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Well, my two groups are both in the Malachite Fortress now... and they have both reached (or are at the threshold) of the 4th level. So far a good time was had by all. It is also possible, that not all the monsters are encountered (for example, both groups did not find the secret room J47 with the Dread Guard).
If in the Malachite Fortress the heroes will go straight to the showdown, the rest of the guards might surrender or flee back to the Underdark.
I think the next installment of the AP 'Flood Season' suggests, that you start the adventurers at Level 4...
I'm starting a campaign with the Shackled City and I may end up with 6 characters. I was concerned with XP, so I tallied it up for Life's Bazaar as if there were the normal 4 charactes. By the time the adventure was over, I came up with 5th level characters! The module says you'll "approach 3rd level." Why are people saying that there isn't enough XP? Am I counting something wrong? I can show my work if necessary.
Did you count the Vhalantru encounter too? I think it's CR 13 or something. PC's shouldn't get any XP for that as they don't defeat him.
There are a number of factors that will lead to the party getting less xp than listed:
* PC's don't need to explore the Jazidrune or the entire malachite hold in order to find the missing kids. In other words, PC's won't nescesarily encounter all the baddies.
* There are a lot of hard to find secret doors. PC's may need to take 20 searching every single 5' square in order to find all the secret doors and the encounters. Considering the PC's are in a hurry, they probably don't have the time to do this.
* The striders (Felio en Farian sp?) could come to the party's aid. Of course, this means they get an equal share of the XP too.
In my campaign, my three PC's came about halfway through 3rd level. They reached 4th level by the end of the flood festival. Considering the difficulty of the Lucky monkey encounters, that wasn't too bad. (man, those raptors are mean!)
Here's a thought - don't give them anymore XP than you want to! Who cares what the XP's come out to? I use the XP chart more as a guideline than a hard and fast rule. Give them as little or as much to keep them on track.
I have a tendency to keep them slightly ahead in levels as the module suggests because some things can be quite deadly. I have 5 players in my group - one players is 6th and everyone else is 7th and they just entered Bhal-Hamataghun last session.
I have a slightly different take on the XP issue than most of you. I only award my party 50% of the XP allocated for an encounter. This was for two reasons - I believe the party progresses too rapidly before they have a chance to master any powers/abilities and also so I can slot additional adventures between each AP 'step' that helps fleshout the characters backgrounds/motivations etc.
What I have found is that my party (even after reducing the XP) is half way through 2nd level and they haven't even entered the Malachite Hold yet. They have been thorough in their search but I would guess they will reach 3rd level by the end of the adventure.
This is very interesting to me considering that the adventure states that the party should have only reached 3rd level and that is without reducing any XP!
I will be interested if them phenomenen continues throughout the AP or whether it is isolated to Life's Bazaar.
Has anyone enountered a similiar increase with Flood Season or any other adventure in the path?
Delvedeep
My group ran all the way up to Test of the Smoking Eye (part 5 I think) in this campaign before work schedules changed up to the point of making regular play impossible. There were originally four of us (including the GM) so we used a couple variant rules. First, we swapped GM duties. I ran the first module, another player ran the second, and so on until it came back to me. Whoever was GMing would also play their own character. Second, we used Gestalt characters (see Unearthed Arcana) until we converted to normal characters at level 7.
At the end of Life's Bazaar, we were all 4th level and loaded with loot. At the end of Flood Season, we were all 6th level and loaded with even more loot. At the end of Zenith Trajectory we were all level 8 and our loot was beginning to balance out. At the end of Demonskar Legacy, we were all 10th level and my character at least was right on the money for wealth by character level as listed in the DMG.
I attribute our success early on to our gestalt abilties. Having the benefits of two classes at once makes low-level characters spectacularly powerful, just like multi-classing is extremely beneficial to low-level characters in the short run (to a lesser extent than gestalt of course). Had we not been gestalt, we would have neglected to tangle with several encounters and probably wouldn't have noticed as much stuff.
Going back and looking over the mods at a later point, I noticed that there was a LOT of XP lying around. If a party of four characters is extremely thorough, I imagine them to be at least one level (probably two) ahead of the curve throughout the entire series and not to mention wealthy to boot. However, I don't think the adventure writers intend for player characters to be that thorough. They intend for them to meet their mission goals, then move on to the next adventure. If your PCs are very goal oriented, I'd wager money they'll stay right about where they need to be.
There really is no problem with letting PCs be ahead of the game though. The Shackled City is a tough campaign. There are several very Gygaxian moments in which your PCs will simply be overwhelmed and if they survive they should thank Istus for their fate. On top of that, the XP system is self-correcting. If your PCs get a little ahead, then they get less experience for the next adventure, meaning they won't get as many levels for that adventure as they did for the last one. And on top of THAT, there are sidebars with each adventure giving tips on adjusting the adventure for higher/lower level PCs. I wouldn't worry about PCs being ahead. I would worry about them being behind and add in a side-quest between modules if they need it to be at least the minimum level, either that or use the adjustment sidebars to power the encounters down.