Hours and days of entertainment! We just finished this adventure last night after about 4 sessions, and my players came away really excited and inspired to keep going with the Avernus campaign! I'm going to guess that this will probably have been a highlight for months to come, given that they're a higher level party, and it was much easier with the PDF's suggestions for scaling encounters up than it has been for the first bit of Descent Into Avernus.
For those with stronger level parties, I found it worked much better to give the final big-bad a more menacing CR: I made him a vampire instead of a ghoul, allowed him to have contact with the shield in order to use its Fire Wall to trap the party inside, and gave him some inconsequential magical abilities throughout the cat-and-mouse period, such as finally casting little torches to come find him when the party went full dungeon-exploration completionist. I also turned the final level of the crypt into a map puzzle, so that when all the ghouls bust out after the fight, they had to put their mapper (squishy, not used to leading the charge) in the front of the group, or else roll history or survival checks to make sure they were going the right way. I very loosely clumped the ghouls into groups of ten that showed up whenever they passed a larger crypt area and eyeballed when a group of them would be encountering the party, rather than tracking them all in chase turn order. It worked out great!
Finally, I had to fill out some of the crypt lore with ascended Hhunes' deeds on those crypt rooms, because it was feeling a little same-y same-y. It kept the party distracted and occasionally led to some false puzzle shenanigans that made the loot in those coffins worth the digging up. Not only do I have the barbarian attuning to an OP shield, I have the bard attuning to the dagger, and they're both Chaotic to the extreme to begin with. The ranger saved two Kruthik eggs and managed to tame both of them upon hatching at the end of the adventure, and the party has a nemesis in the form of a thwarted incubus. Pretty good value for a 4 session diversion in Baldur's Gate! If they weren't going to Hell before, they definitely are now.
Thanks, MT Black! You knocked it out of the park!
|