My group will be entering the Ancient Library in the next session or two and I was looking over Mokmurian's tactics and think he may need some help.
My main reason for this is that they have a Flame Dancer bard and one of his tactics is to cast Fog Cloud and then uses Song of the Fiery Gaze (details below) allowing them to all see through it.
Song of the Fiery Gaze (Su): At 3rd level, a fire dancer can allow allies to see through flames without any distortion. Any ally within 30 feet of the bard who can hear the performance can see through fire, fog, and smoke without penalty as long as the light is sufficient to allow him to see normally, as with the base effect of the gaze of flames oracle revelation. Song of the fiery gaze relies on audible components.
They also have a conjurer with a Rod of Dazing that he is using with Snapdragon Fireworks.
With this in mind I'm thinking of having 1 or 2 Runeslave giants in the room with him when they attack.
Would this over power this encounter?
Thanks for reading and taking the time to respond.
Actually, no. Keep it as is. Because Momkurian is going to use their tactic against them.
Solid Fog does more than block your line of sight. They'll walk right into it and be vulnerable to Mokmurian's attacks... and never expect it.
How many players in your party and how optimized are they?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Big M can see through their fog.
But honestly, I ditched the whole "I'm a stone giant and I love fluffy clouds!" theme. I had him drop a Wall of Force diagonally between the pillars and leave a 5' gap at the bottom. He could then target a Fireball at the base of the gap and still get a nice spread, or use column spells like Stone Call or Ice Storm over the top, all the while anything directly targeting him has no line of effect, so arrows and rays and such can't get to him. Made the fight last a lot longer.
I also have him a ton of stone-themed spells. Because.
Mokmurian knows they're coming before they walk in. He can have his fog up before the bard can do anything about it. You can mess with his spells all you want. When I ran this encounter, I gave him contagious flame. The beefy plate male fighter was in the negatives & prone before he got to act in the regular first round after surprise.
Thanks for the thoughts all.
I did catch the fact he should know they are coming and will get reports from the headless guy.
I have 4 players...
Conjurer - Very Tactical, has the Dazing Rod, plus like to use lots of pits.
Bard - Tactical, Flame Dancer mentioned above
Rogue (Bard's Cohort) - Tatcical, ranged sneak, can do sneak attack out to 50' and has Cluster Shot to help with DR.
Life Oracle - Semi Tactical, keeps people alive, very little offense.
Barbarian - Semi Tactical, new player been playing less than 6 months. Crit seeker build plus Superstitious rage powers.
So 5 characters in the party with 2 damage dealers and 3 support.
Keep in mind the AP is written against 4 pc's at 15 point build. So if you have 5 pc's, adding some beef to Mokmurian might not be a bad idea.
On the fog spell "duplication" - from one point of view all M's tactics do is save the bard from casting fog cloud. You could even make an argument M doesn't necessarily know the bard's song gives the group vision through fog but since the bard cast fog cloud and starts singing and the group appears to ignore the fog (as he sees it through the Headless Lord) it's not hard to figure out.
So you have three choices:
1. M plays it out as written relying on his glasses and damaging cloud spells to work as planned.
2. M avoids the fog spells (but retains his glasses which might give your pc's a surprise) This might reduce his effectiveness since his spell memorization is built on the "fog" strategy.
3. Change M's spell memorization away from fog spells entirely.
One observation of uncertain helpfulness - if M doesn't use fog spells yet has the fog cutting lenses your pc's might (pending on how they think about these things) assume you gave him the lenses as a <rhymes with trick> move. They've been using the fog tactic and now the BBEG has a defense to ignore it. Might look suspicious.
Don't forget, he also has the Hounds of Tindalas that he can call to him. You could have him call them to him ahead of time so they don't encounter them outside the door. Assuming of course they come in that way - my group used the Staff of Heaven and Earth to do Stone Shape - and since Wall of Stone attaches itself to existing Walls of Stone and to the stone wall, one use of Stone Shape will open a hole in the blocked corridor. (He would have been better off using the Runeslaves to do stone bricks so that trick wouldn't work.)