Temple of Elemental Evil - 5E Style - Experience Points & The Nodes

 

Ah, the Nodes  ... the most controversial part of the physical dungeon! If you've looked into online discussions of running the adventure - in any edition - you will find a lot of people either dislike the nodes or decide to drop them entirely. That's four separate dungeon levels in this place that many DM's decide to excise - but why?

The big complaint is that the nodes themselves are a slog. Some of them are much larger areas than the dungeon levels but only have 20-30-something encounter areas - and that's in this newest version where they took the extra effort to flesh out the nodes instead of making it a zone of purely random encounters. They can be tricky to get in and out of of as well depending on how your party is equipped and what they know. It's also entirely possible that your group may not have a great picture of what these things are for or why they should care about exploring them.

A secondary complaint is that these things are a serious hassle.  The whole area is slow to explore, some of them cause environmental damage just for being there, many of your spells are altered as far as how they work or even if they work in a given node. Also as mentioned it can be tricky to get in and out of them as the various gates between them are scattered around and must be located anew in each node. All of this ups the hassle factor a great deal and a party that's just spent months of real time clearing out temple bad guys may not think it's worth all of that. I get it.

For me personally I've run and played in several attempts on the Temple over the decades and none of them ever made it to the nodes. I don't think this is particularly unusual. They're mainly accessed from the 4th dungeon level and by that time a successful party will have basically wiped out (or be close to wiping out) the whole operation. If you destroy all of the factions and creatures in the place you've effectively ended the current threat. It's true that the seeds for a future revival of the cult will still exist but the heroes don't really have to venture into the elemental nodes to put this one in the win column. 

So why am I planning to keep them in my campaign right now? A few reasons:

• For one, Goodman Games put in the effort to make these a more traditional keyed map with specific fixed encounters in addition to a table for wandering monsters for each node. This is a big improvement in what we had before and makes it quite a bit more "runnable" from the DM side of the table.
• I think with the right setup these turn from a slog into a search for some items that are needed to accomplish the ultimate goal of the adventure - sure, you can wipe out the cult but if you go about things right you can destroy the whole temple and its source of power - ending this particular evil for good rather than just for now. 
• Most importantly these things put the "Elemental" in the Temple of Elemental Evil! A lot of the dungeon is not terribly heavy on the theme. There are main temples and shrines and things here and there but the environments and the opposition tend to be fairly "normal" humanoids and monster types. Players may be wondering "where is the fire"? - well, here you go - a chunk of the elemental plane of fire you need to investigate to implement a final solution - and it's full of fiery things and terrain and creatures and it's one piece of a 4-part finale to this big honkin' adventure! 
  
  It is interesting when you see people complain that the temple isn't "elemental" enough - and I agree with that to a point - as they also mention that the nodes are a boring slog that they are eliminating. I mean, how about we make those things less boring and use them to add a huge dose of "elemental" to the final section of our campaign?

I will grant that ideally the nodes would be more integrated into the main dungeon areas or at least there could be more elemental stuff in the main dungeons - this would be more on-theme - but it's important to remember that the elemental thing is kind of a scam too - the divine powers involved here are using it for their own ends and are not really elemental powers themselves. It's really more of a cover story and marketing for beings otherwise not all that appealing to the masses. 

I'll talk more about my thoughts on setting up the nodes for a better game in a future post - for now let's look at the numbers involved. I'll warn you now - it gets pretty silly.

• Air Node: There are 32 keyed areas here and it adds up to just over 85,000 experience points. If we take our theoretical 6-man party from the prior post that was at 23,000 XP and 7th level after clearing out the other dungeon levels (but has not defeated the Big Bad) we can add over 14,000 XP to that total - they will hit the next level at 34,000 so our new 37,000 puts them easily into 8th.
  
  Now that seems like a lot and it is but over half of it is wrapped up in 3 big encounters and two thirds of it comes with 6 total encounters so this area is going to be some big fights in some fairly open areas. 
  
  
• Earth Node: Here we have 24 keyed areas which add up to just over 68,000 XP. This means just over 11,000 per character putting us at 48,000 total XP which his just enough to hit 9th.
  
  Here too about half of the points come from about 4 encounters but this area is much more confined so this will be a more dungeon-like set of encounters in a set of natural caves. 
  
  
• Fire Node: This node has 36 keyed areas and yields just over 63,000 XP. Our 6-man party will add 10,500 to their total here and 58,500 is still well within 9th level. 
  
  This is another carved rooms & tunnels type dungeon area and looks a lot like the prior temple dungeon levels - just with more fire. Over half of the experience here comes from just two encounters so those should be exciting to say the least.  
  
  
• Water Node: In this node we have 24 keyed areas and an impressive XP yield of 96,000! That puts our party up to 74,500 which is over 10th (64,000) and halfway to 11th!
  
  This is a large open area and of course being able to breathe under water is significant here. Roughly two-thirds of this XP comes from just 3 encounters so there could be some big moments in this section. 

This is ignoring wandering monsters - many of which in the nodes are part of a lair anyway - but even with some additional XP from those I think 11th is still too far away to be achieved this way. 

However, this total does not account for defeating the big bad opponent in this adventure which is possible and awards a variable amount of XP based on the condition it is when the fight happens. There is also an additional XP award for destroying the temple itself and that can actually earn enough XP to make it to 11th for our party. That's not counting any side adventures or wilderness encounters or locations. 

One final XP note - a character could be as high as 4th level when they start this and while they might hit some levels earlier than starting at zero the numbers get so big that those initial few hundred or few thousand XP don't change the ending point of 10th or 11th level. 

Also a reminder  -this is pretty close to the maximum. Odds are an actual party playing through it will have somewhat lower XP numbers than this and of course the number of PCs will make a big difference here as well. My point in doing this exercise is to show that it's there if your party wants it.

There is also some variability here in how much XP one awards for not just beating down opponents. There are many opportunities to negotiate with opponents all through the temple dungeons and yes even in the nodes too. There are a lot of intelligent creatures in this one and they are not all fanatical cultists nor do many of them even like each other nor are all of them volunteers! This can be a delicate area as if your players find out they are getting less XP for talking through an encounter than they would for solving it with violence then the talking may go by the wayside outside of dire circumstances. I'm leaning towards keeping the full XP regardless as solving a problem is solving a problem but I need to think through it more.

The last thing I have to consider now is that having done the math is that my goal of moving on to "Against the Giants" after this is .. actually dead on. Tales from the Yawning Portal (which contains the 5E version) recommends starting it at 11th level so ... wow ... that works out very nicely.

Now of course I have to see how the chaos of a big group actually playing through this works out. It should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to it even more now that I have run through this whole effort.