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I'm moving to Gainesville, Florida and I don't know anyone. I'm looking to either run a game or play in one. Is there anyone in the area who's interested?

I'm leaving town and only have one session left with my gaming group. They've been playing Savage Tide and have just hit 17th level at the end of Into the Maw. They're horrible power-gamers, and nothing has really been able to even hurt them. So I decided that for our last session, I'm just going to throw Demogorgon at them. The full CR 33 Demonomicon of Iggwilv version. And the scary part? They might beat him.

Just finished the umpteenth Discworld novel. His stuff is really funny, especially for people in the know about fantasy/D&D stereotypes.

A wastrilith demon can cast blasphemy at will with a CL of 15. Suppose a 14th level party gets repeatedly dazed and weakened by this, their Strength decreasing by 2d6 when blasphemy is used. Does this Strength decrease stack with itself? Can a wastrilith just keep blaspheming everyone non-good to 0 Strength and just coup de grace them all?

The party's wizard got feebleminded, leaving the party stranded when they needed to teleport home and heal up. So the psion dream traveled everyone back to Sasserine, which was a horrifying mini-adventure.
In the dream world, they met up with Penkus, who looked just as dead and bloated as he did in TINH. After the party answered his riddle, he gave them his pegleg:

Penkus' Pegleg
Slot: Boot
Activation: - and Immediate
This pegleg can be pulled over a leg like hosiery, and makes the wearer appear to have an actual pegleg. It provides a +5 piratey bonus on Balance and Intimidate checks. When on a ship, the wearer gains a +10' piratey bonus to his speed. Once per day, as an immediate action, the wearer may cause an attack that would have hit him to simply miss (as if the attacker had rolled a natural 1).

Is this too powerful for a 13th-level party, do you think?

My party got pretty creamed by the mauhrezi demon and the skinwalkers.
Psion: feebleminded; figher: enfeebled; duskblade: frightened; cleric: fireballed to death; wu jen: unconscious and nearly coup de grace'd.

The fight lasted about 12 rounds, during which the fighter was dropped unconscious (and at 11 Strength, thus unable to use 6 of his feats), the duskblade was 4 rounds away from the fight, a summoned ghoul was killed by the wu jen's hell hound familiar, the cleric was dropped to negative 36 hit points, the psion was down to 1 hit point and no power points, and the mauhrezi demon teleported away with 9 hit points left.

Did anyone else run this encounter yet? Was it as ball-shreddingly brutal as it was for my PCs?

Lightless Depths is awesome but doesn't provide much direction when the PCs get to Golismorga. They're kind of expected to wander around until Rakis-Ka leads them to the Tear/Ziggurat or the DM decides they've wandered enough and throws them a bone.

In their wanderings, my PCs wanted to interact with/explore the buildings, which isn't really covered. I decided the buildings should all be sentient, irritated, and capable of rejecting intruders.

I ended up with:

A cilia-covered fleshy dome with tentacles of foundations, which, if touched, wrap around the offender and fill his mind with horrifying images of the Far Realm (insanity, Will DC 30 negates). Whether or not the save succeeds, thereafter the PC casts no shadow.

A towering polyp which invaginates and extends tongues to defend itself, or tries to invaginate and consume any PC attempting to climb it (Grp +50, 6d6 crushing damage and 1d6 Wis damage per round).

A vast auditorium of fleshy concentric toothed sphincters, the smallest of which can converse in aboleth and which leads to the labyrinthine undercity. Travel to this area is a nigh-infinite drop (as space is infinitely warped down here) and requires a Will save every round (DC 30) to prevent insanity. If the save succeeds, the PC is unconscious for that round.

Has anyone else had to think of ways to punish PCs who think, "Hey let's mess with the hideous alien nightmare buildings?"

My PCs decided, in order to stop the production/refinery of shadow pearls, to:

1) destroy Tlaloc's Tear
2) wait a day for the cavern to flood, and assume the aboleth will wake up and kill off/enslave all the kopru
3) go back to Holashner's ziggurat, with water breathing, and destroy whatever's left inside

I figure it probably won't make their job any easier when they return, since instead of a horde of koprus guarding the bilewretch, it'll be a bunch of aboleths and a horde of enslaved koprus guarding the bilewretch. It'll become virtually impossible for them to destroy it.
And even if they do get past the aboleths and destroy the bilewretch somehow, it may still bite them in the end, since it's a ton of XP and loot they will never get.

They've just destroyed Tlaloc's Tear. Anyone have any ideas or hints to drop to kind of lead these (highly chaotic) PCs to the ziggurat *before* it floods?

One of my PCs is a psion with Object Reading. This power allows one to examine an object and determine its 1) race, 2) gender, 3) age, 4) how it gained the object, and 5) how it lost the object. And so on, up to 10 previous owners.

1) M lemorian, 30, bought it from a troglodyte, left in Farshore when he was killed
2) M troglodyte, 27, traded with kopru, traded with Vanthus
3) M kopru, 300-ish, given by Bilewretch of Holashner, traded with troglodytes
4) genderless Bilewretch of Holashner, from beyond the realm of time so age is meaningless, given by a skinwalker, gave it to the kopru
5) M skinwalker, 200 or so, given the pearl by aspect of Demogorgon, gave it the Bilewretch of Holashner
6) M aspect of Demogorgon, 5000-ish, took pearl from fiendish oyster, gave it to a skinwalker
7) genderless fiendish oyster, 80, created the pearl, had it taken by aspect of Demogorgon

The problem: My players just saved the diplodocus from 6 terror birds with relatively little trouble. Then they come across 4 more terror birds at the entrance to the mountain pass and think, "Okay, there's only 4 and they're not that tough. They're even the same size as the last batch. Piece of cake." So they get a surprise round and lay into them, and are immediately getting the snot beat out of them by these 110 hp grappling machines of death.
This would definitely have been a TPK if I hadn't had Urol, Skald, Lirith, and even Tavey (he got a crit with a heavy crossbow) join in the fight.
I know the aranea warned the PCs that they were there, but is there any obvious visual indication I could've given the PCs that these elite terror birds aren't the run-of-the-mill kind they fought earlier?

Their speed is listed as... 5'. Terrifying in the water, certainly, but is a horde of kopru in Golismorga really a threat on land with such speed?
Is there some special environmental condition I'm not reading that allows them to not be so slow when the PCs encounter them in Golismorga?

So the party meets Rowyn. They start talking, and she offers them a job with the Lotus Dragon. They begin debating the possibility of taking her offer. The duskblade decides he's had enough of talking and attacks her. He beats her on initiative (by a lot) and channels a shocking grasp through his rapier. He crits her. 27 points of damage. Down she goes, without ever having acted. End of discussion.

Fortunately they kept her alive, so I can still have her seek bloody revenge in Sea Wyvern's Wake.

So, in this thread, I talked about how my 21st level party got killed by Kyuss or turned into his undead slaves.

I ran a brief (3rd-10th level) campaign in which some new PCs are sequestered in an extraplanar hideout, and when they come back out, the Age of Worms is in full swing and they have no idea what to do.
After escaping the now-nightmarish Free City, fleeing their epic-level undead PC counterparts, and fighting off an undead horde laying siege to the Twilight Monastery, they finally make it to Magepoint and find Manzorian.
There, with some help from Zeech, the PCs sneak into Alhaster while Celeste leads a diversionary attack on Kyuss' undead hordes. They head up to the Spire, fighting off small patrols of undead, until they reach the top, per Manzorian's instructions. There, they manage to destroy Kyuss' monolith (while simultaneously getting annihilated at the same time by Kyuss), at which point a ring of levitating spell weavers gate in and strip Kyuss of all divine abilities, saying that "the experiment is over". Basically he loses all divine abilities, all clerical abilities (and associated epic feats), and his worm that walks template. Then the PCs fight him again as just a mortal (albeit a very badass sorcerer). I wanted the party to have a fighting chance this time.
With backup from Manzorian and Agath, the PCs manage to whack Kyuss from all sides, smiting and healing and draining Con while Kyuss kept knocking them on their butts. The dwarven fighter, who'd specialized in bull rushing since 1st level, managed to actually knock Kyuss off the 240+ foot Spire, leaving him a bloody crater on the streets of Alhaster.
Anyways I thought this was neat and wanted to share.

Round 1: Rogue cohort readies to counter Mordenkainen's disjunction with a scroll. Wizard does time stop, throws 4 maxmized sonic delayed blast fireballs at Kyuss -- none manage to beat his SR. Monk tumbles to the other side of Kyuss. Druid turns into a pit fiend and casts a fire storm, which fails to beat Kyuss' SR. Cleric does a chained heal (using a special magic item) to heal the damage done by the harm that happened back when Kyuss started emerging. Kyuss spends the entire round emerging from the monolith. His divine aura dazes the cohort and the barbarian.

Round 2: Rogue is dazed. Wizard does a Mordenkainen's disjunction on Kyuss, which is useless, as he has no spells going. His two artifacts are unaffected. Monk does a hasted greater flurry and lands one hit on Kyuss. Druid tumbles up to Kyuss. Cleric does another chained heal to un-daze people. Kyuss uses Hand of Death and slays the wizard outright. Then he uses a quickened maze on the cleric (which fails, as he has greater spell immunity) and a quickened time stop (he has Multispell, Automatic Metamagic (quicken) and Improved Metamagic). While time stopped, he buffs himself with true seeing, protection from energy (x5), and a maximized delayed blast fireball, which wounds the PCs but doesn't kill anyone. He also readies an action to engulf the druid, which succeeds. The druid fails the Reflex save, loses all Int, and becomes a favored spawn of Kyuss. The barbarian moves up to Kyuss.

Round 3: Rogue moves up to the wizard's corpse and grabs her staff of the magi, intending to do a retributive strike. Monk does another greater flurry and lands one hit. Druid turns into a dire bear and moves towards the barbarian. Cleric does a greater turning and destroys the druid. Kyuss hits the cleric with a Divine Blast and a quickened maximized meteor swarm, killing him. Barbarian takes out a full attack on Kyuss, missing every time.

Round 4: Rogue begins sneaking up to Kyuss. Monk takes out another greater flurry, landing two hits. Kyuss engulfs the monk, turning him into another favored spawn of Kyuss, and does a quickened harm on himself to get rid of what little damage has been done to him. Barbarian attacks and misses again.

Round 5: The rogue jumps out at Kyuss, trying to get Kyuss to engulf him. The monk moves up to the barbarian and hits him once, nearly stunning him. Kyuss uses a Divine Blast on the rogue, annihilating him. The barbarian picks up the staff of the magi and readies to be engulfed.

Round 6: The monk beats the everloving crap out of the barbarian, leaving him with 6 hit points. Kyuss uses his death touch domain ability and snuffs him out. TPK.

The players had a very good time, despite being killed, and are looking forward to the next short adventure I'm writing, where a low-level adventure is going perfectly normally, when Kyuss worms begin raining from the sky and suddenly there's undead everywhere.

I'm sure there's been a thread on this already, but I can't find it.

So is it KYOOS (rhymes with "wuss"), or KAI-us (rhymes with "why us?")?

Just curious.

The party is full of serious powergamers, and I restricted them to the core books only. I also advanced Dragotha to a great wyrm and gave him maximum hit points per hit die, and added 100 hit points just for the heck of it. Mahuudril, Venk, Zyrith, and three avolakia clerics were in the battle as well.

The bad guys lasted all of 5 rounds, and managed to kill a cohort and an animal companion.

Ugh.

Any thoughts on how to make the fight with Kyuss a bit more challenging?

This might've been covered already, but I was just curious what other folks' parties used for their team name in The Champion's Belt. We had two different parties:

The Okktuplets (there were 8 of them including animal companions, and the barbarian was named Okk)

The Five Tongues of Mak Thuum Ngatha (one of the clerics worships a Far Realm deity)

Last night my players fought the Mother Worm from Kings of the Rift. I loved the Kaiju template when I saw it in a previous issue of Dragon, so when I saw it was actually used, I thought, "awesome, this will be a fight of immense proportions".

But as it turns out, the Mother Worm could barely scratch the PCs. A couple of their ACs were up in the 40s, so it couldn't even power attack and have a chance of hitting. They also had DR (via stoneskin, righteous might, & some from shapechange), so when the Mother Worm did hit, it would typically only do 1-6 points of damage per hit. The only two somewhat daunting things, as it turns out, were its AC and the DC for its paralysis. But once the cleric was dishing out the freedom of movement, this immense aberration was suddenly laughably easy.

Has anyone else had to beef this encounter up?

I just had a guy leave my AoW game who's been complaining for the last 15 levels that the loot provided by the campaign as written has been woefully inadequate. Have any other DMs here gotten this complaint?

This happened both when I was playing the Library of Last Resort, and when I ran it with another group:

Lashonna and the PCs scry on Heskin, and realize that they've got competition in finding the Island of Last Resort. The group decides that they must act immediately, and they teleport straight from Lashonna's house to the Island of Tilagos. They are now hours ahead of Darl and his crew, so they effectively skip the encounter with the orcish pirate crew, as well as Krekie ambushing them in the maze of menhirs (since she hasn't even gotten to the island yet).

I realize that Darl's party will eventually catch up with the PCs in the island demiplane, but has anyone else encountered this situation? If so, how have you dealt with it? Just have Krekie join Darl's party when they attack the PCs on the Island of Last Resort?