Player With a Question: No Spoilers Please

[RaizielDragon]

I'm currently playing in a Council of Thieves campaign, and we just escaped the Asmodean Knot (sp?) dungeon.

I had a question about one of the encounters: There was a room with a big black floating monolith in the center, and an infinite, warping, staircase. Apparently the monolith spouted some kind of insubstantial ghost things while someone is in the room. When we encountered it, we managed to barely kill one, and then had several people have their Str drained before we managed to escape; one fairly severely.

My question is: was this meant as an encounter you are supposed to run away from for certain? Not having or having gained any magical weapons seems to make it pretty difficult to succeed at that encounter, so I'm just wondering if that wasn't supposed to be a winnable encounter, or if we missed something, or what.

Our GM later hinted to me, out of character, that we were probably supposed to have tried to break the stone, but that didn't seem obvious at all at the time, and on top of that, the fact that the scary, incorporeal, unkillable ghosts were coming out of it made all the players want to get AWAY from, not jump the gap and go attack it.

[Fabius Maximus]

It seems like your GM made some modifications to the device. As per the book, it is a somewhat challenging, but optional, encounter.

My player took a good look at it from a distance and decided that they didn't want to mess with the thing.

[Rakshaka]

It can't be avoided, its literally at the beginning of the dungeon. Unfortunately, what is written in the module is exactly how your DM ran it; I called it the Room of Infinite Shadows, because as written, there was no upper limit to the number of shadows that could come out of the mirror/obelisk. The only change is that I remember it being a mirror, not a monolith, but otherwise, yeah, your DM ran it as printed.
Out of an otherwise outstanding module, this is the one problem encounter that has made a few DMs scratch their heads. [Can we just farm shadows for experience??]

[Fabius Maximus]

Rakshaka wrote:

It can't be avoided, its literally at the beginning of the dungeon. Unfortunately, what is written in the module is exactly how your DM ran it; I called it the Room of Infinite Shadows, because as written, there was no upper limit to the number of shadows that could come out of the mirror/obelisk. The only change is that I remember it being a mirror, not a monolith, but otherwise, yeah, your DM ran it as printed.

Out of an otherwise outstanding module, this is the one problem encounter that has made a few DMs scratch their heads. [Can we just farm shadows for experience??]

Rakshaka, I think he's talking about the

Spoiler:

dead Kyton that serves as a power conduit for the Nessian Spiral.

[Rakshaka]

Not to be over-correct-y, but I'm positive he's referring to room b4, the only spot in that dungeon that spawns (in the OPs words)"insubstantial ghost things...STR drained.." which can only be shadows. The Kyton conduit is in room b12 and fights like an animated object. Room b3 and b4 (where the shadows are) have to be passed through in order to proceed into the dungeon, which is what he's referring to. The only way my PCs got through it was buffing the monk to a ridiculous touch AC and having him bait them all while the other PCS ran by.

[Sleygon]

The description of RaizielDragon sounds like room b4. I run the campaign as well, my group finished the second Part right away. The only things, that drain str are the ones in b4 in the AK.

There are both options, to kill the source or to run away, but i suppose it is meant to run away.

I really had doubts about this encounter with my group but thankfully they realized finally that they should run rather than stand and fight. If you have a stubborn group, this could develop to a TPK there.