Advice for running Rappan Athuk

[shadowlodgemember]

So I am running Rappan Athuk later this month. The players are being given triple starting goldand 25 point buy. Starting level 1. I've also said some templates and powerful races are OK.

1) Will this break the design of Rappan Athuk?

2) Is there anything specifically I should prepare for, regarding running this dungeon crawl?

3) I have a BBEG that has Forbidance cast on the entire dungeon to prevent teleport and phasing. He has raised incorporeals and plans to have them prevent the party from stone-shaping their way through the dungeon.

He plans to follow the party through a few scrying mechanisms and learn their battle strategies before sending raiders to engage them directly.

4) Is it considered poor form to alter a dungeon by adding traps, puzzles and changing encounters in the case 1 or more player has already ran it?

[Duiker]

#4: no never. I would consider it rather mediocre DMing to not change things around. But then I tend to heavily rewrite the APs as I'm running them anyway in order to make them more challenging, tie relatively random events into larger plot lines, etc.

[P.H. Dungeon]

Rappan Athuk is a huge dungeon. I probably wouldn't have a dungeon wide effect that prevents teleportation/phasing and the like. I'd consider such an effect for certain areas or maybe even levels of the dungeon, but not the entire complex.

It's intended to be a pretty challenging Dungeon, I'd probably just start the PCs with regular starting gold and a 20 point buy.

[Jacob Saltband]

Have you read through Rappan Athuk? Some levels already have things like what you want to apply to the whole dungeon complex.

[shadowlodgemember]

Bumping my own thread here. Can anyone suggest a good source of pre-constructed puzzle rooms, (evil and misleading) traps or other ways to make a traditional dungeon more difficult?

I realize Rappan Athuk is already challenging, but the group I am playing against is a group of veterans, and I've allowed them to create rather powerful characters out of the gate.

[Squirrel_Dude]

My only suggestion would be to have your players prepare multiple characters ahead of time, so that you don't have to worry so much about pulling punches. Likewise, I would prepare as a DM for ways to quickly introduce new party members.

[shadowlodgemember]

I am looking more for links that have clever trap or puzzle ideas. Introducing new players in this setting is fairly simple, since the upper levels of the dungeon are the playground of a psychopathic lich's cult of followers, and they have a rotten habit of kidnapping, torturing and sacrificing people. Means the PCs are just some 'new recruits' so to speak.

New captures are bound to get lost in all that chaotic evil bureaucracy and paper filing..

[CWheezy]

I dunno if you are a noob to running adventures, but my advice is to look very carefully at the map sizes. They run from 5 to 300 ft squares, which affects a lot!

[shadowlodgemember]

Would call DM magic on this one. It's perfectly believable that some rooms of a dungeon are empty or used to hold prisoners. Especially in a mega-dungeon.