I'm just going for a quick love-in thread here. We're at the halfway point of this module now; the characters have finished with Sodden Hold and are on their way over to the Cold Forge as soon as they finish doing some research on this squid-faced things. We covered Sodden Hold in two big sessions, and I think it's been some of the most concentrated gaming goodness of the adventure path so far.
If I go into depth I'll be here all night, so I just want to call out some of the highlights. First some setting details: I've set the game in Eberron, with the players based in Karrnath for an extra helping of undead and militaristic fetishism. I'm not using all the conversion notes, but I did swap the drow out for dolguants.
So what's been great?
Best Use of Doppelgangers in a D&D Adventure. Somehow, the presence of Changelings in Eberron has even accentuated this. During the frame job in the Crooked House, within a couple of rounds, as the crowd started to turn against the PCs, the cleric shouted at them all, "Haven't you idiots ever heard of changeling assassins??" Our party changeling, from across the room: "Hey! I want you to know that's a hurtful, racist stereotype!" By the end of the fight, when the would-be assassin's corpse shifts back to its natural form: "Oh! Of course, doppelganger assassins are a very real, and serious threat to society."
Did I mention that by this point, the changeling was the character who had been kidnapped and replaced by a doppelganger?
How deep did the doppelganger paranoia get? It got bad enough that one of the characters, Sorra the (Neutral Good) Dragon Shaman, killed an innocent, harmless prisoner for fear he might be a doppelganger.
When the party reached the Sodden Hold cells, they were already wary of more doppelgangers, and the attack by the two prisoner-guards reinforced that. Poor Gattem Wattel was unconscious and nearly dead in his cell. He looked (from 15 feet away, since no one was willing to risk actually entering the cell to check his vitals) like a corpse. Sorra reasoned there were two possibilities: the figure really was dead, or he was a doppelganger trying to trick them. So she went for a simple test: she chucked a dagger into "the body."
One brief, quickly ebbing spurt of arterial blood later, and Sorra has some serious guilt to work through. And, oh, did Octavius the party *cough* changeling rub salt in that wound. A lot.
Other great moments? The group soon run across "themselves" strapped to chairs. "Octavius" looks at them and declares, "Oh, nuh-uh!" and shoots a crossbow bolt into the chest of "his doppelganger." Sorra then turns to "Octavius," hands him her dagger, and says, "Here. Drive this into his brain to finish him off." I should point out at this time that Sorra's player was really getting into playing the guilt over her earlier accidental homicide, and just walked right into this anyway. At any rate - "Octavius" turned the dagger on Sorra instead, to jaws dropping around the table. The rest of the fight played out with little light bulbs going on over the players' heads as they started calling Octavius's player on all the things he had done to get them into trouble over the past two sessions. It was a great moment. Oh, and Sorra externalized all her guilt onto her own doppelganger for the duration of the fight, continuing to beat on "that murdering b!tch!" some time after she was clearly dead.
Finally, the party tried to retreat and rest for another day after rescuing Octavius. By this time, a couple of doppelgangers had escaped into the maze, and so Telakin had been warned. So I switched the order up a bit, and had Zyrxog and his dolgaunt minions arriving just then via the secret passage. Zyrxog mind blasted and shifted out after being seen only by Sorra.
(Which was another fine moment: "The third figure behind the two tentacled monstrosities steps forward from the shadows, and... I'm going to need you to make a Will save here. Actually, first, let's step into the hall while I tell you exactly what you see." On our return: "Okay, my Will save is 21." Players cheer. "Hold on! Um... I'm going to spend an action point on that." Which ALSO drew some apprehensive attention from the table.)
Fighting broke out in the hallway, and the dolgaunts drained her Con down 3 points, and took her HP down to -6, dragged her back into D9, the water control chamber, and tossed her into 40 feet of water.
The fight in the water control chamber was great. Our adamantine-plated warforged cleric risked the AoOs from the dolgaunts to dive into the water after her, and healed her back to consciousness before sinking like an adamantine-plated warforged. We ended up with two separate fights - two characters underwater with no need to breathe trying to hold one of the dolgaunts under long enough to drown it, while the other three characters above killed the remaining dolgaunt, and then engaged with Telakin and his two remaining doppelganger guards, who arrived on scene a few rounds after the fight started. The water control mechanism got activated a couple of times during the fight too, complicating both the surface and underwater fights.
By the end of the fight, three of the five characters had suffered Con drain, two had gone into negative HP (one of them went negative, got healed, and went negative again), and four of the five players were out of action points, but they had defeated all the dolgaunts and doppelgangers without anyone in the party actually dying. At which point Sorra was able to ask, "Where's the third one? The leader, the one with the four tentacles for a mouth, where did it go??" And the other players all had their second round of, "Oh, god, it all makes sense now!" in two sessions. And there was much swearing related to Thralls.
I got email at 2:30 in the morning after the game session from one of the players: "That last session? That was why I play D&D." So anyway, I thought I should offer some of that praise back to the adventure's author. Thanks, Jason!
Tomorrow night they head to the Cold Forge. I've eliminated sorcerers from my campaign and replaced them with warlocks, so Zyrxog's stablock is getting some final revisions. Looking forward to Phase 2!
100% Agreed, Doc; this one was awesome fun and extremely deadly!
I just got through running HoHR (right before we took our Christmas break) too, and loved it. I think the players had a good time too despite their PC's getting run through the wringer several times over. I tried to introduce some red herrings to have the PC's doubting each other's trustworthiness and non-doppelganger status - I mentioned some of them in another thread where I was asking for suggestions for how to build suspicion among the party, so I won't go through it all again here. Every one of them went right over the players' heads, but by the end they were all paranoid basket cases anyhow. How completely fiendish is this adventure? My players were cursing Bulmahn's name by the end of it. Illusion- and enchantment-based tentacular death, deception and treachery at every turn, and I'm sure JB'd be happy to hear they fell for pretty much every trick and trap. I'm pretty sure they are all still sleeping with one eye open, wondering whether there may be any doppelgangers still among them.
They fought Zyrxog for almost 3 full 4-hour sessions(!) (I'm pretty sure we play very slow compared to other groups, but this was the first time an encounter has spanned more than 1 session in any of our campaigns) and somehow managed to dodge a seemingly inevitable TPK, with a little help from me when I decided the illithid would have a superiority complex and, in a moment of overconfidence, decide to toy with them with hit-and-run tactics for a while before finishing them off and eating their brains. So when he broke off from combat to lure them into his sanctum (by suggesting the crit-optimized fighter's falchion would be "blessed" if he tossed it into the 'tadpool' below from the balcony - secretly I was hoping he'd find the berzerker sword to use until he retrieved his own weapon, but they ended up going straight down from the balcony instead of following the ramp down - then retreating there to recast some recently expired buffs on himself and his remaining octopin* before the PC's caught up) to benefit from the combat bonuses he gets there*, it bought them some time to recover from being stunned, etc. and gave them a fighting chance. I don't feel too guilty for giving them a slight edge (ie. the kind you cling to for dear life with your fingertips on a cliff face, not the kind found on a blade and used to slice up one's enemies), since the flayer's mind blast DC was overstated in the adventure causing several PC's to get stunned when they should rightly have saved before I discovered the typo (actually, I read about it here somewhere and opted not to to check the numbers, preferring a DC they had a slightly better chance against over possibly discovering the poster who pointed out the mistake had been wrong - can't remember the correct DC but your player may deserve to get back that action point they spent upon rolling a 21 on their save if it was vs. a mind blast. You might want to check those numbers before the big fight).
Well, technically there's still a bit of adventure left; they're still in Zyrxog's lair and haven't yet tried to examine any of the "treasure" very closely, or come back out through the glyph trap. Or navigate their way back to the streets through the sewers, hopefully not meeting up with any more of those random PC-killer black puddings like the one that killed our rogue! So there's still a chance some PC's might not make it I guess. But we decided to break there and switch over to the FR campaign one of my players runs for an adventure before switching back to AoW for the end of HoHR and Champion's Belt. We always switch campaigns between adventures to give both DM's a chance to play too sometimes, plus we get to play in twice as many games that way. Plus, it gives me a hope in heck to find time to paint up a BBEG miniature for each adventure I run to give them a break from prepainted plastic DDM and a clue that the encounter is particularly significant when it's not already obvious - I tend to paint more slowly and infrequently than I'd like, so those extra weeks when we're in Faerun instead of Greyhawk make all the difference. Found an awesome Zyrxog from Reaper minis for this one, and I am hoping their purple worm will make at least a passable Apostle of Kyuss for the upcoming Champion's Games.
Anyhow, you're modifying Zyrxog's stats so it's hard to predict what will happen as compared to my campaign, but you should know that guy is one bad SOB who might just slaughter your whole party - beware!
Yup, a great adventure all around. Thanks indeed! I had a blast running it.
Kang
* ok so his overconfidence is sounding a lot more like intelligent self-preservation the way I've explained it, but trust me, he had them beat, hands down, at the point when he decided to break off, taunting them as he retreated in hopes of increasing their overall level of terror since scared brains taste better.
PS. Apologies if my compulsive overabuse of long, mid-sentence parentheses have rendered this post somewhat incomprehensible. In my defense, this is the cleaned-up version - even I could barely make sense of the first draft...
Halfway through HoHR, I can say that the adventure's AoW connections are fairly thin.
But ... the themes of misdirection, deception, nothing-is-as-it-seems, distorted reflections and mind games are all very strong -- and have made it extremely enjoyable to play.
Moreover, the secondary theme of an octopus -- many tentacles, many story threads, is also being grasped by the players, especially as it relates to the infiltration of Greyhawk society.
These themes come through during play, and they do a great job of giving the players a sense of "place" and "time" and "mission." All of which are important.
A couple of notes:
Hopefully swapping Zyrxog from Sorcerer to Warlock won't make him particularly more deadly than his already formidable sorcerer-self. I toyed with going giving him Psion 3, but it really does sound as though that would make him pretty overwhelming. Plus, this way I don't really feel the need to juggle stats and items and such.
As far as the connection with the rest of the Age of Worms goes, I've had two elements that have or will tie it in a little more:
1) In Sodden Hold, the players used some of the potions that had looted from Illthane's chest in the Twisted Branch lair. When they noticed Sorra was not recovering Con quickly enough after the dolgaunt attack, they cast Remove Disease on her as a hunch. They have not yet figured out why she then vomited up a couple of green worms. They are, however, freaking out.
2) As soon as they arrived in Korth, I started playing up the Champions' Games, including posters with Auric's picture, and folk tales about the mighty Loris Raknian. Just drop a couple of Chuck Norris jokes into conversation with Raknian's name attached, and the players get into the mood instantly. =)
"Of course the sun goes down at night - that's when Loris Raknian comes out!"
In line with the Eberron theme, I gave the dolgaunts some back-up by way of some Dolgrim warriors. Five of 'em, warrior 3, with feats Monkey Grip and Distracting Attack (miniatures handbook), armed with a pair of longspears each.
It was very special. They were warrior 3, with the non-elite array, but their feats meant that they could stand behind the dolgaunts, making 2 attacks at full attack bonus (Dolgrim racial ability), and whether they hit or not each attack caused all allies to be at +1 [u]cumulative[/u].
See my website http://www.paulmurray.id.au/ageofworms/week17.html.
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Re; the Eberron games...
Doesn't the existence of changelings in the setting totally change the way the PCs and NPCs act?
In standard D&D, doppelgangers are (hopefully) rare enough that, although they are known to exist, people don't expect to ever meet one, and players can be lulled into a false sense of security.
In Eberron, if changelings are common enough to be listed as a regular PC race, then doesn't it cause the citizens, or certainly the authorities, to take more precautions? I can easily see there being spells, powers, items and tactics to detect, isolate and destroy them. And for these items to be common PC tactics.
If a changeling is caught commiting a crime; death penalty, on the grounds, they're too difficult to lock up, and too dangerous to live.
Get caught wearing someone else's face, and the assumption is that you're in the process of commiting a crime.
Ergo; kill 'em all, and let the gods sort them out?