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When last I DMed my Shackled City game, I left my group at the entrance to the lava tube down into the Kopru Ruins. At this stage we had already played about 4 x 5 hour sessions of Flood Season. My players seem to be having fun, though the last session did drag a little for some of the players. I’m fairly eager to move the campaign along, and hope to resolve Flood Season in the next two sessions.
So my question is, ten hours game time enough to finish the Kopru Ruins? I’m thinking of cutting some of the combat encounters, but which ones? Any advice?
My players have probably about had their fill of combats with mooks (Alleybashers and thugs) after a series of running battles at the Lucky Monkey and a failed ambush by Alleybashers back in Cauldron. Any suggestions on cutting some or all of these? I thought I might just leave the group guarding the hoist / cage, and leave a group of body guards for Triel. Change the “gauntlet” in the central corridor to a trap instead of archers behind arrow slits?
Other encounters – are giant spider and ettercap encounters leading up to the harpoon spider tedious? How about the undead leading up to Tarkilar? The Mud Slaad encounter could be interesting, but seems a little superfluous – what did others think of this encounter?
Any other suggestions?
I like the idea others had about re-locating the wand hunt to the city itself, but I don’t think I’ll do so, given that my players are already just about to enter the ruins, and we’re playing in about 48 hours, so I don’t have a lot of time for major re-writes!
Thanks in advance.
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I like the idea others had about re-locating the wand hunt to the city itself, but I don’t think I’ll do so, given that my players are already just about to enter the ruins, and we’re playing in about 48 hours, so I don’t have a lot of time for major re-writes!
Thanks in advance.
I've seen many similar sentiments about the number of superfluous battles in some of the chapters or areas. I say go ahead and edit/cut some of those. The spiders are a good one to axe; as are repeat encounters with similar M.O. such as more alleybashers.
Finally I really liked the idea of making the wands hidden in the city, too; but when I tried to envision doing this as I read the chapter, I couldn't do it easily in my mind and I finally decided it would be too difficult to try to re-arrange all of it, and come up with clever ideas for doing so. Not impossible, for sure; just that I didnt want to spend so much energy trying to "write up the ideas."
The only thing I thought of was breaking down the ruins encounters into groups and seperate them into various building locations.
i.e. one abandoned warehouse is infested with the spider encounters. They must go there to find one wand, but encounters the spiders. Another building has undead - and of course the undead of the ruins are encountered there. BUT linking them all together and getting the PCs the clues to go to those locations was something I was having trouble coming up with making a fun "treasure hunt."
Robert
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Yeah, I like the idea too, but I don't have the time to be creative right now ;-)
I'm thinking just cutting encounters and/or areas from the Kopru Ruins will be the way to go for now. Not too worried about my party not getting enough xp, they're relatively close to level 6 on average already, so I think they'll level at the end of the adventure ok...
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Ok, so I'm thinking I'll cut the "mooks" encounters down to three to four groups for the entire ruin. I'll cut one of the spider encounters, and the encounter with the eight zombies. I'll probably keep the mud slaad ... Maybe put in a couple extra (or more dangerous) traps.
While cutting the encounters I'll probably also wipe a few now empty or unimportant rooms to cut down on inevitable time spent listening at doors, searching rooms, etc.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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I recently ran the Sunless Citadel and did some pruning like that. My method was to start with the core encounters that I wanted to run and list them out. Anything that was not part of that core was cut. Then I rearranged the rooms so that the layout of the dungeon consisted only of those core rooms. I've run the Sunless Citadel before and liked my cut version much better. It eliminated a lot of the dire rat encounters, pointless traps, and other junk and focused the module on the goblins, the kobolds, and the druid.
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That sounds like a good way to focus the cuts. I don't mind longer dungeons, but I don't want this game to run for too many more sessions, and I don't want my players to ger bored.
When you cut out a lot of the ancillary encounters in Sunless Citadel, did you find you had to boost the difficulty of the core encounters to compensate for the fact that the players havent expended resources dealing with those minor encounters? Ie, did any of the core encounters end up easier than they should have been?
I don't think this will be the case here, but I'm not too sure. I guess if the first "boss" encounter seems too easy I might give the next one an extra level or a couple of minor allies on the fly.
I didn't cut anything. But when the Stone of Alarm went off, the entire complex became aware of the party coming down the lift. So I had a pitched battle on the beach with Triel leading all the mooks. It was a close call but got rid of the bitty encounters in one go. I had Skaven and Tarkliar stay behind in confidence of Triel's success.
The game moved quite swiftly after this, although if i would cut anything else out it would be some of the spiders - didn't need that many.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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When you cut out a lot of the ancillary encounters in Sunless Citadel, did you find you had to boost the difficulty of the core encounters to compensate for the fact that the players havent expended resources dealing with those minor encounters? Ie, did any of the core encounters end up easier than they should have been?
Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer for that question. I was running the game for my high school gaming buddies, none of whom had played 3e. In order to increase survivability, I made their characters all second level. It made a big difference against such weak opponents, and they cut through them pretty quickly. I did beef up the dragon encounter though, and that was still a good challenge.
You may want to increase the mook count for the Boss encounters, or, better yet, set it up in waves so that they encounter multiple mooks before hitting the Boss. That should soak up some resources and keep things moving pretty quickly.
Of course, it goes without saying, you're going to have to tweak xp and treasure. I wasn't as worried about that when I did my cuts because I knew it would be a one shot game.
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You may want to increase the mook count for the Boss encounters, or, better yet, set it up in waves so that they encounter multiple mooks before hitting the Boss. That should soak up some resources and keep things moving pretty quickly.
Of course, it goes without saying, you're going to have to tweak xp and treasure.
Thanks Sebastian, that's good advice.
Orcwart, I have a feeling my players will probably let the stone of alarm get tripped too. Having Triel gather up her minions and defend the beach sounds a lot like her style, I'll definately give that some consideration, thanks.
The organized defense would probably be a lot more interesting. I played it as written and it got a little tedious. Not only were the middle complex encounters the same, the map was cramped for a 6 person party. However, there are a lot of interesting fights and we had a blast with the T-rex. The harpoon spider is neat, but the sorceror was just about useless in the fight.
Dedekind