The god that Crawls
This scenario was very neat to read through, with some truly insane items included (that chariot... wow). Playing it was better than the last two adventures, although it wasn't a perfect experience. Part of that, unfortunately, was that my party is just too good at this...
To start, I had no trouble getting them down into the pit -- they know a good plot wagon when they see it, and are always happy to hop aboard. We had our cleric and magic-user back, a new specialist, and our fighter's player had to quit the game, but we got a different player in to be a fighter. The cleric knew about a supposed vault of stuff under a church from the priestly grapevine, and away they went. They were suspicious about how helpful the townsfolk were about getting them into the pit once they mentioned wanting to go down, but beyond that they willing to go straight into the hole.
Cue removal of ropes, ringing of the gong, and singing of hymns. Also, a little smirking by the referee.
They immediately clued into the idea that the villagers were trying to summon something, probably to eat them, and so ran for a bit until they found a different room. After a little bit of exploring they found both sets of letters on the wall, and after reading them, in less than a minute deduced that it was a map. Before they could follow it, they ran into the god for the first time.
The fight involved some bad luck on my dice rolls, but they managed to knock it down to half health without taking any real wounds despite the regeneration. It then failed its morale check and retreated to heal, taking with it any menace the god had for the party. While they spent the rest of the adventure avoiding it religiously, running when they found it once they realized it healed completely from what they had done to it the god was never again an object of fear.
This was compounded by following the short map immediately, with the result being the discovery of the hidden exit before the first torch had even burned out. With access to the exit, and the church supply room for food, no fear of the god, and plenty of time to methodically search, they soon became quite wealthy liberating treasure caches.
The most interesting thing they did was, upon finding the animal sounds paper, they used it to rig a trap with the collapsing ceiling for the god. They then went straight to the coin upgrade room and went to work until the god caught up to them again, quite a bit richer (50 sp to gp after all).
The specialist managed to finally break his death streak, this time only being affected by the toad in the jar. He wanted to know the meaning of life. Now he knows that and looks like a toad. Otherwise the party simply collected everything that wasn't nailed down (including the vast majority of the magic items and books), a heap of treasure, and simply left once it got late and the priest was asleep. Well, they left after setting the building on fire.
No real threat, tension or worry, but it was certainly different, and the pile of 'magic items' could make for some... interesting future sessions. After all, they haven't experimented with most of them yet... ::insert evil cackle::
All in all, I would recommend this one, although smart and lucky players may find it pretty easy. Mine certainly did. Next week I'll be running as many parts of the Three Brides as I can cram into one session for my (now) level 3 party. See you then!