After taking out the Orcs at the Ruined Keep of Agramar, your reputation has grown. An escaped dwarf slave has managed to elude the clutches the Ogre King. Following his crude map, the Council has asked you to penetrate the Halls of the Ogre Lord and steal the mystic rune that rumors say is hidden in his treasure vault.
Once more the council has sent you into danger. This time on an expedition to the Halls of the Ogre Lord to retrieve a Mystic Rune they have heard tales of. You have faced danger before, but this is something you have never done. Penetrate the Halls of the Ogre Lord and steal his Mystic Rune.
Available Here:
Halls of the Ogre Lord Part 1
https://www.nexusmods.com/solastacrownofthemagister/mods/49
Halls of the Ogre Lord Part 2
https://www.nexusmods.com/solastacrownofthemagister/mods/50
This module is based on and has direct encounters from G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief the old Classic D&D module. The Hill Giants are replaced with Ogres, and the Ogres are replaced with Orcs. Beware, like most old AD&D modules you will be greatly outnumbered. It is a mix of those and some of my own encounters.
This module is for Character Levels 7-8 so max current level for Solasta.
Originally this was supposed to be a 2 level dungeon. But due to corruption issues they had to be split apart and played separately. Once the corruption issues have been resolved by the Devs, I will combine the modules into the 2 level dungeon it was intended to be.
I will try to give them a try later this week. Been working on my own level 7-8 dungeon. The AI is so stupid though. It's really hard to challenge level 7 characters unless you use a bunch of monsters (at least with what's currently available). Even smart monsters with ranged attacks available seem to say, "Oh look a cleric in plate dodging with Spirit Guardians up, I wanna go stand next to that." Or the archmage, "I can cast any spell in the spellbook. Think I'll use firebolt."
Also seen some weird things on playtest. Did you know evil priests can use a mace as a ranged attack? I have mace that does that too; just didn't know the old-style, non-spray mace could too. Also, can't tell for sure but looks like if you fail your Spirit Guardian save, you attack at disadvantage because hey, spirit guardians is not good enough RAW.
Lol yeah agreed on the AI sometimes,
I cannot peg casters, I think they seriously underdid the Caster AI. I think the casters should be able to manage to use at least SOMETHING a little more than Chilling Touch. I get not going crazy with a spell dump to wreck the party, I get that... but I think they can do a LITTLE better with the default than THAT.
And yeah sometimes the advantage/disadvantage for any given thing just has me scratching my head.
I DO have some hope though...
When I play tested Halls of the Ogre Lord Part 2, I saw some of the strangest, yet coolest AI tactics I'd ever seen.
There's a part where you end up in a Minotaur Maze... I had them arranged in a ring... well, the two in front of the party... were blocking access because there were only 4 spaces... so I watched the others run off backwards, and I was going huh?
Suddenly they re-appeared behind me, they'd run all the way around the reverse side just to flank me.
Another one...
There is this hidden goblin area in there too, but the passage is only blocked off with rubble, then there's a crawlspace to access it, one block over. So I passed this area, and somehow they goblins spotted me since I wasn't steathed, as I didn't expect them to be ABLE to see me or detect me, and suddenly all the archers moved to this little space and started pelting me with arrows, so I braced against the impassible rubble and decided to just trade arrows and spells with them...
Suddenly I see markers for the 6 Goblin Cutthroats off to my left, they had run back the other direction and crawled through the crawlspace and were coming from my left to flank me. So I had 8 Goblin Archers firing at me alongside 2 Goblin Shamans and 6 Goblin Cutthroats flanking me from the left.
I was thinking of how ingenius that was... unfortunately I didn't think of it. I had no idea they would do that.
Hi Silverquick,
I finally found some free time to go through Halls of the Ogre Lord Part 1 and I thought I would share my thoughts with you.
First of all, congratulations for a very fun module. I really liked the layout of the dungeon and the design of the rooms, even though I found that the later tended to make combat too easy due to the use of so many ogres, that are large creatures. In fact, I didn’t have to long-rest and only short rested once, even though I finished the module having spent all my healing potions, powers and spells, and with some characters with just a few points, but I just lost one character throughout the whole module. Almost every encounter against the ogres took place at the entrance of the room, that became a choke point that only let the ogres come to me one by one or in pairs at the most. The rest just stood in the back waiting for their turn to be slaughtered... I think that using small creatures results in funnier and more agile combats, since they are not so much restricted by space. For example, the fight I liked the most was the one with the goblin cutthroats and orc archers, since it made me act more tactically than when fighting the ogres.
Also, the battle against a lot of ogres (20+?) became boring quite quickly, since one round could last around 10 minutes... and most of the time I was just waiting for the ogres to do nothing, since they couldn’t move due to the lack of space :(. I understand that right now it’s difficult to create a real challenge for a high-level party, and I hope this is solved when stronger monsters are released, but right now this is a point against high-level modules. Having too many monsters in a single combat really becomes boring due to the lot of time that takes each turn.
I also think that it would be a good idea to distribute the magical gear throughout the dungeon. Most of it can be found in the initial chest, and that’s cool because you get into the dungeon quite well equipped, but, in my opinion, having to search for the best gear feels more satisfying to the player. I also was short of arrows in the first part of the module, and I really found this satisfying, because it made me figure out a different way to use my ranger, just hoping that I would find more arrows later on. And that’s just what happened when I started killing orc archers and looting tons of arrows from their corpses. In the end I had far more arrows than I needed!
These are just some ideas I thought you might consider interesting. As I said before, in general the module feels quite satisfying, and it was very fun to play.