Category Archives: Adventures

Updated adventures: The Stolen Staff and Tallinn’s Tower

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Edit 9/15/2011: Based on some play-testing feedback from an awesome reader named Jeff, I have made some improvements to Tallinn’s Tower (mostly just clarifications and clean-up edits; nothing transformative). Thank you, Jeff!

Edit 9/8/2011, evening: I changed the low-level monsters in the first encounter of Tallinn’s Tower to something more interesting. I guess I’ll never be done tweaking these adventures!

After running my own adventures at TactiCon last weekend, I’ve finished tweaking them based on my play testing. The new versions are formatted much better and should be easier to use at the table.

I’ve renamed the first adventure in the trilogy from The Staff of Suha to The Stolen Staff. This is because I’ve decided The Staff of Suha makes more sense as a name for the whole trilogy, while the Stolen Staff is just the first part. I’ve also totally revamped the skill challenge into a series of scenes that I think you’ll find easier to run and more fun for your players. There’s also an alternate encounter for entering the stronghold.

As for Tallinn’s Tower, the main changes are to the formatting; the core content is mostly the same.

The third adventure… well, I’ve decided that I’m going to submit Descent Into Darkness to Dungeon Magazine because, hey, why not? But since they won’t accept anything that’s been previously published elsewhere, I can’t post it on my blog if I want it to have a chance of being accepted.

Based on the odds, I’m guessing they’ll reject it, at which point I’ll publish it here. But until that happens, I’m going to hold off.

Download The Stolen Staff PDF.

Download Tallinn’s Tower PDF.

Maps for the adventures are below, scaled to a 50-pixel grid for use in programs like MapTool (both with and without a grid).

If you run either or both of these adventures, please let me know how it goes! And if you want to playtest the third adventure, drop me a line at mailto:onlinedungeonmaster@gmail.com.

Stolen Staff - Lair Exterior - Gridded

Stolen Staff - Lair Exterior - No Grid

Stolen Staff - Garbage Tunnels - Gridded

Stolen Staff - Garbage Tunnels - No Grid

Stolen Staff - Shrine - Gridded

Stolen Staff - Shrine - No Grid

Stolen Staff - Grak Chamber - Gridded

Stolen Staff - Grak Chamber - No Grid

Tallinn's Tower Level 1 - Gridded

Tallinn's Tower Level 1 - No Grid

Tallinn's Tower Level 2 - Gridded

Tallinn's Tower Level 2 - No Grid

Tallinn's Tower Level 3 - Gridded

Tallinn's Tower Level 3 - No Grid

Tallinn's Tower Level 4 - Gridded

Tallinn's Tower Level 4 - No Grid

TactiCon 2011 – LURU 2-4 Need to Know

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LURU 2-4 Need to Know – Spoilers ahead

The final adventure I ran at TactiCon 2011 was LURU 2-4 Need to Know. I had a full table of six players, including my friend Nate, another couple of players who I knew from Enchanted Grounds, a player I knew from other convention games, and a couple whom I hadn’t met before.

I began by asking the players to introduce their characters to one another, and Nate led things off by doing so in-character. This set the tone nicely for the rest of the table, as all of the PCs came to life. All of them mentioned their race (although the changeling in the party explained that she claimed to be an eladrin, hinting that she wasn’t really), though most did NOT mention their class. Instead, they let this become clear from the way they behaved in battle. One introduced himself as an actor (later revealed to be a hybrid bard-warlock), one as just an adventurer (later revealed to be a rogue), one as bloodthirsty bug (a ranger) and one as a princess (a hybrid bard-warlord).

The princess in the party is my favorite PC I’ve seen so far in an LFR game. She rode around on a Tenser’s Floating Disk and made excellent use of Direct the Strike to boss people around and make them attack. It worked really well. She was also able to leverage her “royal status” to bluff her way into a guarded city along with some of her allies during the adventure.

The best part of this adventure was the opening combat encounter, which took place in an inn that was soon set on fire. The growing fire and the lava elementals that arose from it were a ton of fun.

The final encounter was less fun, as it involved a beholder in a pretty boring 10 square by 10 square room (with an attached sewer area). Every time a player started their turn, they were subject to an eye ray attack (unless they ran into the sewers). They couldn’t flank the beholder, nor could they take opportunity attacks against it when it used its eye rays.

It got frustrating, but having learned my lesson from an earlier adventure I started changing the beast up a little bit. I tried to cut way back on the most devastating control effects from the beholder – the sleep ray knocked out the fighter for several rounds, and the petrification ray took away at least two PCs’ entire turns. The adventure made it clear that you need to go easy on those during the beholder’s turn, which I did, but when it rolls a random ray at the beginning of a PC’s turn, the odds are good that a controlling power is going to come up. So, I switched to more damage and less control later in the combat, even on the random rays.

Ultimately, everyone had a good time, and using MapTool and the projector to project the spreading fire onto the map in the first encounter was a big hit. It was a good way to end an awesome TactiCon.

TactiCon 2011 – MyRealms adventures

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MyRealms adventures – Spoilers follow

All day Friday at TactiCon 2011 was devoted to my MyRealms adventure trilogy: The Staff of Suha in the morning, Tallinn’s Tower in the afternoon, and Descent Into Darkness in the evening. I only had one player who played in all three adventures, but my tables were full throughout.

I feel confident in saying that these were a hit. I’m constantly tweaking my own adventures, and I was taking notes as I ran them, but they were all little things to tweak here and there – nothing that needed a complete reworking.

My favorite moment of the convention came in the final battle of Descent Into Darkness, which involves facing a beholder in a room that includes a river of magma. The party was doing their best to keep the beholder locked down, and at one point a rogue decided to jump onto the beholder’s back. He stayed aboard for four rounds.

In the first round, the beholder was stunned, so the rogue stabbed away.

In the second round, the beholder got up from prone and tried to shoot an eye ray at the rogue (tough to do when he’s on top of the beholder) and missed.

In the third round, the beholder flipped upside down and flew just over the surface of the magma, but the rogue made a great Athletics / Acrobatics check to scramble around the ball of eyes as it rotated and avoided the magma.

In the fourth round, the beholder had had enough of this nonsense, decided that it could handle the magma better than the fragile humanoid on its back, and dove into the river and back out. The beholder and the rogue both took 30 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage (save ends).

The rogue’s player asked me, “So what happens if that takes me below zero hit points?”

The whole table replied with “Oooooh….”

Yes, he fell unconscious while in the river of magma, which meant that he lost his grip and floated just below the surface. The beholder survived the bath, but the party ran out of options to rescue the rogue without killing themselves. Thus passed the short-lived rogue, may he rest in peace.

I’m not much of a killer DM, but PC do die at my table from time to time. In this particular case, it was worth it. I knew that was true Sunday evening when some players at a different game I was running said they had already heard that story about the beholder and the rogue and the magma river. When your players are telling stories about your games to their other friends at the convention, you’ve done something right! Well, unless they were saying, “This jerk of a DM killed my character…”

TactiCon 2011 – CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way

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CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way – Spoilers Follow

I ran three sessions of CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way at TactiCon 2011 – Thursday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning. My biggest worry was that there wouldn’t be enough players for the Sunday morning game, thus denying me the Iron Man achievement, but no worries there – I had a full table. Actually, the Thursday evening table was the only non-full table I ran all weekend (only four players). Saturday morning’s table actually had seven players!

I hadn’t run this adventure before TactiCon, but by the end I was quite a natural with it. It’s a fun little adventure, where the party has to track a missing caravan into the feywild, dealing with a thieving elf who accidentally got the caravan into trouble. They rescue the captive drivers and caravan workers from gnomes who were planning to deliver them as slaves to some eladrin – and then fight off the eladrin as they try to escape from the feywild.

The first table decided to take a different approach to the final encounter. Rather than dashing for the portal out of the feywild, they decided to literally circle the wagons and shelter in place. No problem – I adapted the existing maps I’d prepared in MapTool, and they fought from within the wagon circle.

The second table, with seven players, had four people who had never played LFR before. As my regular readers know, I LOVE introducing new people to D&D, so this was a great time for me. The highlight was when one player, having thrown his only (non-magical) dagger at a foe in an earlier round, decided to try to take out the enemy by springing off one standing stone to kick the bad guy off another stone. Good Athletics and Acrobatics led to success, with the PC standing atop the stone and the bad guy prone at its foot, taking decent falling damage, after which he was soon dispatched. Awesome.

The third table had my friend Nate as a player (yay!) as well as a father-son pair who had approached me on Thursday or Friday, admiring my projector setup and asking about the game. I told them that the Saturday morning and Sunday morning games would be ideal for new players, so they signed up!

This was a solid little adventure, and I could see using it as a good introductory adventure for new players in the future. Also, I found myself using character voices in this adventure – something I don’t usually do much of as a DM. The thieving elf Harelahur somehow developed his own voice, which I think made the players feel a bit sympathetic toward him (they all let him run away instead of turning him over to the authorities at the end). The cold eladrin leader’s voice was fun to do, too. I’m not usually a big “voices” guy, but I could see doing a little more here than I have in the past, if the character is right for it.

TactiCon 2011 – SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

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SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – Spoilers follow

I’ve already written extensively about my experience running this adventure at TactiCon. In a nutshell, it was a mostly-fun paragon tier adventure that my party decided to take on at a high challenge level. This came back to bite them in the final encounter against a hydra, which they eventually had to retreat from. This meant that they received a negative story award, which left them with a lousy feeling about the game. And it led to my only non-perfect DM evaluation scores of the convention (two people gave me a 9 out of 10).

I did learn later that the hydra’s attacks and defenses and damage should not have been scaled upward by 1 according to the adventure, so I made a mistake there (but the boss monster in the other adventure branch does have instructions to adjust his attacks and defenses and damage, so it was an understandable confusion on my part). And ultimately I should have changed whatever seemed unfun to me as we went along at the table (a lesson I took to heart in the last game I ran a the convention).

I guess I’ll have to shoot for perfect scores next time instead. 🙂

TactiCon 2011 is in the books

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And on the fifth day, OnlineDM rested.

TactiCon 2011 started Thursday evening at 6:00 and wrapped up Sunday evening at 6:00. 72 hours from open to close for me (plus a little extra time at the end for the DM appreciation ceremony). I spent 36 of those hours at the game table, running games.

And I had a blast!

I got some dubious looks when I said I wanted to Iron Man the con (running games the whole time), but I can honestly say that I came out of it feeling energized, not exhausted. I did run a little short on sleep over the course of the convention (I had a 30 minute drive each way, so that cut into my sleep time a bit), and I’ll admit that I feel asleep at 9:00 PM last night and slept until 8:00 this morning, but I wasn’t getting headaches or feeling drained or anything like that.

Ultimately, TactiCon was a lot of fun. I was running games at tables in more public areas for most of this convention (in the past I’ve often been in individual hotel rooms), which meant that a lot more people got to see my MapTool / projector setup in action. It was a great feeling to have people stop by to say how cool they thought it was, or to ask questions about how they could build something similar themselves. Some of them even brought friends back later to show my setup off to them.

I’m looking forward to the next convention!

Individual game recaps

I’ve decided to break my detailed recaps into separate posts, rather than putting it all in one massive post. The links to those posts are below.

Lost on the Golden Way (Thursday evening, Saturday morning, Sunday morning)

MyRealms adventures (all day Friday)

Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds (Saturday afternoon and evening)

Need to Know (Sunday afternoon)

Puzzle: The floor of runes

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I was asked after I posted my runes last week to also share the puzzle that these runes appear in. As you wish!

This puzzle appears in my forthcoming adventure Descent Into Darkness (the sequel to the Staff of Suha and Tallinn’s Tower). During a trek through some caverns, the adventurers come across a square chamber, 30 feet by 30 feet, with runes carved into the tiles of the floor. It soon becomes apparent that some of these tiles have solid pillars beneath them while others are false floors that lead to a nasty fall. The runes give a clue to which tiles are solid and which are not.

The party is entering from the tunnel on the left side of the map and is trying to get across the chamber to the tunnel on the right side.

Any PC who speaks elven recognizes these runes as representing the numbers 1 through 8 (the number of lines in each rune corresponds to the number it represents).

While tiles are safe, and which lead to pits?

The PCs enter from the west side of the map and are heading east (left to right)

Hint 1: If you need a hint, mouse over the next section of text (white text on a white background: Keen-eyed PCs can spot the rune that equates to the number 1 carved over the tunnel on the far side of the room (the east wall).

Hint 2: They can also spot the rune that represents the number 3 carved into the south wall.

Hint 3: The rune for the number 7 is carved into the north wall.

Are you able to figure out the puzzle?

Cover art: The Staff of Suha Cycle

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I’ve written three adventures over the course of the past year, all of which have been run as MyRealms adventures for Living Forgotten Realms (even though they’re not really set in the Realms). I’ve released versions of the first two of these on my blog already (the Staff of Suha and Tallinn’s Tower). The third adventure, Descent Into Darkness, is done and has been run twice already, but I’m going to wait until after I run it at TactiCon this weekend to release it (since I may tweak it further after more play testing).

My eventual plan is to release all three as a single adventure PDF. Each of the three adventures is really a delve – a four-hour, self-contained adventure. Together, they make for a respectable-length adventure that I’m calling the Staff of Suha Cycle.

When I started thinking about doing this, I realized that I needed a prettier layout than I’ve been using. I’m not much of an artist, but I’ve been trying to make things look a little bit nicer in Word (and the ultimate PDFs).

And if I’m going to publish this as a full-on adventure (for free, of course), I need some cover art. So, I created some.

This is the cover page for the Staff of Suha Cycle adventure. I’m quite happy with the way it turned out. I wouldn’t call it professional, but I’d definitely call it presentable.

What do you think – does this cover make you interested in checking out the adventure?

200 Posts: My favorites of the second century

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This is post number 201 on my blog, so I thought I’d continue the tradition I started with number 100 of looking back at my previous 100 posts and picking out a few of my favorites. The OnlineDM Greatest Hits, Volume Two:

1. My players are smarter than I am. This post talks about my experience of using player ideas during a session. In this particular example, one of my players mused that he thought the bad guys would try to push a wall over on the PCs. I’d never envisioned that possibility, but it sounded like a great idea, so I ran with it. If your players give you ideas about what might happen and they’re good ideas, use them!

2. Creating D&D converts. Lots of us have friends or family members who we think would enjoy gaming, but it’s tricky to get them into it. This post describes my experience of introducing my brother-in-law and his wife to D&D via Castle Ravenloft and then some Living Forgotten Realms adventures when they visited over Christmas. It obviously worked, since I’m getting ready to run yet another session for them this evening over MapTool even though they’re in Texas. Their characters are at sixth level now, by the way!

3. Bonus points. Lots of DMs have used similar ideas; this is my own take on it. Basically, when one of my players does something creative or cool or especially in-character rather than just focusing on the numbers of combat and tactics, I hand them a bonus point that they can use in the future to add 1 to a die roll they make or subtract 1 from a die roll made against them. They’re great incentives to encourage the kind of play I enjoy.

4. Out of the gaming closet. In my first 100 posts, I had talked about the fact that I’m in the closet at work about gaming; I didn’t mention it to my colleagues out of fear of… I don’t know, ridicule? Well, I’m over that now, and happier for it.

5. Running an online game for new players. I’m really excited about how this particular game went, because I’m such a sucker for introducing people to gaming. In this particular instance, I had some people coming to me online, saying that they wanted to learn D&D but weren’t sure how to go about it. So, I recruited a group and ran a game for them. It was a lot of fun, and something I’d like to do regularly (maybe every few months or so).

6. Tallinn’s Tower. I’m including this post as a representative of my free adventures posts. I’ve posted two so far; Tallinn’s Tower was the second. The third is almost ready, and I’ve just finished a major revision of the first. I’m personally excited about this, although I haven’t gotten much feedback yet. I love free adventures, and I love to share them with the D&D community.

7. My first Pathfinder game. Yes, I’m branching out beyond D&D4e! I love learning new games, and since Pathfinder is so popular I really wanted to learn it. I think that so far I prefer D&D4e, but I do get the appeal of Pathfinder, too.

8. MapTool flexible monster creation. This continues to evolve for me, but I was quite happy with my take on flexible monster creation. I’ve been using this method exclusively since I wrote it, and it’s made monster building much faster. Also, I love the goofy damage dice I can use (2d13+16 for instance).

9. D&D Encounters. I DMed for the Encounters this summer and loved doing it, mainly because of the opportunity to introduce new players to the game. This particular session was great because it was my grand finale (I missed the final week since I was at GenCon), my wife played, and I met a new friend. Encounters was a lot of fun, and I hope to run it again next summer when my Wednesday night bowling league is over.

10. GenCon – D&D New Products Seminar. I have to include this one, even though it has no original material. This is my minute-by-minute note taking from the seminar at GenCon where WotC talked about their plans for the next year. To say that it was a popular post would be an understatement! I typically get around 300 hits per day on my blog; I topped out near 1,500 during the weekend of GenCon when this post was live. You guys love GenCon news!

Thank you all for reading Online Dungeon Master. I’ve really enjoyed having this way of talking to the D&D community and hearing from you, too. Remember that you can also follow me on Twitter as OnlineDM1.

Review: Cairn of the Winter King (Monster Vault adventure)

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Tonight I finished running my family through the Cairn of the Winter King adventure from the Monster Vault. Overall, they seemed to really enjoy the adventure, even more than Reavers of Harkenwold. Of course, this is a party of players who can best be described as Slayers – they want to fight monsters and take their stuff, rather than spending a lot of time on story and such.

We ran this adventure over the course of three sessions, spanning about 12 hours of play. We played the game via MapTool and Skype (my brother in law and sister in law live in Texas while my wife and I live in Colorado). If you’re looking for the MapTool file we used, you can find it here. If you’re looking for my version of the adventure maps, those are here.

Like Reavers of Harkenwold, Cairn of the Winter King is rather non-linear, though for different reasons. Reavers involved political wrangling, traveling around an overland region performing tasks for various groups (in whatever order the party wished) in order to gain their help against an evil overlord before engaging in a big battle and an assault on the overlord’s keep. Cairn, by contrast, is a traditional dungeon delve in which the party is free to explore in any direction they wish. They can run into the various encounters in a variety of orders (though certain encounters are likely to come up later simply by being farther from the entrance).

SPOILERS AHEAD

Critical review

The skill challenge of flying the ship was well done. I like skill challenges that use scenes like this.

There were some cool set piece battles in the adventure, particularly against the tiefling lieutenant in a room with fiery forges. The fight against the gnome illusionists and the otyugh was also quite cool. I also liked the kitchen fight, where the transmuter could slide PCs over to the otyugh’s pit and occasionally turn a character into a piglet or a newt or whatever came to my mind (though this attack seldom worked).

I appreciated that the adventure allowed for some alternatives to combat, although I would have liked a little more discussion of how to handle the Winter King encounter for a party that simply gives him the Scepter and tries to leave (this wasn’t fully explained in the written text).

I wasn’t happy with the extended rest situation. It’s clear that the party is expected to take at least one extended rest and likely two while inside the dungeon, but at the same time there are patrols walking the halls. How do the patrols not find them? Also, technically PCs aren’t allowed an extended rest unless they’ve been adventuring for many hours. That just doesn’t happen here.

Players who want a lot of story probably won’t enjoy Cairn of the Winter King. Players who like cool fights and dungeon exploration will love it.

Narrative review

Cairn of the Winter King begins with the party visiting Fallcrest in the Nentir Vale, where it’s discovered that the whole region (and beyond) has been gripped by an unnatural and vicious winter for weeks. During a meeting to discuss what to do, a dragon-headed ship full of undead creatures flies out of the sky and the creatures start attacking villagers. The dragon head demands the Ice Scepter, and it is soon discovered to have been stolen by a half-elf passing through the area. The adventurers are to take the Scepter, board the dragon ship and fly to the lair of the Winter King to convince him to end the endless winter.

My party grabbed the Scepter and flew off without worrying about bringing the half-elf or anyone else. A skill challenge to pilot the ship to the Winter King’s lair followed. I enjoyed this particular skill challenge, since it’s presented as various scenes that the characters can respond to as they see fit (endure a hailstorm, fix a torn line, etc.). I much prefer this over static skill challenges that say things like, “The PCs must pilot the magical ship. Primary skills include Nature, Athletics, Endurance…”

Once they arrived at the lair, they saw the Cairn itself – a frozen pile of skulls that stands over a cave entrance. The first dungeon combat followed, against a big man who claimed to be the Winter King and who invited the PCs in for a feast. It was soon revealed that there was much illusion in the room – the man’s hunting hounds were Dire Wolves, his attendant was a gnome illusionist, and the feast table was actually covered with dead bodies. A fight broke out, which almost killed my PCs (scaling things intended for a quintet of level 4 PCs down to a trio of level 5 PCs is tricky for me). The gnome escaped, and the party decided they needed a rest, so they bedded down in the comfy beds in this first chamber. They had some bad nightmares, which were supposed to have a negative effect in future battles, but which I let slide.

From there, the party began exploring the lair. They came upon some wraiths that badly hurt them, followed by a run-in with a pair of gnome illusionists who claimed to be the Winter Queen and her attendant. Once the ruse was revealed, the gnomes attacked along with a zombie and a pet owlbear. This encounter was a lot of fun, as the gnomes made triplicates of themselves when they were thinking about fleeing (but the PCs beat them down anyway).

After this battle, the PCs heard some footsteps in the hallway and found themselves fighting a guard patrol (a relatively quick battle). They decided to try to take another long rest after this fight, going back to the beds in the first chamber. I allowed it, even though they really hadn’t been adventuring long enough at this point. After the second rest in the cursed beds, they found themselves suffering a -2 penalty to attack rolls in future battles.

That next battle was in the lair’s kitchen, fighting a human transmuter, a dwarf brawler, and an otyugh in a garbage pit. The transmuter was happy to chat for a while, but when the party was unwilling to just hand over the Scepter he started fighting them. His area burst slide ability was useful for moving the PCs next to the otyugh’s pit, at which point the tentacled beast started feasting on the warpriest. Yum! The party did ultimately prevail with good teamwork (eventually).

Wanting to eliminate the nightmare effect, the party had to take an extended rest elsewhere, but this time I ruled that they hadn’t been adventuring long enough. They decided to just hang out for a few hours in an alchemist’s chamber they had found, which I ruled would get rid of the -2 to attack rolls but not let them recover any surges or daily powers.

Next up was an encounter with a dragon. The frozen dragon had an ice key on a rope around his neck, and the PCs had already found an icy temple door with a ghostly dwarf trying to get them to unlock it. They snagged the key and then turned to fight the now-unfrozen dragon. Eventually they worked their way to the icy door during the fight and used the key, at which point the key melted. Some negotiation with the dragon followed (fortunately, two of the three PCs spoke Draconic) and they convinced the dragon that he could find better food by leaving the dungeon and hunting outside.

From here, the party found a room filled with frozen traps, but they were too nervous to enter. Instead, they explored a ruined library, and the warpriest was excited to discover a potion that would allow her to breathe fire for an encounter. THAT was a big hit in the next battle, where an ettin and two barbarians faced the party in a hallway. This battle normally would have taken place in the trap room, but since the party skipped that room I decided to have the bad guys jump them elsewhere.

At this point the party had gone through three fights since their last true extended rest, so I allowed them to take another one, after which they faced off against the Winter King’s tiefling lieutenant and his ogre and blazing skeleton allies. The party loved discovering that they could dip their weapons into the blue flames of the forge in this room to make them deal extra damage – that was another big hit. They happened to totally rock this battle, too, with only the warpriest taking any damage.

Discovering a fire key on a chain around the tiefling’s neck, the swordmage brought out a javelin and hooked the key’s chain around the end of it (the key was hot and would burn anyone who held it for long) and took it to the temple door that had previously been unlocked with the dragon’s ice key. The temple was filled with ice, but the ice had a keyhole that perfectly suited the fire key, which evaporated the ice. The ghost of the dwarf priest in this room bowed to the party and gave the warpriest back the two healing surges she had lost while fighting the tiefling before fading away in peace.

At this point, the party explored the remaining empty chambers and even tried getting into the vault beyond the trap room (none of them spoke dwarven, so they couldn’t figure out the puzzle) before finally entering the Winter King’s chamber (listening at the door revealed some spooky whispers, so they saved that room for last).

The hunter and warpriest navigated the icy bridge with no trouble, but the swordmage fell off twice. Finally, the warpriest walked up to the frozen skeleton in the throne and slipped the ice scepter into its hand…

Whereupon the Winter King burst from his ice and commanded the PCs to kneel before him. They refused to kneel and tried to reason with him, explaining that they just wanted him to end the winter and let them go. The Winter King spent a few rounds threatening and yelling at the characters, who wisely chose not to attack, instead continuing to talk to him. They got to the icy skeleton after a while (winning the skill challenge), who commanded them to leave and never come back. The swordmage asked him to melt the icy bridge to make her exit easier, which royally (pun intended) ticked off the Winter King, who threw a bolt of ice at the swordmage as a parting shot. Never ask the Winter King to melt ice!

At this point the magical cold from the outside world began rushing into the Winter King’s lair, and the party hightailed it out of there, hopped on the now-icy dragon ship and flew back to Fallcrest. The winter was over – mission accomplished.

As I said, the group had fun with the adventure. Give my party lots of fights and they’ll be happy. A story-loving party might not have as much fun, but there was nifty stuff for most types of players in the Cairn of the Winter King.