5e lvl4 Orvold’s Tower

• Orvold’s Tower
  

  Orvold’s tower is an excellent adventure from the world of
  ICRPG. I have run this adventure in ICRPG, of course, and also 5e
  several times, Mork Borg twice, and Cy_Borg. It is an excellent
  adventure that is fun, fast and easy to re-skin. To fit Orvold’s
  Tower into the PCs story I explained that each PC was told to go
  back or drawn back to the caverns and the tower where they left
  the cultists. I asked players if they had an idea who or what
  would draw them back. most of them said they just wanted to
  ’finish the job’. So they all came back to find that they
  cultists had awakened Zelligar. Zelligar and the cultists had
  killed each other and the wizard Orvold came to fill the void.
  The adventure starts on the top of the roof with the players
  delivering the final blow. I asked players to roll an attack and
  the highest to hit got the final blow. Three players came up with
  22 and Orvold was smashed into oblivion. His dying breath of
  curses/clues for the players was cut short because D smashed
  Orvold’s head.
  

• Cool moments
  
  • The party busting their own hole off the tower roof
    

    E is the party bard and had the idea to break through the stone
    roof. This split the party effort for the first round, K B and I
    all clearing the door while E and D worked on the hole. But the
    team clearing rock from the door way joined in the effort when
    they saw that the stairs were broken on the other side of the
    door.
    

  • The bard using thunder-wave to push magma Mephits away
    

    The rift room was obscured by ash and smoke. The bard made
    excellent use of thunder-wave to create space for the PCs to move
    to the stairs and escape.
    

  • The druid with spider climb
    

    The whole crumbling tower adventure the druid had spider
    climb. The player looked very satisfied each time they reminded
    me. I adjusted the difficulty of any dex check down by 3 and some
    I simply hand waved. It was the druid that was able to ’rescue’
    the imp from Orvold’s Tower.
    

  • Party using rope to make things easier esp K
    

    The party set up many ropes to make their descent easier. One rope
    on the roof, one rope in the rift room that was held by the strong
    dragonborn fighter. This ensured that a failed roll crossing the
    rift would not result in immediate death. Finally the party used a
    rope down the last flight of stairs to make their descent easier.
    

  • K rolling a critical hit with a slumbering dragon great sword
    

    K attacked as soon as they saw a creature emerging from the well
    in the middle of a room. With a critical strike hitting a low hp
    monster like a Slaad tadpole I decided to carry through the damage
    to the edge of the well. This caused the tadpoles that were
    climbing out of the well to loose their progress and delayed their
    arrival by 1d4 rounds. More than enough time for every PC to get
    out.
    

• Rules checks
  
  • Handling combat narrative vs initiative
    
  • I probably let the wizard get away with too much mage hand
    
• How the map worked
  
  • Awesome
    

    The zone based map was great. easy to set up and easier than i
    thought to change from room to room.
    

  • Players like to touch/use the terrain minis
    

    Players were happy to help set up the rooms and help each other
    understand the zones.
    

  • Fresh
    

    Zone based movement feels fresh and fast, especially after we had
    been tracking movement RAW in the dungeon. RAW movement gave us
    some very good chase scenes and created some close calls with
    traps. So there’s a place for both at my table, zone movement for
    a fast pace game and RAW movement for close calls and chase
    scenarios.
    

• Hang ups
  
  • Players didn’t want to loose their rope
    

    Other players promised to by that player so many ropes if they
    made it out alive.
    

  • Players wanted to loot
    

    Players got to the bottom of the tower to fight the Slaad with 7
    rounds before the tower collapsed. E thought this would be a good
    moment to finally look for loot. The Red Slaad though took down
    two PCs in one turn and E decided getting out would be better.
    

• Players received
  
  • Level up
    

    Tracking XP the old school way was interesting. Some players were
    very excited every session to receive their XP. It was tough
    for me to count up at the end of every session while players were
    talking and asking questions and stuff. I think if I planned XP
    delivery better it would be easier to run games that way. But then
    I don’t really enjoy prepping XP delivery, I’d rather work on
    Secrets/Clues, interesting traps or monsters, coming up with hard
    choices for the players or figuring out what factions/NPCs are
    doing.
    

  • Gauntlets of Ogre Power
    

    Your Strength score is 19 while you wear these gauntlets. They
    have no effect on you if your Strength is already 19 or higher
    without them.
    

  • An imp
    

    I’m not sure if the druid left the imp in the tower or took it
    with them.
    

  • Deck of illusions
    

    Get one of 34-(1d20-1) illusions when you pull a card at random
    from this deck of wizards cards. The illusion lasts till card
    moves or till it is dispelled. pass a dc15 investigation to
    recognize it is illusion.
    

  • Knowledge about Slaads
    

    Players faced a slaad, I hope they learned that they can always
    look for alternative ways to handle things. Even things like
    combat. Slaads sometimes are controlled by crystals and if you can
    manipulate the crystals then you have something more powerful than
    a sword or a firebolt.