So on weekends (some weekends, anyway) I play 4e Living Forgotten Realms up in Easton, PA, at Cybermedics. This past Saturday I ran two adventures, AKAN1-1 (“the Rotting Ruins of Galain”) and CORE1-3 (“Sense of Wonder”).
“The Rotting Ruins of Galain” was put together very early in the 4e LFR development cycle, and it shows. The designer didn’t appear to have had much to work with, so it’s a simple series of combats. While most RPGA modules have an introductory scene establishing who the PCs are working for, why, how much they’re getting paid, et cetera, “Ruins” starts in medias res: the party has been hired to slaughter goblins on account of goblin raiders are disrupting trade, fade from black with a roll for initiative as the PCs converge on a group of goblins in the act of looting a merchant caravan.
As written, there’s four combats in “Ruins,” as the PCs chase down the goblins to the ruined city they use as a base of operations and fight through the streets of the wrecked city to the chief’s hardpoint at the city center. I cut fight #3 completely out, and split the goblins in it between fight #2 and fight #4, which meant reworking fight #2 somewhat more than fight #4. The revised fights #2 and #4 played very nicely; every PC went down at least once from the hail of goblin javelins in #2, and #4 was tense for a good long while. I applied a modification I’ve been thinking about for a while, and cut every monster’s hit points by 20% while boosting their damage by +2 across the board. This worked very well from my perspective, as it seemed to meet the goal of keeping fights tense and short.
After lunch, I ran “Sense of Wonder” for the same group, plus an additional player. “Wonder” is the antithesis of “Ruins” in terms of combat; the bulk of the module is a series of skill challenges capped by a single long fight. The plot is considerably more interesting than “Ruins,” but in noncombat situations some of the group had trouble keeping focused and all moving in the same direction, which was a little frustrating.
In retrospect I probably should have maintained a round-robin approach, asking each player in turn what they want to do, and imposed more structure, but it’s a risk you run with LFR; groups are not used to one another’s quirks, and this particular group included an eight-year-old who had trouble staying focused (among others).
The final combat in CORE1-3 has the potential, at a glance, to be a long slow slog, and while that would have been interesting under other circumstances, I don’t regret the decision I made to rush all the monsters out past their traps and ambush-spots and turn the fight into a single large melee at the entrance. The -20% hit points, +2 damage system worked well enough here at speeding things along, which was good.
“Wonder” ends with a two-part puzzle, the first part of which bleeds into the combat, and which I skipped entirely. The second part went fairly smoothly, but people started getting up to leave before it was completely done, so I rushed the end. One lesson here is that the combat-heavy RP-light module should probably be played earlier in the day than the puzzle-heavy combat-light module. Still, no complaints — I’ve run worse adventures.
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