Little late on this one but on with the show. Like last week this encounter continues on in the catacombs beneath the desert. As I said last time this one is a much more traditional dungeon crawl with larger maps and the encounters flowing much more naturally as the party travels through the winding passages and caverns. Case in point once they dispatched the undead welcoming party from the previous encounter the party spent a few minutes slowly creeping forward through the catacombs before encountering their next battle.
The harshness of the first chapter has let them a bit skiddish, or maybe they just don’t trust me, in either case they went slow and steady, searching for traps and ambush. I let them creep up and as the Thri-kreen turned into the next big cavern gave them a quick layout and description of the area. Then in true devious DM fashion I ambushed them jsut as they’d gotten comfortable with the little gauntlets that acted as this encounters first monsters locked down the Thri-Kreen.
Now I had some problems with this encounter when I read it. It had one standard spider and then a ton of minions. Nine of them to be exact, which though it sounds like alot of enemies is nothing if the group gets some good burst or blasts attacks. Which is exactly what happened. Once the battle started the three skeleton minions at the maps far end were obliterated all at once by the Psion before they even got an attack. The gauntlets lasted till the second round but then fell themselves. Less than five minutes into the encounter and I was down to one monster. Thankfully I thought ahead and brought in two extra zombies to give the fight a little extra oomph.
To make it more interesting I actually made the zombies puppets of the spider and as the fight wore on they realized that and decided to ignore them and focus on the spider. As it dropped so did the zombies and the party one the day without a single death, although the Thri-kreen did end up bloodied again.
So far it feels like the writer is trying to compensate for the difficulty of the first chapter by making the second a breeze. I’m having to toughen things up to keep it interesting. Still trying to decide how I’m going to tweak next week as I already know it’s not going to be enough of a challenge on its own. It is a very different kind of encounter from what they’ve faced so far though so should be interesting. Hopefully I’ll get its report up on Friday.