So I ran the final session of “The Whispering Cairn” last night and it may well have been the final session of the Age of Worms campaign path. After several session of getting battered to death’s door, my party finally was ready to reap the reward. They’d hit all the important points – made contact with Allustan, learned the background story of the Vaati, tracked down (and prematurely killed!) Filge, found the note that was the hook for adventure two, buried the Land family for Alastor. Onwards to the Chamber of Sighs and big treasure.
Oh yes, there’s the trifling matter of the two 6HD opponents who can fly and have a ranged attack that they can use pretty much anytime they want. I decided that having the wind warriors just sit back and smack their swords together would be no fun for anyone concerned, so I had them mostly engage the party hand to hand, reasoning that they were created to be melee combatants and “programmed” to attack in that manner. The ranger (who despite having almost enough experience to be third level had never even bothered to level up to 2nd) and the rogue/sorceror were the ones who triggered the attack by mucking around with the airshaft while the fighter/barbarian, warforged tank, and goblin favored soul (NPC healer) hung back. Actually, the warforged was out of the room entirely, picking up some of those iron balls to use as a door jam because he was worried about the door closing on him (my fault – I forgot to mention that the trigger for the door was on that side).
So the wind warriors appear and engage. Let’s see, +8 to hit vs. low level characters, average 7.5 damage per hit, high AC, lots of HP. Yeah, that didn’t last long. They split up, running for the rim. The ranger managed to hide himself behind the barbarian. The rogue yelled for the cleric then was cut down (-7 or so, stabilized with an action point at -9). The healer ran to respond and was knocked down to 1 HP. By this time the warforged was in the fray. He interposed himself between the wind warrior and the fragile goblin. No prob, the wind warrior just flew out of reach and used the sonic attack. One goblin healer, down for the count.
The ranger decided to flee from relative safety and made for the airshaft. I had decided at this point that this was going to be a slaughter and that I would reward his daring by having him find something that would control, or at least call off, the wind warriors in the true tomb. But I wasn’t going to make it a cakewalk. While WW1 is dealing with the warforged and the barbarian, WW2 follows ranger into the true tomb. Ranger decides that it’s too risky to investigate the true tomb with WW2 on him like glue, so he flees back down the shaft. WW2 follows, fumbles an attack roll, so I rule it lost the weapons (mostly to give them a bit of breathing space and also see the looks on their faces when it summons a new pair next turn). At this point ranger decides to see if he can do something about the healer. WW2 follows and guts him. Ranger has no AP left and fails his stabilization checks. I play with Whimsy Cards and one of the other players used one to give him a second chance on his last roll. I even gave a bonus. No luck.
Meanwhile warforged and barbarian have been battering the heck out of WW1 and finish it off just in time for WW2 to come after them. Warforged goes toe to toe while barbarian hangs back with his bow. It’s going pretty well for them until WW2 gets in two solid hits on the warforged (already a bit battered to begin with), one of them a confirmed critical. Light fortification takes care of that, but still the damage is enough to drop him to -13!
That left the lone barbarian. Fortunately, the warforged had softened up WW2 quite a bit, and he’s able to finish the job in just two or three rounds. With one round to go, barbarian attempts to stabilize the healer. Success! Although two characters are dead (one arguably deservingly so), three will survive. Barbarian plunders all the bodies to find healing magic. There are a bunch of potions, some recovered from the beetle room and some recovered from Filge. They never got a chance to ID any of them, but had figured out that several were of the Conjuration school of magic.
Barbarian decides not to take a chance, and runs into town to but some potions. OK, I estimate it’s about 5 miles. Feeling charitable, I tell him he can run all the way, do his business, and run all the way back. I estimate about an hour and a half altogether. Meanwhile, I look up the rule about recovering consciousness when you’re in the negatives. 10% chance per hour, and you lose a HP if you fail. Ooops – they’re both at -9. Barbarian comes back to find two more dead companions.
At this point, playing in character, barbarian decides not to investigate any further, but simply to pull his companions out, bury them, and retire from adventuring. So now the Age of Worms campaign is over, as are my days as a DM. I don’t think the group will play under me again. I’ve broached the subject of continuing with new characters, but did not get anything even resembling enthusiasm.
Analysis:
What I did wrong – I could have fudged a lot of rolls, minimizing damage and having the wind warriors miss more often. I could have ignored the rule about losing HP when in the negatives or fudged the rolls. But I’m not really comfortable with doing that too often. I don’t think I have the “killer DM” mentality, but I do try to play the opponents intelligently and prefer to let the dice fall as they may as much as possible.
I could have had Alastor warn them that there were some guardians inside – I simply forgot to do so. Ditto with the door trigger – things may have been different if the warforged had gotten there a little sooner. I could have realized that two wind warriors would be too much and just used one – that would have been challenging but not devastating.
Another problem was that before this session most of the party had enough EXP to become 3rd level, but I find it unrealistic to say that people just gain a level without some kind of downtime. The party didn't want to take that downtime because they were worried that the rival adventure party would find the WC and get the big reward before them.
What the PCs did wrong – They could have stayed together more, backing each other up, instead of splitting up and making themselves easy individual targets. Barbarian could have taken a chance on one of the potions being a healing potion – good grief, he was a little injured himself, he could have tried it on himself first. They also could have retreated, although I’m not sure they could have escaped creatures with an 80’ flying movement, although I wouldn’t have had them pursue the party outside of the Chamber of Sighs (they had no way of knowing this, of course).
Other Problems – I think my group and I are not well adapted to the play style that is assumed by published adventures. Very heavy on highly challenging combat encounters, packed tightly together. Don’t get me wrong, I think Whispering Cairn is a fun adventure with a lot of fine role-playing encounters, but it’s also very, very deadly. My group almost gave up at the very beginning when the wolves and (later, after rest) the beetle swarm/mad slasher combo nearly wiped them all out. Is this really how most people play – a combat that incapacitates most of the party, rest, repeat?
If you made it this far, thanks for reading (and bearing with my abrupt changes in verb tense). Opinions and advice welcome. The big question nagging me is - am I an unreasonable killer DM? Should I have let the players live?
