Topic: Cursed Chateau character level

Hi guys. It has been a while. Wanna run the Chateau for 3 characters. What would you recommend their level should be?
Cause right now they are still level 1 and reading the adventure that seems awfully low, especially if it's only 3 of them.

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

Well, personally I'd run it for any level and any number of players. It's much more of an investigation and exploration rather than a "kill them all" kind of adventure. And there are some things in there that can be insta-death for any level character, but can be avoided through careful or clever play.

However, if you know they are going to be aggressive and try to kill the various undead they encounter, you may want to bump their levels up a bit, or provide them each with a follower who can help out or take on some of the risk.

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

Crunk Posby wrote:

Well, personally I'd run it for any level and any number of players. It's much more of an investigation and exploration rather than a "kill them all" kind of adventure. And there are some things in there that can be insta-death for any level character, but can be avoided through careful or clever play.

However, if you know they are going to be aggressive and try to kill the various undead they encounter, you may want to bump their levels up a bit, or provide them each with a follower who can help out or take on some of the risk.

The question mainly came to my mind when I read about the Minor Entities of Flame. They'd wipe the floor with them with their high AC and lifepoool and doing 1d6 themselves.
I guess I could just scale things down a bit on the tougher foes.
Was still curious what people are saying.


Also, I have really no idea how this thread ended up in this forum. I apologize, honest mistake!

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

Well. In the first session in the middle of the maze we already have the first character at 0hp. Not sure what to do about that.
Whenever they get into combat - most of the time by random chance - things end badly for them. I think I'm losing them if this goes on like this. Gotta soften in a bit somehow. Don't wanna make it easy, that is certainly not the intention. But ye..

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

OSR/LotFP can generally be deadly - are they accustomed to this style?

(My players lost over 20 characters getting through Grinding Gear, but amazingly only one in Cursed Chateau.)

If they insist on fighting everything until it’s dead, they will have a hard time staying alive. You will have to adjust the challenge if you think they’re not enjoying it.

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

[This post contains minor spoilers for Chateau, Better Than Any Men]

They are accustomed to it to a certain degree and they certainly don't mind losing a character. But I think if it gets too much they won't be enjoying it anymore.

They also don't insist on fighting everything at all, but the fights certainly are looking for them (Glass Tiger in BTAM, Twins in Chateau, etc.)

But you wrote something interesting: "... until it's dead".
Escape did indeed cross their mind during the last fight, but in that case there would have been a roll for Pursuit and that would leave things up to luck entirely I feel.
I'm certainly not an experienced GM at all. How would you handle such a situation? (I.e. players know they hardly stand a chance, they wanna get away, plainly rolling on Pursuit seems to luck dependent)

Last edited by cryion (2020-04-29 11:54:59)

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

So there's two different kinds of deaths going on here:

1) Players make risky or bad choices, which results in a bad thing happening to the PCs. In CC, I think the twins only come if they steal the tiara, right? This happened to my party - the group decided to leave it alone, except one player decided to sneak back and snatch it, which unleashed the twins on them. They were luckily able to defeat them. The party thought this was a random attack, only the thief who took the tiara knew it was likely happening b/c of his choice.

2) Bad luck (ie, you get the most deadly result on a random encounter roll, or some such thing). I was playtesting the new LotFP rules and made a survival roll for the party, which resulted in one of the PCs tripping on a rock and taking d8 damage. It was enough to kill them. They were not happy about this, especially since they made the choice to leave the dangerous dungeon and get back to safety.

Number 1 I'm not concerned with. If players don't seem to be getting it, you may want to reveal some of the behind the scenes stuff after they've finished with the consequences. Let them know that they would not have fought the twins if they hadn't stolen the tiara.

Number 2 does kind of suck. I think having random bad stuff happen is okay, but random death isn't.

At any rate, I've mitigated both of the above with a few things.

1) Instead of dying at 0 hp, instead the PC loses a permanent point from their CON, and a permanent point from a random other stat.

2) They have a Luck stat. This is an average of all their stats at character creation. From then on, they can burn a point from this stat to reroll any die. However, this is also their stat for initiative, running away, and figuring who the "bad thing" is going to happen to (ie, I ask all to make a roll and the one who rolls worst is the one that gets the random attack). I also use this for when they try something possible but risky, they just roll their luck and don't roll a 1 to succeed (this last one requires you to have unusual dice, like those from Dungeon Crawl Classics).

3) At character creation, they create four 0 level characters and choose one to put at level 1. They can bring the others along as helpers who can take on some of the risk, including, when running away, these are always the slowest characters. One or more might die, but it allows the leveled party to escape.

Doing just one of the above might be enough to give your players the boost they need to survive. I decided to implement the above b/c I found that the unavoidable instant deaths in LotFP were a lot more enjoyable to experience then the dying through hit point loss method, and my players started to be too afraid to interact with anything, so I needed to give them a bit more confidence to explore more.

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

Thank you very much for the detailed response! It certainly gives me some ideas to work with.
I think in terms of character death I am going to go with Ten Foot Polemics Death and Dismemberment rules. They seem fun enough!

I have another session in a couple of hours and I am wondering about something, maybe you can help out:
I was certain I read somewhere that household staff are restored back to (un)life after they have been destroyed after 24hrs. But I cannot find such a passage in the book anywhere, except in the Turn Undead rules, which to me seem to imply they are only restored in that one scenario.  Are they restored or are they not?

Last edited by cryion (2020-05-02 18:56:28)

Re: Cursed Chateau character level

I believe most are generally not restored, but I think there are a few who are restored and I think it says it under their specific description.