So my party hit 14th level and they're rolling around the underdark on a quest to find the place where Torm killed Bane. I need some good challenges for them and the Bestiary and Bestiary 2 are looking a bit light on solid creatures that fit the bill.
I have the gamesmastery guide, Core Rules, Advanced Players and both the Bestiaries - but none of the APs or other books. I do have a whacking great 3.5 library, but I'm nervous about just lifting high level stuff and dropping it in due to game balance.
Ideally I'm looking for angel/deva/devil/demons and high level NPCs. Any ideas of products I should grab that would help out?
Thanks in advance!
if you are looking for grab and go npc's you might want to check out pathfinderdb npcs there are a bunch there that are fairly high level that you might be able to use with whatever modifications are needed for your particular story.
I am running a campaign where the PCs are 18th level and we started at 14th--believe me, I feel your pain.
One thing to remember--and this is all the more true at high levels--is that many enemies can be used instead of one, and this may prove to be the better challenge in many cases (because as you hit high levels, it's more likely that either PC or enemy will manage to one shot the other with a lucky hit).
The PRD posts equivalencies for CR, so...
# Creatures Equal to…
1 Creature CR
2 Creatures CR +2
3 Creatures CR +3
4 Creatures CR +4
6 Creatures CR +5
8 Creatures CR +6
12 Creatures CR +7
16 Creatures CR +8
So, rather than attack someone with... let's see, for evil enemies, you're pretty much limited by the first Bestiary to 1 adult red dragon or 1 nalfeshnee... try 2 ropers, or 3 barbed devils or stone golems, or 4 rakshasa, or 16 shambling mounds, etc. etc. Multiple outsiders and golems both make for nasty challenges (but hopefully fun if done well).
In addition to what Kolokotroni linked to---you could also access the NPC Gallery from the GMG and use some of the higher level encounters in there (2 13th level clerics can make for a great fight, though see my notes below).
Also increase your pool of monsters also by adding templates--attack them with an advanced template iron golem or glabrezu (CR 13 becomes CR 14), for example. The various simple templates are easy ways to do this. Add class levels and/or boost hit dice.
The other trick is to make sure you use good smart terrain that can make some things easier and somethings more difficult (something I am still learning to do). You can use weaker monsters but find other ways to make the fight challenging (fighting over a pool of lava or something).
You can of course make character enemies with class levels, like a 15th level fighter or sorcerer (or 2 13th level ones, etc.). Bear this in mind---also regarding powerful monsters with lots of different abilities---
Making and tracking spell lists is a huge pain. It is the one problem I have repeatedly had as a GM running a high level campaign. High level spellcasters are downright obnoxious to build, I find (I actually paid someone 20 bucks on this board to help me write up enemy powerful spellcasters because I was getting so frustrated with it). Beyond building the character, you have to pick spells and find a way to reference them easily. Even with trying to prep beforehand, I often find myself running to look up what some spell does (or some "universal monster ability" that doesn't get properly explained in the statblock), which slows down combat and frustrates both me and my players. It is doable, but does require a lot of prep time (I find myself pasting whole spell descriptions into homemade statblocks so I don't have to always be looking stuff up in game, which increases my prep time exponentially). It's easier if I can get Internet access and can access the PRD (the hyperlinking makes it much easier to work with than either the PDFs or the printed books), but only one of the three possible places we play has Internet access I can use.
So... long story short, keep your powerful spellcasters minimal and design them when you have time--or get help.
Good luck, I hope you find some great ideas.
If you have time to build the encounter consider environmental or out-of-monster difficulties for the party to contend with. Two stand-bys that I go to when I'm flapped for ideas are Environmental or Temporal encounter situations.
The reason I go to the above mentioned encounter techniques when I'm short on brain power and long on game time is that they do a decent job of shifting the load onto the PC's in a manner that at the very least will give them a tangential puzzle to solve. It won't help all the time, and there may be situations where you underestimate the deadliness of the encounter. But that's what high level play is all about right :) ?
As always...YMMV.
I doubt it would harm your party but underwater normally wrecks any of my players. With all the penalties that water combat gives only 2 characters even function.
An underwater cave in to seal the exit, several agathion and a monadic deva that have been tainted from the near by unholy site of where bane died filling their heads with evil thoughts turning them NE. Even if my party was 20 I believe they would end up dying to a TPK though then again they just never equip for underwater combat.
Edit: by Agathion, I meant Cetaceal. Curse you commas!
Okay, those are some great suggestions. I think there's definitely room for swarmed by hordes of nasties enounter.
I agree totally about the environment. The last adventure had them racing to stop an aboleth and kraken opening a crevasse to the underdark in the seafloor beside a city. That was fun - and it's amazing how scared a party becomes of a simple dispel magic when their list of active spells is all that stands between them and the crushing deep...
A portion of this adventure will be inside a massive underground frozen waterfall. I just need to find things that will make that a fun encounter.
@Deathquaker - I had a look at the clerics in the GMG, but the low ACs threw me for a bit of a loop. I know that they can be amazing once the spells are active, but it takes so long to layer up all the active spells and take account of them. I wasn't too impressed by the ease of use of the high level NPCs for actually picking them up and playing with them. The Pathfinder db resource has some crackers though. I'll throw those through hero-lab before the game.
A portion of this adventure will be inside a massive underground frozen waterfall. I just need to find things that will make that a fun encounter.
Give the cold a magical quality and you have the means to refreeze melted ice and introduce extreme cold that the monsters could simply be immune to. The 3.5 supplement Frostburn has some cool stuff you could probably nab for extreme magical cold.
You could go one level further and have the "ice" be something that is really horrible when melted (acid or something). Continued combat in the frozen environs will undoubtedly damage the ice that could release "things" or "stuff" (how's that for suggestively vague? lol). You probably want to avoid having a reprisal of the crushing deeps scenario here or your players will start flipping you off behind your back and never go adventuring within one plane of a wet climate. But you could have gasses, swarms or additional monsters released throughout the combat.
Hampered mobility makes sense but that can be annoying to deal with if your players feel like it's become Balance Check Encounter 2000. You could still use icy terrain to control up-the-walls movement or charging accross certain bits of the area (the latter mostly if you use maps for tracking combat instead of the narrative style).
One thing that you could do that would up the ante and make the encounter memorable (but require some on the fly mechanics) is to allow the latent magical and divine energies surounding the encounter area to cause an aggressive magical ice that tries to form on any surface including characters for as long as they are in the area. Allow it to be temporarily dispelled from a creature or an area depending on Dispel or Greater Dispel (# of rounds would probably work as a d4 since this is a persistent effect). You also want to reward specific preparations that would circumvent extreme magical cold (not endure elements but Elemental Aura:Fire would be good or simply rendering one-self immune to the ice in some way...players can be cagey so let them benefit if they thought ahead). For the other poor SOB's that thought a trek towards the final repose of a deity of murder would be a fun sight seeing tour...they get to take part in your festival of delights.
First off you don't want to sideline the whole combat but you want to bring attention to the situation so I would allow a character to spend a move action to counter the freezing as they bust out of it. This simple mechanic has a large effect on a high level party in reducing the effectiveness of Haste, Full Attacks and other decisions the party gets each round. Given the temporary nature of dispels and other potential protections they may have it really calls them to work as a team and be tactical in their actions in order to win the day. Here is what I've come up with for "Mechanics-out-my-bum-for-freezing-PC's":
To this situation you toss in as many monsters as you want and that monster (if it is immune to cold) gets to have a significant leg up on the PC's.
That's a fun collection of rules ideas. Ice devils spring to mind as a good enemy in that situation. Thanks a lot - I'll definitely run with that.
I might go with some encroaching ice as well - if they get concerned that they might end up getting frozen within the waterfall they'll have good reason to race to get out.
Now I get to dust off the maps I did for Forstor Nagar and throw them into maptool for the game. Thanks guys - this should be a lot of fun.
Flying drow monks is a new one - that I have to see in action. I have a drow thread lined up for a future encounter so I'll look into that.
As for the party, yes. Creating a 15th level party is a good way to go - the players are racing a Zhent party to the goal so the high level party is definitely in there. I just need to put in some time setting it up.
If you're heading to cold terrain soon, check out the winter wight (bestiary II, CR 17). Seems to be a natural opponent, and one of the few high CR enemies that's not an outsider or outrageously huge.
If you send a party of npcs after the group, be sure your spellcasters have back up in case of a antimagic shell or similar abilities. That spell is a nasty mage killer if the mage baddie's alone. Golems might be a good addition too (hoards of ice golems could be put in the frozen waterfall).
As for published resources, you might take a look at the Book of Monster Templates by Rite Publishing. It has some really nasty templates and some appropriately high level sample creatures. There's a couple of free previews on the Paizo website if you do a search.
This thread reminds me why I switched to 4E (I'm not trying to be an ass, just remember the pain of trying to run a high level 3E game). Anyhow, the most important thing to keep in mind is that the game is now all about magic. Unless your enemies also have access to powerful magic your heroes will probably crush them. Demons, devils and the like can be good opponents at this level because of their access to decent spell like abilities. However, you do need to use them in numbers, and you can probably throw the CR system out the window at this point in the game. Ambushes can be effective, especially ones that debuff the heroes in the opening round and then surround them or hit them hard with things like poisoned arrows and nasty spells. If the heroes have time to prep for a fight by buffing up with magic, you will be hard pressed to challenge them unless you can hit them with spells like dispel magic and disjunction. You also need to make liberal use of enemies that can get off the ground or at least get their attacks into the air. Using high level NPCs can be effective, but can backfire because the end result is that it tends to load the heroes up with tons of magical loot, as having NPCs need to be decked out in magic items to keep up with the heroes.
That winterwight is awesome - thanks a lot! I'd totally missed him. I'm now leaning towards an encounter through twisting tunnels with a skirmishing winter wight and a large number of entombed (converted up from Frostburn). The prospects of undead that slide out of the ice to pull in is just too delicious to pass up.
Good call on the book of monster templates. As a Rite employee I get to be a kid in a candy store with free pdfs - so that's definitely one to use.
3.5/pf is a tricky one to run at high levels, but it's mostly a matter of knowing the players. At this level I'm happy to throw pretty much anything at these ones without the expectation of a TPK. I run both 4e and PF and I really enjoy both. I love PF when I have the time to dig into the details and build things that are complex and nasty, but after the last session I was hitting a wall of lack of inspiration. Thanks everyone for the help! That's been brilliant.
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A few things I have found to be helpful:
> Use waves of enemies. Oh sure, that Cleric (or Magus/Psychic Warrior/etc) can kick some serious butt, but he needs a couple of rounds to prep? Use some fodder (zombies, orcs, ogres, hill giants, something APL-4 or -3, flavored to fit your current situation) to buy him that time to buff & prepare. Bonus points = PC's are happily slaughtering bad guys, unknowingly showing their hand to the BBEG, who can spend that last 1/2 round monologuing before going for the kill.
> Use NPC's. Recently, my group freed some 40 or so villagers from a BBEG in a dungeon (they had been Soul Trapped, so turned from "I'm a jar" to "Oh, I'm a person again?" inside said dungeon), and were escorting them back to their home village. Random encounter roll = worgs.
Rather than scrap the encounter, I had the enemies circle the commoners, going for the "pull the weak & sick" trick so common amongst predators, and forced the PC's to use movement time and abilities to get amongst their charges.
> Use space. Having a long-ranged fight inside the city, or scattered throughout a building / dungeon complex can put the PC's on their back foot. Again, in KM, we had a "city event" of "Monster Attack." This happened during an "Administrative Week" (all PC's present in the city, but scattered taking care of their various duties), so everyone had to "waste" time and resources getting from where they were to where the enemies were. The Druid (randomly assigned PC) was on the spot first, and had to hold off the enemies long enough for her team to arrive and back her up.
Finally
>Use Illusions. They are an oft-underrated class of spells, mostly due to the "Will save, if interacted with" line. Some DM's avoid them like the plague, because of this. However, a creative caster / monster with some prep time and a mean streak can have the party all over itself, believing doors aren't there, walls are actually gates, hordes of monsters are coming down the hall, while the actual (summoned, natural ally, what have you) monster lies in wait Invisible right around the corner. In this way, a lower CR critter can tie up, harass, or even defeat a much higher level party through creativity and ingenuity.
Use terrain
Don't just throw an ice devil at them in a 10x10 room, if they are in the underdark, make an area that caters to the ice devil's strengths.
Separate the party. The underdark is great for any enclosed terrain you could possibly imagine, and separation can be done with pit traps and such, or even with just a very narrow corridor where the PCs go single file (and enemies could come from above, or small enemies from side tunnels).
The most important thing is to remember that big monsters don't challenge a party - lots of monsters challenge a party.
That, and avalanche encounters. Time to rest and prepare mean a party can win the next fight with relative ease. Keep up the pressure. Start off with a fight, and the commotion wakes up some nearby monster that joins the fight. Have the finale of the fight involve a partial collapse of the area (that can be a pretty nasty CR challenge in itself) - even better if this partially splits up the party and some more fighting ensues before they can meet up.