GM Commentary: Forges of the Mountain King

I reworked every encounter in this module. I liked the setting and elements of the back story, but the encounters seemed wildly unbalanced to me. I put a ton of work into this adventure, probably more than I should have. I crafted unique puzzles, handouts, and monsters. The "gems of the septych" had a brief hint as a treasure entry in the module and became more of a central theme for me.

Once again I was disappointed in the quality of the maps in this module. Rather than redraw maps to represent what is supposed to be a massive dwarven civilization I chose to represent the dungeon as a skill challenge. I made a table of key encounters and random encounters. While traveling in the halls of tannhiem the party made a series of skill checks (History, Nature, Perception, Dungeoneering) to determine how far and how long they traveled before the next encounter. If they failed many checks they would encounter something random. If they did well they would reach a key encounter quickly. Some of the random encounters I planned would have been natural hazards, although at the pace my group went I ended up skipping most of the random encounters in the interest of time.

I stole another idea from the "Keep on the Shadowfell". I replaced the tomb of the underking encounter with the Sir Keegan skill challenge. This added a depth to the setting and allowed the PCs a chance to gain some quest XP. I used the throne room map from H1 again, it's just too cool to pass up on.

The beholder encounter could have been better. I learned that solo monsters aren't really built to be soloed and need some allies to help flesh out the encounter. Vismund became a pseudo-villain for the duration of this adventure, but was "fixed" by the end. Austin and I came up with the idea for the monster he became from a Castlevania boss fight.

The Mountain King is positioned to become a reoccurring villain.