My Age of Worms campaign has finally ended, after a year and a half playing once a week.
Yesterday we played the final fight against Kyuss at the end of "Dawn of a New Age". As with the Dragotha fight, I'm posting this information so others can (hopefully) benefit from it.
We play using Pathfinder rules, Core Rulebook only. The setting is Forgotten Realms. I used the Jergal metaplot from the Realms conversion documents, written by Eric L. Boyd. I also added a lot of things of my own creation, like a modified Mak'ar room in the Spire of Long Shadows (it was a small spaceship)
The party:
- half-elf barbarian 20
- half-elf druid 20, small cat animal companion
- human monk 20
- half-elf cleric 20. Magic and Protection domains. It is important to say at this point that in our group we don't use Mage's disjunction.
- half-elf sorcerer 20, infernal bloodline
- Syranus, solar ranger 5
When the party got access to 9th level spells they tought about casting gate and getting a powerful ally to help them from the beginning of "Into the Wormcrawl Fissure". I suggested the creatures from the "gating in the heavy hitters" article in Dragon magazine. I statted up all of them and they chose the solar. Syranus doesn't wear the standard solar full plate but has taken a lot of gear from dead enemies to compensate for that. The cleric player is the one who runs the solar.
No additional allies for this fight. The party had the two fragments of the Rod of Seven Parts (so they got that nice +20 attack bonus against Kyuss), the sphere of annihilation, the Talisman of the Sphere, and the Circlet of Zosiel. In the Rod's case, they had to fight the pit fiend Visciannix to get it (it wasn't an easy fight).
On the other side of the ring we have Kyuss the Wormgod. Since I'm running Pathfinder, I had to convert him. At first I thought about using the Mystic Theurge prestige class along with sorcerer and cleric levels, but in the end I kept the True Necromancer levels so he didn't lose those cool powers (some of them are very important, like that increase in CL on necromantic spells and sp-like abilities). I chose the arcane bloodline for the sorcerer levels, since that benefited him much more than the undead bloodline. Clerics have less spell slots in Pathfinder so I adjusted that, deleting some spells from the statblock.
I looked over the Worm that Walks template published on Bestiary 2 to see if something could be added or modified on his statblock. I gave him fast healing, deducting his CR from the SR. That helped him last longer.
I added his divine Rank 1 to his AC, since the magazine forgot to account for it. I also chose an additional Divine Salient Ability: Automatic Metamagic for his cleric spells. According to the 3.x Divine rules, a Rank 1 deity should have two DSA. Kyuss already had Divine Blast.
At some point I thought about adding 2 slams to his attack routine in case he lost his Mace, but my players didn't tought about using the sphere to annihilate his artifacts, so it wasn't needed. I suggest looking at the Worm that Walks statblock on Elder Evils (3.5) for an appropriate damage value and additional ideas on how to improve Kyuss.
The feat selection stayed mainly the same, but I swapped some useless feats (like maximize spell) for something a lot more interesting: Multispell (x2), Vital Strike, Power Attack, etc... that helped him to keep his melee damage output at a threatening level and stay on par with the PCs on the action economy (he could cast three quickened spells per round, each one at +1 DC due to bloodline arcana).
How I debuffed Kyuss:
When I first read the adventure, I couldn't believe how weak Kyuss gets if the PCs accomplish all the objectives. I wanted to reward my players without turning the final battle into a walk in the park, so these are all the benefits my group got by fighting despair on Alhaster and destroying the Unlife Vortex:
- Kyuss needed two turns to emerge. Not rounds, but turns.
- He lost his +20 insight bonus to AC.
- He lost his Divine Aura.
- The Wormgod's spire lost all those nice player-killing magical effects.
The combat:
The party reached the top of the spire after dealing with Lashonna, the blessed angels and Maralee. Everyone had deathward, freedom of movement, fly, haste, bear's endurance and greater heroism. Some had spell resistance on them. The animal companion had animal growth.
When they saw the monolith and the negative-energy explosion, we rolled initiative. Kyuss got the third position I think. the whole battle lasted 6 rounds.
The monk, the barbarian and the druid moved near the monolith.
The solar kept his distance since he was going to shoot his bow and cast spells.
The cleric stayed near the stairs and casted a buff (righteous might or divine power).
Kyuss got his first turn, and started emerging.
The sorceress moved and opened the portable hole.
First round over. At this point, an alien artifact the party had recovered from Mak'ars spaceship (Numunal, the spellweaver codex that appeared on Dragon magazine) appeared flying near the monolith and projected an image of Jergal as a shadowy spellweaver, with new arms growing directed at the avatars of Bhaal and Myrkul (they were outside of Malchor Harpell's epic barrier), Kyuss and an avatar of Bane that had fallen seconds ago from the sky near the ziggurat. The important thing here is that the party had until round 10 before Jergal absorbed his 4 horsemen of the apocalypse and became the new Forgotten Realms overgod, surpassing Ao.
Second round, some party members tried to destroy the alien artifact (it didn't had an effect on the battle but the party didn't knew this), others casted some additional buffs and Kyuss emerged fully as a full round action. He casted divine power, miracle (to get the benefits of a greater heroism spell) and wail of the banshee at the druid, the druid's animal companion, the solar and the cleric. Unfortunately, I rolled crap on half the caster level checks to overcome SR and the other half of the characters saved taking no damage. Only the animal companion failed the save and almost fell unconscious (0 hit points). Kyuss threw a worm as a free action at the sorceress. The sorceress extracted the sphere of annihilation from the portable hole and moved it towards Kyuss (not enough to reach him). She also casted a mage's sword spell to get rid of the worm.
On the following rounds, the batlle went more or less like this:
- The monk and the barbarian stayed near Kyuss nearly the entire battle. Both of them died from full attacks or decapitation (barbarian got "vorpaled"), but were later revived with a miracle spell from the solar. With the heroism and haste effects, the barbarian could hit Kyuss regularly with 3-4 attacks. The monk was having worse luck and lower bonuses, so he failed a lot more.
- The druid full-attacked in dragon form using shapechange, since the circlet of Zosiel allowed her to punch through Kyuss' damage reduction. She died after Kyuss returned the favor, and got revived with another miracle. The animal companion full-attacked and died as well.
- The sorceress spent her move actions almost every turn to move the sphere and touch Kyuss. The standard actions were used to cast spells or redirect the mage's sword to a new enemy (the worms Kyuss kept throwing at her). Her touch attacks were high due to the rod of seven parts fragments and increased dexterity. Kyuss' lower AC helped too. It was her who dealt the killing blow using the sphere.
- The solar alternated his turns between casting healing spells/reviving fallen allies using miracle or full-attacking with his bow. He did good damage to Kyuss.
- The cleric casted a lot of healing spells, basically. His last spell (mass heal) gave the party the victory against the wormgod, because she succeeded in the SR check (rolled really high on the die, 16 I think, with both spell penetration feats) and Kyuss ate a hundred points of damage even after saving. That damage left Kyuss under 200 hit points, and the next hit from the sphere killed him (the adventure specifies this).
- Kyuss: As I said before, the firs spells were burned mostly on buffing his melee attacks. Why? because the party was well protected against magic effects in general and I thought it was better to focus on the melee to do the most damage. With divine power and greater heroism, he got a +10 to attack and +6 to damage. Power attack was always used, adding +15 to damage and -5 to attack. +50 to damage rolls in total, and an extra attack at the highest bonus. With those spells in place, I could hit most of the characters easily. Luckily for me, the characters were too busy trying to kill the wormgod to even think about dispel magic.
For the most part, I kept full-attacking and killing or severely damaging characters; and using the quickened spells to cast harm to heal. After the sorceress hit Kyuss for the first time with the sphere, I tried to use an implosion to kill her and get some pressure off, but I rolled crap on the SR check and decided it was better not to maintain concentration on the spell (Kyuss had a lot of 9th level spells so it wasn't a big deal). On the next round I thought about casting gate on the sphere, but clearly the dice were against me and if I failed, Kyuss would have probably died on the next round. I casted harm a third time to heal the maximum. To annoy the sorceress, I kept throwing worms at her so she couldn't have all the actions without facing the consecuences of the super-worm eating your brain.
The fifth round sealed Kyuss' fate. I tried desperately to kill a character or two, but that round I rolled like three natural ones (luckily for me Kyuss doesn't miss automatically) and the last two attacks failed to hit. And then Kyuss got hit by the cleric's mass heal. When the sorceress next turn came up, she controlled the sphere, rolled the attack and hit.
The Wormgod died and the Realms were safe again!
Final thoughts:
Both the players and I had a lot of fun with this fight. Running Kyuss was much more fun than Dragotha, because there were less combatants and turns were much quicker to resolve. As the magazine says, he is a complex combatant, but in the end I don't think you have to devise a very detailed strategy. As with the Dragotha fight, magic is less useful than simple melee attacks, except for buffs. I had nightmares about a two-round end battle but in the end Kyuss proved to be an acceptable challenge after the players worked hard to debuff him. I know some DMs have made Kyuss more difficult but what I wanted is a satisfactory ending for our campaing, and I think we got it. After a very difficult campaign (55 deaths, not counting animal companion deaths), it was great to see my players happiness after killing a god!
I will try to post a link to my Pathfinder statblocks conversion
document on another thread so other DMs can use it if they want.
Awesome story!
I'm working my way through AoW now, and would love to see any statblocks you've developed.
I have a bunch of pathfinder conversion stat blocks (mostly that other people on these boards have sent me). If you want them PM me and I'll e-mail them to you.