Pyske's page

Ironically, your half-party kill and my TPK killed the same number of PCs.

As a tip to future GMs, I might suggest having individual beetles begin "leaking" out of the elevator during the two rounds leading up to the geyser swarm / slasher arrival.

I've seen a couple people speculating about the best way to slow the pace of advancement in the Adventure Paths, and about what the best side quests would be to insert. As a result, I find myself wondering how difficult it would be to "zipper" the adventure paths together, alternating bits from each campaign and meshing the two together into a single storyline. The certainly seem to have some similarities and links already.

Obviously, the treasure and XP would need to be reduced, but that's true regardless of which adventures you choose for side quests. Anyone foresee any additional difficulties?

PS -- I see someone beat me to the punch on this one. Here's the other thread: http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/dungeon/ageOfWorms/runningBothAPSimili taneously

Alternately, if you've already established the balls as iron, make them iron plated, instead of solid. Suddenly those balls are a lot less valuable... barely worth the price of smelting.

I think with an inexperienced group with fewer than four players with some cold dice there is definitely a potential for a TPK. You'll definitely want a cleric, and it pays to stock up on cure potions and the like, or to take the dungeon _very cautiously_.

This is a dungeon in the grand tradition of Dungeons & Dragons. If your players have not yet learned to be careful, they will probably have a few difficult lessons during the course of the adventure.

Sorry about the TPK. They should be proud of being the first one in the world, though. ;)

I don't blame you for the TPK, Erik. :) I don't think the module was poorly designed; I like it (or I wouldn't have picked it to run), and the players had fun right up to that last fight.

The group is not inexperienced, and I think they were appropriately cautious, but the split party (one person at a time on the platform) and the smaller group hurt them. An unlucky first attack by the abberration halved the remaining party strength, and the cleric simply wasn't strong enough to take on a CR 2 encounter by herself.

PS -- One other factor plays in, which is that the group was not designed goal-oriented, but RP-oriented, so they didn't try to fill the classic roles. No rogue, no mage.

Bearing in mind that this is mostly my fault for not scaling the adventure properly, I really miss the "Scaling the Adventure" sidebars. What ever happened to those? I just wiped out my entire 3-person party.

Here's what happened (minor spoilers, but intentionally vague): after a brief scuffle in town, the PCs (Cleric of Wee Jas, Fighter, and Monk) made their way to the Cairn. They handily dispatched the first encounter, explored a bit more, and experimented in room 7. The first PC arrived in area 9, but refused to step foot off the platform. The remaining PCs above switched to a different platform, triggering an encounter. They ringed themselves with torches in the 2 rounds they had, which I decided gave them an intimidate check against the non-intelligent portion of the encounter... the check succeeded, and that portion of the combat was avoided. Unfortunately, the abberration then tore the remaining party to shreds, taking the monk to 0hp in one strike, and eventually whittling the cleric down as well. The hit rolls just weren't coming for them, and the monster suffered only a single hit in retaliation.

Ah, well. Better luck next time, hopefully.