Advice for Sunless Citadel

[TheTrueKing21]

Hello everyone,

I’m going to run Sunless Citadel for 6 of my friends in a few days, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice, tweaks, or tips they’d recommend in the course of running this module from Tales from the Yawning Portal.

Some questions I have right off the bat.
Is the Belak fight as written going to be adequate enough of a challenge for a group of 6?
Is there any ideas for Oakhurst?

[Galithar]

The module will not be challenging for 6 players. I drastically increased fight difficulties for my party of 7 and they STILL stomped everything. The only time people went down was when they ran off on their own.

I would definitely suggest increasing the difficulty of some of the fights if your players are expecting combat to be difficult. As for how you do it, adding a few more mobs in and giving the powerful creatures a 1 or 2 point bump to AC and/or proficiency is a pretty simple method if you're not experienced with encounter building.

[ScoutTrooper]

Galithar pretty much hits the nail on the head with their post.

I too am currently running it for my table of 3~5 players. They took the hook and walked into it at level 3 so I've had to max or raise the HP of the mobs, add 1 or 2 here or there. Also bumped the level of the baddies at the end. More twig blights, many more twig blights.

I've actually played through it before as a player, and in the same aspect one of my players has ran the module three times during their DM career. With that, I've been able to catch him off guard with minor tweaks to mobs, that and he forgot all the traps.

Also unrelated note: for some reason the players attempted to traverse the difficult hazardous terrain outside of it, needless to say, so many giant rat fights.

[TheCleverGuy]

I'm currently running it for 5, and I had to increase the difficulty too. I was using the average HP for all the monsters, but found that they were all going down too quickly. My party's Light Cleric cleared out basically every enemy in the Hobgoblin boss room on the first level of the dungeon with a single use of Channel Divinity, and that's when I decided to use max HP instead.

My group is down in the Grove level now, and just had a huge battle with the goblins in Belak's laboratories. They tried to sneak through the main hall, but the Monk rolled a nat 1 on a Stealth check and alerted the goblins, who came out and attacked. Some of the goblin commoners tried running back to the entrance hall, and the warlock hit them all with a Shatter spell--which also blew the door of the hinges and alerted the skeletons and twig blights they'd avoided earlier, as well as the bugbear Balsag and his two pet giant rats. With all those enemies at max HP, we finally had a battle that lasted more than 2 rounds, though I don't think any of the PCs were in danger of being knocked out.

They've decided to try a long rest after the fight, so I think I'm going to have essentially all the remaining goblins, twig blights, and the second bugbear form up in one of the arboretum rooms to try and capture (either through intimidation or battle) the party and bring them to Belak. If they fight, the battle won't be trivial and they'll use up some resources before the final boss. If they go quietly, there'll just be more enemies for them to deal with in the final confrontation.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Hello everyone,

I’m going to run Sunless Citadel for 6 of my friends in a few days, and I was wondering if anyone had any advice, tweaks, or tips they’d recommend in the course of running this module from Tales from the Yawning Portal.

Some questions I have right off the bat.
Is the Belak fight as written going to be adequate enough of a challenge for a group of 6?
Is there any ideas for Oakhurst?

I put an NPC in Oakhurst who had Reincarnate on her spell list. "Just on case"

If they are newbs who knows what will happen.

Assuming the first few encounters go easily ramp it up accordingly with better prepared foes or a couple more.

[Segev]

One thing to keep in mind is that, if the party makes noise by fighting things, the kobolds and goblins should be able to hear and react to it. Reinforcements are supposed to show up from other areas, making fights bigger than they may otherwise seem.

The two points where my PCs had the hardest time in Sunless Citadel were when they tried to cross the caltrop-laden corridor to the goblin-built low archery-blind wall, and when they faced the hobgoblins. They managed to come at the hobgoblins from below, which meant they had to scramble up and keep them busy to keep from being target practice on the walls of the well.

They actually left the dungeon to report back to the merchant who had hired them to find her children, then came back, and the route they took back took them into underground caves as they chased the Bugbear hunter, so they came in through his lair on the way back in.

It gets a little more complicated because I restructured it to fit into Tomb of Annihilation, but that's the thrust of it.

You can easily justify increasing the number of blights, and even adding some Thorn and Vine blights to the mix. If they aggro the kobolds, you can add a few more coming back from patrol, too, when they try to hole up. I would also increase the frequency of random encounters. A small chance of one every 12 hours is practically nothing.

With a party of six, I'd suggest considering making the troll start at the weakened number of hp, but otherwise have full troll stats, too.

Also, use Jot better than I did. I did well, I think, having him attack from across the spiked pit, and attack when one PC was on her own on his side of it in the troll's sepulchre, but I didn't have him move back out of line of sight of the other PCs after attacking her, which I could have, enabling Jot to keep attacking her for longer, or at least to escape to harrass them later.