NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 5025033" data-attributes="member: 1139">Major spoiler alert for E3: Prince of Undeath.   I’m going to assume people can follow along in the module.The final skill challenge in this module (indeed, the whole final encounter set) is appallingly bad.  I haven't seen any reviews or discussions highlighting this point.  It's amazing that the writers couldn’t come up with a decent skill challenge or encounter to conclude their adventure path.The skill challenge: level 30, 8 Successes before 3 failures.  The Raven Queen has been pierced by a Shard of Evil, and you have to remove it to save her.  The key problem is that there’s essentially no benefit from completing the challenge, given the number of actions it will take, and an enormous penalty of failure.  Success: remove the shard without killing the Raven Queen.  Orcus takes 100 damage.  Unless Orcus gets his hand on the shard again during this encounter, his plan for seizing death's power fails.  However, beating Orcus is going to entail beating him in the combat part, not taking away the shard.  Even holding the Shard is quite dangerous for the PCs.  Failure: The Raven Queen dies.  Orcus is fully healed and gains a +10 bonus to damage rolls, a +2 bonus to all defenses, and 400 additional hit points. Note that failing the skill challenge is the only way the Raven Queen can die in this encounter; you can just fight Orcus before attempting it.  The encounter becomes much harder if you fail, but there’s no real benefit to success, given the number of actions it takes.  Indeed, even if every standard action was guaranteed to succeed on the skill challenge, it wouldn’t be worth giving up 8 actions for (12.5 damage per action).  Back to this broader set of encounters: the instructions for running them are contradictory.  In L2 (the monsters in the room), it suggests running this encounter first, with the obelisk trap if the players trigger it.  Then segue into L4 when the players attempt to save the Raven Queen.However, in L4 it says that Orcus stays out of the fight until the adventurers get past the obelisk traps or once they begin to remove the shard from the Raven Queen, but he joins the battle as soon as the adventurers attack him.Suppose you get to L2 and the archery ranger takes a shot at Orcus.  If you follow this direction, the next thing you know you’ve triggered Orcus’s encounter (complete with him summoning minions), plus the previous encounter, and the obelisk traps are still in force.  So this advice should be mostly disregarded.  It shouldn’t be disregarded entirely; if the party sits back, doesn’t try to save the Raven Queen and doesn’t disable the obelisks, they shouldn’t be able to shoot Orcus with impunity.  A better set-up would build Orcus not joining forces with his previous encounter/obelisk trap to overwhelm the PCs into the plot.  As written, the earlier Orcus joins the fight the worse it is for the PCs (this failing of multiple encounters that should obviously combine into one occurs <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/268586-number-encounters-level-per-day.html#post5012252" target="_blank">in other published adventures</a>).  If Orcus doesn’t join the fight, the party can take a short rest after defeating his initial guards.   Another particularly poor feature of the writing is that Orcus has a damaging Aura 20; his stat block is in L4 with no mention of the aura in the earlier encounters.  It should say whether it’s supposed to be on in L2 (and give the details of the aura if it is).  I’ll go into a few ways the skill challenge could be improved in another post.</blockquote>

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