, his signature spell, and
freakishly enough it worked. (The GM's mouth was hanging open. We
calculated this as about a 2% chance.) The PCs cut up their childhood
terror into little bitty pieces, and then healed Alec of his madness
using an artifact potion from a previous adventure. However, they
could not get back through the mirror gate, and on pushing out via
the only exit, found that they were on Occipitus.

Almost at once they were attacked by nine babau demons. The babau
threw a volley of Dispel Magic and managed to dispel almost nothing
except the Dominate Person on Grahlia. Grahlia, finding herself free
in the middle of a fight in deeply hostile territory, cried out that
she offered her parole and would aid the PCs while they were in the
Abyss; Fritz and Charis accepted.

Fritz used telepathy to snarl at the babau, "Why are you attacking
me, you idiots? Don't you know who I am?" and rolled very high on
Bluff, ending the fight suddenly. ("Oh gosh," said the babau. "Sorry,
sir. Mistaken identity.")

Kauraphon's desire to help them in the fight was rather stymied by
this (he got in one fireball) but he introduced himself to the PCs
anyway and made his pitch about the Lordship of Occipitus. The PCs
were divided on whether he was a lying knave or an honest dupe, but
in neither case did they find him the least bit trustworthy: the
fact that Alex sensed him as evil didn't help.

Throughout this part, Alex' comments seemed incredibly naive and
closed-minded. The PCs had just about decided that they didn't care
for him when they realized that he'd been Wisdom-drained into near
insensibility by the Amaranth Elixer. Once they fixed that, he became
a much better ally.

The PCs set out for the Cathedral of Feathers, with Kauraphon as
guide. They were not at all sure they were going to attempt the
Tests, but they needed a way out and hoped to find one there.

They fought a gray slaad (ran him off but couldn't beat him) and three
thunderbeasts pursing a green slaad (killed the thunderbeasts with
considerable difficulty) and a flight of vrock. At this point the
GM said, "Four or five more days like this to the Cathedral of
Feathers" and the player said, "No, please, don't do that to me,
this is miserable." The PCs were having a very bad time with DR
and SR in all of these fights (as well as at Vaprik's Voice, where
they had just fought a flight of vrock and half a dozen babau) and
were becoming very demoralized. So we abstracted through the PCs
being hassled by a demon leader, killing a bunch of his strike forces
and then the demon himself, and meeting the bone centaurs. (In
retrospect I was sorry not to play out the bone centaurs.)

Part of the problem was that we had never found adequate solutions
to high DR; another part was that the PCs had meant to go to
Karan-Kurrul and resented being sidetracked onto Occipitus with
no clear goal. They were not eager to take Kauraphon's advice as
he was clearly not their friend.

There was a really interesting late-night conversation between
Jules and Grahlia about Jules' demodand ancestry and what she might
do to capitalize on it. Several of the PCs were becoming reluctantly
fond of Grahlia. (Alex and Shensen definitely were not.)

At the Celestial Rubble the PCs met a leonal guardinal who
challenged them and would not let Grahlia or Kauraphon pass.
The PCs felt honor-bound not to abandon Grahlia alone in Occipitus
after the deal they had made with her. The natural thing at this
point would have been to plane-shift away and not come back, but
there was a Divination pointing to Occipitus, and on a metagame
level the player hated to miss an entire scenario. (My
GM's other group just bailed from Occipitus without ever doing
the tests, and was happy to get away.)

Charis challenged the leonal to single non-lethal combat, no spells,
to establish whether the leonal was right in forbidding them from
going on. The leonal won absolutely effortlessly. Grahlia said,
"I'm in your way. I'll just stay here--I'll be fine" and the PCs
reluctantly left her and Kaurophan. (They have regretted this bitterly
ever since.)

At the Cathedral the PCs fought and beat a succubus and a fire
salamander, nearly losing Charis and Rael to the salamander. They
heard from Kauraphon, who had dimension doored to the
Cathedral. Alex and Charis were aghast that he had cheated the
leonal and gone back on the bargain they had made, and drove him
angrily away, telling him that they would kill him if they saw
him again.

They met the mummy lord, chose to pass through the avoral doorway,
and each spoke privately with the avoral. They tried to free it
but could not; several PCs independently promised to free it later.
For the first time, several of the PCs (Jules, Charis and Tillie)
began to feel that they might have a reason to become Lord of
Occipitus, if only to disband this awful slave-taking test.

Several of them (Fritz, Rael, Lakos, Alec, Shensen) said flatly to
the avoral, "I will not be Lord of Occipitus. I'm here to help my
friends, that's all." When it let those PCs pass, they wondered
what the test had been and whether it had any meaning at all.

They headed off, following their guiding lantern, and in the Ossaic
Forest realized they were being tailed by a mind flayer and his
minions. They guessed this was the same mind flayer who had nearly
destroyed a town near Sasserine in an earlier encounter (we ran
_Speaker in Dreams_ as a side adventure) and jumped him with extreme
overkill, slaughtering the whole group in seconds and without a
chance to parley.

Then they found that the mind flayer's minions were carrying holy
swords. Charis' faith in her own goodness, and goodness in general,
snapped completely at this point. (It was a strong echo of a
previous scenario in which they'd attacked a group of drow for
what turned out to be morally inadequate reasons). Alex tried to
comfort her but failed. She had not lost her paladin powers, but it
was not clear why; she no longer considered herself a paladin.
At this point the PCs had a hint that the final Test might involve
sacrifice, and Charis became privately resolved that she would be
the one sacrificed.

On the border of the Plain of Cysts they fought and beat a black
dragon. On the Plain, they were told by a mummy lord that they
must choose the entombed creature who would be their champion in
the Test. The lantern would illuminate the insides of cysts so that
they could see and speak with their candidate champions.

Before they could get started, they met Velassia, an acolyte of Lakos'
temple in Cauldron, with her drow and retriever servants and a
rogue, Finch, from the Last Laugh. Velassia demanded that they
turn back; Lakos, who outranked her, refused. After a tense
discussion the two groups split up, giving each other plenty of room
on the Plain. Fritz established telepathic contact with Finch, who
was getting dubious about Velassia's sanity.

The PCs started to look into cysts. They talked to Tleklatl the coatl,
an athack, a bodak, a vrock, a sentient magical weapon, a gray
slaad, a babau, a celestial lion bard, a lammasu, and a spellweaver
lich. (The poor GM was starting to wonder if they would *ever* stop
looking into cysts!) Finally they went right back to the beginning
and chose Tleklatl. They had another run-in with Velassia and ended it by
using a teleport gate to get close to the Skull.

In dense jungle outside the Skull, a were-baboon with a big sword
blocked the way forward, saying that only those who were committed to
the Test could pass, and each could take one champion. Jules, with
Tleklatl as her champion, and Charis, with Rael, went forward. No
other PC would say that he or she was really willing to continue,
so the rest waited there. They were attacked by Velassia and Kaurophon,
and killed them, sparing Finch. (We didn't play this out; it
seemed to distract from the main line.)

Jules and Charis fought and beat the rakshasa during the ascent. They
were tense with each other as it seemed that they might be
adversaries soon.

At the top, they were challenged by a nalfashnee demon, the Steward
of Occipitus. He asked each one what she would renounce to be Lord of
Occipitus. Charis, without hesitation, laid down her paladinhood, which
was deemed a suitable sacrifice. Jules hesitated--I didn't think
she'd go on--and then said, "I sacrifice my freedom, as every Lord
must." This, too, was deemed acceptable. They plunged into the
flames. Charis was turned into a kind of berserker (we used the
Iron Heroes rules here) and Jules into something resembling an erinys.

The two of them, with only magical support from their champions, fought
the Steward. He tried to turn them against each other but failed.
Charis was killed, and Jules barely managed to kill the Steward. She
took the Rod of Raising from Charis' belt and raised her from the dead
just as the flames exploded through the whole cavern. (The GM said,
"It's highly significant that Jules' first act as Lord of Occipitus
was to raise a potential rival from the dead.")

(If we had played the Skull as written, probably Charis would have
sacrificed herself so that Jules could become Lord of Occipitus. As the
book describes it, doing so would have made *Charis* Lord of Occipitus.
We really disliked this possible outcome; I think it would have
wrecked the party. So the GM chose to do something else.)

The rest of the PCs were horrified to receive back a demon-lord and
a fallen paladin. They had not meant to pay so high a price. Jules
bargained with them and eventually it was agreed that they would help
her scour the Plain of Cysts and she would help them defeat the
Cagewrights. Alex said, "The person you used to be never would have
bargained like that," to general dismay.

They went back to the Plain of Cysts and Jules offered each of the
prisoned creatures various choices including serving her. She put
together the beginnings of a Council consisting of the lammasu,
babau, athack, and grey slaad (that one was trouble from the start),
and the celestial lion as her personal chronicler. She also freed
the avoral guardinal and the lantern archons (in the lanterns) from
the Test. She was too afraid of the spellweaver lich to free it, and
Lakos killed the bodak when it would not cooperate. The vrock and
weapon had no concept of cooperation; baffled, she left them where
they were.

Jules and Lakos then plane-shifted the PCs back to the Prime
Material. The GM ruled, for metagame reasons, that the party was
split up with the NPCs ending up in Cauldron and the PCs somewhere
far away (so that he could run a different adventure, namely Vampires
of Waterdeep, before returning to the SCAP main-line).

Since then Jules has been using every spare moment to try to solidify
her hold on Occipitus and learn how to control it. She takes her
Lordship utterly seriously. This has caused considerable tension
between the party and its allies in Cauldron, where demons are
currently very unpopular.

Jules learned from a Commune cast by Lakos that there were three
Lords of Occipitus: herself, the marilith Valshea, and the fallen
angel Sauraya. She had a chance to hunt down Valshea and
took it enthusiastically, killing her once on the Prime Material
and again in the Chamber of the Eye. She wants to talk to Sauraya
(and perhaps to kill him too--we'll see) but he is on Occipitus
at a place called the Well of Wishes, which the bone centaurs tell
her that no one can reach unless they pass various tests. She
has reluctantly set this plan aside until the Cagewright crisis is
past.

We did a custom class for Jules, so she is a moderately powerful
demon-like sort of thing. The character had been so extremely weak
all campaign long, especially since DR started to become common,
that even giving her much better stats and abilities than before
didn't seem to make her overpowering.

The roleplaying impact of her giving up her freedom has been immense
and unmistakeable, though rather hard to describe; it was definitely
a real sacrifice. Her ambition is to make Occipitus an independent
realm beholden to neither Celestia nor the Abyss, and peopled by
fallen angels, corrupted demons, and rebels and misfits from every
plane. This is probably outside the scope of the campaign, alas.

Charis has decided that, having been ransomed from death by Jules, she
has to serve Jules--frankly, she doesn't know what else to do with
herself. She goes berserk in combat and fights as if she doesn't
care whether she lives or dies, and it's a marvel that she hasn't died
yet. Rael is deeply troubled by this. Since she could no longer be
a paladin's mount, Rael has taken levels of ranger, with evil outsiders
as her first favored enemy and good outsiders as her second. She
privately hopes to put her horn through the heart of that leonal
guardinal some day; she blames the leonal for breaking her mistress'
spirit.

Mary

We didn't meet them until much later, introduced by Shensen after Flood Season. The PCs went from cautiously friendly to coldly hostile toward them over the course of their first days' acquaintance and have never warmed to them since. Sometimes you just can't predict character dynamics....

Shensen ended up as a party PC (with the party all the way through Smoking Eye) and the PCs took a quiet pleasure in having "stolen" her from the Striders.

I think the hostility arose from a feeling that the Striders were using the PCs as a stalking horse ("You stick your necks out, we'll stand back and see who cuts them off"). But it may also have hurt that the PCs didn't meet them until fairly late, so it rather appeared that they'd been standing by uselessly during previous threatening situations, especially Flood Season itself.

Mary

After a point we've found non-blaster wizards to be more powerful than the blasters, because they are less hampered by SR, save-to-no-effect, resistances, etc. Many more things can shrug off a fireball than can shrug off Evard's or glitterdust or web. For our current campaign (SCAP) I'd say the crossover point was around 12th level. By that point, a dedicated blaster is hardly getting any use out of his low-level spells--they tend not to work--but grease, web, glitterdust, invisibility and flight are still winners. And don't forget dispel magic, perhaps the best third-level spell around! (The NPCs in our game know it, too, and dropped a significant chunk of the PC party into a sulfurous lake by dispelling their flight....)

You don't want to stock up on just illusions because the perfect defense is too low level (true seeing) but a mix of spells can work great.

Mary

My GM went crazy (and so did the PCs) trying to find how to get to Zenith's part of Bal-Hamatagn. Finally he found the rope bridge in a room description somewhere, but it should be on the map!

Depth of water should be given in all encounter areas with water, such as the Vaprik's Voice outer chamber (my fighter just fell into it....) When a plate armor fighter loses his Fly, it does matter whether this is 10" or 10' of water.

On the whole, though, copyediting seems quite good. I'm running AoW and having much more trouble with errors than the SCAP GM is.

Mary

Thanks Bran, Colin, Mary and VendiCold - great comments and troubleshooting, and sorry for the tardy reply.

Hey, thank you for the hard work on designing this! My GM was excited to run it.

Kelnor uses blasphemy to debilitate the adventuring party one or two members at a time, all the while taunting her foes. She does this with glee, realizing it typically creates increased terror and despair, and deliberately targets only one or two charcters with this effect. In essence, she uses blasphemy to strip down the party, then she attacks the survivors, before turning her attention to those who are paralyzed, weakened or dazed.

I'd be careful with this, because a consistent problem we had with SCAP in general and Occipitus in particular was the PCs concluding that they were outclassed and should bail out. Having a superior foe toying with you is one of the most demoralizing and unpleasant experiences in roleplaying, in my opinion, and if you do it here--in the already rather weakly motivated Occipitus line--you run a big risk that you will derail the whole module.

I'd cut this encounter down if the PCs are too low-level for it. (My GM left it out.)

Mary - your experience with the guardinal is fascinating. The encounter is designed as a roleplaying experience - and that's how it rolled out with my group. With the exception of the odd friendly duel here or there, the encounter is unlikely to escalate into a hostile situation (unless the party is outright defiant, disrespectful - or evil). However, if it does, your experience shows it can be deadly. I am writing up some errata for this leg of the Occipitus adventure and I'll make some suggestions based on your experience.

I think that when you put in something whose nominal CR misrepresents its strength this badly, it's helpful to warn the GM. Mine was very upset.

I also think you've missed a number of ways that this encounter could naturally end up as combat even if none of the PCs is evil (and really, is a TPK a good reaction to one of the PCs being evil? I don't recall SCAP saying that they mustn't be....)

(1) One of the PCs/cohorts/allies/etc. has the background feat, found in the SCAP hardcover, which makes you register magically as evil even if you are not.
(2) One of the PCs has an oath or obligation that prohibits them from submitting to mind-reading, or is for some reason immune to mind-reading.
(3) The PCs are not willing to trust the guardinal enough to waive their saving throws.

Consider an encounter that progresses exactly the same as this one, except that instead of the guardinal, it's the succubus from the Cathedral, polymorphed. If the PCs agree to throw their saves "to allow their minds to be read," she gets to charm them all for free, and she should shortly be Lord of Occipitus. Oops. If the party thinks about this, and has no way to prove to itself that the guardinal is actually what she says she is, they may be balky about the mindreading.

(My PCs had just pulled exactly this dirty trick on Grahlia Cairnness, so they were very aware of the possibility. "I need to read your mind to verify that you're telling the truth" followed by casting Dominate Person instead of Detect Thoughts. Not nice!)

All that said, it was a roleplaying experience, and rather a significant one for the campaign. It was a catalyst to the paladin renouncing her paladinhood (after Kauraphon dimension doored into the cathedral it became apparent to the paladin that the leonal's purported goodness was doing the work of evil, and that was the beginning of the end for her), and it also shaped the direction in which the new Lord of Occipitus is taking her lordship. That PC turned out to take her new role very seriously, much more so than the module expects.

I'll try to do a writeup at some point and post it here.

Mary

We did this at 3rd and found it exceptionally tough but managed not to lose a PC (we did lose some of the rescued prisoners). At 2nd it would have been TPK for sure; the Web was the only reason we survived.

I personally think I would have enjoyed SCAP a lot more if the PCs had been one level higher than the listed level throughout. But mileage definitely differs on this one.

Mary

If our experience is any guide, the biggest issue you as GM should be thinking about with Shackled City is how much information to get into the PCs' hands, and when.

I have heard from a lot of groups that by the time their PCs hit the endgame, their general reaction was "who are we fighting? why do we care? what's going on?" because the big baddies have been so cryptic, the PCs have no connection to them.

My GM had read those accounts too, so put in a *lot* more information early on. This turned out to be really double-edged. The PCs were a lot more informed and felt a lot more connected to the main plot; but they knew about it too early, when it was way over their heads, and this was very bad for morale. They felt they ought to be doing something about it from around 8th level on, which the modules don't support well at all. The GM ended up having to rewrite the endgame for 13th-14th level characters because stalling the PCs any longer was just going to kill player enthusiasm.

It is very easy, if you give more information than the modules do, for the players to feel that their PCs are hopelessly outclassed and just pawns of the various big-league players. (Which is true, to be honest.) On the other hand, without the information there is little dramatic payoff. It's a tough line to walk.

You will also want to monitor EXP and treasure carefully. If there are 5-6 PCs in the party there may not be enough of either to go around, and the modules are difficult enough that this is a real problem, especially if the PCs are not hyper-efficient in their spending (item creation feats, etc.) or their class choices.

We found the Smoking Eye chapter to be the most problematic as far as motivating the PCs went. My GM's other group flatly refused to engage with it at all. My group did engage and then felt let down by the module continuation--a big deal is made about gaining the Smoking Eye and then nothing comes of it for a really long time.

On the other hand, you have a lot of very cool stuff to look forward to--there are a lot of really fine NPCs and situations in SCAP. Have fun!

Mary

My party had had advance warning of the erinys' presence, as otherwise the GM expected a TPK. Unfortunately I made a bad tactical decision, feeling that the Charm Monster was a major problem compared to the archery and that therefore it would be essential to keep the party together and inside Magic Circle Vs. Evil. This led to not investing heavily in flight, which turned out to be a disaster.

The PCs (fighter, paladin, wizard, rogue, dervish, cleric, plus Shensen) took out the early kuo-toa with moderate difficulty and took out all the priests in the central chamber just in time for Aushanna to appear. They had spent nearly all their money on Stoneskin scrolls, which saved the wizard's life on the first round. The wizard cast Haste and everyone ran like hell, because it was immediately apparent that fighting Aushanna in that room would be fatal.

The rest of the fight was seventy rounds of cat and mouse through the complex. We use a Star-Trek-transporter delay system for Teleport so the PCs could see Aushanna coming, but she'd teleport outside and then take potshots down the long hall or through the eye sockets. The dervish got one glorious attempt to grapple her but failed. Almost none of the PCs' spells worked (the wizard and rogue got in one successful Magic Missile each) and the erinys' DR bounced or nearly bounced everyone's missile attacks as the group lacked a dedicated archer. Basically all the PCs could do was move around, watch for her, and trade shots, with Aushanna doing far more damage than they were. (And knowing that there were more kuo-toa unaccounted for who might be healing her, though in fact they weren't.) They used up their entire stockpile of healing magic, and all of their arrows, at which point they were pretty much in despair.

Why didn't they use Oil of Bless Weapon? Because the spell description for Bless Weapon says that it does not work on bows, only on single arrows, which is nearly useless.

Why didn't they summon a celestial creature which could hurt Aushanna? Because celestial creatures are DR/magic, not DR/good, and can't hurt Aushanna any more than the PCs can.

Eventually the High Priest got his armor on, and insisted that Aushanna help him kill the PCs rather than continuing her cat-and-mouse. The PCs won that, losing the paladin and putting everyone else in single digits. This felt a bit like a GM fudge to save the situation, though he swears it wasn't.

This was supposed to be a memorable climactic fight, and it was indeed memorable, but it basically convinced the PCs (and player) that they were not up to the Adventure Path and should just abandon it. The fight took seven hours to play out and was absolutely gruelling, as the PCs had next to nothing they could effectively do. And it was clear that without the pre-warning about the erinys, and without having spent a lot of money bribing the dragon to stay away, they'd have lost. They couldn't run, as Aushanna would easily have killed them in the open. (Yes, they should have had Water Breathing, but their pre-planning hurt them there; they knew the Temple was dry, so they didn't spend precious money on it.)

Afterwards we agreed that a large part of the problem was that the PCs had advanced too fast and the player didn't know how to use their abilities well, so we slowed down advancement drastically and put in a whole bunch of side adventures. Managed to save the campaign that way--it just had too much good stuff to die.

My impression of this fight is that a lot of GMs instinctively "make mistakes" to make it winnable: they play Aushanna's tactics poorly, or forget a rule or two at a critical moment. I don't blame them, either, as having the PCs slaughtered by something they basically cannot hurt is not a lot of fun for anyone. Some parties, of course, will do fine--flying fighters or heavily optimized archers have no trouble, especially if they are not mostly Good in alignment so the Unholy Blight doesn't hurt as much. But parties with strengths in melee who lack flight, or parties with strengths in casting, are likely to have a very bad time here.

(To end on a more upbeat note: much later, the dervish was turned permanently into an outsider on Occipitus. The GM gave the player carte blanche to decide what the result looked like, and when the rest of the PCs saw her, they immediately said "My gods, it's Aushanna!" So I guess she did make an impression beyond just "We're not up to this.")

Mary

It raises again the issue of the broken CR system (how come a 13th level spellcaster with 7th level spells could be a CR11 encounter ?)

Bran

The other one like this is the leonal guardinal. For various reasons of ideology, the first time our PCs encountered her, the paladin challenged her to single non-lethal combat. It was okay that the guardinal won, but she won by such a huge margin that we seriously doubted she was a CR12 encounter. This was a useful warning that led us to say, when it appeared that the whole party (including now ex-paladin) would jump her later on, "Let's run this fight out of continuity and see what happens." TPK. This one "CR12" monster beat a party of eight PCs levels 11-13.

The blasted guardinal is, therefore, still there in our game, and the new Lady of Occipitus is having signs put up: "Stay out of the Celestial Rubble if you value your life!" It really sticks in her craw that she can't get rid of the guardinal, but even now (PCs are 13th-14th) we're not too sure about the fight.

I think a useful generalization is: never trust the CR of an angel, and be skeptical of the CR of a demon or devil.

Mary

My PCs did this, but they tried to make it as non-vigilante as possible. They enlisted the High Priestess of Kord, convincing her with the evidence of the zombie-girl, and had her put her weight behind their formal challenge from the arena floor.

Raknian could have run, but he had just found out that Bozal was dead and his plans were in ruins. He would have been giving up his position, his hopes, everything he had. He chose to fight, hoping that if he won his resulting popularity would enable him to quash the accusations--after all, the accusers would mostly be dead, and the High Priestess would accept the results of a trial by combat.

The PCs waxed him (and seven of his henchmen--he wasn't going out there alone against so many of them!) and then, to make extremely sure that everyone knew they were in the right, they *excavated the ulgarstasta* with a harp of building, and killed it as an arena fight. That was a bit harder than they'd expected, but the crowd loved it, especially hacking open the worm to free the swallowed party member.

It was not politically expedient for the law to intervene after that. The PCs were too popular.

It seemed fairly reasonable to me. Sure, the Free City law could have gone after them, but we had had to portray the Free City law as extremely ineffectual throughout the last two scenarios to explain their uselessness against the dopplegangers, Zyrxog, Bozal, etc. and having them suddenly develop a backbone when it was the PCs at fault would have strained credibility.

And it was really fun to run, and I thought made for a more satisfying experience than just having Raknian get away.

I was bummed by the lack of a map of Raknian's palace too. When the module does things like have an NPC say, "There are only two places I haven't been able to get into--the Caenobium and Raknian's palace" it is not at all unlikely for the PCs to end up in Raknian's palace.

Mary

Good GM recordkeeping helps a lot. My husband meticulously puts stat blocks for *everything* he runs onto his laptop, so he has the stats at his fingertips with no looking through books. This also means he's vetted everything before he runs it, which can catch problems in advance.

I'm too lazy to do this, but his combats do run much faster and more smoothly than mine.

Both of us find an initiative chart essential: it has not only PC and NPC initiatives, but the round and segment where each short-duration spell will run out.

If you are using more than one book monster, flipping back and forth through the Monster Manual can be quite cumbersome--copying them out onto paper really helps. It's even worse if you have to do something on the fly, like turning a lion into a celestial line--it's worth avoiding this.

Creatures which the PCs or NPCs intend to summon should be done up in advance. Insist that the players of summoning PCs keep sheets of the things they typically summon.

You can also experiment with shifting some of the bookkeeping to a player, if you have an amenable player. They can track the initiative chart or spell durations, for example, or run allied NPCs, or make certain rolls for the NPCs to save GM time. Don't try this if your players are the slow link in the chain, though, as it will just make things worse.

We find that large delays in combat come from "delay" and "ready" actions, spells which require continuing rolls (Evard's Black Tentacles and similar effects), and from having too many combatants. Unfortunately these are hard to fix without massive house rules, but you can try to avoid loading multiple NPCs in a single fight with combat-slowing abilities.

The setpiece fight in Zenith Trajectory from SCAP took us seven hours to play out, and by the end of that I just wanted my PC to die and put me out of my misery. It's really worthwhile trying to speed things up.

Mary

Last night's fight with Ilserv (FR version of the mind flayer) was a 15-round slugfest of spells, arrows and mind blasts. I found the position of the mind flayer at the start of the battle horrendous (levitating above the middle of the water). It kept me from using extraction at all! Had I thought more about him being stranded over the center, I'd have positioned him a square or two to the side. Oh well, we had a great time anyway!

Other people seem to have had very different experiences with the mind flayer encounter than we did.

None of our PCs could affect it with spells (we had not realized that Glitterdust ignores SR, and frankly I still think that's a mistake). It just hung up there, out of reach, while its octopins killed the slowed and mind-blasted PCs. Only one PC was a strong archer and the mind flayer concentrated on him. With its high armor class, displacement, and dispel magic it seemed more than capable of handling anything they could do. (Actually I forgot to give it the benefits of its displacement, but that didn't help enough.) There wasn't any fight. They basically could not hurt it.

We went back over the fight(s) afterwards and basically didn't find any way for the PCs to win with their normal capabilities, short of rolling nothing but 20's. They could have spent a lot of money souping up to its level, but we had been trying to avoid that.

This one encounter pretty nearly ruined my game. I wish I had vetted it better in advance. We have an implicit contract that the players won't munchkin the rules, and the GM won't give them things they flatly can't handle. I broke my side of the bargain here, and I've been paying for it ever since.

We had the same experience (different GM and player) with a key fight in SCAP. It's one thing to fight a very hard foe, but a foe which you can't hurt at all is hard on player morale. The player actually *won* that fight with seventy rounds of mostly "ready" and "delay" and a lot of running around: but the reaction (both player and GM) was "That was no fun; I never want to do it again; I don't think I care to continue." Took a lot of work to salvage the campaign.

Mary

Make sure to explain in a rational, clear manner what D&D is about and what it is not about. Perhaps there were other factors at play in this case but the social worker couldn't pin them down and decided to focus on roleplaying as the culprit; make sure that all your 't's are crossed and that no other reasons for being denied exist.

This was our approach. We explained calmly, clearly, with examples...each home visit, seven or eight of them in a row. Perhaps it was useful; we did get the home study signed after nine months of this. But it was awfully frustrating. None of the explanations seemed to stick. The social worker asked the same questions every time, and seemed equally baffled first to last.

We had this problem over a lot of things. I think the social worker may have been in a constant state of intense fatigue and overwork. When we got the draft of our home study it had a remarkable number of factual errors (clear-cut stuff like how many siblings I have, my job title, etc.) and we had to insist that it be revised.

I advise patience, but stubborn in-your-face patience, not the quiet kind. If you are quiet, they'll ignore you. We called once a week for six weeks prior to the final signing of our home study.

It's good that you have a private agency working with you, because if DSHS distrusts you, even a signed home study does not mean you will ever have a child placed with you. (We've been trying 14 months so far, though we've come close a few times.)

Mary

I think Whispering Cairn will work pretty well for higher-level PCs with few changes. If you allow the three cult-groups in Three Faces of Evil to cooperate a bit more, and maybe up-level a few of the leaders, that should be okay too.

Blackwall Keep will be too easy, in all likelihood. (It's awfully easy even at the stated levels.) It may be helpful to give the lizardfolk a level of fighter apiece, and more intelligent tactics.

After that, I think having PCs above the stated levels may be a positive asset. Hall of Harsh Reflections nearly killed my campaign; it was much harder than anything my player could enjoy (double TPK). After that we raised the PCs' levels; perhaps too far, but I'm pretty reluctant to go back down to the stated levels after the debacle in HoHR.

Mary

Hi Mary,

Firstly I would look closely at the Charm Monster spell as that is the only thing allowing the PCs to question her, otherwise I imagine she would go feral and attack them - once the polymorph is off that is.

The player has actually been rather clever here. Ilthane is at -8 levels, so she will tend to fail saves. He cast two Touch of Idiocy spells, ten minutes apart, on her before removing the Polymorph and Feeblemind. (No, there is no chance of accidentally removing other spells, at least not as I read Dispel Magic: you can target it on a specific spell.) She ended up as an Int 2 Wis 3 charmed dragon. The other PCs kept carefully out of her sight here. At Int 2 her basic reaction to the charmer was "You're my friend. Feed me!" and that's what the charmer did. The PCs then waited for the first Touch of Idiocy to wear off, leaving a charmed Int 7 Wis 8 Cha 7 dragon with 8 negative levels. Such a critter is not going to make any saves or skill checks, so it's very hard to argue that the PCs don't find out what she knows, especially when Detect Thoughts is added to the mix.

Then they killed her. Too dangerous to keep.

The player was, I think, very disappointed with her information. He is craving some local enemy to engage with; his PCs take the attitude that the Age of Worms as a whole is too big, too nebulous, and too obviously someone else's problem. I wish I'd had a big Ilthane-related plot to spill. I may have to write an intermediate adventure between Gathering of Winds and Spire of Long Shadows.

Mary

Instead of trying to couter or cancel the party's reasonable use of available magic, why not give them credit for it, and assume they're able to handle a more serious threat?

They're going into the no-holds-barred battles with a serious advantage. So assume they're functioning one or two levels higher than the average party level, and run them through more difficult challenges.

That would be my advice.

My experience of this is that it leads to an increasingly brittle game, where either the PCs win overwhelmingly or it's a TPK. My play group hates this effect. We would rather have somewhat more even fights against even opposition than all-or-nothing fights against things six levels higher.

I find that if I make the opposition too powerful, *all* I see are manuvers like this, and the players tend to stop roleplaying. Other groups may not have this problem, but it's a big deal for me.

And in any case, a tactic used over and over becomes boring: the game is more interesting to me if the PCs (and NPCs) have a wider range of tactics. Silence, in our hands, is so strong that it's always used except in very strange circumstances. My own SCAP PCs are 13th now and always carry 2 Silences prepped (they should probably get a wand as well but it's just too obviously broken). It's as useful as it ever was, and still leads to numerous crushes of what seemed to be reasonable opposition.

Mary

You could rule instead that Silence prevents surprise, because the opponents will _know_ something is amiss when the silence suddenly blocks out all the background noises of the environment.

Other than that, I don't have much to add. Silence is far far too powerful.

We do that in noisy environments, but it's hard to argue that PCs sneaking through quiet corridors are really "audibly" more silent than the background.

Silence + Invisibility is particularly nasty, as even if the NPCs know that there's something wrong, it is next to impossible to non-magically locate the PCs. My player usually stacks on Fly, too, so that there is no scent trail and no pressure-plate trap triggers.

Mary

Wouldn't a similar argument apply to its SR? SR 32 is very high for a creature meant to fight an 8th level party: they cannot affect it at all unless someone has Greater Spell Penetration, and then only on a 20. If the sorcerer levels are giving it SR at one for one, perhaps they are worth more than you think. Or is this an error as well?

Mary

We are Wiccan also. I think there's a real possibility in both cases that the social worker's issues with religion (to which she legally cannot object) are being displaced onto gaming. But my impression with ours was that gaming was genuinely an issue for her as well. We had to explain it again, every home visit for nine months; it never stuck!

Mary

If you think Silence destroys encounters with mages, you should see what it does to grimlocks (which see via sound, so in Silence they are blind and deaf). My player romped through a lengthy grimlock-infested dungeon with this. In general we have found Silence to be overly strong. On top of the advantages you mention, it allows the PCs an almost guaranteed surprise, since the NPCs can't hear them coming. My player likes to move very fast through a complex with Silence up, hitting each group unawares.

Some things to try:

If the PCs throw a Silenced item into the room, have the NPCs throw it elsewhere (or back into the PCs). If the Silence can be identified as being on a PC, consider bull-rushing that PC out if possible. If it's on the room, have them get out of the room (you may want to have the big bad guy proactively attack the PCs one room earlier, leaving himself somewhere to retreat to if necessary). None of these are perfect but they help a bit.

We did not allow the warlock's blast to be used in Silence, but it's probably too late for you to make that change now.

If the bad guys are clerics, putting up a glyph or forbiddance keyed to take down Silences could help. A glyph of Dispel Magic can do quite a bit of harm to a buff-reliant party.

Potions can be used in Silence: the bad guy might invest in some delaying-action potions for this sort of emergency. Levitate, fly, invisibility, mirror images can all help him survive until the Silence ends or get out of it.

Finally, you might consider making those rooms a bit bigger, if it will fit on the map.

I am heartily sick of this spell and will probably change it next game.

Mary

We are trying to adopt domestically and had trouble with this too. The social worker was baffled by the idea of 40-year-old professional people playing D&D. (She also had a lot of issues with our religion, but to my surprise, the gaming seemed to be an equally big issue.) It took 9 months (instead of the promised 90 days) to get our home-study approved, and a personal appearance at DSHS headquarters to talk to the senior staff there. But we were stubborn and noisy--letters to the social worker's superiors, to the state ombudsman, etc.--and we did get it approved.

My best advice is to find allies: people of impeccable reputation who know about D&D and can write letters of support for you. We had letters of support from a local minister and a child psychologist.

You can also consider going through a private adoption agency which deals with DSHS for domestic adoption. In my local area WACAP is one such agency. This will be expensive, but they are often much better placed to negotiate with DSHS than you are.

My experience of DSHS is that they are so afraid of making a mistake, they behave very erratically and not in anyone's best interest. It's a sad situation, but there's not much individuals can do about it other than negotiate the system as best we can.

Good luck!

If you want to write me about this privately my email is mkkuhner@eskimo.com.

Mary

My PCs found an...unusual way to deal with Ilthane in Gathering of Winds. They hit her with, in very fast succession, -8 levels due to enervation, feeblemind, charm monster, and baleful polymorph. She is now a friendly little Int 1 lizard.

This would be okay except that they plan to strategically undo some of those spells later (after they find Allustan) and question her. With their resources, they are almost certain to succeed. I have no idea what she knows, other than the plot in Mistmarsh. She invoked Dragotha's name when attacking the PCs, and that caught their interest. But I really have to avoid providing information that would lead to them shortcutting to the endgame, since of course it will kill them.

What does Ilthane know about Dragotha, and how? Does she know anyone else involved in the main plot arc? Maybe her main contact was Bozal; that would limit the usefulness of her information a bit.

(The PCs handle most fights with stuff like this. Up until the end, where they redeemed themselves in the public eye by their fight against the ulgarstasta, they were the most unpopular successful gladiators in the history of the Games. They would win, but no blood! no heroics! no spectacle! They turned Madtooth to a frog before it ever got an action. I had them roundly booed, but they didn't much care. Raknian had to have the frog turned back into Madtooth and killed by someone else that afternoon, or there would have been riots.)

Mary

One way in this situation to motivate them to go after Artor is Artor's paranoia. Artor can't stand the idea that someone might know he exists. So, even if the PCs are willing to let it drop, Artor might project his own paranoia and convince himself they remain a threat. Then he might start subtly attacking them, hoping to destroy them while remaining unknown.

--Eric

If Artor is inclined to kill people who know about him, he should start with Dhusarra!

Maybe the PCs could be motivated by having Artor assist them in killing Dhusarra, but in a way they find unacceptable: say, he Dominates some decent folk and sends them to help, getting several killed in the process. Or turn around the events of the second module and have Artor send riddles siccing the PCs on Dhusarra, rather than vice versa; if he is as nasty about how he does it as she is, this may nudge them into going after him. (Not very bright of him to be so nasty, though. But if he is as careful and calculating as he's been in the past, I'm not sure he should lose, or even get onto the PCs' radar.)

A final way to make sure that the Fireplace Level arc happens would be to have Artor go after Dhusarra and take her prisoner. (There must be some way to take a vampire prisoner, though my PCs had trouble finding one....) Then the PCs' attempts to find Dhusarra will eventually get them in trouble with Artor. Perhaps he is trying to perfect some new vampire-creation trick and uses her as raw material, or perhaps he wants to find out how to bind a vampire not of his making to serve him, or perhaps he's just too vindictive to kill her outright, or perhaps he is using her as bait for any vampire hunters her actions have attracted.

This would be iffy for a non-Divination-using party, though, as they might never find Dhusarra at all.

Mary

Hi, Jason,

While you're here and on this topic, can you explain Zyrxog's CR? The Monster Manual says a base mind flayer is CR 8 and a mind flayer with 9 levels of sorcerer is CR 17. That suggests that a mind flayer with 7 levels of sorcerer would be CR15; why did you assign CR11 instead?

Mary

I'm really not clear how making the PCs hate Dhusarra more and more will encourage them to abandon their hunt for Dhusarra and fight Artor instead, especially since, as you say, Artor may be a positive force for good in Waterdeep. It might eventually be the logical "lesser of two evils" decision but by that time, the PCs will be emotionally invested in destroying Dhusarra and *not doing what she wants.* Players can be very stubborn. If they have come to genuinely hate Dhusarra, I think they will continue to try to kill her. (Imagine trying to sell "Let's free Dhusarra so that she can go home" to the party paladin!) And I never really felt a strong connection between exploring the Crypt Level and killing Dhusarra: the fact that Dhusarra wants the PCs to do it is an argument that it will *help* Dhusarra.

(This reminds me of a situation in Dragonlance, years ago. A dungeon built by a big baddie had a crossroads with a clue that essentially meant "Go left." The PCs went right, ate a huge fireball and all died. The GM said, "Why didn't you take the clue?" The players said, "Because we figured the big baddie wouldn't leave a clue there in order to help us!")

I also don't think that I would find a setting in which Dhusarra could escalate without limit to be plausible. Waterdeep does have other people in it who might object to a genocidal and very public vampire. And Artor himself might want to rub her out, to protect his secret. He has access to Commune, too--with a Dominate that high he has access to any spell he'd care to request! He has been keeping Waterdeep clear of enemy vampires for decades: why not this one?

And finally, how do you propose to have a brick wall in finding her? She is not given defenses against Commune or Contact Other Planes. The PCs can do the pins-in-a-map thing: Where was Dhusarra at noon five days ago? Four days ago? Three? and if a pattern emerges, they strike. Another good question: Who knows where Dhusarra is? Or: Who could best help us kill Dhusarra?

The idea that the PCs might try to strike a deal with Artor is interesting. If they succeed, though, most of the module is wasted (unless they go back on their deal afterwards and try to take out Artor, but as you point out it's not clear that this would be wise, and it's certainly dishonorable). I presume you think they would fail, but why? Their interests and Artor's seem to be the same: get rid of Dhusarra before she causes any more trouble. But maybe they are dealing with Fhang and don't know it. I'm not sure what Fhang would want to do in this situation. I didn't get to read the political notes.

I like your idea about the ghosts. It's a very double-edged way to go etherial!

Mary

Thanks for all the comments. I'm very glad to get feedback on how it ran.

If I understand correctly, you didn't think the adventure handled the possibility of the PCs going after Dhusarra's pack. My thought was that the adventure did address this by giving you a set piece location for the lair and clues to find it. How fast the DM dispenses the clues is dependent on the particular running of the module, but my hope was that Dhusarra would avoid the PCs long enough (obscure lair, rather nasty way of sending messages) that the PCs get hooked into at least the Dungeon of the Crypt. Once they kill Dhusarra, they then have sufficient motivation to kill off the "false" villain of part 2 and the true villain of part 3. Dhusarra might even survive into part 2 or part 3. In other words, it's possible Dhusarra dies AFTER her foe.

Can you give me more insights into the issues for your group?

--Eric

I haven't read the module in any detail, only played in it, so it's possible that we missed some things that would have made it work better. That said--

If the PCs go after the fangboys rather than going after Dhusarra, they can find the fangboy lair immediately. (Misty vampires flowing there are a dead giveaway, actually, if a PC can follow them. I agree with the other poster who said that misty vampires are awfully slow.) But after that, what happens? My PCs found out where Orlpar lived, went and asked if he needed help. He said No. They tried to find Dhusarra using Locate Creature and similar abilities, and failed. They then used Commune to find Dhusarra's lair, which as far as I know put the GM right out of his prep: he had to make up a lair for her. (If she had laired at the coffin-maker's, the adventure would have ended cold at that point, with no links leading onward at all. Pity to miss the Fireplace Level!)

So the whole Orlpar's-basement arc didn't happen at all, and was clearly never going to happen. That's okay (we weren't counting on it) but now what?

At this point, their only motivation was to nail Dhusarra. When she sent them riddles, they read the riddles (correctly, I think) as "I have a foe, and I want to manuver you into killing my foe for me." They were extremely reluctant to be used in this way, so they didn't want to investigate the riddles. Sure, there might be another vampire, but who wants to be one vampire's tool in taking out another, especially since such arrangements traditionally end in the death of the patsies? What they wanted, increasingly strongly as the messages arrived, was to kill Dhusarra. They had plenty of resources to burn to avoid red herrings--Locate Creature, Divination, Commune. So any location which didn't seem to contain Dhusarra or a clue to Dhusarra, they were motivated to avoid.

Note that if the PCs' goal is to kill Dhusarra, having her trapped in Waterdeep by her own ritual is a plus for them, so they particularly don't want to undo this. (Mine never figured that out, though; in fact they never knew that anyone was trapped anywhere, which is good as their attempts to get out would have been hard to adjucate.)

They did solve some of the riddles (with Commune: note that Corinna can cast this even if the PCs can't) and that only confirmed their suspicion that Dhusarra was sending the riddles in order to deflect them onto her enemy and off of her. The PCs were not from Waterdeep and had no previous connection with any of these characters, so knowing that Artor might be around was not particularly significant to them compared to their increasing hatred of Dhusarra.

We salvaged the situation by having the PCs go into the Crypt Level, not to beat it, but to make contact with someone who could sell them useful information about Dusarra and her defenses. (The lair the GM came up with was a dilly; they wouldn't have done well going in unprepared.) As it was, they never finished the level, and did the Fireplace Level only because that was the price their informant exacted for his information.

In general, the module takes little account of the divinational resources of characters of this level. I know that many players avoid using these spells--in part out of courtesy to their GMs, since it's easy to break scenarios with them. And maybe, as a mystery, the adventure simply cannot be made Commune-proof. But I think it would run more smoothly if the PCs had a stronger reason to go into the Crypt Level. "Because your worst enemy wants you to" is not a very reliable reason, and the PCs do not need to do it to get clues, because they can get all kinds of clues magically.

Locate Creature is a great spell versus vampires, because it is stopped by running water, but so are they! It doesn't have the range to find a vampire in Waterdeep, but it can certainly rule out her presence in any given location (as well as finding other vampires right and left). It would be a good idea to scryblock significantly more of the complex.

All this aside, though, the Fireplace Level was really stunning. The sudden shock to the PCs when the mer-vampire dispelled their Water Breathing, leaving the fighters drowning 30' down while he and his sharks circled overhead.... The vampiric gibberer also gave them a very bad turn. "*That* is a *vampire*??" And the final fight against Artor involved the party splitting up between the Etherial and Material, with the mage literally hanging on a rope by the portal and relaying information between the two groups: very scary, as you generally don't want to split the party like that. And the medusa poking her head out of etherial walls to say "boo"....

Mary

We've finished this now, and I can say a bit more about our conclusions.

Part I seemed weak, with motivation problems and a degree of brittleness if the PCs don't do what's expected of them. If you run it, be prepared to wing a lot of stuff.

Part II is better, and Part III has some of the best fights I've ever seen in a module. The use of terrain is amazing. Advice on running it: if you have a big battlemap, draw the entire Fireplace Level out on it. In our hands, the fights ended up spread over two planes and six rooms, and tracking locations would have been very tough without the full-level map.

You'll want to be very familiar with etherial and underwater combat, too. One point you may need to clarify for yourself: how opaque is the water in that pool, really? Descriptions have it as inky black, but the mechanics don't treat it consistently that way. The encounter will be much more difficult if the water is a significant visual barrier.

I really enjoyed the big setpiece fights in Part III. The PCs got to use everything they had, often in novel ways. However, this particular PC party has extraordinarily good communications (lots of telepathic bonds, and they sent one character back to sit at the gate and rely). Without that, the final fight might have been completely intractable, as the bad guy's resources for breaking contact with the PCs are huge.

Mary

My GM added a thread where Jil was the prime mover in another attempt to abduct the Shackleborn child at the orphanage. After she lost her entire team to you-know-who, the Last Laugh leadership was sufficiently angry at her that they quietly let it be known they wouldn't mind seeing her dead. The PCs took them up on this, hunted her down and killed her.

Months later, they ran into her sidekick Finch in a totally unexpected place, and found (to the player's amusement) that all those months they had been worried about Finch coming after them and killing them, he had been equally worried about them!

This fit in between Lucky Monkey and Zenith; the meeting with Finch was in Occipitus. (Finch said, "I thought that getting out of town--way out of town--would make sure I didn't run into *you*!")

I thought this was a good idea, because the game had been suffering a lot from "Everything is too hard, everyone significant is higher level than we are, we can't actually accomplish anything" player demoralization. Jil was a hard fight, but taking her out definitely felt like a task within the PCs' capabilities, and a significant one. (Two of the PCs have close ties to the orphanage, and they took her murder of a kid who got in her way there very personally.)

My GM tried very hard to give the player a better idea of what was actually happening early on, to avoid "Okay, here are the big bad guys!" "Huh? Who?" at the end. It's double-edged, because the player can easily come to feel that everything is way above the PCs' capacities and it's really hopeless to try to do anything. Cutting out and killing Jil helped soften that impression.

Mary

I have his permission to hear spoilers; the module's so unrecognizably different by now he doesn't think it will matter.

The big fight against the merfolk vampire was, I must say, a very nice fight: the terrain made a huge difference. We got intimately acquainted with the drowning rules, and *just* managed to haul two heavily armored fighters, choking and coughing, out of the water in time to save their lives.

Mary

Player point of view here.

My husband is running SCAP for two non-overlapping groups of players. When we got to a particularly nasty module, one group (mine) played it completely by the rules, no cheating. The other group, I believe, did some cheating on to-hit and damage rolls.

They had a heck of a lot more fun than we did. Based on results, I'd have to say that the cheating was probably a service to the game. I'd have preferred the GM to do it, but if that wasn't possible, having the players do it was the next best thing.

Why? Because that encounter, played fair and square, took seven frustrating hours to play out (about 70 rounds of combat) and depressed my group so badly that they nearly abandoned SCAP permanently. It was enormous amounts of dice rolling against a villain who was nearly invulnerable to anything the PCs could do. It was the failure of every cute trick the players could come up with, one after another. I know I didn't feel any satisfaction at the end--I had known for the last four hours that my PC deserved to die, and I was just impatient to get it over with.

When I read accounts on the boards of this particular fight, it looks as though most GMs do some "creative" rules interpretation to make the fight a little more possible. I've also seen a couple of accounts where no one did anything, it was a TPK, and the group abandoned the module.

So it's worth considering, if the players cheat, it is possibly because they believe the game won't be fun otherwise. And possibly they are right; in which case cheating is a poor overall solution, so maybe you as GM can find a better one.

I wish we had never run this scenario, at least not as written. I don't like to cheat, but maybe it would have been better for everyone concerned if I had. It did an awful lot of damage to the players' enthusiasm for the game; took months to recover.

Mary

I am currently a player in this (it's being used as a side adventure in SCAP). It's a little hard for me to comment because I don't know to what extent the GM has adapted it for my PCs, but I can give a general impression.

The opening didn't work very well for us. After the big fight in the bar, the PCs chose to hunt down the defeated gaseous-form vampires, rather than do what the module expected. This made sense at the time (the PCs have fought vampires before and are firmly convinced that once you drop one, you *must* hunt for the coffin or you'll just have to do it all over again) but it seemed to knock the module off the rails.

The PCs then became fixated on killing Dusarra. Again, this does not seem to be what the module expected, and it caused the GM a lot of grief. The more that the PCs learned about the actual plotline, the more they said "Dusarra is trying to get rid of us by sending us against these other vampires" and the less they wanted to play along. There does not seem to be good support for a PCs-versus-Dusarra conflict, at least early on. The GM ended up writing a lair for Dusarra from scratch.

We managed to get things back on track, mainly through an alliance between the PCs and Galgauth (sp?), the undead wizard, which got the PCs some more information and motivation. But it was very rocky and uncomfortable at first. We nearly gave up on it several times as it just didn't seem to be working out.

We also had a problem in that everyone the PCs felt connected to turned out to be a bad guy. The PCs are not Waterdhavian, and had no prior connections there. So this left them rather inclined to say "Never mind, these folk are all creeps anyway, let's just leave town" when the going got hard. This would probably be less of an issue if the adventure were used as a stand-alone; we were fighting the PCs' natural tendency to want to get back to their friends and relatives in SCAP.

Finally, you may have to address the question "Given that his foes have access to Commune, how *has* the master vampire stayed hidden for so long?" which bothered my GM a lot, especially after the PCs cast Commune.

Good luck with it. I'd recommend going through the first module very carefully, thinking about what your PCs will know at that point and what their motivations will be, and maybe making some adjustments.

Mary

After Blackwall Keep the adventure arc turns sharply away from the Mistmarsh and all of the clues found there. My player didn't really like this, so I ended up running a second lizardfolk-lair adventure with one of Ilthane's very young offspring and a kobold priest of Kyuss. They were supplying worm-ridden potions to the Free City, and the PCs ended up in the next module by following the chain of ownership of those potions. I thought it worked well. I don't think that this gives too much forshadowing of Ilthane's appearance later on: I'd rather the PCs didn't respond "Ilthane? Who's that?" (I also had the "Draconic Brood" team in the Champion's Games be a half-dragon and seven draconic kobolds, so there are additional connections available if the PCs choose to pursue them. They are Ilthane's people, but their reason for being in the Games is unrelated to the main plot.)

As for Allustan, yes, it's important that he have a relationship with the PCs: but the events as described in Blackwall have a significant chance to utterly destroy that relationship. I think it's better to do something else--almost anything is better than playing the module straight, unless your game has specific support ("my apprentice needs to prove himself") for a different and more palatable motive for Allustan.

I just let the PCs persuade Allustan to stay; my player was okay with this, and the Blackwall fight was already so easy, it hardly mattered. (Allustan didn't contribute that much anyway; his spell choices are questionable.) In retrospect, it would have been even better to give the lizardfolk a level of fighter, as the original poster suggests, and have it be a real fight.

My player's getting mighty tired of high-level "good guy" NPCs who won't do much to help: first Allustan (and Amaris, and the heads of Bronzewood Lodge), and now Eligos. I think I am going to have to make Manzorian much less of a good guy. I've been laying foreshadowing for that all game: Allustan is frankly afraid of him and Eligos has some visible ambivalence (especially when the PCs asked him to deliver the Apostolic Scrolls to Manzorian). I just don't think my player is going to swallow another round of "I know the world's about to end, but hey, I'm a busy man. Don't expect much from me."

Mary

My fear about the gladiatorial scenario is that if the PCs know that Raknian is their enemy, they simply will not put themselves in a position where he could so easily do away with them quietly. The scenario will still work if they don't participate in the games, but my player and I are unhappy about missing out (and also concerned about the EXP hit). So I'm doing the opposite--trying to direct attention away from Raknian, and find other reasons why the PCs need to get into the Caenoby. I am changing some clues that pointed at Raknian to point directly at the Kyuss-priest instead--because the PCs *don't* know who he is, and therefore won't freak.

Entering yourself in gladiatorial games that are being run by someone who is trying to kill you--you know, that just doesn't sound like a really bright move! It would be awfully easy for an accident to happen, wouldn't it, and no one would be the wiser?

I just ran it as it stood, and yes, it was a pushover. The PCs took a bit of damage at Blackwall and *no* damage in the lizardfolk lair (Silence and Fly let them sweep through without alerting anyone and gain surprise). I plan to run an inbetween adventure before the next SCAP module, though, based on the alliance the PCs made with the lizardfolk druid; he can tell them where Ilthane's potion-making workshop might be, and they'll probably raid that. That could be a bit harder without straining credibility.

I think we wouldn't have so much trouble with the scattering of the initial lizardfolk if the module didn't so obviously believe that it was a hard fight--it's annoying to be told "This is too hard to do directly" when in fact it is very easy. Makes you feel like you're GMing badly. Did playtest groups really find this fight difficult? I can't imagine how, given the lizardfolk's weak attacks.

The previous two modules were plenty hard enough; I don't think it's awful if this one is easy. But I wish the writeup were more accurate.

Mary

Started with six:

half-elf wizard
half-elf paladin
human rogue/scout/fighter/dervish
human rogue
human cleric of Wee Jas
half-orc fighter

At least, that's what races the PCs thought they were; it's become apparent that the first five are mistaken....

It seems likely that the wizard will eventually turn into some kind of spellweaver and the paladin will shortly turn into some non-paladin thing--we're in Smoking Eye.

Two PC deaths so far, the fighter at the Lucky Monkey (critted by the lycanthrope) and the paladin at Zenith. Zenith was very, very close to TPK, though, and not much fun for the player; nothing the PCs did seemed to work, and it went 70+ rounds over 7 hours of play. We pretty much abandoned sticking to the main line of the modules after Zenith.

Mary

I'm curious; did the ending fight with the "dragon egg" actually go as expected for anyone?

My PCs cast Fly, flew over to the egg, gently put it in a bag, took it away and figured out what it was. Then they roasted it on a very large bonfire.

Since it's just sitting there doing nothing, I'm not clear why anyone would attack it. And it is too far from the kobolds to plausibly be caught in an area of effect damage spell, even if the PCs are not trying to save the lizard eggs.

Mary

I looked at Blackwall Keep and thought, "Why is Allustan here if he's just going to run away? The author *knew* this would be a problem, and my player is going to hate it." So I decided he wouldn't go.

The PCs then applied *enormous* amounts of arm-twisting to Allustan to make him come with them.

At that point, I blew off what the module said to do, and simply had him fight alongside them. The player didn't mind, and it seemed a lot more workable. I cannot swallow "It's so urgent for me to go back to town and collect help in 1d4 days that I cannot take 3 rounds to cast Stoneskin and Fireball for you." There's no real danger to him. I felt my player would see this, not as Allustan's cowardice, but as pure railroading.

I had a bad time with Blackwall in general: it ran fine, but only after I made a lot of changes. I had trouble understanding how the soldiers could or would tolerate that thing in the basement; things make more sense if it gets in later. The module knows the PCs may catch up with the lizardfolk prisoner group, but gives no indication who is in that group or how they are travelling (and seems to have forgotten that they must be slowed by the prisoners). It knows an alarm may be spread in the lizardfolk HQ but gives no help on tracking the results, instead preferring to present a useless room-by-room of Blackwall Keep. It has diurnal lizardfolk sitting around in the middle of the day in pitch-dark rooms....

And watch out, because if the PCs let all the eggs get turned to spawn, and then kill them all, you will not be prepared for the level they'll become. The module thinks it is penalizing the PCs for this by denying them a CR8 bonus, but 200 CR1's is a lot more points than a CR8! And since the spawn are confined to a pool which they cannot escape, this is dead easy to do. (My player didn't do it, thankfully, but he pointed out the possibility to me.)

Mary

The lead PC of our party *really* acquires people. Over the course of the game the party has included (pardon my spelling, I've never seen most of these words written down): one of the Dark Creepers from Jeziderune; Lauro; Shensen; a wizard cohort from outside Cauldron; and a scout picked up on a side adventure. Of these only Shensen seems to have really stuck as a permanent party member. He;s also recruited the lead Dark Stalker, one of the bandits from the Lucky Monkey, a stray Shackleborn, and two out-of-town Wee Jas enforcers as associates but they don't adventure with the PCs.

In Occipitus, oddly enough, they now have Alec Tercival and Grehalia Cairnness. The drawbacks of this combination are becoming more and more apparent.

The party paladin has a unicorn, and Shensen has an animal companion; total party size currently 13. We find there is no such thing as a "small combat"--it's not worth taking out figures and rolling initiative unless it's going to be fairly important!

We'll need to get rid of someone once we get back; I think the wizard cohort, and Tercival.

Mary