Playing Temple of Madness (RoSD) in Sellswords (March 11 - Final Boss Fight)

[Burgundavia]

Looking for something new to play with my usual group, I stumbled across a Rangers of the Shadow Deep scenario called Temple of Madness. As both RoSD and Sellswords are both coop, I thought I would give translating it a shot.

Today was the second try through the module - we got through the 1st and failed on the 3rd a few weeks ago.

We took in 240 points of PCs - 80 each for 3 of us, totalling 12 PCs. 7 made it ot the exit door - the 1st module you need to activate pillars to find the door. 5 PCs fell right at the exit door as my big armoured mouse knight was not able to take down a lone temple guard (the snake people).

I'll write up a fuller blog post detailing how I converted the module.

[Sunjester]

Looks good. I'd certainly be interested in how you translated ROSD into Sellswords, as I have been looking at doing the same thing myself.

[Burgundavia]

It isn't that hard - swap out the monsters for equivalent and think through the spawning, as RoSD lacks the card-driven system that Sellswords has.

[Spinal Tap]

I'm also very interested to see the conversion process,  will give a multitude of possibilities.

[Burgundavia]

We needed a quick and dirty game to play between adventures 1 and 3, so I dreamt up some classic dungeon crawl. We ended up running two back to back. It was a lot of fun, quite deadly and we'll definitely do it again. I written it all up on Warbard:


http://www.warbard.ca/2023/12/18/adventuring-in-a-dungeon-in-sellswords-spellslingers/

[Burgundavia]

The King's Council despaired - two failed expeditions to the Temple of Madness had been lost to the last. So they scraped together to send the largest expedition yet - the strange floating, tentacled spellcaster known as Peldross and their equally strange companions - a walking tortoise, a minotaur and 3 halflings, the Sir Fluffles, a sorcerer whose cat-like nature best went undiscussed (not to mention his 4 dog companions). At least the northmen ogres of Tollak looked human, even if their skin was more akin to grey.

(Three parties of 100 XP each. Peldross - Corey, Sir Fluffles - Brian, Tollak - Sean)

Thankfully, the first room, the Laughing Columns went well, no deaths, although the traps were brutal. Like last time, the Temple Guardians (Armoured Guards) were tethered 6" to each of the pillars, so we only needed to fight a select few, but even then they were still nasty - DL 13 and 5/6 armour save on a d6.p

[Burgundavia]

And more photos as we fought our way through.

The traps were the most brutal, especially as we misread the darts one and used a 3" radius and not diameter. We had three of Brian's dog go down to traps, all varied off the board in the tentacles of Peldoss.

[Burgundavia]

And onto the 2nd module we go - pit of ghouls.

I modified this slightly - rather than 4 wheels closing a pit each, I had 4 capstans eaching closing two pits. And we changed it from standard Sellswords spawning to rolling a d8 and them (trying) to spawn at thar pit, provided it hadn't been closed. I forgot I was going to do this until 3 turns in, oops.

Also, my airbrush broke, so while I built all of this, haven't had a chance to finish painting yet.

The game went fairly quickly and wasn't too deadly - we only had 2 large skeleton knight's spawn and only 6 hordes or so. Many more tried to spawn, but were stopped by the closed pits. The only truly dangerous moment was when they're at our back card spawn 5 skeletons right on top of most of the PCs in the first few activations of the game when most hadn't been able to move yet.

We only had two injured PCs, although amusingly both Skeleton Knights spawned right on top of Sean's PCS (as well as most of the skeletons)

If I did this again, I'd have the far pits have a d3 skeletons, rather than just a single one. And change the spawning at the end of the turn to spawn from the big well (which didn't get used).

[Burgundavia]

Scenario 3 - the Incantation Lock today. It was a tough scenario, but we only lost a single PC due to bad rolling on their Out of Action roll. The scenario has you activate 4 platforms in order to open a lock. The module has 3 parts-, go to the door to lean you need to activate the platforms, activate the platforms and then try the combinations at the door. For time, we eliminated the 1st and 3rd part - I suspect RotSD has faster movement than Sellswords.

Due to the superb owl event, we traded Sean's today, so we still had players, albeit one fairly new to Sellswords and also with a new party. Both Brian and I had our same team - the story of 8 tentacles and one furry cat in a dungeon.

The other challenge we ran into was dealing with spawning monsters. Sellswords usually starts with a fair number of foes on the table, while this module doesn't (only 4 2 HP temple guard at the start), so we found we needed to spawn with each turn (as per the scenario), each complication card rolling on the same end of turn table and then cards spawning too.

Most of the foes in the game were skeleton warriors, who didn't do a lot of damage but were annoying. The temple guard with their 33% armour save were the most deadly - taking down one PC and badly wounded a whole bunch more.

One hilarious moment was one trap we got - flickering status field. It ended up being triggered right in the middle of the party, but after we cleared it, it slowed down the foes that spawned on our start location. You can see the trap marked with an orange cube in the photos.

Onto scenario 4, the fight with the big bad.

[Spinal Tap]

Fabulous as usual.

[Sunjester]

Superb, I must look at this scenario for our Sellswords games now!

[Burgundavia]

Superb, I must look at this scenario for our Sellswords games now!

I'll write up something once we play Scenario 4 with my notes on Warbard

[Sunjester]

That would be great!
I've been looking at your suggested new PC creation document. At first glance it looks very interesting, but I need to find the time to read it slowly and digest.

[Burgundavia]

That would be great!
I've been looking at your suggested new PC creation document. At first glance it looks very interesting, but I need to find the time to read it slowly and digest.

A couple of the PCs have been built to that new spec for this scenario - Peldoss is a floating, 8 tentacled spell caster with no legs and many arms. He is also venomous and glows in the dark. Brian is running Ser Fluffles, a cat with no arms (also a spellcaster). My team also has Karst, who is a minotaur (horns, big). The free attack at end of move action combined with whirlwind of steel made for a devastating combination against a horde. All my halflings are small. And lastly Tortue has natural armour 2 for the big shell he carries around.

[Burgundavia]

On our way to fighting the big bad, we had a quick trip through the dungeon (mostly because I haven't finished the terrain for the final boss fight). We tried out doors - rather than placing the next piece when the first PC steps onto the last piece, you place the next piece when the door is opened. Overall, this worked well, although our progress bogged down quickly, as you'll see.

Starting off, we started with few foes and moved easily, placing the 2nd, 3rd and 4th rooms. First, an earthquake knocked just about all the PCs down, extinguishing all but two torches and injuring many PCs. Then the problems truly began - a Temple Guardian (the snake person) spawned in the first room, catching two of Sean's characters there, one of whom didn't have a weapon because all he had was a torch. And then two massive hordes of skeletons appeared - 11 in total, all right on the starting line. With some truly abysmal rolling by Sean and then myself, we failed to wound the Temple Guardian and it quickly took down 3 PCs - two of Sean's and 1 of mine.

By this time, we were massive strung out and light was becoming a problem. But we finally got lucky - my minotaur broke away from the temple guardian and we were able to slam the door closed in its face, leaving 2 OOA PCs and 11 skeleton warriors behind with it (the 2 OOA PCs hadn't been rolled on yet, so we ruled they appeared on the next Lost Adventurer card).

By then, real world time was running short, so we placed the final room and cleared out the last Skeleton Knight - the two mouslings in the front did - one cleric and one ranged fighter.

In the end, we escaped with only a single dead PC, which was shocking given how many were carrying wounds by the end.