Eye of the Beholder [3.5 Module]

[Chrono22]

This is a level 6-8 module I created about a year ago. Feel free to download or use it for your games.

*It was made with the intention of being a very challenging dungeon for a party of 6 level 6 characters. It is undead and trap heavy, but there there are opportunities for characters of any class to contribute.
*It has some custom monsters in it.
*It's written as a Microsoft Word document.

http://groups.google.com/group/kingdoms-of-illuria/web/Eye%20of%20the%20Beholder.doc

[Narmy]

Really awesome quest man. I'll definitely be using it in my campaign, I'll have to convert it for pathfinder, but that won't be a problem.

Thank you very, very much.

I admit, at first when I read it, I squirmed at the sight of so many zombies. >< Big long fights >< Lots of initiative and turns.

My only suggestion would probably be to reduce the amount of monsters in some cases, then again. I haven't tried the battle yet, so. I'll let you know how it goes if I am still able to contact you.

Also, am I correct in assuming the main boss is a Shadow Beholder?

[Chrono22]

Sort of. It's an advanced gauth with the shadow creature template from the ToM, and I also switched it from aberration to undead type.

The number of monsters isn't so bad, when you use group initiative for identical monsters. I also have a paizo initiative tracker, and that helps tremendously.

I didn't mention it in the document, but once the players give the old man the eye, he takes off a blindfold to reveal a deep cavity in his upper face and forehead. After he places it into the cavity, he thanks the party, pays them the agreed fee, and departs. The eye grants him a special paralysis power.

In my games, he became a recurrent subordinate of the BBEG, and the party believed he was the BBEG. The BBEG was actually their patron, who dominated the old man and used him to motivate the party to collect parts of a powerful artifact. She was a good intentioned, lawful good bard with a god complex.

[Narmy]

I was not aware that there was a group initiative thingy. I'll have to google it, That would help a lot. ><

[Chrono22]

No need to google it. It's a pretty simple (and common) houserule.
Whenever you have multiples of a kind of enemy (for example, goblins) they act on the same initiative count. This way, you don't get as mired in tracking initiative... and you also don't have to keep switching back and forth between monster statblocks.

[DracoDei]

Another method I use is spacing out the enemy initiative evenly without rollingis considered to have rolled every number from 1 to 20 inclusive. For 10 use all the even numbers. For 5 you would use multiples of 4. You still modify it for Dex., Quick to Act, Etc Etc. Actually I only used it once so far, but it seems to work.

[Mulletmanalive]

I came up with a piece of script for Excel that took a big encounter, assigned random numbers between 1 and 20 to all the creatures and then ordered them with gaps in between so that i could write in the PCs own initiatives.

Not used it in a while because i started using an OGL game of my own devising and i lost a computer in the interlude but i'll have a look see if my old "one encounter per page" generator macro is floating around anywhere...

[DracoDei]

That doesn't sound like it takes Dex into account. Is that true?

[Narmy]

The group monster initiative would take Dex into account, hence why it is only best used for combats where you have a lot of the same monster.

All the zombies, GO!

I.E. It's bad for battles with enemies whom are not the same.