Hi there all,
My players have recently finished Thirteen Cages (SC, obviously!) with an average level of 14, so in order to get them ready for the big push against the remainders of the Cagewrights, as well as the Demon Lord of Madness, I'm planning on getting them to go searching through the Maure dungeons looking for ancient information to aid in their quest, and to get some more XP.
Any suggestions from those who have run the various levels in Dungeon (as well as 'Wizards' Walk') as to which sections to be wary of and how to give a 14th level party a chance at survival in there?
Ta in advance,
Reggie.
One of the problems my group had with this adventure was that the obvious route through it is to follow the Seekers. The problem is if they do that they dodge many of the most interesting parts of the adventure.
Thanks for that Jeremy. Are the Seekers that obvious to follow? Not having the issue here, I'm going from memory; but I don't recall any ovious trails through the upper levels, at least.
Reggie.
Thanks for that Jeremy. Are the Seekers that obvious to follow? Not having the issue here, I'm going from memory; but I don't recall any ovious trails through the upper levels, at least.
Reggie.
Basically the problem is that the Seekers are both an active 3rd party (by which I mean they are actually doing something down here) and that they will react to the players. That's true from the start but its going to be flashing like neon lights in the players minds once they get jumped by the Gnoll Priestess. Now I restatted her to make her kick butt against my optimized players but I think she was always intended to kick major butt. She has word of recall, they should not be able to beat her as she should always be able to retreat until the final fight in the temple on the third level.
Hence with an active enemy group attacking the players, led by a powerful cleric who retreats before they can kill her and then attacks them again later the players are highly incentivised to track these guys back to their base and, in some sense, penalized to go and check out a statue that will probably kill one of them through some sort of trickery, leaving them more vulnerable to attack by the Priestess and the Seekers.
The map is kind of bad in this regards as well, essentially speaking its perfectly possible to go to the third level and avoid 95% of the encounters. These are high level players, they have the resources to find out how the Seekers are getting between the levels (use the stairs, duh) and back track them straight to the temple and that is exactly what my players did.
The problem really is that cat and mouse in the dungeon, while cool conceptually, simply does not compare with exploring this place as its filled with nummy 1st edition chewy goodness - lethal goodness to be sure but nummy nonetheless. The cat and mouse game made an adventure that might have best served as one of exploration into one of combating a group. To the point that what I felt I learned, as a DM, from this experience is to avoid mixing the two. A full level that was the cat and mouse game would have been good, but exploration does not sit comfortably concurrent to this kind of cat and mouse game - with the exception of using undead in this roll (ala Ravenloft) as its a lot harder to gain information when dealing with undead.