After a successful jail-break, the party picked up their equipment and set Ilya free from her cell, they found the secret door at the top of the stairs and found their way into the storage area.
Checking the crates and barrels, unleashed the three mimics upon them. One by one, the party managed to eradicate them and moved on to smash every barrel/box they found to make sure there's no more mimics.
The two guards came to pick up another PC when they noticed them gone and the noise drew them into the storage room to.
The ranger who spotted the guards decided to ambush them back at the cells, since he believed the trap (door) actually let back to the jail cells.
Down into the pit he fell, when the two guards jumped off the catwalk to tackle the remaining party members.
A round later, the rogue who was a switched doppleganger joined the fray and the massacre began....
Now, I've got a big dilema on how to continue on the AP from here... Do I send them to Zyrxog's lair, do I get Eligos to contact a group of adventurers to further investigate his findings after the party who got him interested in the AoW did not come back for the info he researched for them...
Loads of things to prepare now, any suggestions ? I'd really like to continue on with the AP (and my players are all too eager to find out more too).
I wish I could help, but I'm getting ready to do the same scene next week. I think I'm skipping the mimics - they've faced those before. Good luck.
DM T.,
Not knowing how you and your group handle raise dead, resurrection, etc, one possibility could be for the heroes to awaken at Eligos’ home, sans equipment and their last memories being of the fatal battle they last fought. A week has passed and Eligos, through the use of contacts, recovered the group’s remains and had them brought back from the dead. Now the group is in debt to Eligos’ patron, Manzorian who wishes them to reinvade Zyrxog’s lair and remove the threat that his organization possess to the Free City. To accomplish this, Eligos has been instructed to provide sufficient funds for the group to equip themselves, along with an assortment of potions and minor magic items (basically whatever you as a DM deem reasonable). If there was a wizard character, use a bit of metagaming to say they lost their traveling spell book and not their master spell book that had been securely stored somewhere else. ;-)
This allows the players to continue on using their characters and all of the accumulated campaign history up to this point. It also makes the characters predisposed to Manzorian later in the adventure path.
If you and your group are looking at new characters picking up where the old left off, I would say use your idea about Eligos hiring the new party to find out what happened to the previous group. A really neat idea might be if any of the former group had family or friends that were also adventurers. Maybe this relative or friend has come looking for the previous group with his own (i.e. the new party) and traces his or her relative/friend’s last contact to Eligos. This provides great incentive for the group to be involved with Eligos. In addition, by tying the old and new group together, you add depth and preserve the verisimilitude of the campaign as a whole since the new group picking up where the old left off should not seem as forced.
Anyway, I hope the above is of some help. Good luck with whatever you decide.
Good gaming,
Mark
Manzorian through Eligos or Celeste could also hire a new group of heroes to replace the fallen PCs. This would cover the knowledge differential between the new group and the old, since Eligos tells the new adventurers everything that the old adventurers discovered.
Question: what about the character replaced by the doppelganger? Since said doppelganger turned on the party and contributed to the TPK, the real PC is presumably still tied up in the basement. So whatever you do, you need to account for that.
If that character could escape and go to Eligos for help, it would provide a bit more continuity. You could then handle the replacement/resurrection dilemma for the other characters in a number of ways.
If the deaths weren't emphatic (i.e. the encounter ended with all of them bleeding on the floor rather than with one or more decapitated or otherwise clearly dead before the action ended), you could have the doppelgangers stabilize them and take them prisoner. (Mindclones of them would be quite valuable to the Ebon Triad, and ergo to Zyrxog). You could then have the surviving PC lead some temporary characters on a rescue mission--the temporaries could be fairly generic pre-gen types (special agents for the militia, or a group of adventurers who frequently perform services for Eligos, etc.) This would allow the players to have a hand in their own PCs' rescue, but would allow continued use of the original PCs, into whom much time and energy has been invested.
If the PCs were very dead when you left off, the mission could be to recover their corpses from the pool in the invisible stalker room so they can be raised. Or you could have the surviving PC recruit the replacement PCs if your players want to introduce new characters at this point. (Or you could combine the two, giving players the choice).
The possible temp. characters should include classes
and races previously skipped.
The previous group was probably too few and the wrong mix.
When they choose the PCs after the bodies are raised,
the remainders should continue as party member NPCs.
This is based on what I have been reading about multiple TPKs
on this board.
With 7 party members, all but 3 NPCs, races including half- dragons and a Kobold sorc., and classes including a ninja
and a telepath; my group has not suffered any TPKs.
There have been close calls that keep the game exciting,
but then there should be.
As of current state, all the players rerolled 6th level PCs.
I've instructed them on background building, to include a reason why their PCs are in debt of at least one favour to Eligos.
Eligos, after finding out some information about the AoW, have stumbled into a short conflict that provoked his suspicious mind about doppelgangers infiltrating the ranks in the city (probably with the help of Manzorian).
The PCs are summoned by Eligos to investigate an ancient house rumored as haunted on a far hill overlooking some of Tavernhall's slums. The investigation is after the 'master mind' doppelganger who was could be the reason for the place burning down some 47 years ago.
This adventure is based on one of my favourite levels of Thief:Deadly Shadows - The Shalebridge Cradle. It's a gothic horror mission that I'm sure will provoke some of the PCs fears and with that I hope to implement Heroes of Horror into the AoWAP.
I'd be happy to provide the synopsis of this short adventure that would tie up into my AoW campaign if people wish.