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<blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5244828" data-attributes="member: 78116"><p>So I have continued with my epic game last weekend and had a major engagement, ending the drama with the ship. The encounter with the molydeus ended in an interesting manner, with the creature tearing some chunks out of various characters and generally being a pain. Overall they handled the rest of the encounter well and then we moved onto the capstone of this particular part of the game: Jerusha.</p><p></p><p>Jerusha is basically a sorcerer corrupted by a daemon lord and "empowered" by the creatures vile energies. She can summon massive bolts of random elemental energy to send at her foes with ease, so her basic concept is a multiple attack "standard action" like a hydra. When dazed and stunned she loses attacks from her elemental barrage, reducing how many attacks she can make overall. This also has the effect of eliminating any issue with being "stun locked", so it ensures she has a definite set of actions that she can use every round. Reliability of actions turns out to be very important for how a solo works!</p><p></p><p>A general summary of her powers:</p><p></p><p>Elemental Barrage: Is a "random" elemental attack, either acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder damage or inflict all (multiple energy types) and different effects. She can impose a -2 penalty to attacks, deafen, slide targets and similar. This has three attacks attached to it and can be used as a melee basic attack (like a sorcerers channeling power).</p><p></p><p>Rending Thunder: Is an area or burst attack (her choice, this is a bit of a theme from her elemental barrage if you notice). Targets fort, does thunder damage and against a deafened creature imposes a stiff penalty onto fortitude.</p><p></p><p>Hurl Through the Abyss: This power is a close burst 2. Any enemy hit gets removed from play until they save. When they save they end up prone, taking ongoing damage and dazed (save ends all). This is used to remove the defender or melee characters clustering around her for a round so she can shuffle off elsewhere.</p><p></p><p>Elemental Resilience: A basic power that lets her save whenever an effect is placed upon her. </p><p></p><p>Chaos Chain: This power deals damage, imposes daze and disallows the spending of action points. It creates a small minion that inflicts damage and disabled action points. The minions destruction recharges the power, making it very nasty.</p><p></p><p>Out of Phase: This gave her two initiatives, one at highest rolled +10 and another at lowest rolled -10. Effectively meaning she starts each round and ends each round. This also meant at the end of each round she gets effectively 2 standard actions to really take it to the PCs. This had the effect of "swinging" combat one way and then the other - making for a very interesting battle!</p><p></p><p>Drowning Chaos: This power activates when bloodied, turning churning elemental stuff into a vile liquid that surrounds and "drowns" PCs. Basically makes them fight as if they are underwater and makes life difficult.</p><p></p><p>Empower: This is actually to make her variable resistance count for more, by inflicting elemental damage on the melee PCs weapon attacks.</p><p></p><p>Twisted Space: A teleport that leaves a damaging zone where she was, used to escape melee characters.</p><p></p><p>As well as Jerusha there were two heralds of colorless fire and a cacodemon. The Cacodemon was designed as a skill challenge, with the PCs putting him into an intelligent magic item made from the soul of a man who could bind demons for a living. This worked out very well in the end and so did most other things in the encounter.</p><p></p><p>Turn 1 Jerusha came out swinging, turning the Cleric into a burning pillar and then giving a good Rending Thunder on most of the party. The PCs responded with two critical hits (!) up front on her doing over 200 damage! The heralds came in for support, dealing some damage and moving into the PCs (blocking the Barbarians route to Jerusha). Further spells were flung around, but ultimately it ended with Jerusha in the middle of the party and pretty damaged.</p><p></p><p>Her next turn was devastating, starting with twisted space to teleport and then Chaos chains hitting much of the party. She dropped numerous PCs and then summoned Ter-Soth (the Cacodemon) into the battle. On his turn he possessed the Barbarian and whacked the Cleric with a charging howling strike. He saved spilling the cacodemon out into a deadly mist.</p><p></p><p>The PCs then realized they needed to remove the Heralds of colorless fire, seeing as they had less HP and would be able to rampage around at whim. The next turns were a collection of attempts to bind the demon, being knocked unconscious and the PCs just clinging on to a narrow victory by the end. Key to this was binding away the Cacodemon and keeping him there, as he was quite a disruption to the PCs plans (being a trap, he couldn't be affected by powers so they needed other ways to deal with it). Appropriately, the Barbarian scored a critical hit against Jerusha to finish her evil off at around 5.</p><p></p><p>For an EL + 4 encounter (EL 33) it lasted a solid 2 hours - that's more than fair for such a complex encounter with a high EL. Such an encounter before would have had to be much higher EL wise and last easily a whole session (4 hours). It would have been terribly grindy and nowhere near as challenging. As it was the main reason it took two hours was two of the players were absent, so people playing other characters outside their turn slowed things down a lot. Otherwise I think it would have gone even faster.</p><p></p><p>This really was my genuine "capstone" test of the new maths. It's pretty conclusive to me now that the new maths make for more challenging encounters. All without needing to rely on purely bull mechanics like repeatedly having to stun every PC in an encounter to ensure a monster survives.</p><p></p><p>Once I play through my next encounters this week, which do some fairly trippy things I will post some more and detail the encounters (creatures) entirely.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Aegeri, post: 5244828, member: 78116"] So I have continued with my epic game last weekend and had a major engagement, ending the drama with the ship. The encounter with the molydeus ended in an interesting manner, with the creature tearing some chunks out of various characters and generally being a pain. Overall they handled the rest of the encounter well and then we moved onto the capstone of this particular part of the game: Jerusha. Jerusha is basically a sorcerer corrupted by a daemon lord and "empowered" by the creatures vile energies. She can summon massive bolts of random elemental energy to send at her foes with ease, so her basic concept is a multiple attack "standard action" like a hydra. When dazed and stunned she loses attacks from her elemental barrage, reducing how many attacks she can make overall. This also has the effect of eliminating any issue with being "stun locked", so it ensures she has a definite set of actions that she can use every round. Reliability of actions turns out to be very important for how a solo works! A general summary of her powers: Elemental Barrage: Is a "random" elemental attack, either acid, cold, fire, lightning, thunder damage or inflict all (multiple energy types) and different effects. She can impose a -2 penalty to attacks, deafen, slide targets and similar. This has three attacks attached to it and can be used as a melee basic attack (like a sorcerers channeling power). Rending Thunder: Is an area or burst attack (her choice, this is a bit of a theme from her elemental barrage if you notice). Targets fort, does thunder damage and against a deafened creature imposes a stiff penalty onto fortitude. Hurl Through the Abyss: This power is a close burst 2. Any enemy hit gets removed from play until they save. When they save they end up prone, taking ongoing damage and dazed (save ends all). This is used to remove the defender or melee characters clustering around her for a round so she can shuffle off elsewhere. Elemental Resilience: A basic power that lets her save whenever an effect is placed upon her. Chaos Chain: This power deals damage, imposes daze and disallows the spending of action points. It creates a small minion that inflicts damage and disabled action points. The minions destruction recharges the power, making it very nasty. Out of Phase: This gave her two initiatives, one at highest rolled +10 and another at lowest rolled -10. Effectively meaning she starts each round and ends each round. This also meant at the end of each round she gets effectively 2 standard actions to really take it to the PCs. This had the effect of "swinging" combat one way and then the other - making for a very interesting battle! Drowning Chaos: This power activates when bloodied, turning churning elemental stuff into a vile liquid that surrounds and "drowns" PCs. Basically makes them fight as if they are underwater and makes life difficult. Empower: This is actually to make her variable resistance count for more, by inflicting elemental damage on the melee PCs weapon attacks. Twisted Space: A teleport that leaves a damaging zone where she was, used to escape melee characters. As well as Jerusha there were two heralds of colorless fire and a cacodemon. The Cacodemon was designed as a skill challenge, with the PCs putting him into an intelligent magic item made from the soul of a man who could bind demons for a living. This worked out very well in the end and so did most other things in the encounter. Turn 1 Jerusha came out swinging, turning the Cleric into a burning pillar and then giving a good Rending Thunder on most of the party. The PCs responded with two critical hits (!) up front on her doing over 200 damage! The heralds came in for support, dealing some damage and moving into the PCs (blocking the Barbarians route to Jerusha). Further spells were flung around, but ultimately it ended with Jerusha in the middle of the party and pretty damaged. Her next turn was devastating, starting with twisted space to teleport and then Chaos chains hitting much of the party. She dropped numerous PCs and then summoned Ter-Soth (the Cacodemon) into the battle. On his turn he possessed the Barbarian and whacked the Cleric with a charging howling strike. He saved spilling the cacodemon out into a deadly mist. The PCs then realized they needed to remove the Heralds of colorless fire, seeing as they had less HP and would be able to rampage around at whim. The next turns were a collection of attempts to bind the demon, being knocked unconscious and the PCs just clinging on to a narrow victory by the end. Key to this was binding away the Cacodemon and keeping him there, as he was quite a disruption to the PCs plans (being a trap, he couldn't be affected by powers so they needed other ways to deal with it). Appropriately, the Barbarian scored a critical hit against Jerusha to finish her evil off at around 5. For an EL + 4 encounter (EL 33) it lasted a solid 2 hours - that's more than fair for such a complex encounter with a high EL. Such an encounter before would have had to be much higher EL wise and last easily a whole session (4 hours). It would have been terribly grindy and nowhere near as challenging. As it was the main reason it took two hours was two of the players were absent, so people playing other characters outside their turn slowed things down a lot. Otherwise I think it would have gone even faster. This really was my genuine "capstone" test of the new maths. It's pretty conclusive to me now that the new maths make for more challenging encounters. All without needing to rely on purely bull mechanics like repeatedly having to stun every PC in an encounter to ensure a monster survives. Once I play through my next encounters this week, which do some fairly trippy things I will post some more and detail the encounters (creatures) entirely. [/QUOTE]
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