The exploration of the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk continued today with more of the labyrinth level (taken from Castle of the Mad Archmage).
This is not a well-designed level. It’s way, way too big, only has a few monsters, and most of those are weak. The minotaurs are good – but the party, even after several sessions, hasn’t found any.
Too big, too diffuse… and rather lacking in interesting features.
I decided to punch things up today with some more challenging random encounters. I rolled one check per 90 feet of the dungeon explored (that’s a real old-school technique, where mapping and searching meant character moved slowly – between 60 and 90 feet per 10 minutes), with a 1 on 1d6 indicating an encounter.
The party found one keyed encounter (a CR 4 black pudding hidden underneath a brittle floor – that was a nice touch), and three random encounters. The random encounters?
- Three Otyughs (CR 5)
- One Howler (CR 8)
- One Pyrohydra (CR 10)
The pyrohydra is a variant hydra of my own design – each head can breathe 3d8 (DC 17 Dex half) fire, but it can’t grow new heads. It’s very scary.
The party was:
- Fighter 9
- Paladin 8
- Druid 10
- Wizard 8
- Bard 7
How deadly was each encounter? According to the Encounter Builder:
- Trivial
- Hard
- Easy
- Medium
The party used their limited spells effectively – especially a slow spell against the pyrohydra – but by the end of the session, they needed a long rest. In fact, they could have gone for one more encounter if there was a convenient location for a short rest, but such wasn’t available.
It’s also notable that the group almost exclusively uses healing word rather than cure wounds or other magic to recover hit points, which also limits how long they can continue.
Regardless, you can run out of gas quickly in a 5E session. As wandering monsters, these creatures could well be too difficult for the party – you want something to distract the party without wreck the expedition. For this level of the dungeon, where most of the interest came from these encounters, they were more appropriate.
This level needs a few more areas of interest – things for the party to interact with. I may do some design work towards that end over the coming week.