A party of new adventurers, having found only death and plundered burial niches in the Barrowmaze, sets out for the mountain stronghold of an infamous witch. The characters avoid some barbarians, kill a giant insectoid with magic missile, and penetrate the fortress. Inside, they spend most of their time hacking to bits the witch's corpse and her vat-grown replacement body. They are attacked by some tentacles and find plenty of gems and an intelligent sword. The decide to leave after a few more rooms -- and then half the party dies in a gas explosion in the dungeon's kitchen. The survivors make it back to Hirot.
Observations
- I ran the Free RPG Day 2013 module "The Imperishable Sorceress" by Goodman Games for fresh characters not embroiled in the main campaign. It's a great little adventure, oozing atmosphere and sporting another fantastic illustrated map by Doug Kovacs.
- The gas explosion in the dungeon kitchen sucked:
- There were no clues to its presence. By contrast, a secret chamber was trapped, too -- but that's something one might expect.
- It had a large blast radius (20') and I decided it affected the entire party. That was a bad call, as we had played with lax positioning all night. I should have had everyone make a Luck check to see if he or she was in the area of effect.
- It was very deadly, which is okay, but at [2d6, save for half], it left PCs with few hit points no chance at all (i.e. even a successful save could not save a guy with low hp).
- I overlooked the traps problematic features when reading the module (which was poor prep on my part) and decided against modifying it once it was triggered (which was true to my credo of not pulling any punches).
- The warlock's player used spellburn all the time and it was fun seeing the power of magic in action ... and waiting for things to go catastrophically wrong. That never happened, but it was tense.
In a nutshell
A fun session that ended on a frustrating note. Sorry, guys!
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