My group completed the first chapter of Foundation of Flame last session, and will begin the evacuation of Cauldron next. During the "Meeting of Minds" the party actually subdued Kravichak (by dropping his WIS to 0), and will start questioning him.
By the time they're finished, the events in "The Mountain Awakens" will begin. Someone will realize that the volcano is threatening to erupt, and then head out to save as many people as possible. Since they will already be at the Church of St. Cuthbert, I figure that's where they will begin.
This is how I have the encounters set up:
Northeastern Section
I plan on starting with A City Aflame (event 4), followed by Squished (event 3), where they will have to save the children in the Lantern Street Orphanage. If that doesn't get them moving, I don't know what will.
Crater Lake
The party may very well be divided trying to handle the Stampede! (event 6) and The Morkoth Rises (event 13).
After these first two, the pary can go in any order.
Northwestern Section
The party will have to deal with the Mob Trouble (event 8) as mobs go about The Tipped Tankard, the Guard Barracks, and looting more of Maavu's Warehouses. If the PCs do well, they may be able to turn the mobs helpful, and get them to help with The Upper Story and the Trapped Townsfolk (events 1 and 2).
Southeastern Section
This section can be interesting, because this is the part of the city that eventually gets destroyed. So, I'm throwing in the Gas Explosion (event 9) and the subsequent Urban Avalanche (event 10), both of which will end in the complete destruction of the Cathedral of Wee Jas.
Southwestern Section
I'm leaving the rest of the encounters in this area, Lake of Fire (event 5) and Angry Elemental (event 7) can be run at the same time as the Falling Farastu and Descending Kelubar (events 11 and 12). This should also split the party up a bit to multi-task.
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I'm sure I'm going to have to provide some extra info as the PCs will also want to save their significant others and/or business ventures from being destroyed.
I'm interested in seeing how much of their resources they will use up during the evacuation (and what they've already used to protect the nobles) to see what they have left to fight off Hookface.
We had to put last week's game off until yesterday, but they finished Foundation of Flame, which included the death of one of the PCs... at the hands (fins?) of the fiendish morkoth.
The session began with the players trying to figure out what to do with Kravichak. Most of their ideas centered around things that Jenya strongly disagreed with (the nuetral PCs were ready to tie him up and do bodily harm). The players were not able to come up with a plan, or even a set of questions to ask, so I began Chapter Two: The Mountain Awakens.
After the initial small quakes, the party figured what was going to happen, and headed to the streets of Cauldron in time for the major quakes, encountering the events as I planned (see the above entry).
For the most part, the party did extremely well, using great tactics and spells: Reverse Gravity helped to get the townsfolk out of the crevice in Squished (event 3); summoned earth elementals helped to save the townsfolk (and to PCs) in Urban Avalanche (event 10); and the party ranger used his pegasus (long story) and leapt and grappled the kelubar as it descended (event 12).
They used diplomacy in every situation they could, often with results above 35. So, in the events that could be solved that way went extremely easy for them (and the archmage had Mass Suggestion prepared, which would have come in handy as well. It got a little hairy as two PCs were trying to use diplomacy in The Upper Story (event 1), while the rest were fighting off the Angry Elemental (event 11), but the most difficult of the encounters was dealing with the events near crater lake.
The party arrived and were glad to see that the citizens were already evacuation (read: fleeing), but saw that some had succomed to the noxious fumes and boiling waters of the lake.
The Stampede! (event 6) took them off guard, and it took three rounds of Handle Animal checks and Animal Empathy checks from the ranger and druid before they stopped the animals from rampaging and injuring the civilians (the PCs all took damage as well).
In the second round (before they successfully dealt with the stampeding animals) the Morkoth arose and attacked the nearest thing, which ended up being the stampede, further inciting them to bolt.
After the part fighter (a crossbow specialist) did nearly 70 points of damage in one round, the morkoth turned his destruction spell on him. And the player rolled a 1.
The archmage (a drow) identified the [b]8th level spell[/i] and was spooked into casting resonating resisitance (from The Book of Vile Darkness... the archmage has The Smoking Eye, so I said he met the prereqs). The second scary moment, although they didn't know it was a scary moment, was in the following round when the archmage cast disintegrate on the morkoth. He made his caster level check to penetrate spell resistance, but not by much. I would have cringed to see the archmage disintegrate himself.
The spell reflection became evident in the round following, when the party warmage didn't make his caster level check, which resulted in a 10d6 fireball back on everyone in the party. At that point, the archmage went "ooh... that could have sucked."
The morkoth fell shortly after that, and most of the PCs were down 60% of their hit points. They broke out the wand of cure moderate wounds, and not for the last time that day.
When the PCs had finished all of their work, and were about to leave the city themselves, they saw Hookface fly overhead. The casters were nearly all spent (except the warmage, who has a ring of wizardry I, and uses his 1st level spells extensively). The party decided to flee, and the archmage cast teleport to try to get them to Redgorge.
Now, I had planned a small side-quest to take place before Thirteen Cages, and the teleport went awry, as the magic mingled with the portals appearing here and there, and the party got "rifted" to a d20 Modern setting, along with Hookface.
Even with their limited resources, the party dealt out 200 hp damage to the dragon as it was attacking a military unit out on maneuvers. Hookface, of course left the battle, and now has to figure out where she is.
--Note 1, the warmage's character history is that he came from a d20 Modern setting (but was created using 3.5 rules) and got rifted to Cauldron during a test with portal travel. Later, when Fetor avoided death at the hands of the PCs, he grabbed an extra shackleborn, a brother of the archmage, and found his way to the Modern world. The PCs know that Fetor had left only a few days earlier, but were told that he had been active with a terrorist organization for the past 3-5 years. So they know that there is a time-discrepancy and they can return to Cauldron within hours of leaving it.
--Note 2, when the fighter died, the player asked me if he could create a d20 Modern character to bring into the game, not knowing that they were going there. A funny coincidence, so I said sure. His backstory would include that his character was sent out to find out what happened to the other PC. He's going to run a character using d20 Modern rules, and we will see how well it will match up. If it works out well, he may bring his new character to Cauldron, or he may have his fighter ressurected when the party returns.
--Note 3, I'll be running a d20 Modern adventure for them, merging three adventures you can download from the Wizards.com d20 Modern adventures: Too Far Gone, Everything Goes, and Anything Goes.
Oh, and when the party was travelling toward the southeast section, they saw the huge explosion that topple the Cathedral of Wee Jas, and the reactions from my players were:
Rogue: "No loss there... I bet Kristoff must be happy."
Fighter: "Cool."
Archmage: "...and there was much rejoicing."
0h 2...
I've determined that Jenya will be able to get the information needed to find the entrance to the Cagewrights lair via a legend lore spell cast by Crazy Jared, whom the party inadvertantly restored to sanity.
With the time difference that the party will encounter from rifting, they will be able to recover lost hp and spells and return to Cauldron only shortly after they disappeared. In essence, they be able to go and attack as soon as they get the information from Jenya.
Heh...'nother FROM THE ARCHIVES!!!
Anyone else have any stories running this module?
My party has a paladin who started a church of Heironeous. He also took the leadership feat, which has improved that church's following in Cauldron. The group doesn't really have anyone with diplomacy or intimidate skills so I was thinking that they could use his followers in most of the Citizens Aid sections. Does this seem fair? Of course, were he to convince his followers (almost all 1st level commoners, but with some low level clerics, paladins, and i think a bard) to follow him in a battle against the Morkoth or Hookface, well, *mwahahahah*
Ran this yesterday. I ran the encounters in pretty much the same order that Big Jake used (thanks, it saved me a lot of prep time!).
They started with the fire. The paladin and cleric cast resistance Fire on the paladin, barbarian, and ranger. They ran in and after some excellent search/listen checks managed to get the commoners safe. Hearing the squeels of the orphans they ran over to see the massive fissure and the orphans at the bottom. The party wizard cast fly(using a wand) on everyone in the party(and had already cast fly on himself)so they rescued them without incident.
As they flew over Cauldron they saw the Morkoth emerging from the lake. They freaked out and flew straight at it. The Morkoth summoned the Vroks and they moved in to distract the party. The Morkoth was hurt and just wanted to get out of town, but seeing the party rush at it kind of freaked it out. The party wizard cast disintegrate on the Morkoth and it reflected, but the wizard made his save. The paladin and the barbarian tangled with the Morkoth in melee, while the ranger and the rouge tangled with the vroks. The cleric released an order's wrath (law domain) on the penetrated its resistance. The following round the Morkoth blasphemed everyone except the wizard and cleric (out of range) and they plummeted to the ground. He then began to flee. The vroks clawed at the plummeting heroes as the wizard telekenised them so that fell safely onto the shore and not in boiling water. The cleric attacked the Vrocks. What happened next blurred the line between stupidity and heroism.
Seeing his compatriots on the ground and the Morkoth fleeing, the wizard casts a quickened disintegrate on the Morkoth, and it relfects again. The wizard makes his save, and...he casts disintegrate again. Once again, it fails to penetrate the Morkoth's spell resistance and...the wizard failed his save. DISINTEGRATED! The morkoth flees for cooler waters. The cleric slays the two vrocks and goes down to remove paralysis on his fellow party members.
Once that is done, the water of the crater is rising and the animals are stampeding. I honestly thought that the party was screwed on this one, but the paladin summoned his warhorse who commanded the horses to march out of the exit. The party rouge located Shensen who helped calm down the remaining animals.
Next the party rescued Tomash and his kids. The flying really helped on this one, but they freaked Tomash out by charging. In the end it took some scrambling to find his daughter and pin him. They barely escaped the collapsing building but I didn't run the trapped ecounter since there were no casualties.
Flying also helped tremendously on the lake of fire encounter.
In the southwest corner of town, the heroes faced off against the Farastus and Kelubar demodand. The party mopped the floor with them.
In my previous post, I actually forgot that the Paladin (having almost no useful skills in the opinion of its player) had maxed out diplomacy. Coupled with the paladin's reputation (starting a church, donating massive amounts of money) as well as that of the party (heroes and massive amounts of aid rolls) they managed to use diplomacy in almost every applicable situation.
I opted out of running the Hookface encounter, mostly cause I was tired, but also I didn't really like how it was set up. I will probably run it after 13 cages and buff up Hookface a bunch.
Overall, I felt the evacuation of cauldron was an allright encounter. To be honest, I couldn't wait to be done with it. However, it did afford some nice roleplaying moments and some chances to use rarely used skills for the players. I wouldn't say that the party enjoyed it, but it defintely gave them a sense of doom for the city of Cauldron (in which they have invested so much) and a chance to flex their muscles as the True Heroes of Cauldron.
PLUG: See my other posts about Foundations of Flame.