Question about an Encounter in Carrion Crown Part 1

[Michael Madison]

I've been reading the PDF of the first installment of Carrion Crown since I'll be running it for my players pretty soon, and I had a question regarding one of the encounters:

Details about Specific Encounter:

The Lopper is a variant wraith, but is placed in the oubliette with a DC 30 Climb check with no ranks in Climbing. The text states that he rises up from the oubliette, but his stat block states that he has speed 30ft, not fly 30ft, so by a strict reading of the stat block, he would need to make the pseudo-impossible climb check to get out of the oublieete. Should he be flying or no?

Thanks for the assistance!

-Michael

[Snorter]

I think the author is assuming incorporeal creatures are simply able to 'walk' in three dimensions?

[Steel_Wind]

The Lopper's speed is listed as "30 ft" instead of the normal Wraith's explicit "fly 60 ft. (good)"

The Lopper also has a listed "fly" skill of +12.

IMO, he can "fly" at 30 feet as is reasonably necessary. This is why Mike Kortes describes the Lopper as "rising up from his oubliette with a soul-chilling shriek."

The "rising up" part? That's flying, imo.

The intention of the author is that The Lopper should be combatting the PCs mainly on the ground and using his Acrobatics skill to tumble between foes, not flying above their heads playing golf with his incorporeal touch "axe".

[cibet44]

Steel_Wind wrote:

The Lopper's speed is listed as "30 ft" instead of the normal Wraith's explicit "fly 60 ft. (good)"

The Lopper also has a listed "fly" skill of +12.

IMO, he can "fly" at 30 feet as is reasonably necessary. This is why Mike Kortes describes the Lopper as "rising up from his oubliette with a soul-chilling shriek."

The "rising up" part? That's flying, imo.

The intention of the author is that The Lopper should be combatting the PCs mainly on the ground and using his Acrobatics skill to tumble between foes, not flying above their heads playing golf with his incorporeal touch "axe".

I just ran across this as well. I'm not allowing the Lopper to fly I'm just positioning him out of the well to start. Making him fly makes him way too powerful. Did we ever get a developers input on this? I'm finding a disturbing number of stat-block issue in HoH which is surprising considering it's only a 1-3 level adventure.