Hi everyone!
I love when the players surprise me, but I hate being caught unprepared. Browsing this board has been a great help preventing being caught unprepared, while leaving plenty of room for surprise. So I thought I would contribute with a situation that came up during our game.
In TotSE where mass travel spells like Windwalk was still out of reach, several days of trekking towards the cathedral was expected.
I was very surprised when I realized that the 9.L. sorcerer had selected Phantom Steed as one of his only 3, third level spells. A good hour later they were all traveling at speed 180’on silent phantom horses. Kaurophon had already estimated that the journey would take about a week (speed 20’), but with their new steeds they could make the distance in … one day!
The group elected to bypass all encounters if possible, with full focus on reaching the Cathedral as soon as possible. How do you to catch anything with a base speed of 180’?
If necessary the party could even hustle at speed 360’ for up to 4 hours without killing the steeds. A Slaad could have fireballed the entire bunch, probably destroying the steeds, but that seemed a little farfetched to me and not entirely fair.
As it turned out I let them bypass most of my planned encounters, unsure of how to deal with situation (unprepared). The group really needed the XP from the combat encounters to keep up the pace, and noncombat interaction with some of the residents, to make Occipitus more “alive”.
Some of my planned encounters could fortunately be used later in the adventure, which brought up another question. One of my players made a comment during a combat with some demons. “Vrocks, Telekinesis and Plasma-in-the-sky!” The spell is “by will” and can be used at range 1000’. After roughly 7 rounds, 8d6 fire and 8d6 evil each round (no save) will ruin most character’s day. Could be nasty!
Anyone used telekinesis to lift the characters high up in the air?
SoEgern
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