Someone has talked me into running an epic level game for a couple of characters. I think he and his friend are creating 20th level gestalt monsters loaded with feats and abilities, but only using published sources.
This will be a challenge. I am thinking of running some sort of Planescape adventure. Maybe somebody gives them a dagger owned by her mother, and she wants them to find her, somewhere in the multiverse.
I am open to any and all ideas to make this work. I think I can handle them from the standpoint of game mechanics, but what do I have them do and how do I give them adventures that won't either frustrate them endlessly or let them waltz right through them?
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Mother was an adventurer. She wound up getting cursed by a powerful entity.
She knew she was going to turn into something dangerous, so she left her loved ones. She left the dagger that had carried her through her adventuring life to her child.
The dagger, because of all it has been through and because of what is happening to the fundamentally good mother, has become a minor artifact capable of subtly leading the way to the mother's location, whether by serving as a portal key or having some direction-divining ritual tied to it.
The party can follow the mother's tracks throughout the planes and possibly Sigil itself, running into the mother's old contacts and possibly a few old enemies. Some of these people would be interested in finding the mother as well.
The party eventually follows the mother's trail to the demiplane she has imprisoned herself in.
The catch is this: She didn't confine herself to a demiplane. The curse has turned the mother into the demiplane.
The PC's must survive the dangerous journey through the mother-plane, facing manifestations of all of her inner demons, encounter memories of her past deeds, friends, and enemies. They may be hounded and hindered by people that have followed them onto the demiplane.
They have to cleave away the infection, the doubts, the guilt, and regret that keep the mother chained in her current form, and somehow either help restore her to humanity, or help her become something more than she currently is, possibly leading to the birth of a new benign demiplane. Possibly even the birth of a new world, waiting to be inhabited.
Please keep in mind that I am very fuzzy headed at the moment. Damn sleep depriv.
So how do I have the PCs unlock clues from the dagger, without making it really boring "I cast this divination spell" or "I pay someone to cast this divination spell"?
So how do I have the PCs unlock clues from the dagger, without making it really boring "I cast this divination spell" or "I pay someone to cast this divination spell"?
Simple - the dagger has a plethora of anti-divination spells and protections put on it to ensure nobody dangerous tracks her down.
So how do I have the PCs unlock clues from the dagger, without making it really boring "I cast this divination spell" or "I pay someone to cast this divination spell"?Simple - the dagger has a plethora of anti-divination spells and protections put on it to ensure nobody dangerous tracks her down.
But why would the dagger have anti-divination spells placed on it?
One thought: divination spells can be used to determine where the dagger has been, but since the dagger was separated from the owner, divination spells are useless at finding out where the owner went after that point.
That makes the adventure less linear, as the PCs can decide which of the various places best provide clues for where she might be now.
Of course, that means I need to determine which places might have clues.
I have the idea that she was a valkyrie in Valhalla. I also have an idea that a fiendish bronze dragon in Hell, called Klang, who knows about her and knows where she went. (Klang is also planning an assault against Valhalla someday, just because he thinks the Einherjar are wimps.)
You can't go wrong with a Githyanki invasion.
I'm sure you can still order dungeon magazine #100, with the Githyanki incursion scenario meant for level 18 DnD 3.0. This is only a start to something much bigger. You could easily use this as a lead in to epic level stuff. The 'conversion' to PF should be painless.
Do something with the potential to literally change the campaign setting at its very core. You can have full scale war break out between planes, involving red dragons, githyanki, illithid, etc. with the characters constantly running on a variety of missions to try to swing the balance of the war.
A forum member here wrote up a great point based adventure add-on to Shackled City a while back; focusing on a war which the AP writers kind of glossed over. If you check the Shackled city message board, and look for red gorge, you'll see the right way to run a big war with tons of pieces in play. It's based on small missions earning points to swing the war one way or another, and doesn't focus on big-set battles with the DM trying to resolves combat for hundreds of NPCs. Great stuff.
Always good fun, have a 'Final Wars' sort of game in which the PCs must deal with the Tarrasque and other giant monstrosities running about flattening cities in a battle for dominance, all subtly being controlled by an Evil God that has waited 10,000 years without followers for this moment to swoop in at the last minute, take control of the surviving, most powerful monsters and dominate the Material Plane, having wiped out all his rival's flocks and making himself the single greatest threat/benevolent figure on the planet.
On the lost dagger idea- the dagger does not have to be very magical itself. The lost owner of the dagger is the magical one. Say that the owner is now a lesser divine being. As the dagger she carried in life is returned to each location important to her life, a vision is revealed.
If you remember the old EarthDawn, this is similiar to the mechanic used to let characters get higher level powers out of their items by learning specific facts about the item's history.
Each vision could further the mother's portfolio, eventually giving the epic characters either semi-divine status or some sort of major clue on a realm altering event. (maybe the entry of a new pantheon, maybe the creation of a new country, maybe the opening of a new continent for colonization)
Find a copy of the old 'Paladin in Hell' module for AD&D, and use all the conversion guides to bring it up to current. There is an excellent conversion to PFRPG for the module somewhere else on these boards, as well.
The module says it is for levels 15 to 20, but once you convert it to at least 3.5, I'd seriously be surprised if they make it halfway through, even with gestalt characters at level 20.
Especially if you do what our DM did, and have the first action the Dread Linnorm take be to cast Anti-magic shell.
Oh, and convert the Gorristro manually. The conversion on the boards here used an alternate creature for the massive demon beast, which I'm not sure would be as powerful as the manual conversion of the original our DM did.
And since they're making gestalt characters, make sure you don't pull any punches with your monsters. A gestalt character can usually take on a challenge a few CR higher than their level with ease.
One thought I had, especially as a way to get going in a relatively controlled manner, is to, instead of giving the PCs the dagger, have the PCs have to retrieve the dagger from somewhere.