Yes this! It's one of the most enjoyable experiences you can have as a GM, I think. And my experience is the same as Valegrim's -- I don't care what powers it has, no players will ever keep a talking sword.
Since I'm playing in your PbP AoW campaign this brings dread to my heart.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6
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That's just cruel.I am actually contemplating a living spell version of Mordenkainen's Disjunction - gleefully awaiting the point I ask for a list of all the characters' magic items and start making Will saves.Mordenkainen's Disjunction.
Just plain nasty!
Beyond that, just annoying. Showcases the foolishness of the natural 1 save mechanic, and forces everyone at the table to roll dozens of dice for each hit. Not fun, and the game should be.
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Though this references a past point, a Black Dragon's darkness spell-like ability actually has a radius equal to their age category (1-12) times 10'. Give them the Spell Compendium's ebon eyes spell (1st level, can see in magical darkness w/o penalty) and they can bathe a combat in shadow and suffer no penalty. Add a rogue archer rider with the same spell appended and you've got a great sneak attack launcher.
(Technically, this requires the DM to permit the rogue to snipe and re-hide using the dragon for cover {breaks line of sight} and concealment {allows them to hide in the open). With the -20 Hide check, the PCs can overcome the challenge, but it's still brutal, especially if the dragon can fly away and allow the archer to re-establish their hiding place in the darkness cloud.)
putting skeletons in a suit of animated armor took the cleric 3 turning attempts before he relised it
Beyond that, just annoying. Showcases the foolishness of the natural 1 save mechanic, and forces everyone at the table to roll dozens of dice for each hit. Not fun, and the game should be.That's just cruel.I am actually contemplating a living spell version of Mordenkainen's Disjunction - gleefully awaiting the point I ask for a list of all the characters' magic items and start making Will saves.Mordenkainen's Disjunction.
Just plain nasty!
100% agreement here. I hate that spell; encountering a living version of it might well throw me into a homicidal rage.
putting skeletons in a suit of animated armor took the cleric 3 turning attempts before he relised it
Me like that. Simple but effective.
I've gotten 3 different groups of players with this so far. While knowingly hunting a vampire the PC's find a well guarded and grandiose coffin.
Here is a build to send at the pcs, Shown here as gestalted 19th lvl character and because its got 38 levels (technichaly) it applies for epic:
A Githzerai, with the Abberant Arms subtype (DMG2)
Give him 20 levels of monk
14 levels of soulstealer (book of vile darkness).
Nescesary feats:
Destruction Retribution
Tomb Tainted Soul
Multiweapon fighting feats (improved and greater)
Weapon Focus (unarmed strike)
Because of the monk levels and 4 arms, you get 40 unarmed strikes per round.
Because of the Soulstealer levels, each one that hits does 3 negative levels for a total of 120 negative levels. And heres the major loophole (if the one before wasn't big enouph), each time it hits, you gain a + 4 to str. On top of this, anything it kills is spawned as a wight controled by you and because of your destruction retribution, each wight the pcs kill does 3d6 damage to them and you heal 3d6 damage because of your tomb tainted soul feat. Imagine if the soulstealer has had ten minutes to spawn things, he would easily get atleast 50 spawns in such time (assuming it was in a city).
PC's follow a vampire to his crypt. Inside is three coffins. Two are plain and contain dessicated corpses. One is more ornate and contains what looks to be a perfectly preserved corpse.
Under one of the dessicated corpses their is a series of holes. To find these requires a DC 20 search check (under well lit conditions it becomes a DC 15). Under that coffin is the real coffin containing the vampire.
A hard challenge for pcs is quite simply a collosal sea monster such as a kraken while the pcs are in a boat.
By the time their at the level where a Kraken represents any kind of a fair challenge they'll all be able to move through the air via fly or some other means.
Have the party wonder in to a nest of Bonethief's. See who can make it out with the least number of bones stolen. Make sure the cleric isnt a high enough level to regenerate the missing bones. "How far did you say the next town was, and we have to crawl."
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16
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I was running Red Hand of Doom for the second time. You fight a lot of hobgoblins in that adventure.
No, more than what you're thinking.
Still more.
Now you're getting close.
And they all have potions of cure light wounds. Which they all conveniently die before using. At one point in the first campaign, every PC had about 30 potions of clw on him or her. (I represented these with white poker chips inscribed with "cure light wounds".)
So, let's mix things up a bit.
First off, I swapped out the potion effect, making them potions of lesser vigor that smelled like trolls and tasted worse. Hobgoblins would often quaff those if they had a round to prepare for battle.
So, the party fought a little harder and smarter to get those potions. (White poker chips, now reading "Troll Blood")
Then, once the Red Hand army started noticing that the same PCs were responsible for many of their woes, they sent in a strike force. Which got wiped out, of course. And I handed out the potions of "Troll Blood", except that these had yellow permanent marker around the edges.
None of the players noticed. And I only had to wait two sessions.
Think of when you really want to quaff a potion of lesser vigor. That's just the wrong time to drink dark reaver powder.
Black pudding in antimagic feild. I'm about to use that with beholders who have protection from arrows on them. Antimagic feild= negate rangers fancy bow, DR 10/magic= "did you roll max damage? no? well then don't bother." In a fair fight they would crush both the elder puddings and beholders (party level 20), but this ain't fair. getting the most bang for your CR 13 buck.
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A variant on the Reasonable Bad Guy. He's actually a pair identicle twins. They trade places quite often. One is always in the spotlight so that the other can stay in the shadows. Nobody knows that the two of them exist.
When the party unmasks Count Wellsington, or uses True Seeing to figure out his appearance, before he tricks them and gets away; they then rush to his estate to find he's been entertaining a lady friend while they were fighting, and has no wounds from the fight.
"But we used magic to discern his appearance! Could the Masque's deception spread into magic as well?"
This can serve not only to make the players think they're dealing with some powerful magic, but also lead them down the path to thinking that the "face" of the twins is a victim of this as well as anyone else.
Another is what I call "Two-Stage Zombies".
Basicly, you take commoners, and apply half the zombie template to them. They eat flesh, gain slam attacks, become stronger, their flesh becomes pale, they react on the instict;but they don't get damage reduction, they have greater than animal intelegence, once they feed they become docile, they can move quickly, and so forth.
Once killed, they rise 1d6 rounds later as full zombies, unless someone takes the time to burn their corpses or take off their heads.
Albino red dragon.
"What do you mean the fire didn't hurt it?"
Reminds me of the time I heard a story about a Wight Dragon. It was a red dragon with the wight template.
I once had a long vertical shaft with an iron golem at the bottom of it. The secret door into the shaft was about haldway up the shaft. The walls were coated in oil, one of the PCs spent several rounds fireballing iron golem, thinking it was a giant in armor because it was "eating" a large hunk of ham. The floor of the shaft was trapped with Reverse Gravity, and the floor was really a cube of stone that "fell" upward to crush any living creature that stepped on the floor. The shaft had a niche for the iron golem. The iron golem had a vault built into its chest where the big treasure was. Inside the vault was an aurumvorax (an 8-legged wolverine that eats precious metals (and ham) and is denser than lead)!!!
Have a group of Half Red-Dragon/Half-Trolls attack the party. (Trolls having the regeneration ability and being also half-dragon having the imunity vs. Fire!)...
Ultradan
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Rocks fall. Everyone dies.Ah a classic.
Done that once or twice, stupid halfling rogue survived. But he got punted by the Hill Giant who started the rockslide in the first place.
Nasty things I've done as a DM;
Invisible Iron Pikes at the bottom of a 5 foot pit with a 2' wide walkway... tpk on that one, they weren't supposed to all jump into the pit to avoid the Walkway.
Symbol of Death hidden by an Illusion so obvious the party all make their saves and then Ranger, the Rogue and Fighter died. The halfling Cleric and gnome illusionist were pissed at having to carry the half giant, half orc and the 7' tall human all the way back to town to get them raised.
Young White Dragon with 6 levels of Ur Priest
DM: You search the body and find several vials. All are black except for one which seems to be labbeled "healing poiton".
Player: Oh thats good, that fight really got my fighter. I'll take the potion.
DM: You just took the injestion poison, roll fortitude...
Deceptive tone of voice... This is one of my faves.
Quick example, current SCI-FI campaign. Yesterday the PC's are hanging out in their base chatting with some NPC comrades. Meanwhile some nasties are about to blow the hell out of the place...
One player was chatting to his NPC pal. I was describing the usually flamboyant gestures of this NPC, and mid-sentance I threw in the information that this person's head had vanished, the player was engulfed in blood and goo, and that everyone had lost their hearing. I said this all totally matter of fact without shifting gear at all.
In delivering this information with zero vocal drama, I caught the PC's totally with their pants down and they did not know what was going on for several rounds, meanwhile all hell broke loose : )
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Black pudding in antimagic feild. I'm about to use that with beholders who have protection from arrows on them. Antimagic feild= negate rangers fancy bow, DR 10/magic= "did you roll max damage? no? well then don't bother." In a fair fight they would crush both the elder puddings and beholders (party level 20), but this ain't fair. getting the most bang for your CR 13 buck.
Ob Rules lawyer moment:
DR/Magic is supernatural, it goes away in an AM Field. Else good idea.|
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Give Intelligent Magical weapons personalities of their own..I once had a character find a Pacifistic sword that really wanted to be beaten into a plowshare.....
How about a Blue dragon who has the walls and floor of its lair lined with melted copper pieces...party enters, dragon breathes...conductivity does the rest(not my idea originally I think it was in a very early Dragon or maybe even in Alarms and Excursions)
throw a totally normal encounter at the party that makes them hesitate the next time the same thing happens to them...for instance...your party is travelling through a remote area and a thunderstorm starts...they spot a castle on a hill...the creepy old butler gives them admittance and leads them to the Master...who..is found playing the organ...at dinner he tells them .."I never drink.... Wine"(in a good old fashioned Bela Lugosi accent of course). By now your players will be thinking they have a stereotypical vampire on their hands...not so the old guy is just a normal human..the castle is decrepit because he is the last of his line and out of cash and the creepy old butler is just ...a creepy old butler. Watch as your paladin convinces himself that the old man is blocking his detect evils and kills him...bang auto loss of paladin abilities until a really heavy atonement is done.Granted this depends on your players being stupid enough to believe the stereotype but I had it work once
Some I have used with great success in my dungeon:
A pit trap in a high-level dungeon, so that the character will use fly to pass it, and then an anti-magic shield just above the pit trap. Of course it was a very deep pit trap and had poisoned spikes at the bottom. It almost killed the careless level 18 wizard.
Add a spellcaster to a group of monster and let him manipulate a sphere of annihilation (with a talisman of the sphere of course). I used one in a high-level fight. It never hit the group, but they were scared out of their wits all the time.
Once when the group was rewarderd for succesfully saving the country, some of their enemies rigged the stage on which the rewards were given and the speeches were held. It was rigged with a trapdoor and some magical traps which would activate the moment the group ascended the stage. Of course the characters never checked the stage and only saw the trapdoor in the stage opening when it was almost to late...and then the monsters came out.
Coating a whole room, including doors, walls, ceiling, with green slime. Even better when there is an anti-magic field in the room.
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My personal fave is using Shocker Lizards on the walls. group them up in threes and they can deal massive amounts of damage a round. even at the mid levels my players learned to hate it when my description includes "and you hear a scritching sound on the other side of the column.". And if you combine this with the above idea of the copper covered floors, even more badness.
in terms of trap design: a favorite is placing an obvious tripwire near the floor and then an invisable tripwire at chest height. most rogues i know will stop after seeing the obvious oen and not bother to search anymore. or put a pressure plate the entire width of a hall, 5 feet deep, and a pit trap on the other side. a player hopping over the pressure plate falls in. for added cruelty, you can have the pressure plate actually activate spikes in the pit or a falling rock trap over it or something. my last evil tool is the permanent glue (or whatever it's called). especially when combined with slow acting traps this can usually mean loss of limbs. like in a room with sand filling up and the ceiling descending, you can put the glue on the switch that opens the door. it's easy enough for the player to see if he searches, but will he remember when he has to act fast?
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Dragons with 2 levels of Unholy ravager of Tiamat..which gives them breath weapon substitution. Watch your party gear up for the red dragons flame breath then hit them with Frost and watch their fire shields damage them
LOL and we were complaining about character optimisers...hah we have so many more weapons at our disposal than they do...and we're usually more evil too
The ultimate anti munchkin weapon...the Mirror of opposition...see how they like it when they are fighting themselves
search marky.
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RPG Superstar 2010 Top 32
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Though this references a past point, a Black Dragon's darkness spell-like ability actually has a radius equal to their age category (1-12) times 10'. Give them the Spell Compendium's ebon eyes spell (1st level, can see in magical darkness w/o penalty) and they can bathe a combat in shadow and suffer no penalty. Add a rogue archer rider with the same spell appended and you've got a great sneak attack launcher.
Add Blood Wind from the Spell Compendium and the dragon can use his natural weapons while 20' away...
One of my favorite is Clerical Giants most of them get two levels per CR increase so you can make a CR 13 12th level Cleric Hill Giant and add all the crazy Cleric Buffs to him and use a Blade Barrier to split up the room and kill the spell caster in melee combat while the fighters are on the other stide of the blade barrier
One of my favorite is Clerical Giants most of them get two levels per CR increase so you can make a CR 13 12th level Cleric Hill Giant and add all the crazy Cleric Buffs to him and use a Blade Barrier to split up the room and kill the spell caster in melee combat while the fighters are on the other stide of the blade barrier
Yeah, I LOVE non-associated class levels! I made a Spellthief Eldritch Giant (MM3) that was pretty sick. I like adding warlock levels to tanks. It adds to their versatility, you can enhance their melee effectiveness with Horrendous Blow, and they're a lot easier to run than "real" spellcasters.
Ok, my turn (so I'm not just a party pooper)
Using an electronic dice roller for surprise spot/perception checks, so the players don't hear the clatter of dice.
Dreams. My players HATE dreams.
I prefer my players to hear the dice rolling and fear my intentions.
Dreams are indeed fun for us.
High level Warblade with a spell storing weapon holding an Anti-magic field.
High level Warblade with a spell storing weapon holding an Anti-magic field.
What kind of weapon can store a 6th level spell? Is it epic, or just a higher plus cost, like +3? Greater Spell Storing? I can see allowing up to 6th level spells as a +3 cost, and up to 9th level spells as a +5 cost.
Can you imagine getting hit with a sword, and then you're B's Crushing Fisted? Or Sudden Maximized Energy Drained!
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in terms of trap design: a favorite is placing an obvious tripwire near the floor and then an invisable tripwire at chest height. most rogues i know will stop after seeing the obvious oen and not bother to search anymore. or put a pressure plate the entire width of a hall, 5 feet deep, and a pit trap on the other side. a player hopping over the pressure plate falls in. for added cruelty, you can have the pressure plate actually activate spikes in the pit or a falling rock trap over it or something. my last evil tool is the permanent glue (or whatever it's called). especially when combined with slow acting traps this can usually mean loss of limbs. like in a room with sand filling up and the ceiling descending, you can put the glue on the switch that opens the door. it's easy enough for the player to see if he searches, but will he remember when he has to act fast?
Yeah, there was a trap in a dungeon my party went through last time where there was a rope hanging from the ceiling with a loop laying on the floor with the words "Step Here to Trip Snare" written inside the loop. The rope did nothing, it was simply tied to the ceiling, but the space immediately past that was a pit trap.
Then there was the room in which every five foot space was a metal plate, and the whole room was like a non-lethal game of minesweeper. Every time you step, you'd hear a voice telling you how many plates around you were trapped(1 Point of Eletricity plus Fort-Save vs Paralysis), but not which ones were. Circumstance was on my side on this one, because I don't think my DM knew I spent four hours a day over two months on a boring summer vacation playing minesweeper.
High level Warblade with a spell storing weapon holding an Anti-magic field.What kind of weapon can store a 6th level spell? Is it epic, or just a higher plus cost, like +3? Greater Spell Storing? I can see allowing up to 6th level spells as a +3 cost, and up to 9th level spells as a +5 cost.
Can you imagine getting hit with a sword, and then you're B's Crushing Fisted? Or Sudden Maximized Energy Drained!
Greater Spellstoring.
A Vow of Poverty Monk with Improved Sunder has also been know to wipe the grins from player's faces. Perfect oppoetunity to remove the gamebreaking item/weapon the players weren't meant to have yet.
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Cavern with multiple carrion crawlers and stirges. Crawlers move in for the kill and as the players are paralyzed the stirges feast. Good low to mid level encounter, plus it makes sense in an ecological sort of way. Ran that encounter with the PCs being absolutely terrified of getting hit by the crawlers and ending up drained by the ugly little bloodsuckers.
Sneak attacking while the PCs are using Climb (and denied their Dex to AC).
Warlocks using Repelling Blast while the PCs are on narrow ledges or balancing on top of pillars or near the ledges of pits, etc.
Goblins mounted on advanced worgs, or worgs with class levels, like barbarian, ranger, scout, rogue, or fighter--or blackguard! (Oh, look, they're just goblins--erk!)
Quickened Truestrike combined with two-handed weapon and Leap Attack, while Power Attacking for 20 (+60 damage!). Combined with pounce and haste and that duskblade's 13th level ability, you can get 5 attacks in for +60 damage. Use a keen falchion for extra carnage (+120 on crit), or scythe if you're feeling lucky (+240 on a crit!).
Quickened Truestrike combined with two-handed weapon and Leap Attack, while Power Attacking for 20 (+60 damage!). Combined with pounce and haste and that duskblade's 13th level ability, you can get 5 attacks in for +60 damage. Use a keen falchion for extra carnage (+120 on crit), or scythe if you're feeling lucky (+240 on a crit!).
Oh yeah this could be fun
Frenzied berserker illithid (yeah, I went there).
Area effect poison (yellow mold, stinking cloud) plus undead. DM hilarity ensues.
"Okay. Now roll to see if you get pregnant."