I ran Wolpertinger, Wererat - Well! as an urban encounter within my house campaign. As of time of writing its a Gold seller on DriveThruRPG, rocking a 5 star rating.
The blurb goes "[t]his adventure is an unapologetically linear dungeon crawl [that] follows the three-pillar principle: combat, exploration, social interaction. The idea is to spice up the classic formula with varied challenges that result in a short, entertaining session. This makes this an excellent adventure for beginner players and DMs! Detailed support is provided for the DM in the form of roleplay advice for six completely fleshed out original NPCs, advice on the three pillars in each scene, and scenic sensory descriptions for every scene to make the adventure come to life."
* * * Spoilers Below! * * *
Set-up: Party was at level 4 - a bard, sorceror and cleric - however they hit this encounter on the way home from a tournament all dressed up in their finest so significantly under-equipped. Ran this 3.5e party at the adventure without problems. Prepped it to get it 'on deck' a while back, most of which involved fiddling the back-story to work in my home-brew setting; once that was done the rest ran as plug and play.
It was no problem to drop into ongoing game by simply having the angry crowd gathered around a well appear where the players were making a short cut. As nobles of the homebrew city the party has form for getting involved in civil disturbances but I think it is a great long-ish urban encounter that is easy to drop into anywhere.
How it played out: party hit crowd with Calm Emotions then found out Nibbles was down the well. Talking to everyone at the surface they get a good picture that Nibbles (pictured above) is more than he seems. Sorceror decides to climb down to sort it out, bard reluctantly follows. Calmed cleric waits up top, in case. The sorceror and bard get in a fight with rats which turns into a close run thing as they were already down on resources and not carrying their back-up weapons. After this was resolved they proceeded to have a nice long moment of paranoia with the doors as intended. They manage to make it into the lab, rummage about and find some interesting items before the cleric catches up with them. They talk down the returning owner, defusing the situation and making their way back out of the well to return Nibbles to his mistress.
Really loved:
- easily used; I prepped it months before and it was still able to pick it up to run once the random encounter table turned it up
- great follow on hooks in the connection with the wizard. Nibbles and his nature created a great vehicle to introduce a new block of lore for the world which worked really well for me, but that was a bonus intrinsic to my home-brew setup.
- the minor magic items were a massive hit with the party
- party got a real knock down fight from the rats as they were under-equipped which brought much hilarity
- the traps and puzzles worked really well - enough for some fun, not too much to get tiresome
Sticking points - I found it hard to choreograph the exact sequence of the stairs-door-box-lab in order without a little map on that page; it would be awesome to have a bullet point stack at the top of this section with what the players hit in order to help keep from missing things, especially since there is a lot of 'you apparently see' hidden information depending on perception successes. Better again if there was a little copy of the map there - I recommend tagging your map and the descriptions with colours ahead of time.
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