Glen, please don't read this thread. ;)
I know that the temple of Hextor is likely going to give my group trouble, especially the trap in the room with the balconies. If I remember the stats someone posted in the Obituaries thread, this is the single most deadly of the 12 adventures. Any advice on running this little death trap? Preferably from someone NOT interested in butchering an entire party. Oh, and were any other parts of this adventure that your group found particularly dangerous, or were most of those deaths all in that single room?
Oh, and just for reference, my group had one near TPK and 2 other near deaths, and have not yet completed the Whispering Cairn. The party rogue almost stepped into the crushing elevator without looking first, the druid was almost strangled by the Lurking Strangler, and a very angry owlbear dropped 3 out of 7 characters before she was dropped.
Interestingly enough, Ixit, the druid, much to the chagrin of Nala, our elven archer, chose to keep the owlbear alive. She stabilized her wounds, and, as the party was leaving back for town, went to the local druids to get aid in healing the creature and driving it off into the wilderness.
My group stormed through the temple - never leaving the initiative order since arriving with the elevator. They were conveniently split by the trapped balcony room. I anticipated a TPK, but somehow they managed to survive. I attribute this to three factors:
1) In my map, the balcony was only at the furthermost end of the room; it didn't go around. Thus, they could take (partial if standing, full if prone) cover behind the statues base. It gave them the chance to breathe for a round or two.
2) Lesser vigor saved their ass. The cleric's ranged damage output is relatively low once the spells are gone (and summon monster is easily countered by protection from evil), so it took them a while to beat down the PCs. Meanwhile, they had tripped the statue.
3) At the beginning (fanatics, guards and skelettons), the party's sorcerer used up most of his offensive power. What I thought would ruin it for them later, in fact helped a lot: Having dispatched all guards and fanatics before they could open the door to beast, it saved them valuable hit points.
Still, it was very close. The paladin, monk/druid and favored soul all went to the negatives once or twice; sorcerer and ranger were pretty close. Luckily for them, at no time there were more than two PCs out. We had a blast.
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I let it take the party down. However they were taken prisoner rather than finished off. Theldrick being who he is, and the Faceless One being one who needs to know, wanted information as to how the party found out about the hidden cult. After the Faceless One was satisfied with the information Theldrick had the party healed back up and deposited them into the grimlocks caves (without the Faceless Ones knowledge). His way of settling scores with the grimlocks, though the party didn't readily have their gear. The party loved this twist and carefully began to face off against the grimlocks.
Oh by the way, I brought Theldrick back for The Champions Belt. He convinced Raknian to have him be a part of Auric's war band for the final battle. The party got to extract vengance that day, (ironicaly with Auric's help).
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Glen, please don't read this thread. ;)
I know that the temple of Hextor is likely going to give my group trouble, especially the trap in the room with the balconies. Oh, and were any other parts of this adventure that your group found particularly dangerous, or were most of those deaths all in that single room?
My group had a heck of a time with the labyrinth. Between darkness (whihc I ruled was part of the ancient magics of the temple), kenku mimicry (crying out in other party members voices), and being split up they nearly had to head back out.
The cliffs in the caves of the grimlocks were also tough. Having to climb down one side and back up another to get to your opponent is a serious tactical hinderance.
All in all I had a good time with this module, it was the beginning of the groups true heroic status.
Yeah, I had figured taking the party prisoner(if no one was killed outright, by, say, a greataxe type crit at 2 HP) if things went bad in that room. I think reducing the balcony is a good idea if they really blunder in to the room, keeping it as is if they play it a bit smarter.
Oh, and as for the grimlock cliffs, I cringed at the idea of playing a character in that room. Unless I was playing as a warlock.
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We thought we had a character die on the grimlock cliff, but then his player remembered that he had a ring of feather falling. It's the kind of item that players don't think they need, until they really do.
And we did have a potential TPK in the Hextor temple. But I figured they're lawful, honorable, and intelligent; and living foes are potentially more valuable than dead foes, so they took the PC's hostage instead of coup de grace-ing them.
My players hit the temple running from the fight in the elevator room, and never stopped. The fighter/barbarian crit the beast with his great sword and that pretty much stopped him. They paused long enough to heal up and then straight to the glatitorial arena. I thought they were done when Theldric shut the doors on them and the cleric of heironeous and a spelless sorceress were on the outside and the rest of the party were outside. The diviner saved there butt however buy having a scroll of knock to go in the side entrance. It still looked bad for them, but the sorceress managed a big time hit on Theldric and his summoned ape with a wand of enfeeblement.
Overall it was nip and tuck with nearly every PC being on the edge. It really brought the party together however.
In the Grimlock cliff encounter, the barbarian tried to jump the chasm bull rushing into one of the archers, failed the jump miserably but had the ring of feather falling to save him. The cleric tried next and also fell, but lucked out all the damage dice were 1 or 2????
The rogue did climb down underfire, at least until -2 then fell the last 10 feet to the clerics feet who cured him for 6hp. He then climbed the opposite side to get bullrushed by the barbarian and fell again to -2. HA HA HA doom on all climbing rogues.
The rogue got his revenge vs the chieftan however. The chieftan charged out of his cave and smacked him to 0hp with one great axe swing at the top of the last small cliff leading up. The rogue droped over the edge and drank a potion, sensing victory (rogue was backed up by a sorceress and wizard)the raging chief attempted to jump off the cliff and bullrush the rogue to the ground. Unbelieveably the rogue won the Str check by rolling a 20. With nothing but the cliff behind him the chief fell prone and was ganged up on by a wizard with a club, a rogue, and a sorceress with a staff. Between -4 to ac for prone and AOO for standing up and the rogue and wizard flanking he died the next round.
Everyone is having great fun with TFoE with the best yet to come in the maze of Vecna.
WOOOO HOOOO
On a small side note...
Does anyone else think that it is absolutely insane to put a creature with ability DRAIN in this module? At 3rd & 4th level, you have zero means of dealing with ability drain. ZERO!!! And CR 3?
I played it fast and loose with that one, making it only wisdom Damage, and letting the party face the allip alone, rather than with a pair of wizards aiding it. As it was, they nearly all lost to the allip anyway when 2 of 6 people succeeded on their saving throw to the babble.
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On a small side note...
Does anyone else think that it is absolutely insane to put a creature with ability DRAIN in this module? At 3rd & 4th level, you have zero means of dealing with ability drain. ZERO!!! And CR 3?
I played it fast and loose with that one, making it only wisdom Damage, and letting the party face the allip alone, rather than with a pair of wizards aiding it. As it was, they nearly all lost to the allip anyway when 2 of 6 people succeeded on their saving throw to the babble.
When we got to the Allip, the party wizard had just lost 4 of his 8 points of wisdom because he looked at the green markings on the wall and failed his will save (I rolled max damage too). Then the Allip got a surprise round on the party, I rolled for who it would attack, and of course it was the wizard. At least he had a pretty good touch AC from mage armor, but that doesn't help when I roll a natural 20, with another natural 20 to confirm the crit. There was some discussion in the group if you actually could do double ability drain damage on a crit, but it didn't really matter because again I rolled max damage on the first die and dropped him to 0 wisdom. So he was effectively out of the adventure, but luckily not technically dead (just crazy and unconscious). So yeah, that encounter was pretty devastating in my game, but that was partly due to a string of several rolls going the wrong way (plus wisdom was the characters dump stat). One thing that I think does make the encounter more reasonable is that it comes at very near the end of the adventure, so if the characters survive the fight with some wisdom drain, they don't have much farther to go before they can go back to town and get an NPC cleric to cure them; if it had come in the Hextor temple instead that could have been really debilitating.
Edit- Oh yeah, and the wizards didn't help the Allip in the combat. The party made lot of noise in the room outside the Allip's room (the one with the green markings on the pillars and the bulges in the wall), so the wizards cast their buffing spells and went to warn the Faceless One while the Allip phased through the wall to get the PC's. That would have been a much harder otherwise, especially since the character who was best able to take out an incorporeal foe had just been dropped before he could do anything to it.
I agree, it would have been not as bad had it been at the end of the adventure...
However, my group has a long, long, long history of unorthodox thinking. This led to them making it into the mines almost undetected, managing to ambush and annihilate the two tiefling guards before any alarm could be raised, and then they chose to take the Labyrinth FIRST.