I don't think I ever posted here on this... I was reminded by Meg and Emiliy's blog.

As I mentioned way back here, we decided to wrap up the Arcana Evolved campaign. The players decided they wanted to clean out the Dark Tower rather than simply try and escape the dungeon (I'm not sure why I even asked...). We decided to jump the PCs two levels.

We had two great sessions. The first session, they finished updating their PCs and then started into the Dark Tower.

The Evolved Human Warmain and the Spryte Greenbond ended up fighting an improved Stone Golem while the rest of the party was trapped outside, blocked by a wall of force. The rest of the PCs did beat down the wall of force and arrived to help wrap up the Stone Golem. Lots of good fun, and lots of chance for the fighter types to show off (in how fast the Stone Golem was taken down and how quick the wall of force was taken down).

The next session, they continued up the tower. There were a handfull of almost nuisance encounters that were pretty quickly dealt with. One, the module had this corridor filled with 100 skeletons (and not really enough room for them - typical 1e dungeon...). I knew I didn't want to run a fight with that many skeletons. One fighter suggested they let the spell casters blast them. The other pointed out they could wade through them. Instead of rolling everything out, I just rolled a few fistfulls of d20s looking for 20s to do damage to the PCs (none came up) and narated them blasting through skeletons. I wonder if I should have handled the rolling some different way, but it felt good to roll a bunch of dice and declare the PCs came through without a scratch.

The final encounter was slightly frustrating because the young husband had come up with a spell that just totally shut down the enemy spell caster, but the final battle was still enjoyable to run.

We then quickly handled getting back out of the tower, discovering the dungeon had collapsed around them, rescuing the dragon, etc. And called it a night and a campaign.

I feel like this resulted in a very satisfying end. We didn't end in total frustration like my D20 Arcana Unearthed campaign last year. The PCs accomplished a nice goal. And they got to try out another step in power.

Frank