Lair Assault: Temple of the Sky God
Today I ran the latest of the Lair Assault D&D 4e events at our FLGS (Tabletop Tyrants).
As we only had 4 pc’s I followed the booklets instruction to remove one of the guardians and so we had the temple defended by the corrupted silver dragon, a shard vortex, and a horned gargoyle.
One of our players picked up on the disabling runes idea after reading the list of possible glory awards and so they party agreed to focus on that – their skill checks were annoyingly good with 30 being the lowest they managed and as the DC was only 16 on a weakened rune I ruled that such high scores could disable un-weakened runes (in hindsight this was a mistake as it resulted in them completing the mission within 2 rounds), reading out the consequences of disabling the runes left us all feeling a little deflated (again probably my own fault for allowing the above) as the main protagonist, Valraun, was simply pulled into the rift and disposed off.
I think if I run this again either for the same or another group I would keep all the guardians and probably run as Nightmare Mode (including the extra silver dragon), then possibly once they disable the weakened-only runes have the rift only pull the Abyssal vortexes in and removing the corrupted guardians as non-combatants while they recover, and keep Valraun in play to destroy the interlopers so that he can re-establish his corruption of the temple.
As to the adventure itself, we all agreed the initial setup would look absolutely fantastic recreated in 3d scenery, and the aerial aspect gave a novel twist – we used d20′s beside the models to represent altitude with 10 being “surface” level of the temple.
December 20, 2012 at 8:58 am
I really wanted to run this one, but it was the climax of Encounters this Wednesday so the usual game ran too long overtime and I couldn’t, darnit! I was at first concerned that the runes thing would be too easy, but since the players are only supposed to be able to disable a maximum of one rune per round (and the first rune isn’t “weakened” until the end of the first round), the adventure seems destined to last for at least 6 grueling rounds if played by the book. Still looking forward to playing it and seeing how it goes; it’s nice to see a Lair Assault with so much crazy terrain. (Well, pits, that is…)