Castle Ravenloft Adventure # 3 "Klak's Infernal Artifact"

The third adventure in the Castle Ravenloft game introduces Klak, a kobold sorcerer who is using a powerful artifact to menace Barovia. The goal in the mission is for 2-5 heroes to infiltrate Strahd's castle, find Klak (9-13 tiles in), destroy him, and destroy his artifact. Klak isn't very tough as villains go (AC 14, 6 hit points), but his ability to teleport and open up new tiles means he can be elusive.

It took us three tries to get this one right. The first time, we almost had Klak surrounded and looked to be on the verge of victory, but had some particularly bad luck with encounter cards that teleported us to a far away tile, and by the time we got back we were too worn down to succeed. The second time, we got massacred before even uncovering Klak's laboratory. Our strategy these first two times was to keep our heroes relatively close together so they could assist each other in finishing off monsters, and only open up new tiles when things seemed under control. Our third time through, we tried something very different: we spread our heroes out and opened up new tiles as fast as possible, even if there were already a lot of monsters on the board. The theory was that it's better to have encounters from opening up tiles than encounters from doing nothing, and the sooner Klak appears, the better shape we'd be in to take him out. The approach seemed to work out, though it's possible we were just luckier in terms of which monsters and encounters appeared. Regardless, we killed Klak and destroyed his infernal artifact with a healing surge to spare. The Fighter has a once-a-day power that does 4 points of damage if it hits, and if it misses you can try again next round; I think this will be our big gun if villains are involved in the adventure.

The mission also has a couple of minor wrinkles (canceling an encounter gives 1 point of damage to the active hero & heroes can trade in treasure for new powers), but for the most part this didn't affect our strategy.