Haunted Opera House quest's enemies

[sinclairlim]

I've done this quest a few times, and find it rather cool in concept, but when doing so I find that there are some things I don't like. The quest seems to be balanced around being very easy, requiring no supplies but then also giving a very mediocre reward. This is fine but I think the quest is too easy and too unrewarding. I would like to see the reward and the difficulty being pushed up a bit.

The main problem I see is that the main enemy, the ghosts, spend their rounds using invisibility and iron horn, but don't use the time the PCs are knocked down to attack themselves. This means that they make you waste rounds, but they don't do anything with them. This doesn't make them difficult enemies, just annoying. I think this could be fixed by adding a new enemy, either a ghost variation or a stronger version of the "canal crawler" that spawns next to them, and reducing the number of "Ghost of the audience" to make them a support enemy, rather than the main enemy. If in addition to that this new enemy (and maybe the original ghosts themselves) were to be made immune to iron horn, their abilities would be actually dangerous rather than just annoying.

Se second problem I see is that the Canal Crawlers are too weak. Any fighter/barbarian or the like, while unbuffed, seems to be able to kill them easily- given that the ghost of the audience enemies don't drain your HP fast at all, this allows a frontliner to stay near the mages at the back, making the ambushes not dangerous at all. I think my first suggestion would fix this, but if not, adding a stronger version of the Canal Crawler to spawn among the regular ones would help make these ambushes more interesting.

As for the boss, I see that he is often (and unwillingly) lured to the bridges rather than fought in his spawn area, making the spawns that are supposed to happen while you're fighting him not work properly. I'm not sure how to address this. Maybe by blocking LoS to him by changing the direction the organ is facing the players?

As for the reward, it's fine as it is for this low difficulty, but if the difficulty were to be increased, I think making the quest drop 1 or 2 buffing potions per trip would be a good way of keeping the reward and difficulty balanced.

Just my 2 cents :)