So tomorrow I'm running the next session of ROTRL. My group has already alerted Gogmurt to their presence by spending an hour attempting to set fire to the briars even though they were told it looks too green to do so and then attempted a sloppy recon attempt before dragging all the hungry little refugees out after the tasty looking kitsune.
I have a party of 6-7 level 3s and after rereading Gogmurt again it clicked in my head just how nasty he is. Correct me if I am wrong, but after he casts Entangle, any PC that is caught in it is considered flat footed and thus would be subject to his Sneak Attack bonus with his Produce Flame wand (within 30 feet of course and only if actually having failed the save) since the spell acts as a ranged touch attack.
Has anyone else used this approach with Gogmurt before? I'm not trying to wipe my party but I have told them since the beginning that I'm not going to play with kid gloves on this time and they needed to play smart.
tl;dr. How nasty is Gogmurt and Tangletooth when played to full effectiveness?
Edit: Words are hard! :P
Add to this the fact that Gogmurt can move through the brambles unimpeded.
He's one of the nastier builds in book one, that's for sure. For my money, he's more of a "boss fight" than Nualia is.
My players didn't defeat him the first time around, and he tried to ambush them on the way to Magnimar during book 2. He used invisibility to animals and call lightning with a herd of aurochs, it was quite memorable.
Even without knowing about Gogmurt, we decided that the brambles were a TPK waiting to happen and looked for the back door.
He and TT can be very nasty, particularly if they catch the party in the tunnels (where Medium bipeds suffer squeezing penalties). The party will have a better chance in the "rooms", but even then Gogmurt is a nasty piece of work.
He almost took out the party (four L 2 characters) when my first group of players tackled him the first time, and they had to retreat. Although Gogmurt then alerted Ripnugget, Ripnugget decided to deal with the intruders without alerting his longshanks allies. So when the party simply lay low in town until the infamous goblin attention span "ran out", almost everything had "re-set" at Thistletop when the party tried again. (Thistletop in general gave that party a lot of trouble, as Erylium had escaped them in the Catacombs of Wrath and then joined Nualia. A flying, invisible spy/scout/sentinel with a combined Stealth modifier of 40+ is no joke.)
I'm waiting with interest to see how my second group of players deal with the situation, as they are just about to go to Thistletop for the first time. :) (They managed to kill Erylium underneath Sandpoint, so they don't have that problem.)
Yeah, Thistletop is a rather long dungeon for characters that have such limited options to continue their adventuring day past 3 encounters.
In that way, it is a valuable "introduction" for both the GM and the players.
You need to decide at this point in the campaign how to handle this, because it will not be the last.
I TPK'd my players with him, but I may have been a bit overzealous in giving him cover when attacking from the within the brambles, and I treated TT as having the flanking trick (what rogue wouldn't teach their AC that?). Touch sneak attacks are nasty, moreso with squeezing penalties. He can be hitting on a 2+ if he catches them in the tunnels.
They ended up fleeing the island by creating a boat on the far side after they killed Nualia. So I've got to figure out what to do with a druid angry that they killed his pet, the thicket full of goblins and goblin dogs, an island with a very angry horse on it, and the stuff left in the lower level of the dungeon if my PCs decide to go back.
See my post upthread. (Have him ambush them in book 2!)