AL - DDAL07-18 Turn Back the Endless Night

[darknite]

Anyone have a chance to play or look over this module yet? It's the capstone to Season 7 and is quite intense. Let me know your thoughts about it if you've checked it out. I was able to play it several times at a recent con (premier). Needless to say, spoilers for the rest of the thread.

[E’Tallitnics]

[No Spoilers!]

Oh man such a great adventure!

I will say that if you play you better start 7-18 fully rested, come fully stocked of every potion and magic item you have, and never forgot not for a picosecond that you're on a count down timer, and nothing else matters but getting to the end.

It is truly an adventure that will either save the entire world, or utterly destroy it. We failed to get to the end on time... We barely, and I mean barely survived. It was the most ungodly fight I've ever been in after 45 years of playing D&D.

The only thing that saved us was my pally and the 20th level Mastermind both had Daern's Instant Fortress (10d10 damage) and at the end the four of us were trading off activating and deactivating them so each round we were doing 20d10 damage. By the end of combat one fortress had no walls, the other only one.

After we failed, combat took 1 hour 46 minutes.

[darknite]

[Some spoilers, I guess]

I had the thrill of playing it three times in three days with each of my 19-20th level PCs. The first time was absolutely terrifying as there were only three of us in the game and the balancing mechanic for weak/very weak parties is a joke (ie there's NO balancing of anything for Dendar).

In that game we failed to stop Dendar from arriving because there was a lot of other stuff to contend with and we really didn't know how much time we had to get the gate locked. The combat started at 9:30pm and ended near 1am. One of the players had to sacrifice his brand-spanking-new Staff of the Arch Magi on a retributive strike ... and didn't kill Dendar.

My wizard had started the battle under the aegis of the Invulnerability spell and due to gnomish guile was able to make all the Wisdom saves thrown his way that would of broken concentration. He burned his last 7+ level spell on a Disintigrate but Dendar still had Legendaries to spare (had already used 3). In desperation I tried the Wand of Viscid Gobs and found that it actually worked, Dendar could be Restrained! Next turn I tossed a Daern's Instant Fortress on him and the paladin got the final strike.

Definitely the toughest battle I've had in AL, second is a small-party battle with Grazz't in Assault on Myrmidra. Didn't learn until the end that our PCs would be forcibly RETIRED if we had failed.