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Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:10 am
by thinkslogically
Anyone else notice that spider said "organs" earlier, and this is just a heart?

I don't think we're done here...

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:12 am
by spiderwrangler
((Someone's memory/check recalled organs, but not any specifics as to what.))

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 6:14 am
by thinkslogically
Ah ok! I guess we'll see what happens then :D

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 7:42 am
by spiderwrangler
You solved my yuan-ti mummy lord puzzle!


There were definitely some parts I didn't have well thought through enough, and I would build differently if I had the chance, but I'd welcome feedback.
  • Big rubies that shoot lasers seemed cool... but if the only way to defeat them is painstakingly throwing a javelin 40 times or taking forever to steal it, maybe something less tempting and easier to shut down? Multiple smaller gems that are easier to pop out?
  • Cylinder column ramp thing was poorly described or just plain confusing
  • why are the boxes I invented on the spot because I accidentally gave Holger all the loot in the first chest more secure than the jar containing the mummies heart? :shrug:
  • Why leave fire producing stuff in the same room as the urn when that's the ONLY thing that can harm it?
  • Why does the mummy not seem to have a way to drop the cylinder if it is in the lowest level with the ramp up?
  • Roxy was definitely a game changer, there were 3 or 4 cool things the mummy lord could have done that he never got a chance to... of course, I suppose you would have found them less cool...

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:03 am
by M0rtimer
I'm pretty sure I understood how the "corkscrew lift" worked. There's three levels, and the lift holds a staircase that connects two levels. Middle level controls a lever that has the lift go up/down, bottom level has a urn that makes it rotate. Rotating it also revealed a secret passage that we used to actually got our well deserved loot from this place :P

...Wait, guys- I just realized, there might be another, even MORE secret passage if we raise the lift, then try and open the secret passage on the second level! :shifty: That's totally something I'd do as a DM... Now I'm curious to actually try it. :lol:

But generally I liked it, though. The big rubies were perhaps a bit annoying to remove considering we were effectively "out of combat", but they should have a good reward/risk kind of deal. Perhaps just streamline it a bit more so that once you're out of combat and you figure out a way to do it, it's just one or two checks to see if you're successful?

Roxy might honestly have saved our asses as well, tbf. I can see with how we were pretty much forced to pile in one by one, and with a couple bad rolls, things could have gone very badly... And obviously a GOD would not be scared of some fire, or ever even needing to "respawn". :roll:

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 9:51 am
by BadgeAddict
Yeah, in some ways I regret using Roxy, cause she could have been useful at a later time, but I think she saved us from a TPK moment.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 10:18 am
by spiderwrangler
I can't say for sure, but it's likely that Zephyr, Randy, or both would have been in bad shape, separated from the rest of the party as they were.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 10:34 am
by Lurks_In_Shadows
On the one hand, Randy using the burned claw was something I had been trying to avoid. But it turned to out to be a useful item in the face off with the swords and spears and Randy did get to keep the halberd. That one could've gone badly with some bad rolls too, but it was in general pretty balanced. The biggest problem is that we'd pretty much burned through most of our heals at that point (and it turned out we needed the ones we did have for the poison traps). That was the biggest decider on me using the claw. I didn't think we could afford to mess around with a normal melee, so I pulled out the weapon that would best amplify Randy's new abilities to try to end things before we got too hurt. The good news/bad news is that Randy is still carrying around a tactical nuke. We didn't have to use it, although if Zephyr hadn't summoned Roxy and Randy hadn't gotten dropped early, he might have.
Since Randy got "killed" twice in that encounter, I don't think there's any doubt that things would have ended badly for Randy and Zeph without Roxy. :P

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 10:55 am
by BadgeAddict
Zephyr obviously cares about Randy's well-being somewhat, regardless of her prickly personality. :D

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:18 am
by M0rtimer
Wait, important question: the poison vents are installed in the actual ramp (so, like the elevator), not the rooms themselves, right?

Because if we're really doing this to find out I'm a smartass and we're gonna be met with a wall, if that's the way it works, whoever is actually down at the urn should technically be safe. :roll:

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:24 am
by spiderwrangler
The urn folks would get the same gas that Coljin went down from.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:28 am
by thinkslogically
Yeah I liked it - keeping the pressure up to keep moving is something I really enjoy, and I think it's something that has to be actively pushed by the DM to work. I know we could have taken more breaks than we probably did, but having a party reach the end boss feeling beaten up and low on spells makes it way more tense and (for me) enjoyable. It's so easy to not die in 5e, that you've really got to strain a party to the edge before there's any real risk of seeing it, especially with a party as big as ours. Personally, I like feeling like we beat the odds but I'm also completely ok with dramatic failures in games cos I think they push the plot in interesting directions, but that's just personal preference :)

Roxy was definitely an bit of an ace-in-the-hole for us there, my only criticism is that she seemed pretty OP for the circumstances and took a lot of the tension out of the fight since she could pretty much just focus her / the mummy's attention while the rest of the party wore it down. If that thing was a RAW Mummy Lord, I suspect Roxy wasn't actually mechanically OP, but it did kind of feel that way. It was a badass moment for Zephyr though, so I'm not complaining about how it went down :D (PS We're level 4 now right? :P )

I also liked that there were a bunch of elements involved in the zombie battle that gave us the ability to control the difficulty by being smart about our options. I did not understand the stairs, but I also have a really bad habit of skim-reading, so that's probably just on me :D

But yeah, I enjoyed it :)

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:40 am
by spiderwrangler
I may release the mummy stats, but he was not a full power version, he was tailored to try to be a good challenge for your party.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 11:46 am
by thinkslogically
No worries, that's not necessary (especially if you're wanting to poach the stats for later monsters) - I was just curious on account of the vast list of immunities the RAW version had, but Roxy's fists were magical, which would have offset a big chunk of that problem.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 12:16 pm
by Lurks_In_Shadows
I have to agree that overall it was a good dungeon/adventure. It was hard enough to actually make us sweat a bit, even if we did use a couple of our Ace-in-the-holes. We didn't get to traipse through on god mode. We had to actually work for it. We had to think our way through and actively cooperate to finish it. Good job, Spider! :clap:

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 12:36 pm
by spiderwrangler
I'm kind of wanting to put it into a module form, so feedback is good. I like the idea of having a dummy mummy heart (and other organs) on 'display' that can be easily destroyed, and the real one being hidden and harder to locate, but something that if people make their checks, they will know is somewhere.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 12:52 pm
by thinkslogically
Oooh nice one! If it's for a stand-alone module I would telegraph the existence of real organs pretty hard, and maybe have some signal on the way out that makes it obvious that they've missed something and there's still a source of power in the temple.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:12 pm
by Lurks_In_Shadows
Hmmm.... maybe a hidden alcove in the treasure room? And if they don't find the real thing either they can't leave the temple or if they do, they get gradually weaker and weaker until they return? Maybe with sleep walking towards the temple to make it clear that something is trying to draw them back?

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:31 pm
by thinkslogically
OOooh! Or zombie hoards that rise up from other parts of the temple to resurrect their boss, and get in the way of the party leaving. Maybe you could add a whole bunch of offshoot tunnels that just have corpses stacked up in them. They're no threat on the way in, but wake up when the ML is defeated. Once the real organs are destroyed, the zombies crumble back into actual corpses.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:50 pm
by M0rtimer
Honestly, who says that they HAVE to be stopped? The whole purpose of hiding the real organs in the first place is to trick the original raiders into leaving, after all. But yeah, it can be "unfun" to figure out later on that you essentially just "failed" at actually clearing the dungeon because you didn't figure out you got tricked... So there should probably be some means for them to figure out that something is amiss, yeah.

Anyways, yeah, I think I could see this being a fun module with perhaps some minor tweaks. It depends on what you want to do, really. If you want to go "bigger", one idea you're allowed to steal from me- Turn the whole place into a pyramid, with a column similar to the ones we've been travelling through as it's center piece. The column by standard has a staircase down, or if turned 90 degrees, a pathway leading straight through. (Assume for now, I'm talking that the pyramid is essentially split in two parts- More complex layouts would be possible, but that'd probably require drawing charts to make sure everything is "correct"). For the most part, the puzzle will actually seem pretty "straightforward", because as the pc's descend, They will encounter levers which can only raise/lower a single level at the time, making it the goal to find the lever on each level of the pyramid to descend further. Eventually introduce wheels to them, so they can turn the center column 90 degrees, and cross to the other side of the pyramid.

Continuing this trend they would eventually reach the bottom, where they'd get in the final battle with the mummy overlord... And access it's treasure hoard/fake organs afterwards. At this point, there should be some manner of clue to, if the PC's haven't thought of it themselves, to start messing with the mechanisms to reach rooms they otherwise couldn't have- And raise the column all the way back up to the top, and way at the bottom another passage opens up to the "real" treasure.

I hope that explanation makes sense. :roll:

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:54 pm
by thinkslogically
I completely agree about not necessarily stopping the PCs, but failures are arguably less fun in a one-shot module than they are in a campaign where you might end up with recurring villains and such.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:57 pm
by spiderwrangler
Some of the paintings on the walls could hint at him coming back...

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 1:59 pm
by M0rtimer
Yeah, there should ideally be a couple methods defined for dealing with that... Some could be for when the module is used in an existing campaign, along the lines of the mummy lord eventually coming back, maybe plotting against them... Or in the case of oneshots, probably something along the lines of a curse. Leave your PC's confused when they're about to pack up as they're done, and you state that they'd ought to keep playing for a while. >:D
Some of the paintings on the walls could hint at him coming back...
Well, that depends. The idea of having decoy organs is a neat one, I think, but it could leave the PC's thinking that they've dealt with the whole "coming back from the dead" part, so arguably, it might be better to leave that idea out- There should be some manner of indicator that they've not found "everything" yet, or that it was a trick... Something along those lines, I'd think.

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Fri Apr 13, 2018 2:50 pm
by Lurks_In_Shadows
Maybe as a background for this (and you kind of set this idea up with ML's conversation with Randy) the locals are hiring the party to investigate and stop disappearances of lots of people (the ML magically summoning people to be incorporated as soldiers in his undead army).

Re: The Sundered Way - OOC

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2018 9:21 am
by spiderwrangler
Hey guys, I am gonna have to slow my pace a bit for the next week or so, I have a lot of grading coming due at the end of the semester. Currently I have 6.75 lbs (3.06kg) of student papers to grade to be handed back on Monday afternoon. Things let up a bit after that, but it's going to be a busy few weeks. Feel free to post, if I need the break, I'll pop in and update.