Hezzrack's page

OK, call me a stickler, but according to the adventure text, the cryohydra cannot, mathematically, collapse the stairs. The cryohydra deals 3d6 cold damage per attack. Given that it breathes from 7 separate heads, that means that each breath should be treated separately. Maximum damage per attack would therefore be 3x6=18 damage per attack. The text says, "Quarter the damage (because it's cold damage against an object), subtract 10 for the hardness, and apply the rest to the pegs." One-fourth of maximum damage (18) is 4.5. If you subtract 10 from that, you always get 0. Therefore, the cryohydra cannot collapse the stairs.

Naturally, I can see that you might treat all the damage as coming from a single source, since there is only one cryohydra. However, doing so seems to go against a strict interpretation of the rules. Maybe I'm thinking about this encounter in the wrong way. I plan, for example, to give each head its own turn in the initiative. Maybe that's why I'm thinking of the cold damage originating from separate sources.

When you ran (or when you plan to run) this adventure, did you collapse the stairs? Do you think the stairs' integrity is even important to the encounter's outcome? I can see how it could be -- a collapse could potentially divide the PC party, allowing the cryohydra to kill one or two PCs who have been cut off from the others. How did this scenario play out when your ran it, or, alternatively, how do you plan for it to play out?

My party is halfway through Flood Season and still hasn't even heard of the Stormblades. How important is this sub-plot? Can I leave them out altogether, or would one or more of the adventures suffer significantly if I did? There's just so much going on in this campaign, SO many NPCs, that I'd just prefer to omit them if I can. What do you think?

The main reason why the Temple of Pelor can't help the Temple of St. Cuthbert recover the Wands of Control Water is because, "Last spring, it lost its two most powerful priests to a tragic accident." How? I consider myself a pretty good DM, but one of my weak spots is coming up with creative explanations where the situation seems significant but there is no hint given in the descriptive text I'm using. In this situation, I am torn between tossing the party an enormous red herring, and presenting a perfectly logical explanation. On the one hand, I don't want to make things too easy on the PCs, but on the other hand, I don't want them going off on a wild goose chase, trying to track down the veracity of a strange explanation for the clerics' demise. To those of you who are more creative than I am, please, put on your thinking caps: what would you say if the party asked Kristof Jurgensen (Clr4) how his two higher-level superiors died?

Please help! I am running the SCAP from the original DUNGEON magazines; I don't own the book. This is driving me crazy, and maybe the error (if it WAS an error) was corrected in the book. In the magazine, the Jzadirune description contains two "Z" keys and no "A" key. The two "Z" keys are in areas J34 and J52 in DUNGEON's descriptive text. Should one of these be the "A" key? My party has just defeated Kazmojen, and will probably re-enter Jzadirune to make sure there's nothing there they missed. Right now, they possess neither the "Z" nor the "A" key. I'd like to run the unexplored areas the way they were intended. So, should one of these keys be the "A" key, and, if so, which one?

Because I own all the Dungeon issues containing the entire SCAP, I did not buy the hardcover. Does it contain a description of the Striders of Fharlanghn as an Affiliation, PHB II style? If so, I would be very curious what it says, because, since buying the PHB II, I have been thinking of making the Striders an Affiliation in order to provide my PCs with benefits for joining them. If the hardcover does not provide such a description, I would be particularly interested to hear what people who read this would set as such an Affiliation's Affiliation Score Criteria, and Titles, Benefits, and Duties, in particular.