Treason in Traynia part 2 is out!

Played round 2. Didn't enjoy the battles as much as round 1. The battles in round 1 made me work and were nicely set up. None of them here gave me the same pressured feel. The final battle, once the party was 5th level, was pretty easy. Surprise round kills two thugs. Next round double fireball the spellcasters. Only the necro survived with 2 hp. He cast chilling touch and hit, but that was the only damage I took. In contrast the initial battle, catching the captain, the temple, and the daughter battle in treason 1 were all a challenge. Incidentally, the vampires are not a very troubling enemy as long as you have light. Against AC 20, they have a 1/3rd chance of hitting, but with disadvantage, that becomes 1 in 9. Even with Solasta's pseudo-RNG, they rarely hit, unless you have a lot of them or they attack the lower AC party members. Unfortunately, the monster AI is pretty weak. In my game, they sometimes moved on from the AC 20 pally, but only to attack the AC 20 cleric. You should add some undead to the final encounter. Skeletal Marksmen are always a tough fight. Enough HPs to survive a double fireball (maybe) and they deal out damage with their necro arrows.

Nice use of lore and hiding of treasure. Good storytelling, particularly for the scroll, book, and rapier. Liked the goblin bit, but was curious why the lore came after the battle. Had I already killed the goblin refugees or was there another group I didn't see? The lore also came after the mixed defenders battle. (I did that battle then went back to the mixed vampire/ghoul/zombie crypt area, and so didn't see the lore until much later.)

Minor points: the large spiders didn't come out to play. The three in back got stuck behind the tombs and I had to go in and get them. There's also a wall section missing in the southwest corner. 

I played through it, and honestly I thought it was a good challenge for a level 4 party. 

Nice custom designs on it, one thing I respect is you building it by hand like that. The more custom design, the less generic it will appear to everyone else. Its one of those things that sets modules apart from each other. 

I echo Acadiantri's statements on the use of Lore and Hiding of treasure. Also you did a good job with hidden areas and side areas. One problem though.... some of your lore tags were too close to Combat areas and accidently triggered during combat, so disappeared before I could read them as they were too long. Some of them you may have to adjust to either before entering the room... or towards the back of the room after the fight is finished. 

Nice wrap up to your story. 

Hi both for your feedback! This has been quite a busy week, so I didn't have much time for anything.

I totally agree that this module is easier than the first one, but I didn't want to make very difficult fights at the beginning due to the lack of opportunities to short rest. I wanted to give the players the option of clearint the whole southern part before short or long-resting so that they didn't have to backtrack to the initial area to long-rest. So I tried to design this so that players could rest after clearing the south-west area (that should be possible after three fights, I think). Therefore, I find it a very good idea to move the cloak of protection and ring of darkvision to the spider zone. In fact, that gave me a new idea for a piece of lore, adding some adventurer that got stuck in the crack in the wall, trying to flee from the spiders, and then the players can recover those items from their corpse. I think this would fit nicely there.

Thanks also for the lore tag issues. I'll definitely have a look at them; I'll have to check the surroundings and put them in a place where they neither are out of context nor trigger during a combat... So thanks for that piece of helpful feedback to both of you!

As for difficulty, I will consider increasing it in the second part of the crypt, once you get to the humans, soraks, orcs and goblins working together, since most of the groups will already be level 5 by then. I also found that part to be much easier... so I even added some additional foes before uploading the module (I think I added two extra guard captains to the veterans and a couple more thugs in the final battle. The last brood was just there to catch the players unaware before exiting, but with light he's not much of a challenge). However, I didn't want to just start adding more enemies, since I think that one of the main problems of the game right now for us creators is that it promotes difficulty increas by just adding more enemies, and that reduces the speed of combat, something that I don't like. For instance, I like encounters like the priest and the dark weaver in the room with the tome of strength, i.e. fewer enemies, but stronger. However, balancing that is not always easy... So I'll just have to have a deeper look into the enemies and decide from there. But one think I won't do is adding skeletons or other undad to the final battles, since I want the crypt to be divided in two differentiated parts, the one with the undead, controlled by the evil priest, and the other one under control of the nigromantic humans & monsters that killed the burgermaster.

I'll also have a look at the spiders Acadiantry, but I didn't have that problem in my two playthroughs. They are just at the end in order to give the group some time to kill some of the smaller spiders before the large ones get to the entry point. Maybe changing some of the buildings by columns would improve their movement and also increase a little bit the strategic options in that zone.

Once more, thanks both for your comments! I am in the middle of a playthrough in both of your latest modules, and I already left some feedback (I am both Lockhy and Odhynn due to my nickname being already taken by someone else in some places), but I haven't had more time to play them, and I'm afraid this weekend I won't be able to do so. But be assured that I'll come back to you once I've played them!