Played Seelah the Paladin in the second half of "The Lost Star": another player dropped out, so I was asked to fill in for them. Some random thoughts:
- When the other players told me what I missed, they recounted a lot of hard battles. All the spellcasters were down to 0-1 spells and 0-1 spell points, and the Rogue and Seelah were at half HP.
- I felt very vulnerable at first, but the high AC and shield block provided me a lot of reassurance. Drakus never hit me.
- As a big fan of 4ed and the Defender role, I did manage to be something of a Defender. When exploring new rooms, I went in with shields raised. During the Drakus fight, I used Retributive Attack twice. I never hit with it, but the GM decided to attack me instead of my nearly-dead allies.
- While our GM used a map to place us, our table was so large and the map (based off of the module) was so small, I really couldn't tell where I was without asking the GM. Drakus' room was so small, there wasn't much room to maneuver in as a melee character.
- I tried to use Seelah's Thievery and Pickpocket abilities, but there was too much combat and not enough sneaking. I though about taking the holy symbol off of Drakus, but everyone and the GM said to just attack him. And giving my negative score for Thievery, I think they were right!
- I also tried to use my Criminal Lore in an useful manner, but to no avail. There was no opportunity to test out how Lore checks worked.
- Managing my anathema was a little difficult. Most of the treasure in the dungeon was stolen goods. The other players argued that most of it was untraceable, so there was no way to know who to give it to. As I understood our commission, a representative of the local governance gave a mission to retrieve a specific item, and that anything else we found could be claimed by us. To me, that would have satisfied my Paladin's need to not steal. Our GM didn't care about the anathema, so it didn't matter, but I could see other GMs being sticklers.
- The group found the secret passageway, and after the Rogue scouted it out, we decided to ambush him by going through the passageway. Despite 4/5 of the PCs making too much noise and all of us making clumsy exits from the passage, we managed to beat him that way. The Alchemist and Wizard's splash effects were serious threats to my low-HP party members.
- The Rogue must have rolled 8 times to finally succeed at opening the DC20 door. His Thievery bonus was so high, he kept missing a Critical Failure by 1 or 2 when he didn't succeed. And since there was no consequence for failure other than losing the tools (GM ruled that Drakus didn't hear him), the party was just waiting for him to succeed or break his tools.
- It was only after the party was deep into the dungeon that our party checked how skills worked, and realized that many of the skills required tools to use them. Our Rogue got poisoned, and we immediately left the dungeon to buy a Healer's Kit to treat him.
- The GM said he was curious to test out the Grappling rules, so when I encountered the Giant Rat, I decided to grapple it. It turned out very well: I caught it, and then the Rogue sneak attacked it. Everyone was pleased that Grappling is so simple (and I was happy that my Grapple bonus was the same as my attack bonus!).
Overall: I liked the adventure. It felt like a classic dungeon, with a main theme of monsters along with a smattering of random monsters and an endboss. As level 1 characters, it felt like we could interact with the entire dungeon and take it on as a fair challenge. And the challenges we faced referenced most of the common rules you'd expect to know for the game.