I played 2-8 as part of a table zero in preparation for the release next week, figure I'd start a feedback thread with a play report.
- Party size: 6
- Average PC level: 2.5
- Time spent playing: 5 hours and change
- Number of rests taken: 2 short rests
- Party composition notes: had one 1st-level character, no dedicated tank
- How difficult it was on a 1-4 scale: 3 - None of us died but it was scary at times
- How fun it was on a 1-4 scale: 3 - There were a few slow parts
- How treasure was distributed: Of the two interested players, one had no items, so he got it
- Interesting things that happened along the way: I'm going to be vague to minimize spoilerization since the official release is upcoming.
Laal was super awesome, although her story had holes.
One of our PCs got impatient when negotiating with the human party while we were mid-palaver, so we didn't have help for the next fight, which would have been absolutely terrifying if we didn't use terrain to our advantage.
The damage in the fourth encounter was enough to one-shot a 1st-level PC, which was very frustrating, but the set-up was super fun.
With the exception of the final encounter, none of the fights encouraged a lot of movement, so they ended up as grindy roll-offs.
Monsters in encounter 3 appear to may have a typo in their HP.
We received 1000 XP for the entire adventure, which was enough to give me two levels; seems crazy high! I basically missed out on DDEX2-1 & 2-2 as a result.
RCanine: As this is a level 1-4, it seems very surprising how much Exp you got. In fact it seems way too high!. If actually ask your gm to recheck that.
2-6 also gives a minimum of 900 and a max of 1200, and it's a Tier 1 module, so it's not out of the question this season, apparently.
Ainulindalion wrote:
Thats .. crazy considering how used to I am of 1-4's giving between 600-700 max exp. I havnt gotten to run 2-6 yet, but thats totally blown ouy the calculations I normally tell players on how many games they will need to play to hit level 4.
Its on my list to run, so thanks for the news on that!
It was probably optimized for a table of 4-5 Level 3 characters, impressed y'all made it through below!
On the end points:
1. I would argue that you can't drop damage below 1.
2. Suffocation is definitely weird! O.O
3. I treat it as difficult terrain personally.
4. I'd say that it would be apparent unless concealed/bluffed by ways mentioned in the State of Mulmaster handout.
5. I don't .... know....
#5 is 30 * STR. Or, as the PHB puts it: twice your carrying capacity. Your move drops to five at this level of exertion though.
Oh hey, I was in that group. 
Now I know who RCanine is!
I'm the author of the adventure, so I'm watching this thread (as well as social media) with great interest!
Its not released for normal play yet and Ive never playtested a game in my life, so I will give you a report when I do run it Shroomy.
Oraibi wrote:
Ravix wrote:
That's a fair counterpoint.
I asked Jeremy Crawford about the resistance question on Twitter. As soon as he answers, I'll let everyone know.
klobbermeister wrote:
RCanine wrote:
Played it last night with a Level 2 Barb, and 5 other level 1 characters, 2 clerics, 1 Fighter, 1 Monk, 1 Druid. It was very tough on level 1 characters. We got ver lucky in some places but 4 differerent times characters did drop and had to be healed. Everyone used all of their spells, potions and spent all of their hit dice. We ended up using 3 short rests. This adventure eaisly could have been a 2 round advventures. If it was still 3.5 rules the amount of interactions and sections would have demanded it to be a 2 round module. We almost backed out early without finishing the module as 1 of our players had to leave. I think there will be many groups at a tim compressed convention that will not finish this module. That being said it was very fun.
With Regards to drowning. There may have to be a faq developed for it as one of the characters in our party could breath water therefore could not drown.
I have not seen the text of the module yet but I am pretty sure we did not even complete one of the sub missions of the module. We were looking for a missing adventurer that was lost during a flood.
drufause wrote:
Just completed a roll20 session of a Round 0 for next weekend's regional premier. Once we all figured out how to use roll20 (the DM, also the event organizer, was the only one to use it before), it went pretty well.
We had a party of 3 (cleric 3, rogue 3, fighter 4), which calcs to a weak party, but the DM ran us as Average. It was brutal, particularly when the monster in the second to last room did its neat trick while we were resting after the fight. We did Max XP, though. Woo.
We used pretty much every resource available to us and finally did manage to overcome all the obstacles - I lost count of how many times someone was unconscious. Used all cleric spells, every healing potion we had on us, and the cleric had the healer feat, too.
On the other hand, we made good use of the cultists' weapons for the module, particularly since the third set of enemies is totally unarmored.
Major notes:
- felt almost like a pure combat slog, though maybe because we just slaughtered the cultists and didn't respond to their attempts to parley
- the trapped sand at the end, totally unnecessary after how hard it is to jump across the multiple (9 consecutive checks? Really?) gaps to the little island.
- water weird reforming after 10 minutes is really not cool
- semi-cursed magic item, also not cool. I get trying to make them flavorful and stuff, but with no way to have the item 'fixed', that's so not awesome. Maybe a faq could be released with details on how to have the item fixed? It'd be a really nice item then.
I just ran this for the first time, having just played it before, and have some insights.
Ainulindalion wrote:
Ainulindalion wrote:
RulesJD wrote:
Jeremy Crawford responded back to me on Twitter and said that if you have resistance to a damage type and you take 1 damage of that type, you take no damage - always round down unless told otherwise. Hope that clears things up.
Shroomy wrote:
Kalani wrote:
Is finding the missing dwarf even an explicit side quest? We never even attempted it. Bigger fish to fry (no kuo-toa pun intended).
I played this on Saturday, and while it was clear our DM was just sight-reading the whole thing -- which I find pretty annoying -- do your prep work! -- anyway -- we found one thing particularly... odd. At the start, we're surrounded by the Watch and outright ordered to go down into the sewers to investigate this thing. Okay, fair enough. It's Mulmaster. We're further told we're the third attempt at this, and the Watch has already sent a group of Zhentarim and another group of adventurers. I don't have a problem with this at all; in ups the dread and makes us feel that much more expendable. Again, Mulmaster.
But when we encounter that other adventuring party shortly after entering the sewers, they say they've only been down there for a couple hours! That's one impatient City Watch. When we captured the cultists (asleep and alive), we bound and gagged them and immediately delivered them to the Watch on the surface, fearful that, as it'd been about an hour, they were probably in the process of rounding up Party #4.
Is the adventure actually written that way, or was our DM doing an especially poor job of timekeeping? Either way, it was pretty funny.
We also lived in fear of another flash (poop) flood, but it never came up. I don't know if the DM was cutting stuff for time, but it was so clearly foreshadowed it seemed weird that it never actually happened.
Also, we only fought one group of trogs. The DM indicated that there were maybe more groups of them down there, but we either skipped or avoided them. Not sure what the truth is there.
(BTW, I think we should've had advantage on our Con saves vs. the trogs' stench. We'd been wading through the sewers, after all -- surely we'd become accustomed to strong odors by then. Anyway, I think it would've been apropos/interesting/funny if anyone who hadn't washed the stink of them had advantage on their saves. Surprise benefit of being covered in Mulmaster's waste!)
The final two encounters seemed odd to us, too, but again, that could've been the DM. The water weird was tough. The subsequent skeletons were a cakewalk. (Granted, fighting with two warhammers may have colored my opinion of them, but still.) The tomb itself was something of a non-issue. The DM thought it was ridiculous to roll nine identical skill checks per PC -- hey, he's not wrong! -- so he just called for the one. My fighter failed and fell in, but in a fine piece of video-game logic, the current swept him over to the island anyway, unharmed. I'm getting the impression this wasn't strictly as written.
At any rate, I enjoyed it, but I can't shake the feeling that I didn't really experience it as the author intended.
RulesJD wrote:
I have not read it yet but I would put money on an otylugh appearing somewhere
Kalani wrote:
RulesJD wrote:
RCanine wrote:
Apparently, our DM did an absolutely terrible job of communicating what that final room looked like. It didn't even seem to us like the skeletons and the tomb were in related areas. He drew the skeletons' room as a big circle with no apparent exit. I'm not sure he ever justified how we got from there to the tomb.
You arrive in the skeleton room by swimming through an underground well/passageway that is in a hallway beyond the room containing the water weird (just past the fancy door with fish heads). It spits you out in the middle of the landing that takes up the 'left' half of the circular room with skeletons. The 'right' half is full of water, with stones to jump across to reach a small island with the tomb.
With each new post in this thread, I become a little more irritated at our DM's mishandling of Foulness.
For the room with the water weird, keep in mind
THanks for all the information on this. I havnt run it yet, but its coming up What is the scaling like?
Tyranthraxus wrote:
Tyranthraxus wrote:
Ainulindalion wrote:
Did they just release a new version of the pdf? The copy that I literally just downloaded lists it as designed for five 6th level characters. The xp limits are still 900/1200, but the RoPK went up to a DC 10 Dex save.
Edit: Realized the introduction paragraph is a typo and found the 3rd level designed APL on page 3. However, what about the DC discrepancy between the cert and the pdf? The cert says DC 5 and the pdf says DC 10.
The PDF has said DC 10 since I got my copy for running the regional convention preview 10 days before the release. A call on this would be nice (DC 5 means that basically no one but warlocks without DEX would drop it on anything but a 1, whereas DC 10 isn't impossible but is noticeably more difficult). I didn't see a cert until today, so I didn't realize this was different.
Usually, with regards to certs vs text, the printed text is right, not the cert, but... *shrug*. The editing on the AL modules themselves makes the editing in the printed for-sale modules look pretty good.
Even with a DC 5, most warlocks are going to pick it up after a long rest and not let go until the next long rest. This quirk is going to create a lot of one-handed warlocks... :P
You know that boilerplate text they put at the beginning of every module?
(This one is a typo, but…) If you don't have a 5th - 10th level character, what good is creating a new 1st-level character going to do? 
RCanine wrote:
Ainulindalion wrote:
I hate to keep ringing this bell, but here's how skewed my experience with this adventure was: I can hardly begin to guess who this "BBEG" might've been who could've fireballed us. The head cultist-guy, I guess? The guy who insisted he and his horseshoe-crab-shell-shield-carrying lackeys weren't cultists at all, then misty stepped away into a room with no escape route where we cornered him and he surrendered peacefully? That guy?
It couldn't have been one of the three troglodytes we fought, I'm sure.
Or the water weird.
Or the three kuo-toa.
Or the seven or eight skeletons, five of whom my hammer-wielding fighter killed over the course of two rounds.
And... those were all the bad guys we encountered!
Graarr. I'd find an opportunity to play this one again, but I only have the one Tier 1 character and don't really want to make another -- not before they level up somewhere else, anyway.
devlin1 wrote:
Is there a map missing from the adventure? I'm preparing to DM it next week and I can't quite figure out the layout of the outer vault and the antechambers.
RCanine wrote:
devlin1 wrote:
zingbobco000 wrote:
devlin1 wrote:
Devlin1, zingbobco000, I'm glad to hear that despite the issues with the DM (and to be fair, we all have bad days sometimes!) that you guys enjoyed the adventure.
Would having Marked by the Crushing Wave have impacts on interactions with the reavers and Xaxan, both positive and negative respectively?
I know that some of my players tonight will have it from an unfortunate experience with the bullywogs, especially one whose mini for that battle had him kicking our asses while reading a book. It was like fighting bullywog Kakashi...
Shroomy wrote:
devlin1 wrote:
Mirtek wrote:
Mirtek wrote:
devlin1 wrote:
I think the issue is for a lot of us DM's is that not that we are appreciated but a lot of us probably dm TOO often because we either feel we have to (because we could offend someone) or people keep asking us to run stuff.
In Context in AL, I run Encounters on every Wed night (only table left at my local store) and I run a Expeditions every Saturday ( in 2 different locations of a fortnightly cycle). Generally its the same expeditions scenario two weeks in a row, so the second time is nearly always a better run.
What I dont get is those dms that dm every second night. I love dming I do, but that much exposure to gaming would just burn me out (and I often wonder if we dont lose a lot of people from the hobby because they are gaming 'too' much).
I always read a scenario over twice. Ive got a 45 minute train commute to work each day, thats when I will read over scenarios. Running a game for me is a social contract. Im there to give my players a good story within the bounds of the scenario, to play fair and honest and mutual respect. Running a game cold for me isnt showing them any respect.
To get back on to the original topic, this scenario sounds pretty cool, Sewer dungeon crawls are always awesome.
Tyranthraxus wrote:
zingbobco000 wrote:
devlin1 wrote:
BTW, am I the only one who found it strange that the water cultist was casting fireball? Wouldn't Tidal Wave be much more fitting? After this encounter we were actually convinced that the fire cult and water cult had joined forces.
Mirtek wrote:
Ainulindalion wrote:
Mirtek wrote:
Shroomy wrote:
Can anyone provide a map to the Outer Tomb/Vault & Antechambers? I am having trouble getting the mental image right from the descriptive text. The Trogs aren't supposed to go into the Outer Vault, yet the 4 antechambers are all interconnected around it with some way for all the Trogs to attack from all sides when the party gets spotted. Are the antechambers branching off the main tunnel to the outer vault, maybe?
Also - Who is the Veteran mentioned under "Combat" on page 12? Was he edited out or something? And why was the flumph killed by crossbow bolts when the cultists have javelins, was that another late edit? Was it supposed to be killed by the thugs in the appendix that aren't anywhere in the encouters?
Sorry - just re-read this and it sounds like I'm complaining. I'm not - the adventure is very, very cool and I like that there are some interesting set-ups... but I want to do it justice for my players and I don't want to be fishing around trying to figure out if the roof in the Outer Vault is 60' like the first line of the text says or 20' like it says in "General Description". I suppose it doesn't matter when the game starts, but 60' sounds like a fairly tall roof for someplace that is underground and where we have been climbing up since entering the sewers...
SterlingRat wrote:
SterlingRat wrote:
Shroomy wrote:
I made some maps for myself for this mod--at least how I had envisioned the descriptions... I also made printable PDFs to battlemap scale. The PDFs are printed, the margins cut off on the bottom and the right hand side of each sheet, then overlapped, and taped together with clear tape. They end up being pretty big, mind you, but they're here:
If, for any reason, I need to take these down, someone please let me know. I made them for myself, and felt there might be a problem sharing them, but I guess I'll find out... hehe...
As an aside, running this thing was a bear... Maps almost always seem to add time to the sessions, so doing some of this one using Theatre of the Mind might be a good policy instead of using the maps.
Got it, thanks, all!
If the antechambers all branch off the main tunnel, then only 2 connect to the Outer Vault, I can work with that. My party is usually pretty good at scouting and that set-up will make it a lot easier for the trogs to counter-ambush them when they start a fight in one of the antechambers. I can just see them ambushing a lilttle group of three trogs... then 9 more trogs get there in round 2 from all sides (without attacking, since they sprinted from the antechamber they started in) and the PCs get a chance to try and spot them all. Then they get into a real fight... I didn't want them all coming from the same direction and getting caught by a burning hands/dragon breath slaughter.
If the crossbow bolts are just a mistake and not some future foreshadowing about an unseen villain with a crossbow, I can work with that. I like the part where the water cult has brass-headed javelins to prevent rust, so the crossbow bolt in the corpse will be changed for a brass javelin tip
The Veteran on page 12 isn't Florio - it's someone alligned with the cultists... but now that I know Shroomie didn't have PoA when he wrote the encounter, it makes sense for a veteran to be there and "thugs" to be in the appendix. I'm guessing those were the cultists in the first draft, but then they were changed to reavers in the final draft, right? And I'm definitely including a fathomer in that fight because someone in my group said Armor of Agathys wasn't a good spell and I have to demonstrate his incorrectness. Don't worry, he will not be permanently damaged 
I'll just point out the change in slope when they get to the T intersection... slogging uphill through knee deep sewage sure was fun, so when they start going downhill without the filth it will be a relief.
So it's been a few months since DDEX2-8 was released and I was wondering if anyone else had a chance to play and would like to share their thoughts. Any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks!
TheBreen wrote:
Well... my group played through it and enjoyed it quite a bit, I think. At the very least, they referred back to that adventure when discussing tunnels during 2-14 and the collapsing bit of road in 2-9... and isn't the point of these things to create a memorable and fun story? I say "Mission Accomplished".
They started putting all kinds of drinks and ball bearing and things in the funnels... they started to get frustrated and I had to remind them twice that there was a giant pool of magic water that tried to kill them; maybe that has something to do with the magic fish-mouth funnels. I think I threw them off because I used the word "piscine" and they didn't know what that was.... once I said they were fish-mouths, they picked up on it. They are young.
SterlingRat wrote:
Shroomy wrote:
Foulness is probably one of my fave scenarios from this season.. nearly on par with Dues for the Dead. I loved the pitched battle and the 'flush' against the Lacedons. Just when it looked like the party were winning, the flush occured and knocked several out of the fight. It ended up being a one on one battle with a Lacedon.
The quippers and Skeleton fight I found a bit draining. After the Lacedons, Cultists and Troglodyes, that last battle seemed one too many.
@Shroomy, it seems like this thread has been useful to you, and I'm glad I created it. It would be awesome if our community made a more concerted effort at giving authors constructive feedback.