Looking Over Book of Challenges: Troll and Pets
Premise A troll and some rust monsters team up to annoy the PCs to death. Good The tip in the intro to use rust monsters sparingly is good advice. By EL 7, the balance of character power is almost certainly in favor of spellcasters, so creatures intended to counter traditional martial characters should be used with clear purpose. Either the apparent deluge has ended, or whoever wrote this up didn’t want to repeat all of the balance nonsense from Bugbear Pit Fight. Regardles
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Fool Me Once
Premise A vertical shaft has some traps to foil attempts at ascending it with magic. Good The dispel magic trap is a clever bit of design, since it acts as a warning that may be further traps aimed to foil magic while still providing a chance to resist the effect and being unlikely to cause instant death if it works. The advice for scaling up the challenge by putting enemies at the top of the shaft who can launch projectiles while standing within the antimagic field is nice a
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Fire and Water
Premise A contraption for manipulating pools of lava and water hides some treasure. Good The lava in the pyramid top remaining liquid seems like a gap in logic at first, but I like to read it as actually hinting at the presence of the mephits. I like that the mephits initiate dialogue by default, and the notes about what they want and what tactics can help win them over are useful. Having them act high and mighty despite likely being outclassed (three CR 3 creatures for an E
Looking Over Book of Challenges: An Object Lesson
Premise A creature of Chaos has taken over a maze and animated its furnishings as defenders. Good I’d been dubious about how much shale can be polished, but a bit of research turned up that some shale can have high quartz content, so it actually isn’t a ridiculous material choice to get an end result like privacy glass with muddy inclusions. Granted, shale deposits with so much quartz would probably be called quartz instead of shale, but it’s close enough to reality that I’l
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Hill Giant Madness
Premise Three weakened hill giants are terrorizing the countryside. Good Giving the townspeople useful information they can tell the PCs is good. While the boxed text runs a little longer than I’d like, the actual content is mostly good and well-written. “He […] holds onto his club with the intensity of a drowning man holding onto a life preserver” stands out as a particularly good line, even with the gap in its logic. While none of their personalities or similar characteris
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Grotto of the Shocker Lizards
Premise A clutch of shocker lizards lairs in a watery grotto. Good I like the boxed text including a dimension that isn’t divisible by 5. Maybe I’ve just got low standards for boxed text, but little touches like that help maintain the feeling that the game is conforming to the imagined world rather than the other way around. Mentioning glints of gold and the end of a bow as ways of enticing players to enter the chamber is nice. Having obvious treasure out as bait wouldn’t h
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Cubical Kennel
Premise A cube of 216 10x’10’x10’ rooms is the lair of a blink dog pack. Good In contrast to Displacer Beast Maze providing an example of hit-and-run favoring reach/ranged attacks, this is a set-up for melee hit-and-run. Granted, it’s less flexible since the guerrillas need a way to move through the walls faster than normal people can, but I can appreciate the tactical variety. Salvageable As written, it seems like raising a wall would also require raising every wall stacked
Looking Over Book of Challenges: All of the Treasure, None of the Traps
Premise A winding passage is full of triggered traps that rearm if the treasure at its center is disturbed. Good The basic idea of having inactive traps that the players can rearm inadvertently to give hints about their effects is great. In general, I like the use of some effects that add complications for future encounters, like scare and bestow curse, rather than just picking damaging effects for all of the traps. For this particular encounter, I dislike their lack of leav
Workout Recap - Week of September 19, 2021
I'm mostly happy with the form of this week's workouts. I swapped doing a timed workout on Saturday to a pass/fail for reasons that aren't important, but otherwise, it was mostly back into the old groove. Sunday Type: Pass/Fail Uneven Pull Ups - 2 sets of 5, each side (pass) Stand-to-stand Bridges, one wall touch on the way up - 2 sets of 6 (pass) Archer Push Ups - 2 sets of 13, each side (pass) Bonus: 3 suicide jumps Good grinding, and a return to explosive bonus movements
Looking Over Book of Challenges: Watery Grave
Premise A sea hag has set up a mousetrap with a tasty scroll tube as the cheese. Good Combining multiple traps that have Strength-based checks/resistance (the sea scum and the rope/winch) with a monster that can reduce Strength is a smart set-up. The instruction that the sea hag essentially fails morale automatically if “clearly outmatched” is nice to see, considering this was written for the Dungeons & Dragons edition that got rid of morale as a monster stat (something that
