Linnorms and Hobgoblins, Bugbears and Ghouls, Chimeras of all ages, I bid you welcome to my record of my groups delve into the horrors of Rappan Athuk. I will commit to word here brief summaries of play, fun tidbits, and the all important running obituary list. I feel that this epic dungeon undertaking needs some public humiliation...er...exposure.
First and foremost, I have not told half of my gaming group that their characters will die. I say will, not might. I am not flubbing rolls or pulling punches: if the party runs into 3 worgs and 12 wolves on their first encounter and TPK, then so be it. I want to savor the flavor of their horrified expressions when I tell them that no, we can't rewind that encounter and no, their character did not have a twin sibling waiting in the wings.
We have just been far too nice in this group. There's no danger anymore. Players know that all of the GMs in our group aren't willing to kill them in anything other than a massive climactic battle scene (and even then, only rarely), and have just become far too cavalier. I want them to feel mortal, to feel that there are some stakes involved to creating a character.
I will not, however, kill the party over and over again out of spite. No one wants to play a game where they have to roll a new character every 15 minutes. I'm directing the party away from the main entrance to RA and toward a level appropriate sub-dungeon (1C The Mouth of Doom)
to get them up to a level where they can sort of handle RA proper. And I have informed them multiple times to not go down the well. That said, there will be death: oh, so much death.
For starters, when the party gets to the graves at the Mausoleum (G-2 A Dire Warning), names of their previous characters from Pathfinder and other games will adorn 8 of the 9 filled graves. The 9th? It bears the symbol of an eye with wings and reads "Aroden: The Last Azlanti" or maybe "Aroden: God of Man". Of course the 10th grave will be open and will bear the name of one of the surviving PCs.
We start on Saturday, September 28th, 2013. I'm very excited.
Three sessions and three character deaths. One legitimate: the cleric decided that it was a good idea to 5-foot away from the two gnolls that were flanking him and desperately try to kill one instead of channeling. The horrified expressions on the groups faces when one of the gnolls opted to coup-de-grace instead of changing to a conscious, threatening target were priceless. Narrations of the obscene things done to the gnolls' bodies afterwards were equally amusing.
The second two deaths were a little more engineered: me and my roommate went into the Mouth of Doom with two lv. 4 characters. After roommate's character (an archery built Goblin barbarian with plenty of archetypes and alternate racial features) took serious CON damage from a poison dart, he refused to go anywhere until he had slept off the damage. I told him that since we only had about 45 minutes left that I would roll 8 times for random encounters per day and that any that I rolled would arrive simultaneously. We ended up getting attacked by 4 stirges, 5 giant advanced dire rats, and something like 4 zombies all at once. Despite our high AC and accuracy, we didn't have enough damage output (or anything to get around the zombies' DR) to even the odds. I went down, and then he did once he was out of rage to boost his DEX.
The third session saw a few characters injured, but no real danger. Got the barbarian down to single digits at one point, so that's something.
More to come.