Wrath of Ashardalon and Castle Ravenloft

So after the initial success of Castle Ravenloft we picked up Wrath of Ashardalon.  Awesomely, they work together to form a 3-part "Campaign".  We attempted the first stage of the campaign - to limited success.

The kicker, both with the core games and the campaign, is the limited number of healing surges - but I'll get to that in a bit.

So we randomly picked what characters to play and ended up with the Dwarf Cleric, Dwarf Fighter, Human Rogue and Human Ranger.  The ranger is both exciting and frightening because, for some reason, rangers in our games always die, always.  ALWAYS.

So the goal of the first session is to free several kidnapped townsfolk.  Simple enough, go into the dungeon, save the innocent, kill some baddies, get some treasure, maybe even level up - we can do this.  Once we got our marching order figured out, using the fighter to move ahead first, then the ranger to distance scout a tile, rogue/ranger/fighter kill the spawned monster, cleric staying on the previous tile to prevent to much trap damage.

So some treasure, a level-up and 11 tiles later, we find the townsfolk and the nightmare that is NPCs in this system.  These shits cower, wander, and do randomly the stupidest things they possibly can, then turn into fucking wraiths when they die.  We actually considered killing all but one of the townsfolk just to make our escape from the dungeon easier - we should have.  If you play any computer/console games, you've likely done at least one escort mission - they suck there and they suck here.  We found and freed the townsfolk only using 1 healing surge.  By the time we got 1 of those fuckers out of the dungeon we had used all but 1 healing surge.  Now this is where those healing surges become important - you only get a limited number of healing surges for the entire campaign and the clerics decent healing abilities are the utility and daily powers (effectively once per session).

So, net result, we'll have to replay the first stage due to townsfolk being *not the brightest, swiftest, most eager* individuals to get out of a *deadly, monster-filled, death pit* dungeon.