Xorvintaal and Red Hand of Doom (D&D3.5)

[Coidzor]

Anyone seen someone try to blend these two things before?

The thought just occurred to me due to xorvintaal coming up in the "What Makes Giants Interesting?" thread.

[Greymane]

I'm currently running a Red Hand of Doom game, and I have seriously thought about mixing the two. However, the players are all fairly powerful, and I'm wary of giving up spellcasting. Even minor bits because of wands and scrolls.

[Runestar]

The dragons don't really qualify for xorvintaal, since all of them are younger than young adult, IIRC.

I suppose they could be bumped up to the next age category, though it would increase their cr. This would make the green dragon too tough for the party.

The red dragon would become huge (whee!), the black dragon large, think the blue dragon remains unchanged? They should still be reasonable challenges for the party without being overpowering.

I am not too worried about the loss of spellcasting since you can always give them potions, and their tactics don't really use spells anyways. The red dragon loses shield though (meaning its AC takes a big hit) but it almost always gets dispelled in the first round of combat anyways.

I think it would be nice to give each a different ability to make each fight more distinctive.

I am more interested in other more iconic dragons though, such as ashardalon.

[Fizban]

I think you'd have to change the goal of the bad guys to make it work, since releasing Tiamat would have much bigger ramifications than winning the game. Sure, you'd get tons of points, but who cares about the game when Tiamat's conquering the whole plane?

It could be done though. Say if the whole thing was actually about manipulating some adventurers into unwittingly helping the mastermind take over territory and aquire major loot by setting up a front scheme of awakening some dead god. Then the players get hints that things aren't quite right which eventually point them to the game so they aren't dissapointed when they find out it wasn't what they were told to start with. Let them surprise the BBEG when they know what's really going on and show up with a posse of his foes in the game.

For power levels: Aslan Cross' Eberron Flavored Red Hand of Doom Campaign Journal (return of the capital letters) showed that against an even somewhat optimized party, the standard module breaks down pretty fast. He added couple levels to and totally rebuild all the standard mooks, increased a few dragon sizes, souped up the army's artillery, and beefed up most of the bosses. He did get a couple deaths, but if it weren't eberron they would have been more easily reversed than they were anyway, and you should expect a death or two by the end.

[AslanCross]

While it might be interesting, I think you'll have to bring in a third party of dragons, since the dragons involved in the module are presumed to be allied. Their goals have to work with Azarr Kul as well, whom I think should be a participant in the game somehow.

And yes, bumping up RHOD's bosses is a good idea. The only boss I didn't touch was Varanthian.

[Runestar]

when you say xorvintaal, I was simply thinking about using the template and ignoring the flavour aspects.