Challenging my high-lvl group (NPCs and monsters; my players shouldn't read this!)

[Kaodi]

Corsai Is By The Desert, And Those Dwarves Are Awfully Thirsty

Drought, Advanced Great Wyrm Blue Dragon
Gargantuan Dragon (Earth)
Hit Dice: 41d12+410 (702 hp)
Initiative: +0
Speed: 40 ft, burrow 20ft, fly 200ft (clumsy)
Armor Class: 44 (-4 size, +38 natural), touch 6, flat-footed 44
Base Attack/Grapple: +41/+68
Attack: Bite +52 melee (4d6+15)
Full Attack: Bite +52 melee (4d6+15) plus 2 Claws +47 melee (2d8+7) plus 2 Wings +47 melee(2d6+7) plus Tail Slap +47 melee (2d8+22)
Space/Reach: 20 ft/15 ft (20ft with bite)
Special Attacks: Crush (4d6+22), Tail Sweep (2d6+22), Breath Weapon 24d8 (DC 42), FrightfulPresence (DC 39)
Special Qualities: Dragon Traits, Spells, Spell-like Abilities, DR 20/Magic, DR 3/-, Immunity
to Sleep and Paralysis, Immunity to Electricity, SR 33, Blindsense, Keen
Senses, Fast Healing 3, Acid and Sonic Resistance 10, Sound Imitation
Saves: Fort +32, Ref +22, Will +29
Abilities: Str 41, Dex 10, Con 31, Int 22, Wis 18, Cha 24
Skills: Listen +48, Search +50, Spot +48, Bluff +51, Hide +32, Spellcraft +50, Concentration +54, Diplmoacy +51, Escape Artist +44, Intimidate +51, Sense Motive +48, Use Magic Device +51
Feats: Still Spell, Silent Spell, Flyby Attack, Snatch, Hover, Wingover, Ability Focus (Breath
Weapon), Ability Focus (Frightful Presence), Enlarge Spell. Epic Feats: Damage Reduction, Fast Healing, Improved Spell Resistance, Energy Resistance (Acid 10), Energy Resistance (Sonic 10)
Environment: Temperate Deserts
Organization: Solitary
Challenge Rating: 27
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Spell-like Abilities: 3/day - Create/Destroy Water, Ventriloquism; 1/day - Hallucinatory
Terrain, Veil, Mirage Arcana

Spells - Sorcerer 17 (6/8/8/8/7/7/7/7/4, save DC 17 + Spell Level)
0 - Create Water, Cure Minor Wounds, Detect Magic, Light, Mending, Mage Hand, Arcane Mark,Prestidigitation, Open/Close
1 - Magic Missile, Mage Armour, Shield of Faith, Divine Favour, Disguise Self
2 - Eagles Splendor, Cats Grace, Bears Endurance, Detect Thoughts, Touch of Idiocy
3 - Dispel Magic, Bestow Curse, Displacement, Haste
4 - Death Ward, Freedom of Movement, Scrying, Polymorph
5 - Flame Strike, Wall of Stone, Telekinesis, Cloud Kill
6 - Heal, Greater Dispel Magic, Word of Recall
7 - Control Weather, Limited Wish, Greater Arcane Sight
8 - Mind Blank, Horrid Wilting

Liberal use of the ability to destroy (and create) water is probably a great way to bring peoples in the desert under your control... Or to make it harder to find water for 200,000 thirsty dwarves...

 

[Piratecat]

Shouldn't be there long enough to cause problems...

Heh, says you. Not if I can help it! Some problems will be inevitable, especially since there are food shortages related to crappy weather. Corsai won't be pleased when the dwarves decimate the city's herds, for instance.

The logistics for moving a large group of people are immense, and they're in a foreign land where they don't speak the language, and they're their own army (and will be considered such by any country they move through.) Would do clannish people do in this situation? Become more clannish and insular. Anyone who can pull them out of this and win their loyalty will reap huge rewards. It's up to the PCs whether it's Corsai or Ioun.

Spatz, great logistical analysis, and fantastic NPCs from several people. Thank you to everyone; this is helping more than you know.

I've decided on a common theme that solves several of my problems.

Problem 1: Why don't the gods come down and solve the problem of the worms?
Problem 2: How can the worms cause such damage when they breed?

Answer: when the gods remade the world, they made it alive. Not alive, but ALIVE - a living entity in and of itself, although never sentient per se*. They can no longer set foot on her without causing severe damage. It was the first heroes who trapped the worms, not the gods themselves (I may have some sort of a flashback to this). When the worms breed, they'll kill the world. Because the Gods can't sense worm-stuff (no particular reason for this, it's always been a precedent) they won't necessarily know until its too late.

* Only one person knows this, Kaolot Prisk. He's an insane street preacher in a large city on another continent, a guy who carries a "the world is ending" plaque and babbles about how she is dying. No one believes him.

 

[Steverooo]

Because the Gods can't sense worm-stuff (no particular reason for this, it's always been a precedent) they won't necessarily know until its too late.

* Only one person knows this, Kaolot Prisk. He's an insane street preacher in a large city on another continent, a guy who carries a "the world is ending" plaque and babbles about how she is dying. No one believes him.

A man squars on the street corner, his fingers in his ears... On his chest & back, a sign placard reads: The End is near!

Seems the Defenders could all too easily warn them, eh? Then what?

 

[Spatzimaus]

It was the first heroes who trapped the worms, not the gods themselves (I may have some sort of a flashback to this).

Hmm, the obvious problem with this is that if heroes of the past trapped thousands of worms, why would the heroes of the present be so singularly unable to trap the remaining two? Were the heroes back then all so far into Epic levels? Were they all proxies of gods, of a type that can't be done now that the world is alive? Did it just take tens of thousands of them? Or all of the above?

Also, doesn't this conflict with the history you've already established? The worms killed off the last living creature (whose cry attracted the gods), so if it wasn't the gods themselves who banished the worms, then where'd the heroes come from? All the non-worms on the world were dead/undead. Or was the seer who told the DoD that story just wrong?

Finally, WHY would the gods choose to remake the world as "alive" following the defeat of the original worms? It apparently didn't give it any defense against a resurgence of the worms, and in fact it makes it harder to defend against the worms since it prevents the gods from setting foot on Spira directly.
Maybe it was just the only way they could do it. The world had been damaged too much to rebuild in the normal way, so they had to imbue it with life. (Thought: Is there any way of making it be that the world was directly bonded with a god? Not many were around at that time, of course.)
Maybe it had other benefits; for instance, maybe the humans before that point were absolutely reliant on the gods, but the living planet allowed them to be self-sufficient for all of their day-to-day things, a sort of twist on the whole Tree of Knowledge thing. On a similar note, maybe that process of making it alive is what linked it to the outer planes, allowing the dead to pass on to an afterlife.
Or, maybe it DID give the world an anti-worm defense, which Elder figured out a way around. He was imprisoned for a LONG time, after all, I'm sure he spend some of it thinking. In fact, maybe that very defense is what he's twisted to protect the eggs at the core of the world; the shield that was supposed to keep the worms out is now keeping anyone from getting to them. Of course, the question of how the worms got through remains, but this is where you can tie in some ritual that'd require a worm to sacrifice himself if you want to dispose of Elder.

----------
Put it all together:

The worms destroyed the links that connected Spira to the rest of the universe when they first arrived, so that no one would disrupt their feeding. They then destroyed all of the people of the world, but their spirits were trapped on the dead world, powerless to do anything about the worms now rampaging across the surface. The gods show up, and see this. They imbue the spirits with a sizeable fraction of their own power, giving them the ability to fight the worms one final time.
Hundreds of thousands of warrior ghosts, raised to Epic-level power by the gods, throw themselves at the worms on the surface of the dead world. Most are destroyed before they can land a single blow, but their purpose isn't to WIN, they're just buying time while the spellcasters complete a ritual spell. They hold, just long enough.
The spell that's cast can simply be described as an outright rejection of That Which Should Not Be. Everything on the world that shouldn't be there is affected; those that successfully resist are banished, those that fail are destroyed. Elder and his mate manage to survive through sheer force of will and magical ability, but the rest are locked away.
Once this is complete, the gods raise the world to life, to allow it to heal and to restore its connections to the planes. This allows the spirits to pass on to the afterlife, and allows for the modern races to be created.

Agar gets a vision. An army of glowing spirits, futilely throwing themselves at an oncoming rush of worms. Most spirits are batted aside without effort, but enough get through to impede the worms before being destroyed. Just before the worms reach a circle of chanting spirits, a blinding white flash goes off that vaporizes the ones nearby, and yanks the rest off to their prison.
I just like the idea of an army of undead saving the world; what would Malachite think? And if you really wanted to, you could have the players try to track down one of the surviving spirits in his afterlife... of course, since they didn't worship the gods, the survivors wouldn't have gone to the usual places.

This gives plenty of reasons why you couldn't repeat the ritual in the modern day. For one, realize how many planar travelers pass through a world on a given day? Anything that banished all non-natives would get rid of far more than two worms. Gith monks, phoenixes bonded to souls, angels that protect old priests, mercanes who've set up shop in the Underdark... there's a lot of traffic between planes in the modern day, especially among the most powerful.
Second, there simply isn't an army comparable to the spirits. Now that they know what to watch for, no one could protect the spellcasters from Elder and his mate long enough. (Corollary: if Elder and his mate die in the process of birthing their swarm, you COULD pull it off.)
Finally, the gods had to give some of their power to the spirits... power they didn't get back from all the ones that were destroyed. The gods are weaker now than they were then, and if they were to try that again, they'd weaken themselves even further. Plus, some of the more evil gods would choose not to contribute, so that they could take over afterwards. While the good gods care about Spira, they don't care THAT much.

 

[Piratecat]

Hmm, the obvious problem with this is that if heroes of the past trapped thousands of worms, why would the heroes of the present be so singularly unable to trap the remaining two?

My bad. The gods booted out all the worms but two that they missed, then they remade the world. The new heroes of that world chained the last two. I was unclear, which may have lead to most of your objections.

It may be interesting to borrow from the superb game Fireborn and have the PCs flash back to become those heroes... and discover that they were dragons. This was pre-human, by my mythology, since I've established an age of lizards.

Finally, WHY would the gods choose to remake the world as "alive" following the defeat of the original worms? It apparently didn't give it any defense against a resurgence of the worms, and in fact it makes it harder to defend against the worms since it prevents the gods from setting foot on Spira directly.

I can see this as an unintentional result of breathing life into the world to reawaken its dead husk. Mind you, I'm totally back-filling here, but it needs to be plausible. World is dead, Gods scour world and boot worms, gods breath life into new world (only one god back then, actually; the rest came after), world awakens spontaneously after life has already been created, Gods find themselves physically barred without causing great harm, gods intentionally forbid themselves from returning. Voila - plausible deniability that will fit into my mythos as established.

Maybe it was just the only way they could do it. The world had been damaged too much to rebuild in the normal way, so they had to imbue it with life. (Thought: Is there any way of making it be that the world was directly bonded with a god? Not many were around at that time, of course.)

Daaaam. Although it isn't talked about much, a little known sect believes that the creator god is dead or departed. If he bonded with Spira, that's a nice touch.

Or, maybe it DID give the world an anti-worm defense, which Elder figured out a way around. He was imprisoned for a LONG time, after all, I'm sure he spend some of it thinking. In fact, maybe that very defense is what he's twisted to protect the eggs at the core of the world; the shield that was supposed to keep the worms out is now keeping anyone from getting to them.

Bing! We have a winner. I'll think about this, and about your suggestion.

I'm traveling for a week - I'll check in every few days!

 

[thatdarncat]

Hey Kevin, did you get my PM?

 

[Spatzimaus]

gods breath life into new world (only one god back then, actually; the rest came after),

Hmm. I thought you mentioned in the SH that it was Abbath, his wife Aedrae, and Trea who showed up and defeated the worms. Was there some god before them? If not, then that even makes things better; if you've never detailed exactly what treachery Trea used to kill Abbath was, this could be it. When he went to breathe life into the world, Trea caused him to be absorbed into it in the process. He's technically still "alive" in the sense that a tree is; no intelligence, no consciousness, but the ability to react on a long timescale. So, when the plates shift and climates change, it's because he wanted it to, in his unconscious way.
This also gives a really good reason for the worms to want to get to the center of the world; it's the "heart" of a creator god in a very literal sense. And, it provides a good reason why the other gods can't/won't come down; they don't want to intrude into the "domain" of their father/grandfather any more than they'd want to kill each other... oh wait.

The big problem with this idea is that it'd mean he was effectively dead well before any living beings were there to make him the "God of Explorers", and he DID give birth to Quenntil and Celian before dying. On the other hand, both of those kids' domains are things that can pre-date the rebirth of the world. So, you could easily say that all of the second-generation gods (Aeos, Deifos, Galanna, etc.) were born before this happened. The gods clean up the worms, have a bunch of kids to help them run things, THEN try to restart life on the planet.

This reminds me of a question I wanted to ask. In the story, we're constantly hearing about the churches of second- and even third-generation gods. Doesn't anyone still worship Aedrae or Trea? It just seems strange that there's no mention of them; it'd be like a Greek society that never mentions Zeus or Hera. Okay, Trea's domains aren't something you'd see much of in most cities (although I'd think in politically-savvy towns like Eversink that there'd be a church that quietly worships the less evil aspects of manipulation), but no one worships the Goddess of Fate?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Yes, posting again, I'm at work and got bored. Just went back and re-read the seer's actual words that you posted in the SH:
http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=259124&postcount=218
Specifically, this paragraph:

"But the First God Abbath called to him his love Aedrae and her clever friend Trea, and showed them the world, and showed them the worms and the mumbling dead. It was Trea the clever, Trea the Deceiver, who thought of the plan. It was she who tricked the worms, and convinced them to trust her, and soon all but two were locked in a red prison where they would never escape. The Gods set the lock in stone and breathed life into the key. And they looked upon the worm-riddled world, and Abbath breathed upon it. He fathered a child with his wife, and called him Aeos, and lifted the incandescent child into the heavens. There, the Godling ignited the endless night and brought the sun to a world that knew only darkness, and he forged chains of light to bind the last two worms within the earth. The dead were burned from the pitted world, and the globe was made anew."

Okay, the elf might not have been perfect. He DID say that Aeos was the one who locked the last two worms down, after all, and you're saying that it was heroes who did it (or maybe they did all the dangerous work, but needed him to finish the job by putting a lock on the door?). But the rest of this fits pretty well with the concept I mentioned in the last post; the seer said that Abbath breathed on it and fathered children, but you could always say that it actually happened the other way around, and that Abbath "breathing" on the world could simply be a misinterpretation of an event so far beyond mortals as to be unintelligible. And this does explain why the lower tiers of your pantheon are worshipped so heavily; by the time worshippers actually started appearing, there was no overshadowing Zeus/Odin father to keep them all in check.

Incidentally, this led me to thinking; you can't really worship a god that's dead, so who's been worshipping Abbath as the God of Explorers? Under normal circumstances, it'd be pretty clear to the priests when a deity dies. But if Abbath didn't entirely die, like we've mentioned, then he'd be in a more indeterminate state for that; he wouldn't be able to grant divine power directly (i.e. spells), but he WOULD be able to give power in a more passive sense (spell-less Paladins? PrCs?), along with the occasional miracle. And who'd worship a God of Explorers? Bards, Rangers, wanderers in general (Horizon Walkers!)... exactly the sort of people that a half-awake god bonded to the planet would be most connected to, and still be able to grant power to. So in that sense, he's a perfect match. The "official" churches might think he's dead, since no one's ever been able to call on him directly, but there are always stories of prayers to him being answered...

But there's something I've been stuck on for a while. If Abbath, Aedrae, and Trea were the first gods of post-Worm Spira, and created the lizards and such... where'd the gods of the other races come in? You've mentioned the Dwarven gods (like Moradin), plus gods of the Illithids, and even Mog, the Beetle God. Did they all show up after Abbath and company had done the hard work, and set up their own little domains? (Was it just that they, like Abbath, already existed on the outer planes before Spira was born?) Why is it that Humans and Elves worship the descendants of the creator god, but no one else seems to?

And if you want to get really nasty to the players: when Galanna killed Imbindarla, there were all sorts of calamities. What'd happen if one Illithid god killed the other? The main races would never even know there was a problem until all sorts of horrible things started happening.

 

[The_Warlock]

"...and soon all but two were locked in a red prison where they would never escape. The Gods set the lock in stone and breathed life into the key."

Here's my question...where is the Red Prison that the other worms got trapped in? Could it be accessed by the Defenders, and find there, starved of the souls of worlds, the great dead husks of the ancient worms, a huge writhing of stonelike annelid bodies the size of aircraft carriers, frozen in place, dried out, and yet caught in some form of undeath, irony having a hand in the eternal imprisonment. Not the vile level draining, attribute sucking undead, but sort of a ghostly mental essence, and if the Defenders travel through the worms, the dried tracings of the inner veins and organs can trigger powerful and painful mental flashbacks of the worms remembering the deception and imprisonment from the worms point of view.

The big question to me is how did Elder and the other worm escape, and when were they noticed and bound in chains of light?

"There, the Godling ignited the endless night and brought the sun to a world that knew only darkness, and he forged chains of light to bind the last two worms within the earth. The dead were burned from the pitted world, and the globe was made anew."

This part can allow for a lot of interpretation, especially in terms of the passage of time. While it states grammatically that the globe was made anew after the binding of the worms with chains of light, Aeos had already brought light to a world in darkness. The first races, as agents of the gods, could have been birthed in that arrival of light, and the world could technically already have been filled with life, and then the last two worms are found in the living world, and champion races are led in a jihad to contain them, empowered with Aeos light.

Also, given the sentence preceding the above, it could be argued seers and historians have misremembered or misordered the wording, and that while Aeos brought the light, he didn't forge the chains of light, but instead Abbath forged the chains of light from the radiance of his son. That forging could have been the process whereby Abbath was somehow lost, but gave his essence to his companion goddess to birth more gods to protect the world in his absence.

But that's me being overly complicated. It happens when you run a game based on a prophecy from an empire that got so thoroughly devastated that nobody knows how the empire fell, let alone have accurate records of their diviners.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Here's my question...where is the Red Prison that the other worms got trapped in?

It's Carceri. Or at least that's what Piratecat told us at one point. You know, plane of Lawful Evil? Although, that does beg the question of why none of them ever learned how to Plane Shift to somewhere more interesting...