Gallery of Evil This is a playtest review. We played through this adventure in a single one-shot ten hour session (including some pizza, cookies, tons of tea & coffee). Half of the players used the pregen characters, the other two created their own.
Clever playing obviated the need to fight three of the picture encounters.
The players liked the sense of urgency, and they were totally interested in finding out what had happened to the villain’s competitor who had disappeared. The pictures themselves invited a lot of speculation on how they worked, which was fun.
The DM (me) liked the relatively simple encounters. Each one was a challenge for the players and yet easy to run.
The first encounters was an instant kill for the fighter who entered the room. We rebooted the adventure, but it took us a moment to get over it. Obviously I had missed the Full Attack potential of these two critters.
Sometimes the sense of urgency the players felt was hard to translate into events. Showing through the crowds in the ballroom with all the distractions and trying to do it by the rules was not too exciting.
Well that’s how it started, and finished the next round. The tentacle monsters also had damage reduction 10, and were constructs (no sneak attacks or critical hits). Nice start for a first encounter. – Marco
=> Marco
(Notice that the adventure author later said that having two of them in there was probably an editing error. → Comments on Gallery Of Evil Review)
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My problem is that somewhere deep down I’m both a meta-gamer and a power-gamer. I expected the first encounter to be a nice easy introduction to the story line.
We showed up at our employer’s place to discuss some new business, and something was thumping and banging around inside. The door was hanging of one hinge and stuff was smashed up. Naturally my character loyally charged in to confront whatever was attacking his employer, and was quite surprised to find two tentacle monsters which had 20ft. reach, dealt d6 CON damage and grappled. As a first encounter it was a bit of a shock, and he died pretty thoroughly in the second round. Maybe I learned something. Maybe not.
At any rate, I’d say that’s pretty tough for an introduction. I quite like the Echoes of Heaven game that I’m (sporadically) running because each encounter has a ’Strategic Purpose’. You generally get an introduction, a plot intrigue, a reveal and then a final encounter/conclusion. It works well in my opinion.
The fights were nice and uncomplicated. We had a lot of space to improvise and apply tactics, of which I took full advantage. The rogue encounter was shortened significantly through the use of a disarm, a bull-rush, and a web spell. We captured him unharmed. 😄 The barbarian smashed two of our magic weapons, and my disarm tactics failed repetitively. The grease on his weapon was a nice trick from the sorceress, but he only dropped it once and picked it up again. In the end we gave up subduing him and sneak-attacked and scorching-rayed his ass into oblivion, after which I cut out his eyes and beheaded him for sundering our weapons. I wasn’t alone in that. Unfortunately that was the only time the rogue really had a chance to shine, as we came against wave after wave of constructs (plus one undead).
One last thing, is that the overview suggests that we go into paintings to rescue people. Well we didn’t. We got some mages to analyse the paintings and figure out how they work, and then just waited for the paintings to spit their occupants out again.
All in all, not bad. Was an interesting afternoon and we all had fun.
– Marco 2007-12-24 16:10 UTC
I just realised something: Barbarians get Improved Uncanny Dodge at 5th level. That means that the Rogue shouldn’t have been able to sneak attack the Barbarian. Let me see...
The tentacle monsters, the servants in the house, the dangling rope, the animated sets of armour in the cellar, and the shield guardian were constructs which are not subject to critical hits, and thus sneak attacks.
The barbarian and the rogue both had the improved uncanny dodge feat, so could not be flanked or sneak-attacked.
The undead elf in the basement, being undead and incorporeal, could also not be sneak-attacked.
Well then that leaves the Hellhound I guess. Yes, the hellhound can be sneak attacked, though based on the difficulty we had with it I’m guessing that it was the Nessian Warhound with AC24, 114HP, +20 to hit and which deals 22 damage on average. Yup... good luck little rogue.
The real salt in the wound is that the template rogue has a keen rapier that crits on a 15, but since most of the aforementioned monsters are constructs or undead that’s also useless. The template rogue has +10 to search checks too, and the DC of at least one of the traps (sepia snake sigil on the book?) was 31. How frustrating.
So, I would strongly discourage anyone from taking a rogue for this campaign. Especially not the template rogue.
– Marco 2007-12-24 23:44 UTC
Here’s what the author has to say about the first encounter: “In the encounter entry the Tentacled Horror is listed as a CR 9, but in the Appendix it’s listed as a CR 6. The original draft had the Appendix stat block correct as a CR 9, but I think there may have been some tinkering involved in editing in which the intent was to lower its overall power level to make it a CR 6 or perhaps it was just an honest mistake or typo made somewhere in editing. I don’t know. But that CR 6 typo is responsible for you getting TWO of those CR 9 (not CR 6) constructs at the begging of the adventure and their overall difficulty due to reach and damage reduction should have resulted in an EL 9. In reality, having two of them makes for a whopping EL 11! Tough, indeed.
“So, even though you rebooted the encounter. Congratulate your players for me on defeating them the second time around without any deaths and getting through it the first time with only one! Sorry that mistake almost derailed the game for you early on :|” ¹
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– Alex Schroeder 2007-12-25 19:37 UTC
Actually when Marcel heard about that first encounter, he was reminded of something that happened about eighteen years ago. This is what he wrote:
The party is in a dungeon...
Mircea dissolved...
– Alex Schroeder 2007-12-25 23:22 UTC
=> Alex Schroeder This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini
