Meanwhile I've run the signature adventure of XP1, the Spider-God's Bride.
Impressions / Opinions:
* Some of my players complained about the module being too "hard sausage", which is German gamer jargon for a playing style of nitpicking lengthiness.
Pro Tip: completely drop the DMG rules excerpt forcing hourly Fort saves of increasing difficulty in hot climates. It's nonsense. With these rules, no desert dweller would survive past first level.
* After the first seven travel days or so, I stopped rolling for random encounters. The first RE was a monster scorpion, which the PCs killed (the fight was fun, btw), and a Dire Bat, which I just decreed they'd get rid off without rolling dice.
There's only one interesting random encounter in the module, namely the Nomad robbers, and it would have a rough 1% chance to trigger. So I simply triggered it "manually".
Caution, SPOILERS:
The Nomad assault was fun. They attacked during the day, circled the caravan on their horses and shot arrows from ~120' distance. The PC Nomad focussed her fire on the bandit leader, eventually wounding him so much that he broke off the attack and the bandits withdrew. Then our Barbarian and Nomad went after them and actually managed to capture that guy (which I hadn't expected).
Then the PCs demanded ransom, and our Thief pricked him with a needle and bluffed him into believing he was poisoned, and had to return with the ransom to get the antidote. There was roaring laughter at the gaming table when the players sent the bandit on his way with good tips like "Always hold up the right arm so the poison doesn't spread so fast." - "And avoid stress." - "And don't burden your right leg."
so he had to hop away on one leg.
Anyway, the adventure then proceeded quite smoothly, until the final night, i.e. the attack of the assassins. First they put the Thief to sleep with a poisoned crossbow bolt, he was out for the remainder of the fight. Everyone rushed to the rear of the garden to help the Thief, meanwhile the other assassins tried to break into the front door, but failed their Open Lock checks miserably (rolled out fair and square).
The players suspected that it was a distraction and returned to the front door and caught the assassins in the act. Another fight ensued, which sent the Nomad into the land of slumber, but finally the Soldier and Barbarian managed to kill the last of them.
(in hindsight, I should have given the Assassins bigger weapons; those lousy daggers couldn't get past the armour and rarely rolled well enough to Finesse.)
The main problem here plot-wise was that the players did not sound the alarm. They were all patrolling in the garden at the time of the attack, and even if they had had access to the gong, they wouldn't have thought of using it as an alarm. So I had to resort to using their charging yell (which they specifically declared) as trigger for Sefu to take Yetara and Daimya to "safety".
They did not buy the Temptress's story and quickly knocked her out before Sefu could react. Then they cut the cocoon open and that spawn came out (which I scaled up to 65HP and DR4), but the Barb was lucky and scored a crit with her off-hand attack, rolled 30 for damage, and the beast failed its MDS. (It was pretty late so I was happy to be able to cut the combat short at this point.)
After that, they woke up the Temptress again and made her talk, but then made short work of her and killed her instead of bargaining for ransom. Sefu did not intervene because after seeing that monster, he had lost interest in that bitch.
Now they are in that house but don't realize they might seize it for themselves. They have bashed the door to the library and are looking for valuables to sell (unfortunately nobody has the lore to find out what is worth how much).
By the way, concerning the Conan conversion guide:
Most of the converted encounters (at least of this adventure) are considerably weaker than the original ones. I don't quite see why. I had to scale _up_ the original encounters and the players still had an easy time (their monstrous scorpion had 30 or 40HP instead of 6). Had I used the converted encounters as written, my players would have gotten totally bored. I don't quite understand why they are so much weaker.
But anyway, the adventure as a whole was good and we had a lot of fun, definitely above average as published modules go.
