RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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Greetings!
The players in my Rise of the Runelords game passed through Ravenmoor on their way to the Fortress of the Stone Giants. They absolutely loved the creepy flavor of the town! So I would like to run the "Feast of Ravenmoor" module as a side quest.
However, the party is currently 10th level. The module is written for 3rd level characters. Obviously, a bit of scaling up will be needed. ;-)
Do you have any tips for making the module interesting for higher level characters? I think most of it can actually stand pretty well on its own; the interactions with the townsfolk won't change much (though I may want to give them all a flat +5 bonus on Bluff checks, since the PCs will have higher Sense Motive). My players are OK with the combat encounters being easy, but I don't want them to get *completely* bored. So I'd like to scale up the big encounters from the current CR 4-5 to more like CR 9-10. They will still win easily, but it will be a little more exciting. Any thoughts on how best to accomplish this?
I was also toying with the idea of somehow "bringing the Party down a bit". One player suggested that everyone could play the Party's Animal Companions and Familiars, which would be great fun (and about the right power level), but I don't think it would really work given how much social interaction the module has. But I'm open to creative ideas for ways to change up the party as well as the module.
Tanks in advance!
Hmmm... I don't think that Feast of Ravenmoor can be scaled up to present a challenge for an L10 party without making changes so radical that make it a fundamentally different adventure. It's designed to be a low-level investigative adventure from the bottom up. Part of the mystery in the module is that the evil is so low-level that most cultists don't have evil auras.
I'd recommend just making the town creepy, mysterious, and unfriendly to travelers. If you want the PCs to have an adventure there, I think you'll have to design your own.
I think the only way to run it as a side quest in Runelords would be to run it between Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw Murders. The PCs should be the right level then (4th) and you could just run it straight with a 4-PC party. (It's designed for 6 3rd-level PCs).
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Hmmm... I don't think that Feast of Ravenmoor can be scaled up to present a challenge for an L10 party without making changes so radical that make it a fundamentally different adventure. It's designed to be a low-level investigative adventure from the bottom up. Part of the mystery in the module is that the evil is so low-level that most cultists don't have evil auras.
I'd recommend just making the town creepy, mysterious, and unfriendly to travelers. If you want the PCs to have an adventure there, I think you'll have to design your own.
I think the only way to run it as a side quest in Runelords would be to run it between Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw Murders. The PCs should be the right level then (4th) and you could just run it straight with a 4-PC party. (It's designed for 6 3rd-level PCs).
My guys are lvl 6 and I'm planning on using it to give them some additional xp. I think as far as the Cr of the module is concerned I can accommodate their APL by adding in multiple of the end boss, via multiple cultists dieing with it in them. Or something along those lines.
Edit: My group is 4 pcs, and I'm running it on the way to magnimar as a favor they need to do for a local NPC who knows the Tax collector from magnimar.
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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I did end up running this for my Rise of the Runelords group after all, and the game was fantastic! However, I did change a few things about the Party, even though the module itself was pretty much by the book.
I started off by including a new spell in Mokmurian's dungeon at the end of Fortress of the Stone Giants. It's called "Summon Adventurer VI", and it summons a sixth-level adventurer to assist the caster. This allowed me to include a bit of fairly low-level backup for the BBEG in that book. But the real point was so that I could use it as a segue into this adventure.
The Party's hapless NPC bard decided to run away and succeed at an adventure, in order to prove he wasn't totally useless. He stumbled into the stirges outside Ravenmoor and used a scroll of Summon Adventurer VI to call someone to aid him. However, he bungled the casting of the spell, and ended up summoning six adventurers, instead!
The twist is that the PCs were both "de-powered" to sixth-level versions of themselves, and that they all landed in the wrong bodies! So, the Halfling archer landed in the Dwarf cleric's body, the Shoanti Fighter landed in the Druid's body, and so forth. And the Dwarf cleric ended up being in the body of the Summoner's Eidolon, which led to one of the best session quotes ever, with a cutaway of Erastil saying to Desna, "I just channeled energy through a giant crab! Do you know how hard it is to channel energy *through a crab?!*
Anyway, between being lowered to sixth level and swapped around into bodies that didn't exactly play to their strengths, this adventure proved very interesting for the party! It was still easy, but people had a *ton* of fun, and it wasn't such a cakewalk that it was boring for anyone.
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RPG Superstar 2014 Top 16
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Hmmm... I don't think that Feast of Ravenmoor can be scaled up to present a challenge for an L10 party without making changes so radical that make it a fundamentally different adventure. It's designed to be a low-level investigative adventure from the bottom up. Part of the mystery in the module is that the evil is so low-level that most cultists don't have evil auras.
I'd recommend just making the town creepy, mysterious, and unfriendly to travelers. If you want the PCs to have an adventure there, I think you'll have to design your own.
I think the only way to run it as a side quest in Runelords would be to run it between Burnt Offerings and Skinsaw Murders. The PCs should be the right level then (4th) and you could just run it straight with a 4-PC party. (It's designed for 6 3rd-level PCs).
My guys are lvl 6 and I'm planning on using it to give them some additional xp. I think as far as the Cr of the module is concerned I can accommodate their APL by adding in multiple of the end boss, via multiple cultists dieing with it in them. Or something along those lines.
Edit: My group is 4 pcs, and I'm running it on the way to magnimar as a favor they need to do for a local NPC who knows the Tax collector from magnimar.
I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make this a suitable adventure for level six characters. You might want to increase the skills of some of the townsfolk, to make the difficulty of checks like Sense Motive come out right. And it's easy enough to add some extra cultists or whatever.
I would probably just give the end boss a couple extra levels, rather than having more than one of him. I think that works better in terms of the story. But either way would work from a combat perspective.