[GMs] Adapting Mountaintop Rescue and Lure of the Lost for Knight-Level Play

[StarkJunior 1,240]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone have any recommendations for adapting Mountaintop Rescue and Lure of the Lost for use as intro adventures for a Knight-level campaign?

 

Thanks!

[Kymrel 1,505]

I'm currently playing in just such a game online, just getting started. I haven't read the adventures so I can't comment on them specifically, but I have been the GM for an EotE game for a while and could offer some small advice.

 

In essence what you need to do is to look at the capabilities of the PCs and adjust the encounter difficulty based on that. In a skill-challenge look at how many ranks the PCs have. If they have used the extra XP to beef up skills they need a slightly harder challenge. But usually one more difficulty should be enough as you try to gauge their ability.

 

For example, in the first bit our GM told us he increased the difficulty scaling a cliff from Easy to Hard. The small cliff from the published adventure was in his game a large icy cliff that even a character with decent brawn, a rank in athletics and Enhance to increase his ability, as well as a climbing kit to assist him, only just managed to crawl up. Perhaps an Average roll would have sufficed to make it a challenge, but Hard was doable so that challenged the party more.

 

Regarding combat encounters, I have no idea what sort of encounters the adventure has, but balancing combat encounters is something every GM has to do anyway. A published adventure might assume a fairly balanced party, and if you are running a game with three characters with no combat ability you would tend to lower the number of minions, reduce the ability and give them weapons with lower damage, as well as having ways to solve issues without a fight. If, on the other hand, you have a party of four combat monsters with lightsabers, heavy blaster rifles with autofire and multiple ranks in combat skills you might increase the number of opponents and give them slightly better gear. It's a balancing act.

 

I think the biggest issue with combat encounters in F&D will be if your characters have lightsabers or not. In our party only one character has a lightsaber. One other melee character (mine!) has a pair of swords and the other a vibroknife. The fourth has a blaster rifle. This means that melee opponents don't need to be beefed up as much with multiple ranks of parry, and minion groups don't need to be as big, since the regular swords and knife won't rip through them as fast as a lightsaber might.

 

Hope this was useful, I don't think I'll follow this thread anymore since I want to avoid possible spoilers!

[Donovan Morningfire 10,200]

At least for Mountaintop Rescue, you'll need to completely re-work the adventure's BBEG.  As written, he's pretty much a pushover for the BegBox PCs, so a group of Knight Level PCs are going to crush him into the dirt without breaking a sweat, especially if there's more than one lightsaber involved.

 

The adventure uses a pretty large number of minions, so you'll probably want to go for slightly bigger minion groups and more of them.  I think it defaults to 3 minions per group, so I'd suggest using 4 minions per group and then adding an extra group.

 

I've not run Lure of the Lost (really didn't fit with what I had in mind for my group), so not a lot of help I can offer on that one, other than you'll probably need to beef up the Rival and Nemesis adversaries, possibly by upping their Wound Threshold by 5 and adding a rank of Adversary (cap it at 3 ranks of Adversary though) and a rank to their key combat skills.

[RusakRakesh 567]

Mountaintop Rescue can be a short session 00, written as is, while common enemies should be upgraded from minion to rivals, and in the climax combat are increased to minions groups (size of players or more) the number of players, and some rivals and one nemesis inquisitor (doing the same job he was sent for, just higher ranking).

 

Lure of the Lost doesn't need a lot of adjustments, just make every check 1-2 difficulty higher (with a good excuse of course, don't forget setback too). Climaxes in heists could be elaborately varied, so if combat ensues, just do the same as before... bigger minions groups, palace guards could be big rivals and/or security chief a nemesis.

 

Don't forget your PCs talents, and how they interact with your challenges and enemies.

My PCs (who are currently running the same setup) took a lot of lightsaber talents and less on skills, so I didn't go over with increasing checks, but combat should include something challenging and maybe even indomitable. Rivals/Nemesis with Parry, Reflect, Fear, aided by environmental set pieces and other tricks.

Edited November 14, 2015 by RusakRakesh