[New Release] TFT Adventure: The Chaos Triads

[Steven Marsh]

A noblewoman's plaintive call for help leads to an adventure where the situation has devolved into something much more complicated and dangerous. The Chaos Triads, the first new full adventure supplement in decades for The Fantasy Trip.

Written by long-time Pyramid editor Steven Marsh, this adventure includes new printable megahexes and counters, and a deadly new dungeon denizen.

Dangerous problems call for daring heroes! Are you up to the challenge of The Chaos Triads? Excitement is just a download it today, from Warehouse 23!

[zot]

First of all I want to say that I really like the adventure. The premise is great and it has a lot of good non-combat potential for the players, which is a must for my group. My 3 players walked through the encounter with Alice the Ax because the Human leader is a skill monkey with Strategist, Streetwise, Charisma, and Scholar (among other things) and the player prefers the use of social means over physical, so that went as expected. I see that there are also plenty of things for the Gargoyle and Reptile Man to do though :). These are experienced role players but this is their first time playing TFT and it looks like they're enjoying it.

I didn't want to give each player more than one PC to play so I took the advice on the cover and made 3 very experienced PCs. Since the adventure suggests that four 40-point characters might be able to survive and we only have 3 PCs with very inexperienced TFT players, I made three 41-point characters.

Does the adventure assume the PCs will not have any starting equipment other than the $500 outfitting grant? That didn't seem very reasonable to me, especially since the reward for this adventure alone is $2K for each of 5 starting PCs or at least $1K each if they return only with evidence of the other two groups ($500 each, plus the $500 outfitting bonus). So I set what I thought was a very modest budget for 40-point characters: $20K each. Then I thought like a player and outfitted them accordingly. The way things ended up, a budget of less than $10K each would probably have worked just as well (and they didn't end up using the $500 outfitting bonuses anyway).

Since Stone Flesh rings cost $4K I think it's reasonable that a PC would eventually be able to acquire one by the time they reach 40-points, so +4 armor for each PC with $16K left. They'd have gotten those even if they had a 1/4 budget of $5K each but, again, limiting equipment to $5K for a 40-point character doesn't seem reasonable to me.

The end result was that the characters have excessive amounts of armor protection, good damage potential (even without having put any cash into fine weapons or magic weapons), and strong utility potential; the Reptile Man is an alchemist and made several potions at cost.

So, how do you think characters like that will do? I'm have a strong suspicion that if I take things as-written that it will be a complete walk-through but I'm happy, of course, to modify the challenges as they encounter them. The adventure does provide a good framework for modification and I think it will turn out well.

I'm interested to hear what you think about all of this...