In “Search for Mithral Hall”, your team is tasked with searching the caverns for the Ancient Throne, on which you’ll find a crown to retrieve.

The problem is that Artemis Entreri is hot on your trail and catches up with you at the least convenient time, and you must defeat him as well as getting the crown. At 15 AC, Drizzt has a hard time hitting him with either Icingdeath or Twinkle, and Catti-Brie has a hard time hitting without resorting to her Falling Hail stance, missing out on the extra damage from the Heartseeker stance. Bruenor’s Notched Axe has a slightly better chance. Additionally, if you stay still long enough for Artemis to hit you, he regains health. All of which means you’re going to have to use tactics against Artemis.

Artemis (in gray) is Not a Nice Man.

In the meanwhile, hey, monsters!

I quite like the 4XP monsters. They really draw your fire and force you to make difficult choices vis a vis what to attack, which can easily result in you dying like a punk from the Goblin Archer you thought you left behind three tiles back. Poor Catti-Brie, who soaked up the allocated two Healing Surges for the party, having only 6 HP in her level 1 incarnation. However, her Falling Hail stance results in a +10 2-tile ranged attack with Taulmaril, so if you can keep her alive, she’s well worth it.

Bruenor, as a Fighter, is quite a reliable tank. For your first game with him (where you use the powers listed in the adventure book, rather than selecting them), he only has once stance—that gives him a permanent +2 to his AC, meaning that his AC is effectively 18, and with 10 HP he’s quite hard to take down. Unusual amongst D&D characters in this game, he only has one At-Will power (Notched Axe, which can be re-used against another monster once per Hero Phase if it misses) but his Utility powers make him something of a Swiss Army Knife. Or Axe. For instance, Legendary Knowledge is something no adventure party should be without (in one exploration phase, he can effectively take out three tiles from the top of the cavern tile stack). And with Power Strike, it’s hard to miss that second At-Will power.

I realize that this party would have been more thematic with Wulfgar and Regis, if I have the events of the Icewind Dale series straight. Which I probably don’t, not having read them and, indeed, am still getting through Homelands with Drizzt in the process of being born. I’ll try them out next time.

Basically, I lost this scenario after coming so close to clinching the crown. After Catti-Brie used up the two Healing Surges, Drizzt stumbled upon Artemis in the Broken Door tile, and suffered some serious hits. Fortunately, Bruenor discovered a secret tunnel that led to the throne room, allowing Catti-Brie to skip the @#$@ Spider Swarm and directly access the crown. Drizzt followed her, hoping to circle around Artemis and quickly attack him from behind…

… only to be taken out by a booby trap from the Encounter deck. Realistic, of course. He even had two Scrimshaw Charms for re-rolls, but Lolth really wanted him dead.

The Encounter cards are more often nasty than not. I think the most benign of them is the Volcanic Vent, which you can almost avoid by not being on a tile with a Volcanic Vent, unless you can’t avoid it, this being the way the breaks fall.

So close, I thought, except that Artemis still had full health at that point, but still. So I decided to go up to 5 Healing Surges if that’s what it took. Mentally, I counted up a score for the game: every Surge used means that you score 2^{healing surge} points. The perfect game would score 0 points. Using up the two healing surges would have resulted in 2¹ + 2² = 6. Obviously scores get high quickly, and they should.

Using up another surge for Drizzt added 2³ = 8 more points to the score, for a total of 14. Everyone then went after Artemis, who then managed to take out Bruenor. There went another surge, adding 2⁴ = 16 points for a total of… ow. 30 points.

But we got ‘im.

This adventure was much better than the one in WoA where you rescue some guy’s backpack. Which apparently also teleports you out of the dungeon, because damn there’s a lot of monsters.

Here’s a preliminary, completely unofficial scoring table for number of surges used, low scores are good scores.

Healing Surges Used	Score
0	0
1	2
2	6
3	14
4	30
5	62
6+	126 please try again, the game only comes with five

Update on missing pieces: Wizards contacted me ((Gosh, that sounds psychotic.)) and told me they’d sent the pieces in the mail! Arrival time is up to 15 days or so.