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Greycloak of Bowness's page

Organized Play Member. 667 posts (1,024 including aliases). 3 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 11 Organized Play characters. 1 alias.


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Meh.

3/5 —

I GM'd this one via PbP at T3-4, partially to see if I could make it work as a reclamation project.

It's not a terrible story, though I think as GM, you need to downplay some things early on if you know what I mean, and there is a ton of wiggle room for creative GMs.

There is a good variety of encounters (traps and fights), almost no roleplay and a bit of a change in that it throws a bunch of weak mooks into the battle instead of having competence in the BBEG's.

Overall, the challenge level is quite low at the middle tier so this one is a good candidate for playing up or playing with a small group.

Balance problems

3/5 —

The story, map, and setting are decent and make for a good dungeon crawl.

One encounter at Tier 3-4 is not OK.

GM spoilers for Tier 3-4:

1) Tholrist (the big bad evil guy) has some pretty big problems in his spell selection:
- Rage and Aid are Mind-affecting and thus cannot target undead (him and his allies)
- Command is language dependant and he doesn't speak any languages that anyone in a normal party speaks so he can't do anything with it

Maybe the plan is to have him waste 3 rounds casting useless spells but that's not really implied in his Tactics.

2) His AC is over the top for a party in the lower part of the tier. He's supposed to be up to AC26 with either Protection from Good or Shield of Faith. That's in the CR10-11 range. Couple that with +10 to hit for his 3 attacks that cause paralysis and this guy is a melee killer.

3) That leaves his tactics and morale. He is supposed to ignore paralyzed foes and is unable to leave the room. This means that if he doesn't kill the party right away and they manage to escape to heal up, they can keep coming back, attack him from ranged until they roll enough 20's to pierce his AC and cover (which is everywhere). It takes a while for the PCs to figure this out but when they do, it's dull, dull, dull.

I'm guessing 30 rounds of combat to kill him off unless you have a heavily optimized party with people who can spam ranged touch attacks.

Railroady

3/5 —

I played and GMed this scenario via PbP at the low tier.

I know that the nature of these scenarios is that they tend to be railroads but the rails aren't supposed to loom quite so large as they do in this one. There were very few decision points and the combats were all pretty similar.

That said, there are a pair of potentially non-combat encounters that can be resolved peacefully, and they can be pretty rewarding.

The second last encounter is pretty dull and the BBEG is either a threatened TPK (if colour spray hits a bunch of PCs) or a powderpuff (if she blows her concentration check or something to cast in melee, in which case her ability to avoid damage is comically poor).