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Hey guys.
Just curious how much trouble other groups had with Scarwall? For us, playing through the anniversary edition, it is probably the hardest dungeon I've played in many years.
Our composition is Inquisitor, alchemist, monk and archer fighter. The GM wanted a grittier feel for this campaign and so 9th level casters were off the table.
We're all experienced players but it feels like every single room wears us down a little more and the majority of them are life or death, frantic encounters. We have little in the way of restorative magic aside from what scrolls we could buy and our AC and saves just don't seem high enough to escape without serious debilitation and no reliable means to rest or resupply.
My alchemist is sitting on 6 strength drain, 6 con drain and 4 cha drain. The monk is carrying three negative levels and I don't think the others are in much better shape after six sessions in here.
Is it really meant to be this hard? How did you guys cope?
I'm quite surprised.
From a GM point of view, I always thought that Scarwall wasn't that tough. Sure, there's a few rooms with some really nasty critters (especially in the anniversary edition), but aside from that, most of the creatures in the castle are around CR 8-10 or below, a.k.a "not really a challenge for a level 12 party".
and I don't even mention the hordes of skeleton/zombies/gouls that are totally useless against such high level PCs.
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A few non-spoilery comments:
(1) The AE edition of Scarwall is quite the mess. They didn't add any rooms, but they more than doubled the number of encounters. So yes, the AE version is a grindy drag, no matter which way you slice it. I ran it once. I will never run it again. The original is much better, in my personal opinion as a GM. A haunted castle is creepy because of all the empty rooms and haunts. Not because there's a CR-appropriate undead encounter in every single room.
(2) In the original, you were given two divine casters as allies for precisely the reasons you list: They could queue up and cast the necessary Death Wards and various flavors of Restoration. In the AE edition you're still supposed to get at least one divine caster who has access to both Death Ward and Restoration.
If your GM is running the AE as-is in "gritty" mode with no casters who can provide you with at least Restoration, then yes, you really are getting a much harder dungeon than written. The AP assumes you've got ready access to at least one Restoration a day, so you shouldn't have PCs with ability damage or drain or temporary negative levels going in and out of the dungeon.
Can you pool your gold for the 33,000 required to get a wand of Restoration, or is that forbidden as well?
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Not forbidden so much as impossible. We have no means of significantly rapid travel and we are nowhere near a city large enough to stock a wand of Restoration as an easily obtainable item.
The divine casters have already used their spells on us and apparently they cannot regain spells after resting in this place
From what I'm seeing we appear to be on Hard more and I'm ok with that for the most part. I think I'm just going to speak to the GM though and let him know this volume is actually breaking the immersion because far from being gritty, it's just a grind. I can see other players rapidly losing interest because it gets to a point that it just isn't that much fun to feel weak at level 14
I can't respond any more without accidentally or intentionally giving you a hint. You probably want to talk to your GM before reading what's in the spoiler (I'm trying to be subtle, but it's hard.) Hopefully your GM will point you in the same direction and I won't get yelled at for messing up his/her game.
Not forbidden so much as impossible. We have no means of significantly rapid travel and we are nowhere near a city large enough to stock a wand of Restoration as an easily obtainable item.
The divine casters have already used their spells on us and apparently they cannot regain spells after resting in this place
From what I'm seeing we appear to be on Hard more and I'm ok with that for the most part. I think I'm just going to speak to the GM though and let him know this volume is actually breaking the immersion because far from being gritty, it's just a grind. I can see other players rapidly losing interest because it gets to a point that it just isn't that much fun to feel weak at level 14
What you say here fundamentally changes the way I see things. You say something very critical in this quote. Think about it.
and I don't even mention the hordes of skeleton/zombies/gouls that are totally useless against such high level PCs.
One can also use the troop subtype for those weak undeads. That should make them a little more useful (they should at least be able to do some damages before being obliterated to ashes by the PCs).
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Please don't give tips on how to make this harder for us :)
In the last session we annihilated the dragon.
We had already fought it once and it yielded when on low hit points. When we questioned it, it seemed compelled to silence. Sense Motive and detect magic confirmed that it was under some spell effect that meant it could not talk to us. We had one scroll of Break Enchantment but it failed.
My character really didn't want to kill it after it had surrendered so we left, looking for a means to break the compulsion.
Later, we ran into Ukwar. After a devastating fight where our monk died (again) and I took the drain I mentioned above, we determined she needed to be killed by a glass weapon or else turned into a gaseous form and floated off somewhere inaccessible to rejuvenate. Next we headed to the armory and clues indicated the dragon may have scoured it at some point.
We used our only 2 scrolls of teleport to get to Kaer Maga to resupply. No glass weapons available there so we decided to go back to the dragon and ask to search his horde. I also picked up a scroll of Dispel Evil to try that.
That scroll also failed and the dragon remained compelled to not cooperate. I asked to search the horde for glass weapons and said we don't want anything else from it, or to hurt the dragon, just to find a means to help free him.
As soon as I laid hands on the horde it attacked again and we were forced to kill it. This time the fighter didn't flee from the fear aura so a full attack from him, a hasted full attack of bombs from me and an immense crit from the Inquisitor laid it low and after 6 sessions we killed the first of the anchors although in a very bitter-sweet circumstance from my perspective. I can't think of anything else we could have done besides a (Limited) Wish or Miracle which we were nowhere near acquiring.
Now we have a glass weapon, info on where the rest of the anchors are but limited resources to deal with the rest of Scarwall and no means of travelling for resupply.
Interesting times ahead!
Thanks for the update!
Your GM is definitely bending the rules a bit, but that's well within a GM's purview to tell the story they want to, so I'm not going to criticize them on it; you're just definitely getting a "grittier" AP. Which is what you said your GM wanted.
However, "I buy a bunch of scrolls of Dispel Evil and get rid of the anchors without having to defeat any of them!" is a legitimate fear, so I can absolutely see a GM overruling that particular loophole. It's just too bad you hit the solution dead-on, it didn't work, and you were disappointed with the result.
But it's a minor point. It sounds like the story may be improving for you.
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A few non-spoilery comments:
(1) The AE edition of Scarwall is quite the mess. They didn't add any rooms, but they more than doubled the number of encounters. So yes, the AE version is a grindy drag, no matter which way you slice it. I ran it once. I will never run it again. The original is much better, in my personal opinion as a GM. A haunted castle is creepy because of all the empty rooms and haunts. Not because there's a CR-appropriate undead encounter in every single room.(2) In the original, you were given two divine casters as allies for precisely the reasons you list: They could queue up and cast the necessary Death Wards and various flavors of Restoration. In the AE edition you're still supposed to get at least one divine caster who has access to both Death Ward and Restoration.
If your GM is running the AE as-is in "gritty" mode with no casters who can provide you with at least Restoration, then yes, you really are getting a much harder dungeon than written. The AP assumes you've got ready access to at least one Restoration a day, so you shouldn't have PCs with ability damage or drain or temporary negative levels going in and out of the dungeon.
Can you pool your gold for the 33,000 required to get a wand of Restoration, or is that forbidden as well?
I'm glad you mentioned Point 1, NH - I'm dreading running Scarwall when my PCs get to it, for this very reason. I feel like it's a massive grind, and the various effects in place due to The Curse makes it even more dangerous. Then again, my group also dealt with Runeforge, which was also a long slog through a dungeon, so maybe I'm fretting for nothing.
I'm glad you mentioned Point 1...A few non-spoilery comments:
(1) The AE edition of Scarwall is quite the mess. They didn't add any rooms, but they more than doubled the number of encounters. So yes, the AE version is a grindy drag, no matter which way you slice it. I ran it once. I will never run it again. The original is much better, in my personal opinion as a GM. A haunted castle is creepy because of all the empty rooms and haunts. Not because there's a CR-appropriate undead encounter in every single room.
...
I'm also glad he mentioned it, and thank you, Misroi, for commenting as such, and thus bringing this thread up to the top.
I'm just about to start reading through Skeletons of Scarwall, but I have both versions of the AP, and from a quick perusal I had already noticed that they'd vastly increased the numbers of foes in the reprinted/updated AP. I'm running the original modules (we play D&D, not PF), but was planning to draw more heavily from the updated AP for Scarwall, since it seemed they thought it needed updating for some reason...
I'm glad to hear that the original plays better. I'll probably cherry-pick an extra foe or two (I really liked the Grave Knight when I was thumbing through the Anniversary Edition), but otherwise stick with the original module.
Anyone have any insight as to how much more XP and leveling occurs with the updated Skeletons of Scarwall, than the original? In the original modules, the first 3 get the party up to 10th level, then AHoA theoretically only gains the party one level (which puts them at 11th... going into SoS, which is designed for a 12th-level party...), and SoS should get the party another 2 levels (level 12 to level 14). I imagine I'll easily be able to stretch A History of Ashes to give my large party 2 levels' worth of XP (I plan to add in the Gray Maiden indoctrination dungeon, etc, from the updated version).
Glancing at the Scarwall chapter beginning in the updated AP, I think I've found the answer to my own question. I see that it's supposed to be for levels 13 - 15. So they made the castle harder so as to provide the greater amount of XP needed for the 13 to 15 level-up, rather than the 12 to 14 level-up.
Interesting.