Hey guys, I'm new, pleased to meet you. (Long time lurk tho...hah)
Ok, with that out of the way, I'm going to build an adventure based off the tribe organization of Kobolds. The PCs will be taking a keep back from these foul ankle-biters. And I'm a little stuck. There are a few npc kobold ideas I have, you know, the BBEG being a lvl 6 sorc using flame spells to vicious effect. His second-in-command a tweaked alchemist, who supplies the tribe with goodies to keep the encounters tactically interesting. I'm not even worried about creating interesting traps.
The thing I am most worried about is the presentation of the adventure. I guess I'm just asking if you could share that "little something extra" that would make this not just another dungeon crawl, something to prevent me from running a "You barge through the door, more kobolds fall to your blades and spells, here's 50gp, and there's a door over there." Maybe a cool counter-plot, or just something funny the kobolds could be doing as the PCs barge in. Thanks in advance guys, hope to return the favor someday.
ps. And of course, if you do have a particularly vicious encounter idea, by all means, still share, it'll go to good use!
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From my perspective its about story. You can run your game that way, or you can make the party feel it.
Some ideas. you can have the Kobolds capture the keep up the road, and have the party be from the town. Maybe one or two of the characters are from the keep, or are soldiers etc. They run in to town, grab what they can, ie the rest of the party some weapons and armor and head in to reclaim the keep.
For me it's always first about setting up a background. Get the characters back story down then tie it in to what is going on. make sure you know why the character is there doing what they do. Make sure the Player knows also and best of all work together to make it interesting to both of you.
Then it is about the people around them. If you give them people to care about, they will try to defend and protect them. If everyone they run into treats them like garbage they will cut and run at the first chance. I like to give them a mix. Foreigners get treated with suspicion, other races with hostility, but I make sure that someone is interested in them and they have people to be interested in.
Also people acting mysterious will draw attention so fast that by the time they find out the guy is just hoarding extra onions because he really likes onions they will already have accused him of being the werewolf...
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Pre-Pathfinder, I gave some Kobolds - 3, iirc - the "phalanx fighting" feat from Heroes of Battle. Behind them were three more - with reach polearms. Two more provided covering fire from a ledge some distance away. It was ... ugly. And then, once the party started *thinking* and working together, someone heaved a smokestick between the archers and the "turtle." The archers were not there after the party finally cracked the "turtle" using alchemists' fire. Talk about a PARANOID party! They just KNEW those archers were hiding around the next bend, in that shadow just ahead...
(insert evil grin here)
But giving three of them that teamwork-oriented feat made all the difference in the world. And that one encounter continues to instill fear in the hearts of my players, years later...
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My first kobold lair as GM was set in the Realms, in an underground temple that had, many centuries before, been to Lolth. It had eight passageways to rooms, a 'mouth' entrance (with the 'eyes' of the spider serving as windows they kobolds could spy on the surroundings from, to keep watch), a central connecting chamber that each of the eight 'leg' tunnels connected to, and a bulbous rear chamber that served as the main fane (and, now, lair). The fane had balconies midway up the walls, and the walls were strewn with nets, that the kobolds could clamber along (no stairs in this joint!).
Once in the central chamber, their were kobolds all over the walls, hanging from the netting, like something out of the movie Aliens, hurling alchemical stuff and centipede-poison-tipped darts to wear down the attackers. The walls were slick with moisture, making it hard to burn the netting, but the kobolds themselves knew where the anchoring ropes and pitons were for each 10 ft. square of netting, allowing them to cut away any bit of netting that an adventurer was using to climb up to their attackers.
The central chamber was designed to look exactly like the central lair, and there were even a few apparent females and eggs hidden up on the balconies, which were blown up in some alchemical mishap in the middle of the fight (and later revealed to have been empty eggshells and preserved corpses of other kobolds, indicating that the *real* location of the tribes nursery, etc. was undiscovered), as well as some cheap-o 'treasure' (crappy weapons, shiny but not very valuable stuff, polished rocks meant to look like semi-precious stones, copper coins, etc.).
Beneath the spider-temple, an extensive maze had been dug out, shaped like a spider-web, upon which the 'spider' squatted. The kobolds had repurposed this maze as their actual lair, hidden below the 'fake lair' in the spider temple. The maze was flooded to about waist deep, and the kobolds themselves swam from area to area (and floated their wounded or young or deliveries of game or loot on little rafts, when necessary), and had a few rooms above the water line where they could remain dry and secure. The watery maze was filled with the equivalent of caltrops and a few snare traps which would drag people underwater, which, since the kobolds never walked on the bottom, never affected them.
Various other traps would capitalize on the nature of the maze, as weighted nets would be strung across a section of ceiling and designed to bear down on someone beneath them, weighed down with hundreds of pounds worth of stones, to drag them beneath the water. Outside, there was even a snare trap that snaked between one of those trees that splits midway up into two sections, so that the person triggering the trap would be yanked up and jammed into the fork, which had been decorated with a dozen pointy sticks... (I killed the ranger's dog with that one. He took it out on a lot of kobolds...)
I had a resourceful group, so I didn't go easy on them, trapwise, but if it had been different, I would have gone much easier, reducing the effectiveness of some of the trap, and skipping the drowning stuff entirely (since that's pretty sucky to spring on a group without the resources to survive it).
I also tried to keep the traps limited to the sorts of stuff the kobolds could make using mundane skills like netmaking, ropemaking, sticking nails in boards, etc. and not anything complex or mechanical or magical.
Targetting light sources should be a popular theme, with a darkvision loving race. A thrown clot of mud or dropped chamberpot of kobold pee could theoretically knock out a torch, and radically shift the balance (as all non-darkvision users become subject to sneak attacks and 50% miss chances) and in that last room, with nothing left to lose, there's nothing better those 3d10 kobold young should be doing with their actions other than cowering.
In an area that the kobolds would have mined out themselves (unlike my spider temple), there should absolutely be crawlspaces that only small creatures using the Squeeze action can get into and out of, allowing the kobolds to practically melt into the walls, and get to larger chambers on the other side that it might take a party lacking stone shape or similar magic *hours* to hammer and pick their way to. Using tunnels running parallel to the chamber the adventurers have followed, they can squeeze out of cracks behind them and set up some traps to hit them on the way back (portable stuff, like foot-traps or caltrops, concealed in the mucky floor), or even draw them back with a few arrows or darts, melting back into the walls and letting them run back into the new traps. While they do this, the ones who vanished ahead of them could slip back out and leave some more surprises, discouraging the group and perhaps causing them to leave the tunnel entirely, so that they aren't constantly being ambushed from out of torchlight range, and drawn into yet more unpleasant surprises.
Note that these tiny-sized crawlspaces could occur not just on the side walls, but also on the ceiling, and kobolds could lurk above them, waiting to squeeze a limb out and drop something unpleasant on them from above, like a flask of alchemist's fire.
The kobolds might even take it a step further, and have their young perform such stunts, since their immature (tiny) bodies might be able to fit through specially crafted crevices that the adult kobolds don't like, or they could use some sort of special alchemical muck to slime themselves up and allow them to squeeze even better than their small size would normally indicate.
That sort of thing would also be a potential backfire on the kobolds. Some kobolds are inevitably not going to squeeze away before they are killed or grabbed and yanked bodily out of the crevice, and any 'squeeze oil' they have on them becomes property of the party, who may be able to use it to turn the tables and enter some of the larger crevices and access their special tunnel network, from which they've been bedeviling the PCs... (A gnome or halfling might even be able to follow one, as the crevice remains 'squeezable' for a few rounds after the kobold passes, due to the lingering traces of oil remaining, although it's of dubious value to have a lone small party member hare off into the thick of the next without backup...)
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If you make the first combat so overwhelming, because they swarm like ants, you can introduce them to the idea that there is indeed more than one way to skin a kobold. Not sure how big the castle is but I'd find it hilarious to try to bribe some kobolds and start a revolution in their own ranks. Once they get in the castle I'd worry about massive swarming too so that's an issue with just bash down the door tactics. I mean really it has potential to be a real brainteaser quest.
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Two words:Tucker's Kobolds.
You don't have to be as excessive, but just remember that they players are fighting the kobolds on THEIR turf. The kobolds should be prepared with traps (especially ones with pressure plates that only go off for creatures heavier than the kobolds), narrow tunnels and tactics to counter larger creatures.
The classic kobold archetype is the trap-setting kobold lair. I ran a group through an extensive kobold lair several years ago, and they still talk about it. The lair was heavily trapped and was well designed for defense, with lots of dead ends with crossbow slits where the kobolds could inflict a withering barrage of bolts on the party. I had one passageway where the floor was covered in oil-soaked straw, and lined with hidden spear holes and crossbow slits. When the party was halfway dow the passageway, the kobolds tossed a torch into their midst and then sent a barrage of spears and bolts at the party as they fled down the passageway. The party was a lot more cautious after that attack.
I had a couple of areas where the kobolds had captured some giant scorpions and spiders, and then locked the party in with them after they entered the area.
I had several kinds of kobolds, including some "elite" soldiers who had some combat feats, two kobold sorcerers, and a kobold shaman who was one level higher than the party average. The kobolds also had some custom designed dinosaurian pets that I modeled after wolves, but made custom minis for.
The lair included a torture room with a chief torturer who was essentially a kobold with fighter class levels, and a prison where several prisoners were being held.
The party found it necessary to camp overnight in the lair, and I had the kobolds harass them to keep them from sleeping and regaining spells.
Eventually the party gained two levels in the effort to clear the kobolds out, and they gained a lot of respect for kobolds in the process.
Being a still somewhat wet-behind-the-ears GM on the pathfinder boards (I'm still in the midst of an over a year long campaign, my first) I can only give you some general advice.
First, kobolds are just creatures. We DMs all have enough sadistic tendencies to run a kobold dungeon the way it should be run: Deadly and Disastrous. Players know what they're coming up against quickly enough and it becomes a dungeon slog after that.
The enemy (kobolds in this case but any "group") only make up the encounters. It's the STORY and PLOT that will keep the group occupied. PARTICULARLY with kobold dungeons (or as I like to call them "death of a thousand cuts" dungeons) there has to be a REALLY good reason for the players to want to endure that kind of pain and suffering.
A "you want fabulous treasure, this kobold keep has it" story works great till two of the 6 PCs are laying dead and dismembered from one of the latest kobold traps with yet another kobold charge punctuated with alchemist's fire on the horizon in hour 31 without sleep. At that point the question of "how thick is the stone of this wall and how long is the drop to the moat" comes into play and your adventure collapses pretty quickly.
A couple concepts I'll throw out:
* The kobolds aren't the "owners" of the keep either. One or more tribes could be rushing toward the same goal as the PCs. This may keep the "kobolds turf" problems down while setting up some interesting group vs. group tactics.
* There's the standard "trying to take back your home" methodology that can provide at least a bit more impetus than "snag treasure". If the PCs are high enough level in the campaign the keep itself can become the prize. (One of your PCs is the son of an old wealthy family. The keep they're entering is the PC's keep, rightfully owned by a member of the party...they just need to "take it back".)
* Trapped with no escape can also play very well in a kobold dungeon scenario. Start with a missing/captured important person/people from the nearby town. Put the PC's in charge of recovering the individual(s). Let them spend the first part of the adventure in a "Mystery" manner tracking down the disappearance only to come across the abandoned keep on the outskirts of town as the likely location for the captive. The "trick" here is not to accost the PCs the moment they enter the keep. Let them find their prisoner with a little effort (perhaps run it as a normal dungeon crawl with a few minor/major other "inhabitants" to the keep). The abductor / murderer doesn't even have to be associated with the kobolds in any way...he may be either lucky in that they've not noticed him or enough not a threat that the kobolds don't care if he inhabits a room or two in "their" keep. Of course, the PCs, once they find their goal and decide the adventure is done, encounter the real problem...and are now burred too deep into the interior of the keep to effectively "jetison" the adventure...they're now "forced" to fight their way out for nothing more than survival. This provides a host of wonderful opportunities as their "in tow" captive now becomes an albatross around their necks...not only do they have to survive, they have to keep the non-combat captive from getting skewered also...or they can always choose an alignment conflict by someone in the party and kill the captive in an effort to protect their own skins. (*Evil Grin*: For real fun, turn the captive into the leader of the kobolds at the end of the adventure after gaining the parties trust while in-noxiously leading them into the most deadly of traps.) Add a bit of canibalism into it (perhaps one of the captives is found half eaten by the kobolds) and the PCs have a really good reason to fight for their lives (and even, perhaps, their souls).
It's the story that will keep your PCs willing to slog through traps and horribly unfair tactics in what many DMs consider one of the most horrible dungeon scenarios in D&D play.
--Illydth
Thankyou guys for all the great replies! =) It's definitely got the juices flowing. I guess kobolds have a real rep huh? Seems like goblins are the true low level enemy of the game, where as kobolds have become mid-level baddies. I'd have never guessed! Well, I'm off to craft the adventure, and will post an outline up sometime tonight. Again, thanks guys!
Also consider that you can vary up the actual combats with monsters other than kobolds - if the kobolds have a gladiator pit, they might have a slew of other monsters in various pens - a gelatinous cube as a keep cleaner, a few ogres, trolls, maybe even a dragon in a harness, the kobolds are trying to "tame"...
Two words:Tucker's Kobolds.
one thing that you can do to make things a little interesting is have some unexpected side effects of actualy sucedding XD
say your players in fact do manage to kill all the evil kobolds in the keep. then when their looking for loot they come across the kobolds egg nest. and guess who just hatched right in front of the players.
this is a fun little thing that ive seen a dm do before. and keep in mind these things.
1. its a newborn baby. INNOCENT. characters who kill this arnt just dipping their toes into the evil pool they are wadding in hip deep.
2. the baby will asign one of the player characters the title of MOTHER. (picking which one can be a fun rollplaying bit)
3. what are they to do with it? leave it alone to die? take it to an orphanage? raise it themselves? so many possibilitys.
hehehe in the campaign i saw, the character who was the surogate mother protected and raised his "Daughter" and she quickly grew to be part of the family. she became a non combat npc who was kinda the teams mascot who cooked and tended to the camp while the PC's went and did dangerous stuff.
at one point the dm had her kidnapped by something and WOW i had never seen the whole team rally around rescue and seek out vengance so hard XD they were attached to her XD
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one thing that you can do to make things a little interesting is have some unexpected side effects of actualy sucedding XD
Other unexpected consequences;
1) The kobolds have been in a constant state of war with a race that dwells beneath their caverns, and have kept each other in check. Dark folk? Meenlocks? Who knows. But with the eradication of the kobolds, the *even nastier* folk can now come up and raid surrounding human communities, as the 'plug' on their 'bottle' has been removed.
2) The water source in the 'hatching pool' at the bottom of the kobold lair connects to the water table for the surrounding area, through a subterranean spring. The presence of all those brooding kobold eggs may have actually *helped* surrounding agriculture, somehow (kobold egg gunk is good fertilizer?), but the new presence of a hundred rotting kobold corpses in the water supply for the surrounding communities leads to plague.
3) Struck down in mid-prayer to his kobold god, the high shaman has returned as an undead shadow, and passed through an undiscovered secret passageway to a chamber where a dozen kobold females and young cowered undiscovered, transforming them all into shadows under his command. They now surge forth by night, wreaking havoc on surrounding communities, returning to their former home during the light of the day.
4) Five generations ago, the kobolds were slaves to a more powerful creature, and ordered to hold onto one of it's treasures. They escaped, it was temporarily defeated, etc. and they escaped. This item remained hidden away from the world, deep within their warrens, until the adventurers found it and brought it forth into the world, drawing the attention of the evil force that seeks it out. (What have I got's in my pocketses?)
5) The kobold high shaman makes a blood sacrifice on the night of the moonless sky, to a hissing vent in it's ceremonial chamber. The shaman was taught that it is vital to make this sacrifice by its predecessor, as the thing beneath the vent will awaken if it is not kept fed and aslumber. A few weeks after the kobolds are eradicated, the moonless night comes and goes without sacrifice and there is a regional earth tremor, as something that slept, awakens, and, having been denied it's sustenance, travels forth to seek blood. What is the mystery creatures within the vent? Who knows. A vampire, perhaps. A fiery bodied half-troll Thoqqua, with two troll arms (like a mini-linnorm) and regeneration stopped only by cold or electrical damage. A gibbering mouther, whose mumbled dreaming 'prophecies' were interpreted by the half-crazed vent-gas-maddened aphasic shaman as guidance for the kobolds.
6) Decades ago, a druid cursed an ancient and unkillable enemy of the green to live a life of weakness and fear, forcing them to reincarnate into the form of a kobold. When the unusually clever chieftan is slain, his *past* life flashes before his eyes, and he remembers who he used to be. He smiles up at the PCs, muttering some words of gratitude in an ancient or outsider tongue, before expiring with a look of peace. Somewhere within X miles, he reincarnates in his original form, as an ogre magi or barbed devil or something, and seeks out the PCs, who, in looting the kobold lair, have some of 'his stuff' that he wishes to reclaim, as part of his long-term goal of returning to power and becoming a threat to the region again.
7) A dragon broke some ancient dragon-law in the past, and was cursed by his own kind, his power broken up and scattered among a tribe of kobolds, his cavern sealed and buried, forced to lie unconscious, aware of the tiny pathetic beings that 'stole' it's power, but unable to influence them. These kobolds have lived for centuries, knowing only that they are a little bit stronger, and more gifted at sorcery than the average tribe of kobolds (only a -2 Str and count as having a +2 Cha for sorcerer spellcasting, similar to the Fiendish Sorcery trait of Tieflings). When a kobold of the marked tribe dies, the stolen power of the bound dragon simply flows into the others, or to the waiting eggs, keeping the dragon powerless and unconscious, dreaming restless dreams of revenge and frustration. If they *all* die, the power returns to the dragon, which awakens and begins to tunnel it's way free...
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one thing that you can do to make things a little interesting is have some unexpected side effects of actualy sucedding XD
say your players in fact do manage to kill all the evil kobolds in the keep. then when their looking for loot they come across the kobolds egg nest. and guess who just hatched right in front of the players.
this is a fun little thing that ive seen a dm do before. and keep in mind these things.
1. its a newborn baby. INNOCENT. characters who kill this arnt just dipping their toes into the evil pool they are wadding in hip deep.
2. the baby will asign one of the player characters the title of MOTHER. (picking which one can be a fun rollplaying bit)
3. what are they to do with it? leave it alone to die? take it to an orphanage? raise it themselves? so many possibilitys.hehehe in the campaign i saw, the character who was the surogate mother protected and raised his "Daughter" and she quickly grew to be part of the family. she became a non combat npc who was kinda the teams mascot who cooked and tended to the camp while the PC's went and did dangerous stuff.
at one point the dm had her kidnapped by something and WOW i had never seen the whole team rally around rescue and seek out vengance so hard XD they were attached to her XD
Murdering kobold babies isn't a difficult choice for most of my parties. Morality in Pathfinder is an absolute construct. Some creatures are just evil.
Yes, I just made it one of *those* threads...
I haven't done much research on kobolds in PF yet, but in 3.5 some kobolds worshiped Io (I think)--a neutral dragon god.
In a game I'd been planning that is kind of similar to yours, I'd been planning on having the players encounter a kobold monk, focused on a degree of neutrality. He'd be part of a small sect in the larger kobold clan pushing for the tribe to refrain from their overt aggression, but there were other forces at work in the community pushing the other way: one was an entrance to an abandoned city the kobolds stumbled upon while mining. Unspeakable horrors had crept through the hole even after the kobolds had tried to reseal it, and now the high shaman has to decide whether the tribe can continue to make that lair their home.
In addition, an adolescent (young adult) dragon has recently come to the area looking to build a power base and decided that a clutch of worshipful kobolds would be just the ticket. She tends to exercise her power over the kobolds brazenly, sending them off to raid and pillage nearby settlements, gauging just how strong an army they will make. Finally, she sends them on a major offensive (conquering your keep in this case), but some among the clan aren't pleased with this upturn in violence, even if it may pose a solution to their other problem of finding a new home.
The calm, meditative kobold you've met explains all of this to the party and pleads for their aid, not just in releasing their people from the dragon's dominion, but also in either finding a new home or ending the stream of madness and terror seeping into the kobolds' home. And to please not harm too many of their tribe, especially the young.
In addition to the hatching egg situation, you could have the PCs stumble upon a sort of kobold schoolroom, with many young kobolds being taught. When you barge in, the youths pick up some improvised weapons and attack...ineffectually, but they are a nuisance, and if you've been playing the other kobolds to their fullest in intelligence and malevolence, maybe the players just take their aggressions out on the wee kobolds swinging spoons at them.
It's all about the tactics. Keep in mind that kobolds are smart and not ashamed to use good tactics and traps. I once nearly killed 2 6th level characters (both melee) with about a half dozen basic kobolds simply by trapping the PCs in between two portcullus and plinking away at the PCs with range and reach weapons.
Make each encounter unique, not just "you charge into the room and see 10 kobolds," and use the kobolds' small size as an advantage to keep them out of easy reach of the PCs and you can easily create an encounter much more memorable than it might first appear when you say that they are fighting x number of kobolds. Use tunnels sized for small creatures which will make medium or larger crawl, thus putting them at the disadvantage. Trap doors allow hit and run tactics. Deadfalls to separate the party and make them easier to focus fire upon. All these little things add up.
Back in the 2nd edition days when I ran Dragon Mountain the most deadly thing my players had to contend with was the fact that they simply could.not.rest. I mean they managed to recoup a couple times successfully, but most typically they'd get themselves into an area they thought was barricaded off and safe and the little blighters would tunnel in and disturb them (try to knife a sleeping PC, etc).
Memorizing spells was almost impossible because of the constant interuption, and after a while they were exausted and coming to the realization that they were being slowly herded and driven further and further underground...
Blatantly ripped off from Overlord series.
Have one of the kobolds be half-troll and have inherited regeneration. Have him dressed up as a Jester.
Have him annoy the PCs, but never be very deadly by himself. Have him toss paint baloons on them from above and cackle, have him toss torches on the books in the library so they can't read them. Have him yell and awaken the guards they manage to sneak up on. Have him make up dirty limericks about the PCs and sing them at the top of his lungs (make him a Bard, obviously).
Then let the PCs 'kill' him. Then an our later they can be surprised when he drops a bag of flaming kobold poop on them from the rafters. Have them see him fall into pit traps to get away from them, let them see him jump off the 100 foot wall to avoid being killed, things like this.
Have him be the last kobold left, and at the end of it all, when all the other kobolds are dead, have him sigh and sniff, a single tear rolling down his scaley cheek. "No more party? Griff follow you now! You fun! Make fun of your enemies!" And have him attach himself to them. :) Make him CN (an outcast Kobold) and have him follow them around and 'sing' their praises until he finds someone else more interesting to follow around. :)
I've always been interested in seeing kobolds used the way they are use in Dungeons and Dragons online. Yes its a MMORPG, not a TTRPG, but they are relevant up into epic levels because of the way they are developed.
At low levels you have standard swarm tactics with ambushes and bomb throwers, as well as more normal spellcasters to provide variety.
At 13th level (Mired in kobolds) they use hazardous terrain to slow you down while attacking from such terrain with no penalty, and they turn out to have allied with a black dragon which has given them the half-dragon template.
At 16th level, as you move onto other planes you start to meet fiend-blooded kobolds (which are the equivalent of half-fiends).
Putting all this together in pathfinder format, you can have a number of templates which can be added on to the base creature to make it more powerful as well as tactical options from level bonuses.
Others have pointed out that any creature could theoretically do this, but in reality chaotic creatures such as Orcs or Goblins would have trouble organising themselves to be able to do so; they would be much better at improvised tactics, skirmishes etc.
More lawful creatures would tend to think in terms of organised responses, tactical situations, walls, etc.
Kobolds tend to find themselves in an unusual situation where they are too weak for a prolonged combat suggested by their lawful nature yet (according to that nature) must come up with a reasoned tactical approach suited to their capabilities. No other lawful creature that I can think of would naturally use ambush, ranged attacks, feigned retreats, swarms, hit and run tactics and downright dirty attacks so effectively simply because they have the wherewithal to be more direct in most situations. Kobolds alone occupy that niche where they know that a kobold in a prolonged melee is a dead kobold and plan accordingly. They will always have an escape route planned, a way to disengage safely, allies who can provide cover, etc. Goblins are more likely to wing it and may make use of impromptu attack systems (usually involving fire) and then hope for the best, but kobolds will plan the attack, the retreat and the cover down to the smallest detail.
Two words: Kobold Blade.
The Kobold section of the Monster Codex is one of the best chapters of any book Paizo has ever published. Use the heck out of it.
Wow. What a colorful history these critters have. The spider dungeon atop of the spiderweb tunnels is fantastic.
I'm going to have to revisit this for my next campaign. Lots of good ideas in here.