Hey,
I'm starting House on Hook Street tomorrow, integrated into my Curse of the Crimson Throne campaign, but am having trouble figuring out how the first encounter, with the Dreamspawn Hungry Fog, should play out.
The flavour text describes the creature throwing guards around, but the monster abilities say that the creature has no strength rating and therefore cannot move objects... how is this happening? Is it the host body throwing the guards? I like the idea of tendrils of fog picking characters up, or failing that, blasting them away with shocks of negative energy.
How are the players intended to fight the fog? Other than the damage reduction, does flailing weapons around inside the fog do damage to the creature as normal?
Hitting the host body does half damage to the fog, is this affected by the fog's damage reduction? And if so, before or after the damage is halved?
I really want to do this book justice, it's one of the most interesting and exciting modules I've ever read. I'm worried this fight could bog down into tedium if nobody can do anything to it. Fire appears to be one of the few damage sources that has full effect, I'll likely make it obvious that that hurts it, which runs the risk of my party burning half the city down to kill it. I'm totally fine with this course of action. :)
I agree that it's described poorly, but you can treat it as if it is a dreamspawn creature, for which the creature retains all of its original attacks (or gains a slam attack if it had none).
Sometimes you just have to take their artistic license with a grain of salt and roll with it. The same type of problem exists in Murder's Mark, which I'm implementing to kick off our CoCT campaign next week. I've already run most of HHS (the characters are at the last level of the final area), and intend to shoehorn it in to CoCT along with Acadamae of Secrets, too. I wouldn't doubt if the latter has something similar going on.
Or, maybe, the negative energy is so powerful it throws them back.
Thanks for the replies!
The encounter ended up going really well. The fog can't move its host when it's outside the body, so it was fun to have it constantly being barfed up and sucked back in as it pursued the party through the streets of Old Korvosa.
Most of the PCs spent the encounter attacking the host body for half damage, only one PC figured out that the fog itself could be attacked, and he never told the rest of the characters. Having a fire-focused sorcerer in the party helped them take it out, as some of the characters had no magical weapons so couldn't get through the DR.