I am DMing Burnt Offerings (the catacombs) tomorrow and I have 3 new players. I am almost certain that one of them will ask how they can catch the dagger and keep it away from Erylium. Is there anything in the rules that I am missing? House rules that were successful?
There's a really easy way to keep her from catching it: make her move. The property states that, if the character who threw the weapon has moved since doing so, it returns to the square from which it was thrown.
One well-timed bull rush, or a grapple with some movement, and it'll just fly back to empty air.
(In my first try at running this, the group had to resort to grappling Erylium and drowning her in the nearby pool. They just couldn't hurt her.)
This thread should probably have a spoiler label.
The "official" rule on this would be the feat - Snatch Arrows. I suspect none of your pc's have the feat depth to have acquired it by this early point. Most pc's are 2nd level?
Elyrium is one tough encounter. Technically with her damage reduction, flight movement and invisibility spell-like ability, she should be virtually impossible to slay by any group without See Invisibility (a 2nd level spell most groups can't have when they first encounter her) and cold iron ranged weapons, which few parties carry at this level "just in case." She can just run away whenever she gets low on hp and heal up.
The drowning idea from Christopher Mathieu is a good one. In my campaign, I played her as far too obsessed with the runewell to ever leave it in the hands of the pc's. So she fought to the death, summoning one more sinspawn past the guidance in the AP, rather than abandon it. Even at that it was a bit of a slog - if she'd had the ability to do damage at a higher rate or volume, she may have really hurt the pc's. Her acid resistance even neutralized the Conjurer's Acid Dart.
The dagger does a miniscule amount of damage and Erylium only uses it when she's out of spells and abilities. That will be a long time (at least 10 rounds), so if Erylium is still alive by the point that she considers using it then your players must be having a really rough time.
Even without it she still has claws which are poisonous.
So spending work trying to disarm the dagger from her is not a fantastic strategy.
Peet
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There is no rule for this.
My take would be this: In order to snatch the dagger, a PC has to ready an action on being attacked and succeed at a disarm combat maneuver with the dagger using Erylium's CMD. If the character has Improved Disarm, he gets to try to snatch it before it can attack, if not, the dagger attacks first.
Thanks everyone! Thanks to Tsuto's journal entry and the bard's insane high knowledge planes check, the party is well aware of a quasit can do. I just think it's funny that the party thinks the quasit needs to be summoned. They don't realize she is ready and waiting.
My players tricked her in attacking someone performing his death in a really dramatic fashion. The player "managed" to leave via the double doors and another had readied an action to slam the doors shut. In order to kill that player, E attacked him. The dagger hit the stage acting char, the door was thrown shut and the dagger clattered against the doors from the outside of the cathedral.
RAW? Dunno. Cool idea. Absolutely!
Ruyan.
It occurs to me that this may in fact be a strategy anticipated by the writers. After all, there's no advantage to her for the dagger to be made of cold iron, but it would work against her. If the players have insufficient means of hurting her effectively then stealing her dagger gives one of the players an attack that will penetrate her DR.
Peet