Dave, Chris, Steve, Bevis, Andrew - NO PEEKING! :)
Dammit, my players are romping - romping - though AOW. The main offenders are a dwarf tank, and a half-ogre war hulk. The beguiler is a continual hassle, too. And the rogue is taking levels of ranger and pyrokineticist. Well! I intend to beef up Zyrxog's Lair just a little. Only the melee aspects of it - the rest will be challenging enough. The one-trick-pony half ogre will never make it through the brain room.
We are running in Ebberon, so instead of drow, it's dolgaunts.
Area M2 - the ledge.
- I am replacing the drow with Kenku rogue2/ranger2 archers.
This is also a clue as to why the party is being targeted by the bad guys.
Area M4 - big fight with Myriannas
- Myrianas has Reach Spell instead of Augment Summoning. Note that this can be applied to a spontaneous cause wounds spell, as a full-round action.
- Myrianas has prepared Touch of Madness (reach spell) instead of cure crit. I'll give her a potion of cure crit.
- The dolgaunt monks are reinforced with a few dolgrim warriors, level 3. They have longspears, and feats monkey grip and reach weapon. I'm calling them "Dolgrim spear wall". Each weilds two longspears. They stand behind the monks and use the reach.
- the ledge overlooking the area will have it's entrance on the other side
- the ledge is populated with a few more kenku rogue/rangers. Their orders are to shoot anyone breaking through the wall to get at Myrianas.
More importantly, I'll try to actually run the monks properly - tripping with their tentacles and whatnot. And note to self - the badguys buff before combat, not during.
I was going to give the monks SwordSage levels, but this party needs more lower-level foes, as the beguiler can disable single higher level foes (he found this ranged touch spell that restricts an opponent to one action a turn - no save). And the half-ogre needs someone to great cleave: I'll put maybe four of those third-level shield wall fellas in, and three or four archers. Should make things lively. These guys do not manage archers well at all.
Yeah, it's a lot. But everyone is ECL 8 and has more hp than RAW would grant (we re-roll hp rolls below half the die when levelling). The party will survive - but they'll know they have been in a fight, for a change. Luckilly, the chattel pen is a fine place to put their replacement characters, should anyone die.
Ah, who am I kidding. The players will screw it all up again. They'll trash the bad guys and take their stuff.
Forget about psionic variants - as written, Zyrxog alone is quite capable of performing a TPK. Beef up any part of the adventure past his blast glyph at your own peril!
Anyhow, even if they do kill the bad guys and take their stuff - most of the treasure is cursed anyhow!
Kang
Zyrxog alone is quite capable of performing a TPK. Beef up any part of the adventure past his blast glyph at your own peril!
Agreed. he levitates out of range of the party - not sure what they will do. The beguiler has Dispel Magic, and under magic/psionic equivalence that will drop him for a round or two. If it succeeds. Which it won't. ... Or is the levitate an Su or Ex ability?
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The levitate is a spell-like ability, which can be affected by dispel magic. Since I sent up Zyrxog against 6 powerful PC's, I did boost him up a bit. I raised his charisma to 24, replaced Craft Wondrous Item with Ability Focus (mindblast), and replaced his grease spell with mage armour. I also raised the number of octopins from 2 to 4. Made for a more difficult battle, but my party still took him out without any casualties, due to some decent tactics. I also raised the advanced octopin's hit dice from 16 to 20, and actually killed one PC with a lucky critical hit.
Sounds like you have the right ideas - beef up the number of opponents, not their levels. In particular, make sure there's usually the same number of opponents vs PC's. If there's only 1-3 opponents, you can:
1. combine two encounters together (e.g. re-enforcements arrive during combat - a mid-fight change-up is always good to make the players re-evaluate).
2. add more minions (one minion per PC is a good rule of thumb)
3. do both (i.e. #2 then if that's not good enough, add #1).
I wouldn't add anything much that's not in the adventure though - there's enough encounters, with enough XP. In fact, I trimmed some out when I ran it, and mixed up the order here a bit as my PC's rested overnight so I sent an assassination squad after them, so once they defeated that I trimmed the big Z's lair down a bit - enough warm-up encounters were left but they didn't have to retreat and rest a second time before finding the mind-flayer.
As for Z, his encounter (and the ones leading up to it) are very situational - it entirely depends on your PC's, players and luck as to whether he's going to be overwhelming or simply a tough fight. In my game, he was the latter, as the fighter had Fly cast on him (even a potion would have sufficed), Z never got to mind-blast the whole party (they came in via the balcony, not the path at ground level), and the party fighter made his save (note the printed DC is generally seen as wrong, from memory drop it by 2) then flew over and slaughtered him. Other groups have used spell immunity (mind blast) to good effect - my group didn't think of that, even though they knew they were looking for a mind flayer. The octopins were tough, but once you've seen one intelligent players are not so easily surprised next time.
Good luck and have fun, as others have said, don't worry about the PC's waltzing through everything at this stage, let them enjoy the fun while it lasts. Although if they get to the end of this one without much challenge, and also the next one (Champions Games), you obviously need to work a bit harder to make them work a bit harder. I can't see it though, bits of Champions Games are going to be easy for your PC's, but they don't sound like they have all the bases covered so there will be an encounter here or there that really gets them and makes them work extra hard just to survive. That's the key strength of this AP - there's a lot of variety from adventure to adventure.
Lastly, keep an eye on the level of optimisation your group employs, and if necessary re-optimise NPC's to be a similar level of power. There's not a lot of NPC opponents in this AP, but a number of them are pretty vanilla, you could make them closer to earning their CR by tweaking a few feats, maybe even a few levels of prestige class here and there, as long as you've got a bit of time to do so. The monsters are generally all pretty sweet, there's plenty of new ones and ones from Fiend Folio etc that are pretty nasty, not many push-overs to come (just watch for the single BBEG type encounter: be prepared for your PC's to taken them out in a round or two, or if you don't like that just apply my rules above). As I say, it's early days really, it's good you are thinking along these lines already, just keep an eye on it over time and don't be tempted to adjust too much all at once, what's there is pretty well balanced on a long-term average basis.
I just added a second vrock to Zyrxog's lair, and that almost spelled doom for my group of killers.
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I just added a second vrock to Zyrxog's lair, and that almost spelled doom for my group of killers.
I did the exact same thing - added a second vrock. And, the wizard in the party I DM for only had electrical spells left. It was a fun twist in the game to watch unravel into panic, then terror.
I was gonna tinker with a psionic Zryxog. But I ran out of time. An extra vrock was easy.
Don (Greyson)
West Jordan, Utah
I miss the real, Paizo Dungeon.
Well, Myriannas is dead. The story is up at the usual spot - www.paulmurray.id.au.
I went into the game shop during lunch beforehand and had a quick look through the miniatures handbook, and found the perfect feat for the dolgrims - Distracting Combatant.
So the dolgrims stood behind the dolgaunts, each equipped with a pair of longspears, and harried the tank - giving the dolgaunts insane bonuses to hit (while they survived).
But, I screwed it up and din't get the rules right. And I didn't go for broke on the tank because, well, I couldn't deal with the whinging.
Inner lair after chrissie. I wonder how the players will deal with the levitating Zyrgog. And what is the deal with that viewing platform from the scrying room? I mean, say the players poke their heads through. Is Zyrgog already in the room? Does he go "Oh, sorry, I was expecting you to come through the other way"? What gives? I just know my players will decide to take the shortcut just to screw up the encounter.