Kris Schnee's page

There was some fun roleplaying here, though more for me as GM than for the players.

GMed this for six level 1-2 characters, and they destroyed all the enemies with hardly any damage. That's even with ruling that a particular weapon has 10' reach for purposes of this adventure; the canon rules for it changed since this was written, and following current rules would nerf the enemies. We judged that even if we'd run the higher tier it might not have been much tougher. In one of the battles the PCs have plenty of time to prepare and get a large advantage, but the difficulty isn't enough to make preparation necessary or to present any real challenge if the PCs do it. (One round, and most of the foes are dead/unconscious/asleep.) Also, we ruled that a particular hazard doesn't hit squares around corners, which turned a substantial threat into something that caused the PCs no harm at all.

The game only took around 2 1/4 hours as well. It's partly the difficulty, but also that the situation is pretty simple and linear. It could have used another twist. So, overall, I think my players had fun, but it didn't present a significant challenge or as long of an adventure as they're used to. It was at least a break from two adventures that were inordinately hard. We also got some humor out of a running gag about how astonishing these long-reach weapons are.

What I'll remember most about this one was the ludicrously hard boss:

The scenario is divided into a diplomatic session with unusual rules (an interesting idea) and a more traditional battle/exploration. The diplomacy was an attempt to win over a set of VIPs to aid the crusade against the demons, using a limited number of attempts. My high Diplomacy skill was nearly useless because I was told to use Kn:Local instead, which I didn't have, and of all people it was our fighter who actually accomplished anything. I liked the idea of being able to spend turns probing for an advantage on future conversations, but these were handled such that one PC couldn't use another's advantage or really play off one NPC against another despite them having rivalries. It didn't help our enjoyment that the diplomacy session started with a non-interactive introduction to half a dozen unlikeable VIPs.

The battle session then involved a ridiculously hard boss for our six-member party at levels 6-8, even with the GM removing two extra demons to compensate for the odd way this season handles tiers. Result: one PC died, one nearly died, everyone else fled and failed the mission. One of the boss' powers had a DC 25 save to avoid devastating harm, making it a near-automatic GM victory.with one encounter skipped.

So, it seemed like flaws in this adventure's design limited my enjoyment. It also ran over five hours even with the GM removing an encounter.