My players easily killed every last lizardfolk.
The challenge is keeping the garrison alive. IMC the party snuck around the killed the druid first, leaving the guards to fend for themselves. 26 rounds later and everyone was dead except the adventurers.
Don't be hard on yourself over the siege encounter. I ran it with my group this week as well with stunningly similar results.
1) The party took the time to buff their fighter, currently at sixth level, who then proceeded to puree the reptiles with his Great Cleave feat. The ARMY of lizardfolk proved to be no match for the sword-slinger, while the rest of the party circled around the fray to aid the soldiers in the keep.
2) I don’t imagine the Twisted Branch lair will be much of a challenge either, so im planning to throw in a few extra lizardfolk “pets” to set the fighter back. I’m adding a few rust monsters stacked with the “reptilian creature” template from Savage Species, other gifts from Ilthane. My players should have good time figuring out what kind of giant lizard would be rust colored and have antennae.
I figured the players were due a decisive victory after being trounced by beetle swarms, owlbears, and one particularly nasty dire boar named “Beast”.
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I’m adding a few rust monsters stacked with the “reptilian creature” template from Savage Species, other gifts from Ilthane.
Shambler! Shambler! (give him a large magic diamond that's electrified and attached to the mound wall....watch that baby growwww). Throw in a couple of Naga 'ambassador's from a near-by Yuan Ti lair...
To even the footing the lizardfolk mobs could of used flanking and the "aid another" action to give solid bonuses. It helps lower those insane AC's. Also have the try to target the "fleshy" foes before the heavily armored ones.
In the lair you can use the same tactics as well as assign AC negatives for difficult ground. Its hard to use that dex when you can barely move in 10" deep muck. You could also give them a morale bonus to attack of +1 or 2 because they are defending their home and their young.
My run of the assault went pretty well. The warforged artificer tried to protect the door, while the wizard blasted from the balcony. The wizard was backed up by the spiked chain wielding fighter. The lizardmen broke into three groups, the main one with the leader assaulted the door, while the second one tried to climb up to the balcony, and the third threw javelins.
Shane the Chain kept the balcony clear by tripping them off, the wizard took out some of the door crew with a weak fireball. They damaged the leader pretty badly, but the druid healed him up. The door got smashed in. There was a funny scene where the warforged looked at the druid using the healing wand and said "Stop doing that" and snatched it out of his hand. The leader and druid backed up and let the footlizards charge in. After some fun usage of bullrushing, the warforged was pushed across the room and fighting for his life, while the druid chucked Produce Flameballs at him. The chain fighter backed up the warforged, since the climbers gave up.
Meanwhile, the halfling ranger snuck up behind the leader and took him on solo. The worst part of it was the druid's snake, it kept poisoning him.
The party inside the keep mopped up the lizardfolk and ran out to help. They won with no casualties.
The run of the Twisted Branch Lair wasn't as fun imho. They took a lizardfolk prisoner with them as a guide, but he managed to escape right as they entered the lair and went running around alerting the place.
Chain fighters are a pain in the butt. Shukak spent the entire combat disarmed and on his back.
My players tore through the siege as well, but there were a few moments where it could have gone either way.
I didn't think that my players would have a very hard time with this encounter, so I added a lizardfolk with four levels of ranger that led the attack on the keep. He ended up caught in a web spell as they were attempting to knock down the keep's door.
A few good lightning strikes from our party druid was about enough to take out the lizardfolk leader, and a well-executed tangle spell slowed most of the lizardfolk from advancing on the party members.
After the fight, the PCs interrogated the lizardfolk ranger. He told the party that they were attacking because they believed that these humans were responsible for bringing the "green worms" to the swamp, killing all their young.
The party decided to investigate their claims, and went down into the basement, where they discovered the kyuss zombie. That didn't look good for the men in the keep, but when the men explained to the PCs and the remaining lizardfolk what had happened, everyone believed them.
Then I used the lizardfolk ranger to further the plot of ridding his tribe's leader. He told the party that there were some that did not trust their leader because he was taking orders from a black dragon. He wasn't strong enough to defeat the leader by himself to take over the tribe, so he asked the PCs for their help. In return he promised to end the attacks on the humans and send an emmissary to the Free City to negotiate a peace treaty.
The encounter at the lair was very neat, and I'll have to save that for another thread.
Interesting reads, all. I haven't run or even read this piece yet, so if this is a dumb question, please ignore it. Would it add to the excitement of the adventure if the PC's got a set amount of XP for each defender that survives? Put a sense of urgency to it, so they'd be tempted to forego a few buffs or some defensive strategy?
Would it add to the excitement of the adventure if the PC's got a set amount of XP for each defender that survives? Put a sense of urgency to it, so they'd be tempted to forego a few buffs or some defensive strategy?
Awarding XP for each defender that survives is a good idea... I did for my players. Whether or not it provides a sense of urgency depends on if you tell the players in advance that you'll give them bonus XP for saving the defenders.
In a non-metagame tactic, you can find descriptive ways to describe the urgency of the situation for the defenders... that might also get them moving. For my players, Alustan gave a little "pep talk" just before teleporting away. His advice was something like "The safety of the defenders should be your top priority." It worked well for my group... they never lost track of what was going on at the keep during the battle.
My PC's are all 5th level and I will begin the siege this Friday. This is the second time I've run AOW (first in 7 years) and this entire chapter was rated as "easy" by my players last time. To that end I am going to change a few things, but not many, getting to kick-butt every once in awhile is a nice change.
First - Agree 100% about the surviving soldiers. I will give xp for slaying lizard folk however, every slain soldier will reduce the xp by like amount.
Second - I created a wilderness map of the immediate area of the Mistmarsh (created by Dietrik Cicaeda)this will allow them to stumble around in the marsh, run into some hazards and denizens. It will also allow me to exercise the exploration rule-set which I really enjoy.
Third - Unless the party goes for a complete stealth approach as soon as combat erupts inside the lizard folk lair, they should react violently and quickly to defend their lair. This should put a lot of pressure on the PC's very quickly.
I suggest you give each lizardfolk a ranger level or the like, depending on how well-optimized the PCs are. My lizardfolk couldn't even land a hit.
I have ran this AP twice, and in both instances, the PCs wiped out the Lizardfolk to a man, taking almost no damage themselves. At this point, your PCs are probably extremely paranoid about the deadliness of the AP, especially after the previous module. As a result, they are tossing fireballs, buffing up reach/combat reflexes fighters with enlarge person, and other tactics for dealing with 'trash mobs', which the Lizardfolk unfortunately qualify as. Personally, I knew what was coming in the next two modules, and decided to let them have that one fight to feel awesome about themselves before the more lethal parts of the AP resume. Any semblance of tactics will dominate this fight, so don't feel bad about giving them an easy victory. There are still a couple of dicey moments in that module even (the end of it), so my advice is to let them have their moment before they get turned into Spawn of Kyuss.
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I changed all the lizardfolk to blackscale lizardfolk, from the Monster Manual III. This seemed to work thematically, and made it a bit more of a challenge, though still not a difficult one.
I gave all the lizardmen one barbarian level. With the added rage ability they were defeatable but definitely not easy.