Isle of Dread for 4E

Hi All,

I'm running the Savage Tides campaign converting to 4E. This has some quirky benefits (they got the Tooth of Ahazu last night and the new Artifact rules made that cool), but it also has some issues.

The largest issue is of course keeping encounters interesting. Now I find a lot of the higher level monsters kind of dull to fight. There seems to be a lot of "stand still hitting the PCs" going on once you get above say level 5.

I'm curious what people think would make some interesting level 9-13 Encounters for use on the Isle of Dread.

One thing I am thinking of now is that the Isle should have a strong Feywild connection sort of a "Domain of Dread" for the Feywild. (Which is an interesting way of getting it into a campaign in general...)

Anyone got any thoughts?

I can't give you any specifics, as I'm unfamiliar with your setting. However, one thing I've been doing since our 3rd game together (when everyone's face started freezing in boredom) was to make the environment highly interactive.

While some of this is often my doing (pits, ranged maneuvers involving hiding behind cover and firing, or firing then going stealth in a object-heavy area), it has spurred my players to come up with their own ways of interaction.

Our fighter and paladin were getting rather angry at a flying creature that was hovering over a pit, just out of reach. So the paladin just leaps over the edge, gets a very high roll, and falls to the bottom of the pit with the creature. Before it could try taking off again, the fighter leaped over the edge and crushed the creature beneath him.

Another was when the paladin, fighter, and ranger cleverly lit afire a wooden door with iron bands, then proceeded to critically break it off its hinges and crush a poor goblin beneath it (only to have the ranger finish it off with a point-blank shot through an opening in the door).

The point is that players will have fun when they can put their ingenuity to work. Of course it shouldn't go overboard and start looking like a cheesy level of a video game (how on earth DO enemies always idly stand by/on unstable objects?)