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If you are playing this in Dayton OH, please stop reading.
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Weird thing came up during the last few sessions and I'm not sure I really handled them right.
The group. It is large group of 6 PC’s, but usually only 4 or 5 show up. They don’t all really optimize that well or always use very good tactics. One complete noob and 2 kinda new-ish. So I haven’t had to punch up the difficulty too much, but I think I will start bumping it up a bit in the near future.
We have half-orc paladin 5 wielding a double axe
Human-ish samurai 5 wielding 2 katanas
Dwarf cleric 5 heal-bot with some buffing (newbie)
Druegar ranger 1/psion 4 telepath
Fey small sorcerer 4 with fey bloodline (mostly scorching ray and magic missile so far)
Fey tiny flying psion 4 shaper
First, the near constant detect evil/magic/undead is making it difficult for many of the horror things to surprise them at all. Any suggestions on how to deal with this on a group that has so many caster types?
Second, The Haunted Well scene.
Psion uses sensitivity to psychic impressions to find out there have been a bunch of child murders here.
Ranger finds small foot prints near well.
They pretty much guess they will be attacked if they go to sleep.
Psycrystal familiar goes into well and find a bunch of child bodies in the well.
Paladin wants to give them a proper burial.
I figure from write-up the bodies are not animated until the fog come out.
So they use levitate on a strong guy to rapidly bring all the bodies up while the workers are digging graves.
I figure they get can pretty easily get all the bodies buried well before midnight.
So no real violent action. I gave them full xps because the delt with it cleverly. I also gave them a bit of a reputation boost when they told the tale at the nearby village.
But, it seemed pretty anti-climactic and the players seemed a bit disappointed.
How would you have handled it?
As for Detect Magic (though this also covers detect undead to a degree -> It takes four rounds and they can move out of their sight), I asked that in another thread since I was having the same issue. How I've dealt with it is the fact they are in Kaidan. They do have to 'cast' that spell (for three rounds!!!). Meaning a lot of hand waving and chanting in most cases. The locals are already xenophobic and scared of the Gaijin, so actions like this should impact them appropriately. Commoners and similar would start yelling about demons and run (and probably call the guards) while guards or samurai would draw blades on them. It's fairly easy to get across that using that sort of magic on everybody and everything isn't in their best interests and will only result in a bad reputation.
In Jadoko and the Oni's cases (also the Jiki-something...those ghouls), their shape-changing is a supernatural ability. Meaning it isn't magical and it won't show up as magical if they try detect it. Nothing short of truesight I think would be able to pierce it. Another thing you could do is remove some of Jadoko's other loot and give her a ring of nondetection (or even some potions!). It would make sense for her to have really and she is quite clever.
I admit I haven't had to deal with detect evil since I banned the detect alignment spells for my world beforehand...though nondetection as mentioned above should be able to cover that still.
As for the Well, did they bury the bodies at least...100 feet away I think it is? Else the Children would have still animated and attacked. The module was pretty clear about that. If they did, I think I would have handled it exactly the same as you did. Though...I think I would still give them the dream that night (as a sort of vision), as it sets up some foreshadowing for later on in the next book.
Well the detect X of everything has mostly been in the mountains so far. Only takes 1 standard action to find out if it's present. But they have mostly just been in the trail through the mountains so far. So no large crowds of bystanders to see. But I will keep it in mind for when they are around. Thanks.
I think I will give Jadoko the ring of non-detection. Excellent idea and well in character. I might not even take away much of what else she has.
Yeah, the didn't specify exactly where they were burying them but they did say 'well away' because they didn't want to polute the well. So to me that sounded like 100+'.
I forgot about the dream. I will retcon that next session.
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I think what I would have done at the well was to have it take much longer than a single day to pull out all the bodies. Finding bodies at the bottom of murky water, even with magic, might be tricky and when you start pulling them up, all sorts of things can go wrong.
You could also have changed the encounter a bit so that as the strong guy was lowered into the cold, cold water, his vision clouding up as light becomes dimmer, he feels at first nothing as he gropes. Then, a sudden, his arm brushes against the cold, clammy skin of one of the children. Reaching for it, there is a sensation as of the body moving, away from him. As he reaches again, hardly able to see, he feels what feels like fingers grasping at his ankle... (I predict at this point the player is screaming for the others to get him out of the well).
Regardless of whether the children attack, going into a dark, cold well to pull up dead bodies should be easily made creepy. Remember that in horror, the feelings one gets is, often, more important than the actual events.
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Yeah, I probably could have done a little better trying to describe the creepy vibe. Kinda threw me off when they immediately zeroed in on the well and started doing all the exploring and body finding with the psi-crystal.
Decided afterward, that maybe I should have made it some kind of magical field that inhibited all the senses so the psicrystal could just find everything instantly. Or something like that.
I could have punched up the description a bit after the paladin started going down for the bodies. But it seemed like it was too late since they had already found and figured out pretty much everything by that point.
Honestly mine did that too. I mean, ripping the campsite apart soon as they arrived. By this point they had already been attacked 3 nights in a row and they were getting a bit paranoid. I was careful to mention some other things of note in the area first so they didn't immediately zero in on the well which helped some though (a still slightly warm campfire, the torn up tent in the bushes, various animal trails and some tracks they didn't recognize, etc).
I wish I had played up the digging up the bodies more myself, but I had already achieved the level of fear I wanted when they packed up the wagons in rounds and were in flight soon as the attack started (despite the cleric wiping out half of them with a channel...not that he could see that with the fog though lol).
I would have run it as a simple campsite to start. If you notice on the map, the only open dirt area is the campsite itself, whereas grass grows all the way to the edge of the well/pond. There should not have been tiny footprints for the ranger to discover. In fact until the dream sequences begin for the sleepers and the fog starts to rise, I would have provided no indication that undead were present at all.
Although it doesn't say so in the adventure, until the fog is activated, the zombie children are just dead bodies, not even actually undead - so Detection spells for evil or undead wouldn't work at all. If detection spells were done as the fog is rising and the corpses begin to exit the pool, then they would indicate what the party eventually discovered. As if the fog itself had some kind of necrotic power and then activating the bodies.
I never allow psionics in my games, so I wouldn't know how to handle the psionicist.