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What have you guys done to make the owlbear fight at the end of book two more interesting?
Reading through it, even with the 6-player conversion, my players will basically take one look at it and go, "We lock it down and administer murder". I'm thinking of implementing one of the various "colossus" rulesets people have posted on here. Have any of you tried anything like that? How did it work? Has anyone had a good time with the more "basic" versions presented in the book and the conversion? What about mythic stuff?
Make it kaiju? :)
Make it a family of huge owlbears (number = 1 less than party number) power all but 2 of them down to just barely over large sized (the 'young') and have the PCs discover the body of one of the parent's young at their lair instead of one of the parents.
I hate the 'one big monster' encounter PF uses (a lot). It *always* ends up being stupidly easy for even a moderately competent party to lock a single monster down regardless of its type and then it is all over but the hit point grinding.
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I used a colossus ruleset. I made the Talonquake ludicrously large to the point where it was obvious just stabbing at it or hitting it with spells would do nothing. The PCs had to make their way up its body, flying for those who had it and climbing for the rest (one PC has a climb speed, the others had to haul themselves up the hard way), to reach the two weak points it had - the glowing rune of Nyrissa on its forehead, and the nymph-hair ring on its claw. They sent the flying Barbarian after the ring since he had an adamantine greataxe, while the rest of the party - mostly casters, with the Samurai for defense - went for the rune. This required several Climb and Fly rolls, as well as Acrobatics any time the thing moved or if someone took damage.
The whole time the Owlbear is taking swipes at them with its claws or beak; mostly I used Reflex saves (DC 20 I think), stating that since it was so huge, it didn't care much about AC; if you were in the area when its attack came through, you got hit. A successful save vacated the area; if you missed the save by less than 5, you took half damage as you "rolled with the attack" (Evasion does not apply here). Fail by more than that and you take full damage. Once the party got onto its head, they started having to roll Acrobatics or Climb checks to hold on when it made bite attacks against the Barbarian. I believe I rolled something like 6d6 plus something for damage, regardless of attack, and for purposes of DR the attacks were always Magic and Chaotic. (Lower-level groups may want to lower that damage - my party was Level 11/Mythic Tier 1 at the time.)
The Barbarian started sundering the ring; the carving of the Jabberwock on the ring started shooting rays (half electricity, half acid damage; ranged touch attacks that did not provoke AoOs, dealt 6d6 damage and again lower level groups may want to adjust that) from its eyes at him. When he sundered through the first layer, the hairs inside started attacking him as per black tentacles. That went on until he finished destroying the thing. Otherwise I believe the ring was a 15-HD Large Construct/Animated Object with 0 movement speed, no melee attacks, and an AC around 25 (almost all Deflection - a shielding aura Nyrissa had put on it).
The rune was guarded by two heavily-advanced green Will-o-Wisps who had a number of spell-like abilities (lightning bolt and fireball I remember, again changed to be half-lightning, half-acid; they had others but I can't remember them). When the party destroyed those, a figment of Nyrissa's face appeared above the rune and began taunting/threatening them. They got rid of it and her with a really good Dispel roll; their original plan was to haul up all the PC and NPC casters they had on-hand and do a ritual to get rid of it, which would have also worked, but they had to improvise at the last second. Dispelling it required beating Nyrissa's Caster Level, which for most games would be DC 20. (My game is using Mythic so it was in the low 30s instead.)
I gave it a fey template. As a passing idea that Nymessa had to et rid of the PC's kingdom, she watched the events from far away in the First World and buffed the owlbear with see invisibility, bear's strength, mirror image and other stuff, and then promptly forgot about it a second later. It was still an easy lockdown fight (2 rock elementals per turn will do that for you) but the melee ranger almost died in 1 hit many a times.
Still, seeing a gigantic enraged purple glowing owlbear made them think a lot for awhile.
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Make it THE FIRST OWLBEAR from the Mythic Adventures book.
Make it THE FIRST OWLBEAR from the Mythic Adventures book.
I saw this topic and that's immediately what I thought of. Make it THAT Owlbear.
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My copy of Mythic Adventures hasn't come yet, so I'll definitely take a look at that.
Orthos: At first I was wary of giving it another ring, since I didn't want to have to come up with yet another jabberwock-themed power, and I didn't want everyone and their brother to have them. Then I realized that in your version they have to break it, which solves the second problem nicely, and its power is that it made the owlbear huge and controllable, so the first problem is solved too.
My PCs are only going to be about APL 6 when they fight it, so none of these things might matter anyway. We'll see when Mythic arrives.
Where can I find the colossus ruleset you used Orthos? I thought it was in the Mythic Adventures handbook but its not in there.
-Car
It's nothing official, sadly there have never been official rules (that I'm aware of) for that sort of thing. There was a thread somewhere (probably in Homebrew) by Umbral Reaver that started work on a codified ruleset but it was unfinished when I read it and can't find it now.
Basically I just treated the Owlbear's body as a moving landmass, assigned Climb and Acrobatics DCs based on location and "terrain", and treated the claws and beak as attacks without a body behind them that could be (noticeably) harmed. Then just made up the ring and the will-o-wisps as separate monsters confined to their respective locations and the rune as a persistent magical effect, similar to an un/hallow.
I really like that idea Penny.
One of my goals for my current Kingmaker group is to have every player create two characters. The first set are the ones who go through book 1 and establish their kingdom, the second set of characters are introduced in book 2 sent by their patrons as "a second wave of colonists and experts" essentially.
After this point the group will start governing their kingdom and when missions or events come up that they want to take care of via exploration or fighting off bad guys they can mix and match from their group of PCs who they want to send to deal with it.
So while one group can be out tracking down some trolls, the other group can suddenly find themselves defending the capital from a giant owlbear.
Now I'm really excited about this scenario. This thread is officially awesome.
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Bofdm, I did something very similar, except the second party was full-on adventurers as well. They're allowed to bring either of their characters on any adventure, so it's not like they have an A-Team and a B-Team, or a going-out team and a stay-at-home team, but certain characters do lend themselves to certain types of scenario, of course.
In this case though, they took EVERYONE to go fight the troll armies. Oleg is disgraced, and used to be besties with Grigori until they kicked him out for sedition. Svetlana is a wealthy socialite in the upper crust of their society, but isn't much for fighting giant owlbears. Kesten died fighting the "Maesky Horror" (ran Carrion Hill in their capital city). So as far as NPCs left at home to take care of the thing, we've got Jhod, King Sootscale, and the couple that runs Tatzlford.
I'm thinking that they'll have to race it back home, and that they'll have to leave the army behind to do it. They've got some defenses in their city, but best not to test them with a castle-sized monster.