I'm curious if any DM has ever encountered even the slightest bit of player revolt when going from Life's Bazaar; a game that follows to some extent this format; weird things happening in town (kidnappings) ----> investigate ----> find a secret door located in the shop of a local merchant (Ghelve's Locks) ------> which leads into tunnels under the city (Jzadirune and the Malachite Hold) -----> do a nice little dungeon crawl and defeat the baddie.........into Drakthar's Way, a game that follows to some extent this very same format; weird things happening in town (goblin graffiti) ----> investigate ----> find a secret door located in the shop of a local merchant (Orak's bathhouse) ------> which leads into tunnels under the city (Drakthar's Way) -----> do a nice little dungeon crawl and defeat the baddie.
To be honest, I've already DMed a live group well past Drakthar's Way, and the issue never came up; although we had something like 6-7 months break in between the two installments. I'm now DMing an online game, and we've just started the dungeon crawl, which I estimate to take close to 12 sessions total when played online (assuming game sessions are between 3-4 hours). My introduction to SCAP was in an online game as a player, and we only got as far as the first installment, which took somewhere around 14 sessions. I've seen other camps in progress online, and it seems that 12 sessions is a good benchmark for the completion of the first adventure, the majority of which will be spent in the crawl.
My current group isn't too picky, but they aren't used to such prolonged stays in one environment, and I'm wondering how they're going to react when I drop Drakthar's Way on them.
I don't want to skip it outright though...as I think some of the NPCs introduced in the chapter have a lot of potential, and the showdown with Drakthar should be memorable.
It turned out to be a great experience for my live group, after Orak was deposed, an unbelievable legal battle began for ownership of the bathhouse (I love DMing greedy players, they're so much fun, and so easy to torment!) I do think its a fun installment, with a lot of really great hooks for the DM and players. I'm curious though if anyone has decided not to run it for these same reasons, or had any bad experiences, with players losing interest because of the redundancy.
|
Two things:
1) If one of the players restores the head onto the statue of Moradin, let something great happen to the room (light, clean afterwards and so on). I let the Character roll a d100 after the deed and he rolled a 11. Moradin adopted him as an honorary dwarf (including some of those nifty dwarven traits). He now wants to restore the shrine and has written a letter to Sasserine to send for a Dwarven cleric of Moradin to work here in the shrine.
2) If the party encounters and defeats Drakthar the first time, the whole dungeon becomes a race of time. Make it clear, that the time is ticking away until Drakthar reemerges from his stupor in gaseous form. It will be even better, when you have one of the players under the thrall of the vampire (as was the case in my group). Then it will be really urgent to finish him off.
This will ensure, that the atmosphere of the dungeon will be completely different.
I think it will take less time to finish Drakthar's Way than you estimated. The dungeon is much much smaller than the 2 dungeons in Life's Bazaar. If it took 14 sessions to finish Life's Bazaar the second chapter should be over in 7-9 sessions.
I am definitely open to ideas on how to keep Drakthar's way fresh and unique. Those are good suggestions Oliver, thanks. And you;re right...Drakthar's Way is definitely more quickly traversed than Jzadirune and the Malachite hold.
I was a little concerned about that too so I actually started my group out with the hook from Drakthar's Way so it seemed better integrated.
I had one of the PC's uncle own a warehouse that had been vandalized by goblins and during the investigation they stumbled across Ruphus Laro getting roughed up and thus the adventure really began. The advantage of doing it this way is that it seems like there's multiple threads that need to be unraveled instead of one thread and then another thread that looks identical to the first.
I skipped it with my group, for a few different reasons. One is the reason given by the original poster: too many similarities with the first chapter. Also, my players are not big on long dungeon crawls - in fact, once they found the entrance to the Malachite Fortress they never bothered going back and exploring the rest of Jzadirune (most of it was still left). They just weren't interested in it, and I wasn't going to push them to do it if they didn't want to.
What I did instead was use it as background story by having the party hear about the Stormblades doing it - this kept the rival group in the picture, giving them a significant accomplishment to counter all the glory the PCs were getting. I also had the Stormblades go into Jzadirune and finish clearing it out, and then let the party read about in the local paper as Annah Taskerhill publicly ridiculed the PCs for not "finishing the job." Here are Annah's quotes in the paper:
“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the out-of-town group who came in here swinging their swords around like they were the second coming of Surabar Spellmason would leave a job unfinished like this.”
“It’s inexcusable that the leader of those responsible for the kidnappings of our innocent citizens [Yuathyb the dark stalker] should have been left unaccounted for by that other group” said Madame Taskerhill. "Who’s to say this leader and his henchlings wouldn’t have just continued on kidnapping more innocent citizens, and gone and set up their own slave bazaar? I’m certain something like this would have come to pass already if not for the efforts of our fine constabulary forces, paid for by the way through the hard-earned taxes of our fine citizens.”
Our party can't stand the stormblades. We have tried to ruin them whenever possible, we have an extreme hatred for them. If the above post had happened to us (we never leave treasure behind and thus explore most everything) we might have been jailed for outright murder.
That being said, excellent job chastising your players for not finishing, while not forcing them to go through it.
While the adventures were similar, the second one was shorter and the vampire really gave it a different feel for us. We were not rescuing children or exploring an ancient city with weird doors and a curse. We met the vampire more than once and we set traps for him when we rested.
I'd challenge your players to be creative and use their surroundings more to make each section different.