A great reason to motivate the party to head to Shatterhorn might be a mention of the Cagewright's backup plan to wreck vengeance on the heroes - one of them is going to cast Apocalypse From the Sky (BoVD) and finish what they started with the partial destruction of Cauldron.
My suggestion for that senerio is if your going to do it do it right.
Use Apocalypse From the Sky (BoVD) but really put some power into it.
1. mem spell as normal.
2. Use the sudden feats from the miniatures handbook to sudden maximise it. All the damage, no level bump.
3. Use a rod of energy admixture to bump the damage up from 10d6 to 20d6. the first 10d6 is from the spell the next 10d6 is from the rod. I recommend sonic or if you prefer true scorched earth policy fire is a great damage type.
4.-this one works only if the caster is a cleric- use your divine metamagic feat to burn your turns/rebukes for the day and either empower the spell to 30d6 OR widen the area to 20 miles instead of 10.
5. If the caster has the feats then use another sudden feat to widen or empower the spell. Sudden feats can only be used once a day but for something like this they are perfect and thye stack just like regular meta feats.
Finally if you that evil so as to cast this spell then you should have a helpless minion or so(possibly a captured hero) to suffer the drain this spell places on you. I can't remember the name of the spell but it's in BoVD and the caster heals at an amazing rate because the victim is takeing his damage.
The villian is probably going to be aware that the unleashing of this massively destructive spell is going to make him the most wanted man on the planet.
The Gods of goodness and the nature gods are definatly going to want his head so depending on what world your in you'll have paladins and druids working together to bring this villan down.
Evil won't help because while it may be an awesome thing and something the evil god is pleased with the followers will be catching heat for this for a long long time.
Good gameing hope this is helpful to you.
My suggestion for that senerio is if your going to do it do it right.
Use Apocalypse From the Sky (BoVD) but really put some power into it.
1. mem spell as normal.
2. Use the sudden feats from the miniatures handbook to sudden maximise it. All the damage, no level bump.
3. Use a rod of energy admixture to bump the damage up from 10d6 to 20d6. the first 10d6 is from the spell the next 10d6 is from the rod. I recommend sonic or if you prefer true scorched earth policy fire is a great damage type.
4.-this one works only if the caster is a cleric- use your divine metamagic feat to burn your turns/rebukes for the day and either empower the spell to 30d6 OR widen the area to 20 miles instead of 10.
5. If the caster has the feats then use another sudden feat to widen or empower the spell. Sudden feats can only be used once a day but for something like this they are perfect and thye stack just like regular meta feats.Finally if you that evil so as to cast this spell then you should have a helpless minion or so(possibly a captured hero) to suffer the drain this spell places on you. I can't remember the name of the spell but it's in BoVD and the caster heals at an amazing rate because the victim is takeing his damage.
The villian is probably going to be aware that the unleashing of this massively destructive spell is going to make him the most wanted man on the planet.
The Gods of goodness and the nature gods are definatly going to want his head so depending on what world your in you'll have paladins and druids working together to bring this villan down.
Evil won't help because while it may be an awesome thing and something the evil god is pleased with the followers will be catching heat for this for a long long time.Good gameing hope this is helpful to you.
In my gaming group the Sudden Metamagic and Divine Metamagic feats have been houseruled so that the user can only apply their benefits to a spell he would be able to apply the normal version of the feat to. So a 9th level caster using Sudden Quicken or Divine Quicken could still only quicken 0 or 1st level spells. This is irrelevant since none of the NPCs in the module has these feats.
Empowering a spell increases the rolled damage by half - it doesn't add to the number of dice rolled.
The spell's radius is 10 miles per level which means a 17th level caster would affect 170 miles (180 in the case of Shebeleth). 10d6 damage over that much area is heinous enough without buffing it any further.
I looked for the spell you mentioned but couldn't find it. It would be awesome to know its name.
I think that I'll rule that anyone wearing a ring of the Thirteen can bypass the dimensional anchor effect in the Fiery Sanctum. That way Shebelth is just a Word of Recall away from Shatterhorn.
