Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Greyson 12-04-04, 07:17 PM	I am preparing to referee Keith Baker's Fallen Angel, from Dungeon 117 in our Eberron campaign. I thought I would check to see if anyone else has judged it, and if there are any potential issues to be aware of. I am really looking for comments on how Kaelys Tela was developed and the fight with the memelith at the end. But I'll take any advice. Please share any comments?
The Rooster 12-05-04, 01:23 PM	I am planning to run this adventure as well. As soon as I can get everyone together to play it that is. Rooster
MikeyP 12-06-04, 09:26 AM	I'm still trying to figure out if I'm going to run the adventure or not... The players turned down Kaelys' offer when she wouldn't negotiate on the reward price... (she only has so much money after all) That was the end of last session, so we'll see what they decide now. They may reconsider.
staz100 12-06-04, 02:29 PM	I just started this adventure last night. I've got a party of four (all 3rd level) running through it. We got through most of it last night. Currently we are at this point [beware of spoilers!!!]: The party has gone through Colrac hall and is about to enter the portion of the Glass Tower. As to the original post, I've run Kaelys Tela as a mysterious figure. She contacted the party (through the Sivis message station - they put out an ad in the Korrenberg Chronicle), and checked out their credentials with Lady Elaydren d'Cannith. Kaelys has passed along no personal information, but she has stated that she wants the whole statue back if possible (600 platinum reward!). So, she is pretty much an enigma to the party currently. They didn't ask any questions, and she volunteerd nothing personal. I haven't decided who or what I want her to be. I'll probably leave it a mystery (to everyone, including myself) until I'm forced to make a decision. More interesting was my group's interaction with Faela at Blackstone Church. Included in the party is a Dragonmarked (Sentinel) Cleric of the Sovereign Host. He surprised me by demanding that the party leave a substantial donation to Faela and Blackstone Church for the good work that she is doing with the poor in Fallen. It was a great encounter in my opinion, your party may react differently. As far as some of the other encounters, be wary of the first run in with the ravers - the Blood Drinkers I believe. As written in the adventure, they have max HP for 1st level barbarians, and their greatclubs can do LOTS of damage, especially if they are in a rage. My party underestimated them and took a beating as a result. The party successfully parlayed with the Night Stalkers in Colrac Hall and got a some of useful information. The horrid rats in the pantry and kitchen in Colrac Hall were a lot easier to deal with than I expected. The horrid rats in the Forgotten Forge adventure gave this party fits back at first level. I guess at third level they mere much easier. The allip in the servants' quarters was pretty easy for them as well. Although, I think it was a combination of good rolls on their party and poor rolls on my side of the screen. Also, three of the four members went sprawling in the broken glass after failing their Balance checks. DC12 can be difficult for 3rd level characters wearing heavy armor, no ranks in Balance, and no DEX bonus. The players really seemed to like the adventure so far, it has a bit of mystery: - What is the statue? (I didn't tell them that it is Sythrael, or any of the history of the radiant idol) - Why does Kaelys Tela want the statue? - Why are the ravers collecting the pieces of the statue (tied to the first mystery above) I gave the players a fairly open way of going about the adventure - they knew they were eventually going to Fallen, but they had time to research the ravers (which they though was an evil cult at first), and they did not feel "railroaded" - their words, not mine. And there are many little adventure seeds buried in the adventure as is.
Magagumo 12-06-04, 04:22 PM	Hmm let's see.. * * * * * * * * * Ravers went down fast, but the Night Stalkers proved nasty against a group without Darkvision (Archer Ranger w/ Lantern got speared, then the group's melee shifter PW got lured into a nasty flanking manueveur). I agree that the rats proved much easier.. made them feel like they had definetely improved. The allip Wisdom drained the cleric :eek: , but turning proved useful. The glass was the most terrfiying encounter they had... over 5o pts to the whole group by the time they had come and gone (The full-plated cleric had a terrible time). The Blink Dog maze was also nasty (have them blink through walls, bite, then DD away each round... it took 11 rds to kill two of them, and the last one ended up fighting with teh five StoneKeepers at the top.) The boy went down fast, despite his minions (no time to use his nice potions), but they spared him- upon realizing he was forever possesed by the meories of the dead, they performed a mercy killing and buried him in holy ground (the Silver Flame church in Fallen). The 4th blink dog was also not slain, and was returned to House Vaedelis (along with the language book) after the ranger had time to work out the langauge with it. The psion made a high SC to realize the statue was a fallen ido, and then proceeded to roll v. high on two KNowledge: plaens checks to determine what a radiant idol was (a 21 & a 22 on the rolls for a DC 21.. as a 4th character). Kaelys paid them the full platinum, but they've secretly kept a big toe of the statue to make sure it will never be restored. Great adventure- brutal though with the right GMing ;)
Greyson 12-06-04, 11:23 PM	Okay. This is really good stuff - thanks for sharing your experiences, guys. Now I feel a bit more confident refereeing this adventure.
Ashfallen 12-07-04, 02:09 AM	Here's my experience running Fallen Angel, for those who are interested in reading such things. My group: Zardak, dwarf ranger 4, former Breland tunnel soldier; Aylish, human fighter 4, formerly the leader of a band of peasant women who defended their town from soldiers (including 'friendlies'); Deshardarath, kalashtar psion 4, wandering scholar/tourist; and Kharne, orc druid 4, Gatekeeper with a size M snake companion. They work for a Tharashk-marked inquisitive-wannabe named Torya, who doesn't actively adventure. She's trying to build up a reputation to bring herself to the notice of the high-ups of her mother's house. Adventuring is too dangerous for her, her competencies are more social, including contacts in the low end of the upper class, so she normally scouts out a job and hands it and 75% of the fee to the party. So far she's been worth her agent's fee to them. (1) Kaelys: I've left her exact stats and so on fairly blank, and plan to use her later. I've established her as classically lawful evil, a low-ranking member of the Aurum, a self-centred and prideful person. "Sharn, City of Towers" doesn't say anything about the legality of setting deadly traps in one's own house, so I'm going to assume it's legally A-OK unless an agent of the law (or someone else with a legitimate reason to be in the house, like a servant or family member) is killed by one. Still, it's uncommon and damn suspicious - anyone with a deadly trap in their house almost certainly has a secret they will kill to protect. There's the plot-hook for later. I might make her a patron of a beholder cult led by a sphere minion (Dragon 296). I've been wanting to use one of them for a while. (2) Faela: my party hardly interacted with Faela at all, other than to get the information she's willing to give. As I recall they gave her a small donation. I didn't consider her worth any XP - not telling her about things like the tattoos wouldn't have made any sense. (3) Colrac Hall: I couldn't see any description of it being any darker than the usual shadowy twilight of lower Sharn. The feasting hall might have been a tougher encounter had I realized it was supposed to be dark. Duh. Recommendation: make it fully dark. I opened "dialogue" of grunts and gestures, but my party preferred to let their weapons speak for them. They ignored the library on the first run through, and went through the kitchen. The two horrid rats inside died easily. They didn't bother searching the kitchen; my group's a bit mission-focused, "no wasting time". Nor did they bother the allip or the remaining horrid rats, heading straight for the glass (ouch ouch) and the hole into the upside-down tower (ouch ouch). They got shocked by the chest and left it, then dispatched the blink dog skeletons easily, but had a lot more trouble with the living blink dogs. By the time those were killed (as an aside, I was expecting them to negotiate with the dogs ... but no, swords are the negotiating instruments of choice. Sigh ...) the party had about 20 HP between them. So of course they head for the keeper's room to hunt down the two remaining blink dogs. The orc and dwarf bull-rushed the door together ... triggering the trap. Scratch one dwarf. Splat. Fortunately they had a potion to revive the orc who could cast his last cure light wounds on himself, and they were lucky and cunning enough to defeat the keeper and kill one dog. I had every intention of playing the dogs smart, and blinking away if reduced to below 5 HP, but the party kept reducing them from approx 12 HP to negatives in a single blow, before they had the chance to escape. Only one got away in the end. Poor blink dogs. So, somewhere out there is a blink dog with a neutral alignment and an intelligence of 10, whose family were killed by marauding adventurers. So I figure he'll meet up with a boy from the Lower Wards, they'll have adventures together, and eventually the blink dog will come back seeking vengeance. A nice little plot timebomb for my later use. :) At this point the three survivors decided to put a cairn up for Zardak, and go back to the room before the glass hole and rest up over night. Session ended. Between sessions I realized that the trap was a stone deadfall, and Zardak gets a free stonecunning roll to notice it, so I gave his player one chance. Nope. He's dead. (Mentally rewrites subplots.) Next session they healed up a little and went back for the final encounter. Given the passage of time, what do the ravers in the room outside the statues do? Well, they quickly discover that there's no way to leave. The only way they know to get in or out is hitching a ride with a blink dog. There's only one blink dog left, and it's with the memelith, who isn't willing to be interrupted or lend the dog out. So, they'll huddle overnight and wait for the memelith to demand food. The blink dog will scout out the party and discover what they've done, but it'll stay with his master to protect him, they have no common language, and the memelith isn't reasonable enough to be dragged away from his task to investigate the intruders. (4) So, for the final encounter, almost status quo. I decided that the ravers went into the room with the memelith, slept, and waited to be given orders. Which is where they were when the party burst in on them. This fight was interesting - there was no reason for the ravers to wait, so they attacked the party as soon as the party arrived. The memelith, in religious leader mode, noticed the interruption about three rounds into it, and demanded they cease. Desharadarath tried to read the memelith's mind. Fortunately for him, he passed his Will save, so I had him merely stunned for a round. Next, Kharne tried to tackle the memelith, while Aylish and a summoned bear and Kharne's snake companion cleaned up the last of the raver guards. A confusing melee followed. Kharne rolled around on the floor with the memelith. The blink dog bit at Kharne. Kharne's snake bit at the memelith. Desh mentally blasted the blink dog, and Aylish killed it with a critical. By this time Kharne had smacked his own snake down to zero, and was totally fed up with the memelith who had escaped his grapple and taken down Aylish. So Kharne decided to kill him, which wasn't too hard. Kharne's killing blow confused himself, and the next thing he did was smack--critical hit--the wounded psion. Fortunately the psion had activated his hit point buffing power at the beginning of the encounter, so he survived on -2 rather than -12 (or something like that). Recommendation - if your group go away and rest, the memelith should take a more active part in the next battle, using bard song and charm person spells. Anyway, encounters all defeated, they decided to go home to their underground lair in the Depths ("loot" of a previous adventure), heal up for a night, catch up with Torya their patron, and decide what they should do with the statue, which they can't physically get out of the room. This gave me a chance to introduce Zardak's player's new character, Quayne the human wizard, a summoner from the Lhazar Principalities, and re-introduce the fifth party member, Ben the halfling cleric/rogue, a kind of thieves' chaplain. So, healed (somewhat) and accompanied by their patron and a couple of bugbear stevedores bearing ladders and sacks, the party returned to the statue. (Via the trapped chest, which went off four times ... heal, heal, heal ... before the cleric/rogue got it open.) The wizard fussed over the statue and pronounced it a victim of a flesh to stone spell, and worked out that this particular one (whether or not it was generally the case) was able to mend together any broken bits of itself held in the right place. The cleric took a very close look at the hacked-off wings and pronounced them the wounds of torture, most likely inflicted as punishment. He tried a detect evil - I didn't give him anything, but let him know that, for all intents and purposes, a petrified person is like a dead body, they don't give off evil unless they're aware. So he could take that as a negative result on a "detect awareness" if he wanted to, but it was really up to his character's prejudices and knowledge of the planes. Which prompted the Gatekeeper--who knows a bit about planes--to look at him, and grunt "it's an angel". But a roll of 9 will give you that. As to what would happen if he was un-stoned with his eye missing ... I decided it would 'probably work', but he'd be missing his eye and a small piece of his brain from behind it, so he'd need immediate medical attention. The idea struck me as kinda neat - the eyepatch-wearing radiant idol. :) Anyway they put two and two together, came up with five, and decided the petrified fallen angel was a bad thing to have around. Torya pushed hard for the money, but they compromised. The bugbears would gleefully smash the statue up, and haul the pieces back to Kaelys. Two critical pieces ("bits he can't live without") would be kept. One, Ben gave to the Citadel of the Sun in Hope's Peak for safekeeping, and the other was ostensibly shipped back to the Mror Holds with Zardak's body. The rest they sold back to Kaelys, for (as I recall) 2000gp. Not complete, but a lot more than she had. On the way back, they smacked down the allip. One round. Two blows. Sigh ...
Hellcow 12-07-04, 11:38 AM	(3) Colrac Hall: I couldn't see any description of it being any darker than the usual shadowy twilight of lower Sharn. The feasting hall might have been a tougher encounter had I realized it was supposed to be dark. Duh. Recommendation: make it fully dark. Interesting. Originally I specified lighting for each room, but perhaps that was pulled on editing. Indeed, the entry hall has shadowy illumination, but the rest of the first level is full dark; the whole point of the Night Stalkers is that they seek to take full advantage of darkvision, hence the name. The blink maze is shadowy, with the occasional everburning torch. The areas inhabited by the Stone Keepers have everburning lanterns and normal illumination.
Magagumo 12-07-04, 11:49 AM	Ah yes.. transporting the statue out... the Shifter PW Expanded & had Bull's Strength cast on her, giving her a Str of 24 (allowing her to carry 1400 lbs. as a heavily encumbered person)... it was slow going through the tight blink dog maze and down the stairs biut they made it (glass gave lots of trouble as well). Hmm, on note, is that the description of the stairs in the Glass Tower left me quite bewildered... how could the group reach them from the ceiling (i.e., their respective floor)? Were they spiral staircases with a metal foundation rod placed into the ceiling (which they could shimmy up?)
Hellcow 12-07-04, 01:36 PM	Hmm, on note, is that the description of the stairs in the Glass Tower left me quite bewildered... how could the group reach them from the ceiling (i.e., their respective floor)? Were they spiral staircases with a metal foundation rod placed into the ceiling (which they could shimmy up?) You're not actually supposed to be walking up the stairs themselves, but rather the slanted ceiling - like a ramp.
WynnHuntr2 12-07-04, 01:42 PM	Im still curious about the green stone.