Many months ago I posted some stuff here about a campaign focused on exploring a forest distorted by fey magic. The BBEG is an entity known as the Elvenking, an ancient fey lord of near-godlike power that is in the process of awakening after aeons of dormancy and wants to rewrite the world in his image. As part of this effort, he has sent out his four daughters, the Faerie Princesses of summer, winter, spring, and fall, into the primeval forest, the Urwald, to promote his ideals.
While these Faerie Princesses aren't necessarily enemies that the PCs will have to fight, conflict is definitely a possibility (it all depends on how the PCs approach things), so I'd like to have them all properly statted up. My approach right now is to stat them up based on the stats for a planetar, which has about the right CR and spread of abilities I'd like these ladies to have. I'm aiming for something that would be a serious challenge for a party of around level 14-15 (medium-high optimization, possibly only 3 PCs depending on how well I do at replacing the two who had to drop after the second session due to schedule conflicts). The tricky parts are mainly the SLAs and the implications of switching from outsider to fey creature type.
For SLAs, while I've tried to stick closely to the same rough power level the planetar has (trying to keep to the same spell levels and roughly the same general kinds of spells), a lot of the planetar's healing SLAs aren't a terribly good fit for a fey, and thus I've replaced them beguiling sorts of spells that are more fitting for fey. This means they'll have a good deal more save-or-suck SLAs than the planetar, which will bump the CR up a bit.
Then there's the issue that the fey type has 1/2 BAB whereas outsiders have full. For three of the four Princesses, this isn't particularly important, since they're mainly spellcasters anyway, but one of them is supposed to be a warrior-huntress, and thus needs to have decent BAB. To accomplish this, I need to give her lots of HD, which in turn means high saves and inflated DCs for any extraordinary or supernatural abilities I might want to give (and I would very much like to give all of them the Fey Spirit NPC ability from DMG2).
There will be some variation between the individual Princesses, especially regarding skill and feat selection, but this is more or less the base statblock
Regarding the PCs' capabilities, as I alluded to previously I'm down to just two players at the moment -- one is playing a druid (PH2 shapeshifter variant) with a penchant for blasting (likes to use Sudden Maximize & Empower), and the other is running a warblade/swordsage with an ubercharger sort of build. There will definitely be at least one other PC, possibly 2 if I get lucky, and there's also a chance they might have an NPC archer along as well. They rescued said NPC in the last session and expressed an interest in bringing him along to help them out.
While these Faerie Princesses aren't necessarily enemies that the PCs will have to fight, conflict is definitely a possibility (it all depends on how the PCs approach things), so I'd like to have them all properly statted up. My approach right now is to stat them up based on the stats for a planetar, which has about the right CR and spread of abilities I'd like these ladies to have. I'm aiming for something that would be a serious challenge for a party of around level 14-15 (medium-high optimization, possibly only 3 PCs depending on how well I do at replacing the two who had to drop after the second session due to schedule conflicts). The tricky parts are mainly the SLAs and the implications of switching from outsider to fey creature type.
For SLAs, while I've tried to stick closely to the same rough power level the planetar has (trying to keep to the same spell levels and roughly the same general kinds of spells), a lot of the planetar's healing SLAs aren't a terribly good fit for a fey, and thus I've replaced them beguiling sorts of spells that are more fitting for fey. This means they'll have a good deal more save-or-suck SLAs than the planetar, which will bump the CR up a bit.
Then there's the issue that the fey type has 1/2 BAB whereas outsiders have full. For three of the four Princesses, this isn't particularly important, since they're mainly spellcasters anyway, but one of them is supposed to be a warrior-huntress, and thus needs to have decent BAB. To accomplish this, I need to give her lots of HD, which in turn means high saves and inflated DCs for any extraordinary or supernatural abilities I might want to give (and I would very much like to give all of them the Fey Spirit NPC ability from DMG2).
There will be some variation between the individual Princesses, especially regarding skill and feat selection, but this is more or less the base statblock
Regarding the PCs' capabilities, as I alluded to previously I'm down to just two players at the moment -- one is playing a druid (PH2 shapeshifter variant) with a penchant for blasting (likes to use Sudden Maximize & Empower), and the other is running a warblade/swordsage with an ubercharger sort of build. There will definitely be at least one other PC, possibly 2 if I get lucky, and there's also a chance they might have an NPC archer along as well. They rescued said NPC in the last session and expressed an interest in bringing him along to help them out.
