Two more sessions, one two weeks ago and another Sunday.
We ran Ruins of Ramat two weeks ago and it was pretty much a disaster. It ended in a TPK despite my best efforts.
The party took on the demon even though it was clearly suicide. One guy had the absolute of always getting into fights with people clearly superior to him, and the rest of the party rushed into save him . . . it ended poorly. With one character left, I had a friendly NPC come in to save him from the demon. The remaining PC managed to survive until the encounter with the boss of the dungeon . . . then death when the Big Bad had only 3 hp left. Ruin got too high, Luck ran out.
It was pretty demoralizing.
So, with some time left in the session everyone created new 0-level characters - 8 for 3 players. This time we skipped the Mad Libs part. We had just started Starkweather Mountain when we had to end the session. Realizing that some of the problems with the previous two adventures (one with a near-TPK and the other with an actual TPK) were because I fiddled with them too much, I ran it pretty much as-is. It didn't stop the PCs from going off the beaten path, though. Even when swept up with the mob to the mountain, they decided that haste was folly, and headed back down to investigate the scene of the kidnapping. I used the sample clues provided in TA to use with the adventure and even gave them some extra XP for bothering to investigate. They didn't do a whole lot of investigating (and never did do any damage to the adversary die there or later), but headed back up the mountain. We had to finish the session with them trying to cross the chasm.
The next session, one player didn't show up but two others did, so we reallocated characters and everyone got two, which worked out pretty well. Straight off, two characters plunged to their deaths in the chasm. A third ate it thanks to the Frankendogs (which were pretty deadly; although only one PC died, three others kept going back & forth to 0 and Ruins got to 5 at this point). They were pretty lucky throughout the rest of the adventure (although they were pretty surprised when one of the Frankendogs came back to life; and one PC just barely survived after blowing the poison dust off the paper) and didn't set off any more traps or encounter anything else really dangerous until they got to Anton (Hugo shot at them with a crossbow while they were crossing the bridge then fled, and they never caught up to him). They still had four quakes left until the mountain was destroyed. They encountered Anton and were coming up with a plan to defeat him by tripping him into the lava when he told them his story ("He's the monster, not me!"). They also refused to believe that Drusilla had lost her footing and thought that she had jumped because she was horrified by what Anton had become! Anyway, to my surprise they completely agreed with Anton, and, witting that the entire village would be destroyed (the only local PC had plummeted to his death), made haste down the mountain and out of the area entirely, giving Anton a "Good luck!" (I don't think he is going to make it, guys). They made it out just in time to watch the entire village be destroyed by chunks of mountain and lava.
So I gave them some XP (they did survive, after all), which took them to 1st. We ended up with 5/8 PCs surviving, who then became a valiant, exotic, polymath, hunter, and survivor. They then began to solve a murder (six months later, and after doing some in-between adventures stuff where the polymath grew small horns because of magical research) of a friend of two of the PCs, where I took the city of Sibiu (Hermannstadt to the Germans) and made it a huge sandbox so they could investigate however they liked. I made randomly generated Germans and Romanians but I pretty much ignored the Hungarians because I didn't have a way to generate random names for them.
They didn't get very far in the investigation when we broke for next time.
So, how about a Hungarian random names table?