Raiders of Galath's Roost

[torstan]

I've been playing through this adventure (from Dungeon #87, so no screenshots as I am using the original maps) with an old group from home. We all started playing D&D together in 1990 and we stopped when we went off to college/uni in 1998. Now two guys live in Scotland, I live in Poland and the last guy lives in San Jose (working at Lone Wolf Development - check out Hero Builder, it's really good). There was no way we could play until now. Now we use maptool and ventrilo and they've just started a campaign as new 1st level characters. We're just using the SRD so its a welcome break from the other group I run which uses every book under the sun and currently have three 14th level parties that redefine the term Munchkin.

Anyway, Galath's Roost is an adventure in which the local town has been experiencing some raids that are suspected to be drow raiders from Cormanthor. Given that the local law enforcement patrols have been wiped out when they investigated a disused ruin, the party is roped in to be paid to go and find out what's going on. They headed over and quickly fell foul of the keep natural denizens, a pair of krenshars (that made the dwarves in the party run away lie frightened halflings) and a couple of stirges. They defeated them all and started exploring. Now the keep is essentially a ruin that has been inhabited by a number of different groups - a hive of giant bees, an assassin vine, a large snake and a band of kobolds to name a few. The clues about the actual raiders are fairly sparsely strewn through the setting. The keep itself is a danger with sink holes and old traps. Now the party has managed to spring or fall into every single one, while still (amazingly at 1st level) staying alive.

An example - the thief creeps up a passageway to investigate a trap door. She inadvertently steps on a pressure plate and gets whapped by a spiked grate that blocks the passage behind her. She is knocked unconscious and no-one can get to her. They manage to open the grate to get at her and the cleric immediately runs through the open space. Then he hears the ominous click as the pressure plate triggers again..... They've been gaming on and off for almost 20 years and they fell for that. Priceless.

Anyway, they have looted the keep and have retreated to the local town to sell loot and level up. The next step is to track the raiders back to their hideout which should be good fun.

I'm sticking with 1.2b32 for this which is doing pretty well. The reveal times on the vision are still a bit laggy but it's nothing we can't live with. Otherwise it does the trick nicely. The only comments are that it would be great for macros to be stored by default with the central campaign file (two of them were using newly formatted computers - vista and norton resepctively happened to their boxes - and were miffed that they had to re-enter all their macros). Otherwise no gripes at all. Thanks for a great tool that lets me play daft games with old friends again.