SPOILER WARNINGS. DM MUSINGS. NO ENTRY FOR PLAYERS.
My group is almost done with the Erran Tower and just faced off against Balenni the succubus, which ended in her escape. I've been trying to figure out what to do with her from now on, and I think I've come up with some neat areas to insinuate her further into the story rather than being just a one-off bad guy.
My basic thinking is: what does she want with the aeon orbs? I feel like she has great potential to represent a 'third party' trying to gain the resonant reflections and twist the orbs to their own uses. So I'm trying to figure out how to make that organic. Here's some ideas I had:
When she reached the Erran Tower she was bound by Cavnakash to gain her help in destroying the orb, which left her weak (thus the weak status when they met her) After Cavnakash's defeat, she made her way to Escadar to investigate Moonstone Hall to learn more about these orbs and where they could be found.
With the memory fresh in her mind of being bound against her will, she instead approached an intermediary to gain entrance to Moonstone Hall and gain information for her. Enter Mistress Dusklight. The two of them quickly reached an accord, Dusklight making contact with the xulgaths and sneaking out what information she could (and valuable relics for resale, though that wasn't part of the bargain) and Balenni providing her with protection from her enemies (primarily by charming Darricus Stallit of the city guard, gaining her inside knowledge of the organization's inner workings). Once she gains the knowledge of where the remaining orbs are, however, Balenni moves on to the next stage.
For Part 3 I feel like Balenni could approach the heroes proactively midway through to drop hints about the hag, as she's a bit salty about the Chaotic Evil souls getting snapped up rather than drifting down to the Abyss where they should be. Not sure where else I could squeeze her in, but the idea is that she's also going around collecting the resonant reflections and powering up.
My big issue is I'm not sure how to bring this all to a conclusion. Ultimately, what does she want? I thought of her wanting to taint the orbs somehow to slowly warp the Isle of Kortos into a reflection of the Abyss i.e. the Sarkoris Scar, but am open to better ideas. Maybe the big final battle becomes a three-way melee, everyone trying to wrest control of the orbs from each other? Also looking for more areas to carefully insert her into the background of what's going on. Ultimately I want her to be a rival for the power of the orbs, while also an ally against the xulgaths who are trying to destroy them. Sort of a back-and-forth relationship. Does anyone else have any ideas? Think this sounds like a promising development? I feel like it could be fun.
That gave me an opportunity to, to phrase it very briefly, test the players' capacity for saying no to "free" powerups :-)
That is, throwing aside everything else to instead obsess over the heroes that thwarted her plans. Basically, acting like the succubi she is!
CapnZapp wrote:
The non-spoilery background: There is a scripted encounter where the heroes finally catch up with the one corrupting their friends. It leads to combat, and the end of the Succubi. Let's call her Alenna. Now, what if Alenna the Succubi simply Dimension Doors away when she realizes the heroes are too strong for her? And vows to return to wreak havoc using what she's good at, instead of what the heroes are good at (combat).
Her plan is to find out the sexual preference of the heroes, take an appropriate form, and approach each of them individually (such as when they're shopping in a Magic Shoppe, or posing as a paying customer at the circus etc). One of them meets Stellan The Armorcrafter, another one meets Sue, a mother of three taking her brats to the Circus, and so on...
She will start by using no magic, and simply appearing charming and persuasive, claiming to be able to bolster their prowess. In addition to the listed stat block, the adventure itself sets a precedent of an extra damage die (described as "demonic corruption") or the ability to summon demonic allies. Just as the description says, she's not (only) about lust for carnal pleasures. Players are often interested in plus bonuses more ;-) Bonuses to attacks, to damage, to skills, to their circus performance... (they're circus performers).
Remember, the point here isn't to hose the players. The point is to impress them enough to go "woah, now I really understood how our earlier hermitage friends could become corrupted!". As far as costs and drawbacks, I'm content with even Drained 1. The main thing is giving the players a choice to roleplay their characters as being tempted. And to do that, they can't feel their character's life is on the line. So I'm probably not even going to mention the negative damage (since even 18 points of damage is less than half their hp) And of course, give them an opportunity to realize what's going on, set a trap for Alenna the temptress, and finally once and for all destroy her.
I'm surprised the text doesn't have more on Balenni escaping, considering at-will Dimension Door.
@Taedin I love the idea of Balenni being a third party vying for the orbs. Working with Dusklight could also mean helping spy on the party for her.
@Zapp I like the idea of Balenni trying to tempt the party, but can't 2e Succubi only Profane Gift one person at a time? Plus, the drawbacks of Drained and negative damage are from her Kiss, not the Gift (the gift's drawback IIRC is just suggestion weakness).
I will watch this thread carefully, I'm excited to see a better goal for her in the long run.
I'm surprised the text doesn't have more on Balenni escaping, considering at-will Dimension Door.
The text explicitly tells the GM she stays and fights to the death.
This is understandable in that a Succubi on the loose is a huge headache for a new or new:ish Games Master.
It's much easier to just assume she uses her Dimensional Doors for combat positioning (or not at all).
Obviously, having her actually realize when she's over her head and thus flee (which her high-level Dimension Door makes actually possible), only to worry the heroes, is much more FUN!
In my case I decided she would only start thinking about escape after losing half her hit points (which in turn means the characters stop believing her lies).
And she did. With something like ~12 hp left.
Three martials can easily chew through 50 hp in a single round (I have five players, so I made her a regular Succubi and not a weak one); she only lived long enough to pull off her escape because the fighter rolled below average.
While the players understandably were frustrated (they HATE it when enemies get away), I was secretly thrilled, since it allowed me to weave a much more engaging story; her tempting them under various guises.
@IcedMik: Yes. A regular Succubi has to focus on a single "mark" at a time.
But the story of a single player meeting a new mysterious man/woman while the rest of the players sit on their hands, just waiting, didn't sound like fun to me.
So I gave her the power to seduce/tempt/goad all five PCs (one after the other), to varying degrees of success.
Sure, some PCs engaged more enthusiastically (and thus got more play time out of her), but the important thing was to make every player feel they got involved, if only to get suspicious and say "no thanks".
Given her ranks in Deception and social skills, I don't see why she would fight to the death given that is not a Succubus's schtick. I had her maintain her humanoid form and use Deception. Far more powerful than using her combat abilities against a party.
I can see how an inexperienced DM might not feel comfortable doing so. A Succubus getting into a to the death fight isn't in line with a Succubus's goals or abilities. She can smile, leave, and plague the party as she wishes sending minions to defeat them.
Given her ranks in Deception and social skills, I don't see why she would fight to the death given that is not a Succubus's schtick.
I definitely do not disagree.
I merely hypothesized reasons why the module would say that.
Quote:
I can see how an inexperienced DM might not feel comfortable doing so. A Succubus getting into a to the death fight isn't in line with a Succubus's goals or abilities. She can smile, leave, and plague the party as she wishes sending minions to defeat them.
Again, the potential for the NPC to derail the entire campaign is what's at stake here.
You or I might be sufficiently experienced Games Masters that we won't let that happen.
But I can easily see a GM that genuinely follows advice like yours, which gets enthusiastically picked up by his or her group...
...and five sessions later the entire campaign is in ruins and the GM is at a loss what to do.
It is in comparison to that, it's simply easier to write into the module "she doesn't flee" so there are no loose ends to distract the heroes from the task at hand: stomping smelly ugly troglodytes.
My Balenni also escaped. Knowing that the PCs metagame alot and are on the look out for new acts, I had them meet Balenni in a new form in Escadar. They took the bait. She is currently in their circus under an assumed identity. The NPCs of the circus have begun to be derelict in their duties, similar to the descriptions of the Xulgaths in Erran Tower. Assuming they don't figure that Balenni is at the circus out prior to the end of book two, she'll attempt to murder one of them on the boat ride over to Kortos.
I finally got to put Balenni into action. Been looking forward to this for a while but had to wait through infrequent sessions.
The PCs actually bypassed her, taking the other route through the tower and going straight to Cavnakash. They had spared a Quasit who surrendered and begged for his life, so I had him go snitch to Balenni as the PCs ascended the stairs to the boss.
She arrives just as they finish the fight and the Aeon orb grants them the reflection. Seeing that, she takes a keen interest in the PCs and the strange magic at work here. I made her a follower of Zevgavizeb and she knows the Xulgaths have some important mission with the Orb, but isn't clear on the details. She figures the PCs must play a key role and that she can learn more by following them.
She introduces herself as a captured scholar, the usual schtick, says the quasit freed her while they were fighting Cavnakash, and elaborates on what she knows to direct them to Moonstone Hall. Why lift a finger when you can get some adventurers to do your research for you? The PCs offer to escort her to safety, but she says she'll stick around to keep studying the tower now that it's safe. That's a lie of course, and she easily beats them back to Abberton with flight and dim.door.
Previously the PCs recruited Viktor Volcano to the CoWW through exceptional kindness after the performance dual. The others categorically rejected their offer. Well the PCs return to the circus to find that "Danika" has joined as well. Balenni has taken her guise, extracted what info she needs from Viktor to play the role, and has started up a romance with the Bearded Man.
The players are suspicious of both Viktor and "Danika" just because they're CM members. We'll see how long Balenni can maintain the ruse. I do have a hard deadline on this, as eventually the PCs are going to enter Moonstone Hall and find the generic sacrificed body in the Defiled Chapel is in fact the real Danika, who Balenni will have convinced Dusklight to dispose of.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
My party has taken Balenni pretty far off the rails, currently traveling with her reborn form as a celestial after her soul was devoured by something in book 5.
Long story about Balenni:
Initially the encounter went as planned, with Balenni talking her way out of the fight and promising to revoke her blessing to Cavnakash. She instead told Cavnakash that the group was coming so he could prepare, and she then left the tower. After coming back later and finding Cavnakash dead on the ground near the tower after being pulled off by an errant gravity well, she decided to try and further investigate the orbs by speaking more with the party.
She offered a deal to one of the party members to help decipher the religious iconography and anything else related to the orbs as long as they told her how to unlock its power. The party member agreed, and Balenni followed the circus to Escadar from a distance so the rest of the party wouldn't try to destroy her as a demon.
After doing some searching of her own while the party was setting up for their first show in Escadar, Balenni found Mistress Dusklight in Moonlight Hall and tried to betray the party again. Mistress Dusklight allowed her into the Celestial Menagerie and had her take drugs to limit her spellcasting and abilities to escape so that she could turn Balenni into her newest attraction. The party eventually found their way to the Menagerie and freed Balenni, and the bard attempted to banish her when they learned about the side deal. In the end, the party decided not to allow her to follow along anymore and she set off towards the other towers.
In the Swardlands, Balenni tried to get in with Thesseka and the xulgaths there. Before she was able to make much headway, she was kidnapped by the dero who wanted to try experimenting on a demonic pituitary gland. The party eventually found her and were able to restore her after the horrible procedure that somehow left her alive, and after she broke down sobbing about her various failures the party finally decided to allow her to accompany them as they investigated the towers.
As they travelled, the relationship between Balenni and the original party member flourished to the point that she actually felt some amount of affection towards them. This gradually led Balenni towards changing her plan from just using the party to gain power from the orbs to also trying to help them with whatever they need.
Eventually in the black desert, Balenni began to feel just how much more powerful the party had grown than her, even with the reflections gathered. She was considering leaving the party because she felt like a liability when they came upon the ancient ammut. The party went to investigate the massive clawed hand and Balenni stayed a short distance back with some other allies. A few of the party members and Balenni were swallowed by the creature, and Balenni was slain with her soul being destroyed.
The party had recently come into contact with the fungus leshy bard's muse, a Veranallia known as the Mushroom Queen who brought them into existence, who offered them a rebirth should they require it after falling in battle. And finally last session the Mushroom Queen was able to use her primal phenomenon and Rebirth abilities to restore Balenni to a new more powerful form with a silver halo, feathered wings, and some more soothing abilities instead of the life-draining ones of a succubus.
My Long story about how Balenni survived the first 3 books and may supplant the BBEG by the time this all shakes out::
When my players found Balenni in a cage, the Bard immediately rushed to release this poor woman, and was very receptive to the hugs and kisses she offered as a reward.
I sent a private message to the bard player that simply said "you have failed a will save against a succubus. Act accordingly."
The bard proceeded to be very receptive to Balennie's "gratitude," embracing her and promising she was safe. The rest of the party didn't trust ANY of this and drew weapons, and the bard drew her own weapon in Balenni's defense. It was at this point, and not before, that the bard PC actually saw my private note, and almost choked up laughing.
This began a years-long campaign of hatred by my PCs to bring death to this woman. The bard worshipped Arshea, whose core tenets include both physical passion and freedom. To corrupt the former by robbing somebody of the latter struck her as the absolute height of sacrilege, and the bard grew truly hateful of this succubus after the encounter, which Balenni handily survived thanks to a little flight and invisibility.
On her third appearance, Balenni flipped her original script. A certain dungeon in the game includes a helpless prisoner who is intended to join the circus. Balenni knocked her out and cast Exchange Image to swap appearances with her. When the PCs found "Balenni" unconscious in a jail cell, they did not even give her a chance to speak. The grabbed her as she was waking up and pummelled her through the jail bars, and the druid crit her with shocking grasp. As they realized what she had just tricked them into doing, they tore through the entire dungeon in a rage, not even stopping to heal. The ensuing battle ranged across 2 floors and 3 rooms of the dungeon, featured some surprisingly fight-changing diplomacy and thievery checks at crucial moments, and featured the enraged bard diving into a 200-foot cliff chasm to grapple her out of the air, bearing her to the ground and reducing her to very few hp. She responded with a Diplo-grapple and a Dominate spell, which the bard critically failed. By the time the rest of the party made it to the bottom of the chasm, the now-hasted-and-dominated bard was carrying his "poor, wounded beloved" away from the battle. The Inventor left the party in disgust over the murder, which means she basically robbed them of a third of their members in one encounter, escape alive, and did it all without even physically harming a single one of them.
When I had her show back up in the latter portions of the campaign, I built her CR12 statblock using the Lich as a template. I kept its Spell DCs, swapped out its arcane spells for Occult ones, its undead abilities for the succubus abilities, and altered the Aura of Seduction to no longer be reliant on sexual attraction, including anyone not immune to Emotion effects; justifitcation of the latter being that her aura fills the mind with notions of whatever they desire (treasure, fine wine, knowledge, etc) and then causes them to instinctively associate her with that thing. I also gave her all the resonant reflections, as she's been pursuing them as well and has the support of Sarvel's army.
The other thing I did, which probably would have justified calling her a CR 13 or 14 despite the rest of her statblock, is I had her study the PCs. She attended shows, interrogated survivors, and even fought the PCs directly on two prior occasions. Based on this, I assumed she had extensive knowledge of their abilities, and prepared a suite of spells and tactics specifically designed to frustrate them. Spiritual Anamnesis for the Duskwalker, Curse of Lost Ages for Inventor's Construct, Energy Resistance for the lightning-happy druid, and so on.
At this point, after becoming such an important character, I'm committed to never softballing her. I aim for a "very unfair but still winnable" encounter every time, then balance that by having her prioritizing running away whenever she doesn't feel highly confident of her victory.
