Showdown at Teh Hevuarga, Take Two

For the first time, I ran an adventure a second time.

I wrote about the first time I ran this before, but now I've run it with a different group of players, with the same ultimate result (they won, in a hard-fought bout.)

Anyway, it was interesting to see how these players did things differently.

The premise of the adventure is that of a wild west showdown (though ironically, the lawless frontier in the nation of Nephimala is actually in the east) in which the party needs to find a safe place to keep a young aasimar girl and the half-orc nun accompanying her while the party scouts out the town of Teh Hevuraga looking for allies and staying wary of secret gang members who wish to capture the girl and sacrifice her to the infernal powers that lead the Red Rattler Gang.

The first party did a lot of work to meet all the major figures in the town, while the second never explored the Temple of Coran (God of Glory and Heroism) or the local brothel - which is actually where the first group chose to keep the girl during the fight.

Neither group used the dynamite they could buy. Also neither group figured out the owner of the general store (who sold the dynamite) was a Rattler. Both did chase the card-cheat out of town, though neither figured out he was also a member of the gang.

The Sheriff's deputy, who is the third and final town resident with the gang, had very different fates in the two runs. The first time, the tiefling bard seduced him, got him to warn her to leave town before Galero (a Barbed Devil) and his crew showed up, and then tied him up so he couldn't flee. The second group did not suspect him and he wound up shooting the sheriff in the middle of the fight, only for good old Sheriff Tom Clauron to turn around and blow his head off.

Anyway, I think there's tweaking to be done - maybe incentivize the party to explore the town a bit before sundown. I was also a little disappointed that neither group reinforced the doors or buried dynamite in the road to use as a trap. A single stick could potentially take out or at least severely injure one of the eight regular gang members (and half of them are carrying dynamite themselves, which would go off an almost certainly kill them in the chain reaction.) Maybe it needs to be clearer that they can do these sorts of things.