Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Hambley Farmhouse and Barn

Once the party reaches the farmhouse proper, they should encounter Craesby and his own pack of ghouls. Begin the encounter when the PCs try to enter the barn or farmhouse. Have two ghouls leap out of the upper story windows to ambush the group, while two emerge from the farmhouse to flank. Rogors joins the fight from the farmhouse first story.

Rogors should endeavor to keep his aura over all the wights for as much of the fight as possible. He waits to make use of wake the dead until at least two of his wights have been destroyed. I suggest the following encounter for a party of five adventurers:

Total: 1,100 xp (Level 5 Encounter)

Rogors Craesby carries or wields treasure parcel 4 from level 4. Crade Hambley's hidden coffer contains the same 3,400 silver pieces found in the original adventure (treasure parcel 8 from level 5).

2 comments:

zilvar said...

This is an interesting rebuild of the encounter and certainly looks very cool.

Our party ran this in 3.x at just about the same time that the 4e books were first coming out and I thought it was a perfect place to chuck out a horde of minions (there must have been 20 or so of the ghouls charging the farmhouse for our group).

From a design standpoint, what prompted you to move away from that?

Scott said...

Minions, in my experience, are best used as precisely that - underlings to more powerful foes. If they are used on their own as the basis for an encounter, you run the danger of that encounter being effectively over in a single action. Wide-area attacks with a string of decent rolls can reduce your horde of minions to a couple stragglers in the span of a round.

In this particular instance, a handful of minions might be appropriate if you feel you want to throw some at the party. You'll have to find or create an appropriate undead minion, since there are no printed ghoul or wight minions.