Castle Ravenloft Adventure # 7: "Adventure: Impossible"

The writers of the Castle Ravenloft Adventure Book do a nice job of coming up with interesting twists for each mission. The premise behind the seventh mission, "Adventure: Impossible," is that the town of Barovia is under attack by Strahd's allies. Strahd has cast a dark spell, however, to keep the pesky adventurers from entering the castle together--which means the heroes have to enter one at a time with the goal of defeating at least three of the game's six villains (chosen randomly, and secretly). Even the order in which the heroes enter is determined randomly, and that, combined with the absence of healing surges, makes for an interesting and potentially challenging scenario. Having one hero follow another in sequence raises a couple of rules question that the adventure book doesn't address: (1) Normally monsters are controlled only by the hero that discovered them--do the monsters continue operating after that hero has died? and (2) Do the heroes inherit experience points and treasure from one another? We went ahead and said "yes" to both questions in an attempt to keep things balanced.

For heroes, we rolled (in order): Ranger, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard. The Ranger did pretty well and uncovered the first villain--the Zombie Dragon. This was a problem, as the Zombie Dragon has a ton of hit points and our Ranger just didn't have enough firepower to kill it. He got it down to about half hit points before being felled, and then the Fighter stepped in. We used his Daily power to do 4 hit points of damage, and that with a couple of other attacks was enough. After that, it got easier, as we turned over the Young Vampire and the Flesh Golem, each of whom's biggest threat is making it back to the Start tile and automatically dealing 1 hit point a round. We ran through the Fighter and Rogue, but the Cleric was able to finish off the last villain pretty easily (and our Wizard never even got on the board). Some of the reason for victory in this one may have been a combination of our interpretation of the rules (we accumulated a lot of treasure) and sheer luck (we turned over a lot of Encounters and didn't suffer as much as we expected).