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

[The_Warlock]

I agree with arwink...

We are here to throw out wacky ideas, and hear about the vile and incredibly nasty creatures and events you intend to unleash on your hapless PCs. Spoiler away...I don't think it will impact the enjoyment of the story hour readers...

 

[Piratecat]

Okay then. Spoilers ahead, matey; ye've been warned.

[sblock]I have two* rough plotlines left to go in the campaign. One I don't want to share with you yet, because it involves spoilers for stuff you don't yet know about but which I want to write up. The other, though. . .

One of my big problems is that I've built the worms and Elder up so much that I don't want him to go down in simple combat. I need something more interesting.

The rough plan is that for months the worms are nowhere to be seen, and cause no trouble. Why? They've burrowed down to both the literal and metaphysical center of the world, and they've bred. Maybe they've given their own life for this, maybe not, but picture a giant flaming chasm that's filled with millions of pustulant eggs; I'm thinking of the same effect we got in the Matrix, when the camera pulls back and we see all the little people-pods being tended by machines.

When the eggs hatch (which will happen in a pre-determined time, regardless of what the PCs do), the worms will begin to eat out the world from the inside. Agar will start having rotten apple prophecies/visions. Bad omens will show up everywhere, but since the worms are effectively invisible to the Gods there won't be overt warnings. Then, as things start to go really bad, the clouds will fall out of the sky. I figure that ought to get peoples' attention.

In the superb Malhavoc book Beyond Countless Doorways there's a neat ruined world that the PCs can literally reawaken and reforge. I want to do something similar, allowing the group to quest for something like the heart of the sun or the soul of Spira (they'll also need the item that made Halcyon into such a lawful creature -- I am waiting for this adventure with bated breath) that will allow them to rekindle the planet and burn away all the worms. This will make them the demiurge of the planet's rebirth, and burn away the last remnants of the womrs at the same time.

A little goofy? Maybe, and it needs refining. But the NPCs that the group will talk to can advise and help them towards a solution, and since they don't even guess that the worms can breed there's going to be some fun surprises ahead.

Okay, kibitz and comment - adding improvements! For instance, right now the only good way we know of to get to the metaphysical center of the world is to plummet there in agony after getting hit by Velendo's shield (a talisman of pure good). How would you get to the center of creation, in a way that didn't involve purely physical travel through the underdark?

* three, actually, but one involves the modrons -- so it probably won't become relevant.[/sblock]

 

[thatdarncat]

hmmmm I might have something for you, but it will have to wait until I get home... just leaving myself a note to check Wizard's Holiday tonight.

 

[RangerWickett]

If it makes the PCs feel better, when the worm breeding becomes known, you can always console them that a lot of their enemies who got sent to the center of the earth became worm food.

Unless, of course, you want to recur some villains.

Drama should happen amid drama, especially at a climax. How do the players get involved in reforging the world? Who's out to stop them? You could always go Final Fantasy and have the worms have alternate forms.

Ha ha! You have destroyed my worm skin, but now you shall face my true form!

How about the Modrons were marching to this celestial forge, so that they can be the workforce that rebuilds the world. Like the end of Hitchhiker's Guide.

 

[Robbs]

Just Happy to Be Here

First I have to say I just stumbled upon the whole ENworld thing a few weeks ago and started reading this thread as I am moving my group of heroes into higher level threats also. Then I got hooked on all the RBDM stuff and great story/monster ideas flowing. I've been trying since then to get up-to-friggin-date as I noticed the early posts were from years ago (but wanting to know the whole story before jumping in).
That being said, on to the matter at hand...While a bad image of 'Young Guns' automatically flashes to mind ("okay, everyone got their peyote?"), with things like this I like to require it to be personalized to each member of the party. So each character would need a different method of entry so to speak. Since your post will generate a bunch of good ideas (what seems to happen pretty often is that there are multiple exciting ideas and you end up having to pick one or meld a couple) and you could mix & match based upon the peculiar elements that resonate with each character. Don't know if your DMing schedule allows for this but it would also be a great way to run a series of single player adventures that culminates with them all meeting ("So, how'd you get here? Well, I had to convince a cabal of para-elemental shamans to transmute me & imbue my essence to gravitate towards the center. You know, the usual."). Since this sounds like it might not require a lot of combat you could achieve the transport part of the story arc through email (which would allow you to tailor this to your player's desires since some will be more into this concept than others-they get more email exchanges) which would also allow you to run everyone at the same time (which is usually the biggest downside to soloing your players, the time it takes to run each one sequentially instead of concurrently). The overall concept being that since it is a 'meta-physical' center it requires something core to each person's beliefs and consciousness. Plus you get the benny of tailoring the hook to your player's desires (your heavy player dramaticists get what they want while your combat monster player gets what s/he wants!
Wait, I think I have this whole post thing backwards. Did I just post a way to make your job more complicated instead of less complicated? Sorry, still getting the hang of this! I promise to come up with actual useful stuff too!
Okay, in addition to the tongue-in-cheek para-elemental idea (and in keeping with the RBDM aspect of the strand) I think a natural transport path would have to involve one or more PCs placing themselves at the mercy of either a recurring evil, some fresh new evil (hot off the stove), or more generalized evil. A quick one using some earlier posts could involve convincing an enclave of modified (thru PrC, templates, etc.) mindflayers to weave a psychic pathway that will lift the PC's minds and free them to 'find the center' (Let me see if I've got this straight, we strip ourselves of all magic 'cause it will disrupt the process, then lay down inside a circle of uber-illithids while they all focus their mental powers on us? Right. Well, OK when do we start!). You get the conflict of good needing to work with evil, which always generates good party conflict, and the players have to work an angle to convince these creatures to go along with this and figure out some way to keep from getting screwed over in the process.
I also have an image of something involving the silver strand aspect of Astral travel, maybe having to shift astral then having to enchant the strand to act as a lifeline when the second shift to the 'center' occurs.
Anyway, a couple of ideas to poke holes in; but be gentle this is my first time...posting.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Again, I'll reiterate: EVIL!!!! Okay, that's out of the way, on to the suggestions. (And I could spoiler tag this whole thing, I suppose, but this entire thread is one giant spoiler, so why bother?)

That's a huge thing to spring on the players; I don't think it's enough to rely on direct visions (no matter how vague) for that one. One thing you might use, based on a 3E Psion (Shaper) I had:

Long, long ago (say a few hundred years back), a seer foresaw the upcoming apocalypse, and attempted to divine more detail. He went a bit too far, and it drove him mad. He spent the rest of his (somewhat short) life wandering the wilderness in a daze, teleporting from region to region (and possibly even plane to plane) with no set pattern. But, he retained just enough to know it was important to preserve this information, so he did so in the most permanent way he knew: he used spells like Fabricate (or Stone Shape, or whatever) to turn random trees, rocks, etc. into statues that would tell the story of what was to come. He was an excellent craftsman, so the level of detail on the statues went way beyond "disturbing".
Since he travelled all over the place, few people ever saw more than one or two of the statues, and in time they've weathered/grown/etc into unrecognizability (plus some were destroyed by people for purely aesthetic reasons... when some lunatic magically changes the tree in your yard into a giant worm statue, you'll use it for firewood). Most of the smaller ones have been utterly destroyed, but in a few cases he carved scenes into mountains and such, and there much has still survived, especially the ones located in deserts. As a result, no one alive has ever bothered trying to figure out what the statues were for, and they've just been written off as the disturbing artwork of a madman.
But, a diviner like Agar COULD use spells to see what the statues originally looked like, and piece together enough information to know what was coming. A mage like Ioun might help for this, too, especially if it happened long enough ago that he had firsthand knowledge of the seer. And all it takes to start the process is one person who realizes that Elder looked a lot like an old carving he saw.

I like the idea of the worms not surviving the process, if only because it removes the need for a big fight that the players shouldn't ever win. On the other had, it removes the barrier that would keep them from trying to win by brute force, and the Elder-Stone Bear deserves more resolution. So maybe it's the other worm that's sacrificed, but Elder lives on to guard the eggs. Better yet: maybe both worms are still living, solely because the hatchlings will need a food source... so the moment they are born, the existing two die horribly. This not only prevents the players from interfering pre-birth, it removes the need to fight Elder later. (Or maybe only Elder's mate sacrifices herself that way, and he survives... it's adjustable.)

The "bad omens" are fun to come up with. Tremors in the earth, Stone Bear hearing whispers of Elder's thoughts (and feeling the loss when he dies), seers start to go mad when confronted with the lack of a future... and some could be more metaphysical, like making healing magic suddenly less effective (as the heart of the world goes rotten), or plants animals start getting unexplainably sick.

Also, depending on how much warning you give the world, you could have all sorts of other fun. Magical evacuations to the planes. Looting raids from various planar races (what, they'll fight over Mechanus, but won't grab stuff from a world about to be destroyed?). Doomsday cults.
Oh, and the Citadel of Kodali's Retreat (or whatever it was called) should show up in the sky above Spira. It always orbits a dying world, right? The players would realize what this meant, even if no one else did.

 

[Piratecat]

Welcome to the boards, Robbs! Lordy, it's cool when people de-lurk. Thank you.

(Note that unlike in Word, you'll want to place an extra carriage return between paragraphs; it makes long posts easier to read.)

I really like the idea of involving the enlightened elder brain. Some great possibilities there, and it'd be a shame to create such a fun NPC and then never have the PCs run into him again. Good ideas!

Spatz, the concept of diviners going insane from a lack of future fills me with positive glee. Yoink. Ditto on Kodali's Retreat circling Spira.

 

[Spatzimaus]

So each character would need a different method of entry so to speak.

The fundamental problem with this approach is that it often comes across as extremely contrived. That somehow there exist many different ways of doing something that no one has ever done before, and by some miracle none of the group are going to be left out... in a really small group it's not so bad, but when you're transporting a dozen characters/cohorts/mounts, it's a bit much.

As for how the DoD would do it? The fundamental question is why CAN'T they do it. There must be something about the center of the planet that protects it from the usual scry-teleport combo, some magical barrier to entry that only incredibly powerful beings can penetrate. (Maybe one worm had to sacrifice itself to get them through the barrier on the way in, and the other will have to sacrifice to open the door for the hatchlings to get OUT... or maybe the barrier is the result of the first worm sacrificing itself, and the second will be eaten by the young.)
But, they've already met a certain earth spirit that's proven capable of transporting groups of people anywhere on the planet or even to other planes. A spirit whose sister they rescued from Glubyal. While she herself might not be able to get the DoD to the center of the planet, if her sisters helped she might be able to do something.

 

[Greybar]

I looked it up, so I figured other would want to.

Original reference re: Kodali's Retreat

The group moves through oddly shaped gigantic chambers built to a titan’s scale, doing their best to avoid any other inhabitants of the Citadel. They see several human and tiefling Doomguard from Sigil, drawn to the fortress by its natural entropy, and they pass by a corkscrew-shaped hall that the pit fiend had said leads to a group of Fey. Soon the group finds a room shaped like an inverted ziggurat, empty, with each layer ten feet below the next. The Defenders claim this as their own, and begin to stash their supplies and settle in. Agar casts a permanent illusion to make it look a little more homey, and different people claim different sections of the huge chamber.

“Oh my,” says Arcade. “You’ll want to see this.” He’s standing down on the lowest level of the floor, a full 60’ below the main entrance. His face is bathed by a flickering light, dim and unsteady. As the others join him they also see what has entranced him. The wall here appears to be made out of glass or pure force, and it reveals the unparalleled sight of a world slowly being ripped apart. The Defenders look down from perhaps a mile or so in the air. From their vantage point, they see a land where titans - or Gods? - are running amuck, reshaping a land by ripping it apart, destroying a forest by raising a volcano. There is death down there, even if the people getting killed are too small to see.

“The Citadel always looks out on a world that is dying,” Agar says quietly. “I think that we’re at the end of the Outlands, and this is where worlds come to die, forced into entropy.”

Nolin shivers as a tremendous wave slaps down on a city below. “Let’s not visit.”

 

[ConnorSB]

All this talk of worms has me thinking of Dune, and specifically thier life-cycle (elucidated in later books). Essentially, a few of the ideas that you could steal from Dune are:

a) Wormsign- the obvious and creepy movement of a worm underneith ground. Hills buckle, sand moves, dust clouds puff up. Could make for a great warmup to a fight- you know the worm is there, you can see the towns its tunnelling has destroyed, but WHERE IS IT?

b) Worm-Birth byproducts. Some sort of psychotic fluid might be the byproduct of the birth of all those worms. It might be gooey concentrated evil, but it might also contain creepy memories or whatnot- perhaps agar must eat some of it, or be bathed in it, in order to obtain some sort of prophetic knowledge.

c) Worm-touched people. Perhaps worms when they are born are amorphous and gooey, and at such a stange particularly disturbed people are able to incorporate the worms into thier own body, essentially donning a worm-skin that as the worm grows slowly corrupts their flesh and mind (even more so than it alreay was). Imagine multiple villians that the players have banished to the center of the earth returning infused with some sort of evil worm-touched template, making them stronger, more powerful, etc.

And in an unrelated note, maybe you could incorporate hooks into something somewhere. What better way to catch a worm but with a hook?