Goodman Games

I'm hoping to run my group through this one next Thur, but when I read through it - wow.

Has any 0-level made their way from begining to end? This one has TPK written all over it. I think that's a standard for the zero level adventures when they make 'em: "On read thru, is there at least one moment when you think the entire party could easily die?" "Yes" "Perfect"

In my game, more than one 0-lvl made it from start to finish. And many more finished their lives on the Starless Sea!

I had 6 survive of 17. If you level up on reaching 10xp your players will level before the final and hardest encounter. (We did not level up until the end and still had 6 survivors)
I have some very detail play reports. (See link in my sig) it will give you a good Idea where the TPKs can take place.

Shockingly my players mopped the floor with beastmen. I'm still shocked at the astounding player luck. Only 3 of 12 died.

Karaptis wrote:Shockingly my players mopped the floor with beastmen. I'm still shocked at the astounding player luck. Only 3 of 12 died.

Yup, I had a similar experience. We just finished Sailors the other night and only lost 3 of 12. The finale was a bit more, um, unconventional than most people experienced but sometimes cool has to win out over the written word.

I've ran it twice, had several survivors both times. There are a couple scenes that seem like they'd be meat grinders, they don't have to be. The tentacled beast is probably the toughest. I had a pretty close TPK in the beast-man room. The closing set-peace can be toned down depending on how you handle it. They should see the adventurers as "more sacrifices", and therefore want to "keep them alive". The closing scene is a good opportunity to take them out of their world and into some place like the Land of the Lost... Or in my case, the Isle of the Unknown.

I've only TPK'd once, and it was because a player did something really, really dumb.

I have no problem with TPKs so tomorrow night should be a blast. I'm going to run it as is with 3 players running 5 funnel fodders each.

Zeiros wrote:I had 6 survive of 17. If you level up on reaching 10xp your players will level before the final and hardest encounter. (We did not level up until the end and still had 6 survivors)
I have some very detail play reports. (See link in my sig) it will give you a good Idea where the TPKs can take place.

Awesome write up! Thanks!

Well, we played it. We had 4 survivors out of 16.

And that was with them skipping some encounters

screenmonkey wrote:Well, we played it. We had 4 survivors out of 16.

And that was with them skipping some encounters

First time: 6/20 survived.. (started as 16 0-levels but they picked up some prisoners and what-not).

Second time: Close to having 1-2 survivors at the end, but ultimately a TPK after TWO characters killed themselves on fumbles with the SLING OF DOOM.

screenmonkey wrote:I'm hoping to run my group through this one next Thur, but when I read through it - wow.

Has any 0-level made their way from begining to end? This one has TPK written all over it. I think that's a standard for the zero level adventures when they make 'em: "On read thru, is there at least one moment when you think the entire party could easily die?" "Yes" "Perfect"

I started the adventure last night and four characters nearly died just from confronting the vine horrors in the first area. Literally three characters were brought to exactly 1 hit point and yet everybody survived! Humbled and hurt, they decided to leave and return to the keep in the morning. We'll find out what happens next, next Sunday.

In our group one out of ten survived and it was helluva ride.

My players were quite clever and very lucky. They started with 12 PCs, 2 more joined after the tower to replace the fallen characters. From 14 characters 8 survived the adventure, but one had permanent damage and one was badly mutated. They also lost two companions, a chicken and a sheep.

One third of the characters died during the last session and in the tower entrance to the caves the party was about to be killed but the wizard in the party took on corruption from his patron in order to get a boon during the battle which turned the tide, it was very epic. They managed to make their way down to the underground lake and heard the drumming and saw the activity at the temple across the lake then decided to head back to the nearby village.

I'm thinking of diverging from the module quite a bit now because the ritual was in progress and they left. The most Appendix N thing I can think of would be for some Neutral deity to be dismayed at the PC's lack of courage and so he sends them into the future to see the nearby village after it's been destroyed by the new beastmen army.

nerdwerds wrote:I'm thinking of diverging from the module quite a bit now because the ritual was in progress and they left. The most Appendix N thing I can think of would be for some Neutral deity to be dismayed at the PC's lack of courage and so he sends them into the future to see the nearby village after it's been destroyed by the new beastmen army.

That's an awesome solution. Have they made it all the way out of the keep? If not, you could have them roll an intelligence check to notice that the stairway up seems longer than the stairway down did. At some point, it could start spiralling, and come out on a parapet of the rebuilt keep, where the avatar of the deity has them look out across the landscape now ruled over by Chaos.

BTW, I read your epic blog post on your years in gaming. Great job on that...lots of fun anecdotes, and several parts where I was genuinely moved.

Bilgewriggler wrote:

nerdwerds wrote:I'm thinking of diverging from the module quite a bit now because the ritual was in progress and they left. The most Appendix N thing I can think of would be for some Neutral deity to be dismayed at the PC's lack of courage and so he sends them into the future to see the nearby village after it's been destroyed by the new beastmen army.

That's an awesome solution. Have they made it all the way out of the keep? If not, you could have them roll an intelligence check to notice that the stairway up seems longer than the stairway down did. At some point, it could start spiralling, and come out on a parapet of the rebuilt keep, where the avatar of the deity has them look out across the landscape now ruled over by Chaos.

I had a patron of my own design show up and send the characters into the future as a test. The players weren't very happy with the digression. One of them said it felt like an episode where Q shows up on Star Trek, and he's not a fan of arbitrary trumps. The cleric in the party made an appeal of Divine Aid to her deity (Cthulhu) and asked that they be returned to their own time, and she succeeded on her roll so I returned them to the time and place near the underground lake where they had turned around and left before.

Bilgewriggler wrote:BTW, I read your epic blog post on your years in gaming. Great job on that...lots of fun anecdotes, and several parts where I was genuinely moved.

Thanks alot!

nerdwerds wrote:I had a patron of my own design show up and send the characters into the future as a test. The players weren't very happy with the digression. One of them said it felt like an episode where Q shows up on Star Trek, and he's not a fan of arbitrary trumps. The cleric in the party made an appeal of Divine Aid to her deity (Cthulhu) and asked that they be returned to their own time, and she succeeded on her roll so I returned them to the time and place near the underground lake where they had turned around and left before.

Well, if they're going to complain about things like that, next time just let the Chaos Lords be reborn and ravage the local countryside. The party would just have to flee and come back later when they'd gained enough levels to clean up their own mess.

nerdwerds wrote:

Bilgewriggler wrote:BTW, I read your epic blog post on your years in gaming. Great job on that...lots of fun anecdotes, and several parts where I was genuinely moved.

Thanks alot!

You're welcome!

Bilgewriggler wrote:

nerdwerds wrote:I had a patron of my own design show up and send the characters into the future as a test. The players weren't very happy with the digression. One of them said it felt like an episode where Q shows up on Star Trek, and he's not a fan of arbitrary trumps. The cleric in the party made an appeal of Divine Aid to her deity (Cthulhu) and asked that they be returned to their own time, and she succeeded on her roll so I returned them to the time and place near the underground lake where they had turned around and left before.

Well, if they're going to complain about things like that, next time just let the Chaos Lords be reborn and ravage the local countryside. The party would just have to flee and come back later when they'd gained enough levels to clean up their own mess.

nerdwerds wrote:

Bilgewriggler wrote:BTW, I read your epic blog post on your years in gaming. Great job on that...lots of fun anecdotes, and several parts where I was genuinely moved.

Thanks alot!

You're welcome!

Can you attach a link to the blog post I would love to read it!

-Brogan

brogan_a wrote:Can you attach a link to the blog post I would love to read it!

-Brogan

I included a link to my blog in my profile on here - http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com

I believe the entry Bilgewriggler is referring to is this one - http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2012/01/epic-post.html