DM'S COMMENTARY ON THE TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL PT 3.

The players complained to me, again, about when this adventure will get easy, joking that we seem to still be playing Shadow of the Demon Lord.  My response to them was, "You realize that the original adventure was written by Gary Gygax, right?"  This pretty much shut down the complaint, but the gripe came from the fact that in short time they had been in the temple dungeons, they'd had fought a couple of goblins, a water elemental, 4 shadows, and evaded a search party that ended up finding them and starting another fight.  Their resources are somewhat depleted, but they hadn't adventured long enough to be able to take another long rest and get any benefit from it.  So they pressed on (mostly prompted by the pompous knight) but the fights weren't getting any easier. 

This is EXACTLY what I wanted to have happen!  I wanted them to be aware of the fact that this vast complex was alive, aware of their presence, and actively searching for them.  There would be little to no rest for them as long as they stayed in the dungeons.  I gave them an out in the last session by showing them an abandoned farmhouse not far from the temple where they could potentially retreat to, but they haven't even thought about retreating yet.  Hopefully, they will remember this before they exhaust all of their resources and get too deep into the complex to get back out.

To reiterate what I mentioned in another commentary, this isn't the same layout as the one presented in the ToEE module.  Instead, I took a map from Roll20 (made by the excellent map maker Gabriel Pickard) and took interesting rooms from the original module to populate this map.  I compressed dungeon levels 1 and 4 into one level, essentially, and separated the elemental temples into separate sections of the dungeons (also using excellent elemental temple maps by the same Gabriel Pickard).  So, to be fair to the players, there are not a lot of unoccupied places the characters can hide in and rest like there were in the original module.  I wanted to keep this adventure lean and fast-paced, so I cut out a lot of fat in the process of consolidating it.  To compensate, the heroes will find some potions that will help to refresh them somewhat, providing they defeat Commander Feldrin and his bugbears.  Feldrin has a key to the vault where the temple's treasures are stored, and inside the heroes will find potions and scrolls to help them along.  I plan to try out a Potion of Mana to aid the priest in restoring some spell slots since the heroes can't take a long rest for many hours yet.  I've never used this kind of spell slot restoring device in a 5e game, so I'm going to control it carefully to ensure it doesn't break the game.  I'm going to say that Potions of Mana are extremely rare and hoarded by casters everywhere, so they can't go buy them like they can other types of potions. We'll see how that goes.

So far I'm happy with how things have gone in my revision of the ToEE.  I'm not done populating the elemental temples yet, and had a close call when the heroes wanted to try going into the water temple, so I deterred them by having two water elemental myrmidon standing guard at the entrance, which bought me some time.  For the elemental temples I plan on stealing liberally from not only the original module, but also from the 5E Princes of the Apocalypse adventure.  In fact the temple priests and their servants are all going to be drawn from that resource.  However, I really want the heroes to finish the main dungeon before they go into the elemental dungeons because that is the milestone I have set for them to level to 5th level, but also they will meet NPCs that will give them information they need to figure out what is going on in this place and put a stop to it.  Currently the PCs just think there's a bad cult here summoning elementals for a war.  They have no idea that the banished god Tharizdun is trying to get back into this multiverse through the guise of the Elder Elemental Eye and, unless they destroy the golden orb and the demon Zuggtmoy, who has the seed to Tharizdun within her, the God will be born back into this reality and will signal the beginning of the end!

Anyway, great fun so far!  I love taking adventures like this and making them mine.