laces_out's page

Turning sentiment against the PCs sounds good, but I don't think it will work so well in my campaign. They're in really close with the temple and have already saved the city once. The evil wizard was a respected figure in the past, but he's shown his true colors recently and is ruling through fear more than love.

Black Moria, I love your last suggestion. That fits perfectly with the type of campaign I'm running. I think that's what I'm going to go with.

Nondetection is a good idea. I'll go with that if I need to.

The wizard was a member of the city council who basically took over the city by killing off the council members that weren't subservient to him and then declaring martial law. He made a deal with the snake cultists and brought them in as muscle to enforce his rule. Now the party has delivered setbacks to the cultists by killing the mercenary leader who was running the city guard, so the wizard is going with plan B which is to use demons to keep the city under his thumb.

The balor is doing it because he was enslaved by the wizard, not because he wants to.

I'm running a D&D 3.5 campaign and the party is currently level 13. Right now I'm in a situation where I have an epic boss fight that they are aware of, but are in no way ready to face. It involves a level 19 wizard and a balor. It's pretty much a guarranteed party wipe in my opinion. The way the plot has developed they know where it is and how to get there. Knowing this party, they are going to make a beeline for this fight, even if I have their mentor figure give them the sternest possible warning that it's suicidal. The problem is that they have a legitimate reason to hurry on this, because the balor has been summoning demons to terrorize the city they are trying to protect. I feel like I've boxed myself in a bit, and I need a creative way to stall out the situation for a bit.

To give a little more context, the party captured a flying castle from a lich, and used a wish to get it back to town. They didn't specify where in town, so they ended up buried in the dump. The flying castle is powered by souls, so the lich had an assortment of monsters caged in the dungeon as fuel. He also had a balor trapped in a sealed magical coffin which the party members chose to ignore. They told their temple to keep an eye on the castle, but then went off to deal with other things. Naturally, the high level evil enchanter found out about it, and used a wish to enslave the balor. Now he's feuding with some snake cultists that he had conspired with to take over the city. The party has been mopping up the cultists in the city and just found out about the balor situation, although all they know is that it's a powerful demon.

My thought for now is to have the wizard move the castle to another plane, or just fly it away, but they'll probably be able to locate it somehow and teleport to it.

Anyway, I'm just looking for some inspiration on how to handle this situation.

I saw some sinkholes in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico last fall. Truly beautiful. There was one with a restaurant perched on the edge of it. There was a path running around the inside to the swimming hole with places where you could jump in from 20 feet up.

In a campaign I was running, the party was infiltrating a city infested with undead in an attempt to locate a teleporter in the Wizard's Guild tower. After a harrowing journey from the outskirts of town, they made it to the base of the tower. The cleric cast Windwalk on the monk, who proceeded to the top of the tower where the teleporter was believed to be.

I described to him a complex device on top of the tower, looking like a cross between a weathervane and a gyroscope. For some reason it didn't occur to him that this could be the teleporter, so he proceeded down to the next level of the tower where the bodaks were. He actually made his saves and managed to get away.

Funny enough, the party later had to return to the same tower to find a focus to get to the shadow plane, and they once again sent the monk into the tower. He insisted on averting his eyes instead of closing them when he encountered the bodaks, after a couple of rounds he failed the check and the save and died.

We tried doing this using a webcam/mic setup with Skype hooked up to my friends TV so we had a big image of the player's face on the wall which was pretty funny. It didn't end up working out, mainly because we had trouble getting an area mic setup well enough for him to hear us. When there was crosstalk in the room it just became a jumbled mess to the guy on the webcam. Also it was kind of a pain in the ass to setup and teardown so we came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it and pulled the plug.

Thanks for the ideas. I think I'm going to go with the idea that the genie will offer to take them to where the phylactery is (roughly) rather than allow them to just summon it to them. I wasn't really planning to make an adventure out of this but it will be fun.

The deal with this lich is that he has a secret bunker deep inside a glacier in the Elemental Plane of Ice which is where is laboratory is. That's where the phylactery will be. It's well guarded and there's almost no activity on that plane, so he figures better to have it secreted away so that if he dies the people who killed him won't be able to find it in time and he will be reborn. Also he's a bit of a plane-hopper so it's not that inaccessible to him.

I hope the PCs remember to do this before the 4 days are up. I'm pretty sure they don't want to fight him again. >:)

So the party in a game I'm running recently killed a powerful lich, but have yet to find his phylactery, which is sequestered away on another plane. They have one wish left from a genie and are probably going to wish for the phylactery so they can destroy it. So I have two questions:

1. The monstrous manual doesn't really specify what happens if you destroy the phylactery while the lich is alive. Will that kill the lich again? They still have a few days before he comes back to life, but I'm not sure what to do in that case. My gut feeling is that it should kill him.

2. How would you deal with players wishing for a phylactery that's hidden on another plane? My feeling is that it's beyond the scope of what would be considered a safe wish, so something would probably go wrong, but I'm looking for fun ideas for that.

Having recently played a druid, I can testify that they are pretty awesome. I'm not sure what the guy talking about the animal companion is on about, the animal companion is critical for the first couple of levels, but once you get to about level 5 it's not as critical to your combat effectiveness, since you start to get summons that are stronger than he is.

There was one point in our campaign, we were about level 6, when the party wizard was invited to an office of a local organization that said they might have a job for him. My druid came along to see what was up, and good thing, because when we met the guy who had recruited him, he immediately cast shocking grasp on the wizard and nailed him for a good chunk of his HP. I start summoning... Next round he tries a hold person on the wizard so he can finish him off, wizard makes the save. That round a lion appears and tackles our opponent to the ground, raking him for massive damage and grappling him. He tries to escape by polymorphing into a mouse and running away, the lion gets an attack of opportunity and eats him. :) Then there was the time I Entangled a carriage being pulled by horses at high speed. The horses got caught in the entangle but the carriage rolled on due to its momentum and crushed them. So much fun to be had with a druid, and that's not even getting into wildshape.

As for the roleplaying side of it, I think it's important to think about the historical context, such as it is. The concept of environmentalism or even conservation is a very modern one. In some sense it doesn't really fit into a medieval setting at all. I'm not saying you can't play a druid that way, but druids don't have to be hippies at all. Nature is ever-shifting, full of violence and chaos as well as sublime beauty, something to be studied and worshipped, loved and feared in all of its contradictions, not preserved like an antique.

PC's Name: Erasmus
Race: Human
Class: Monk
Level: 10
Circumstances of Death: Killed by a Bodak while trying to sneak into a wizards tower in a town overrun with undead in order to steal a focus for traveling to the shadow plane.
Setting: homebrew