Help me plan THE END (My players can look now)

[BlackMoria]

Are your players aware that this is a 'all or nothing' fight with the world at stake. If so, be prepared for the possibility of unconventional thinking.

Cause, if I was one of your players, I would propose a plan to have as many friendly crew as possible have 'fly' magics. The airship would be filled with 'things that go boom'.

The attack: Get close, the assault force flies off the ship and I am ramming the airship down the throat of the warforged (ramming speed!), and bailing with my own flight magics at the last second. The assault force now does a mop up after the two airships rain down as debris.....

If the stakes are this high, expect the unconventional and the near suicidal.

 

[Rel]

Rel - I'm really going to think about those Neural Bombs. They, or something like them, sound too good to ignore. Given the nature of the Mournland, don't know if I can put the basecamp on the ground idea into action - think of the Nine Hells, but with a cloud ceiling and aberrations instead of brimstone and devils.

If there are no bad guys on the ground then that leaves us with a ship-to-ship battle unless I'm missing something. So let's take that as a given.

The bad guys primary goal is to set off their Armageddon Device. The meddling PC's wish to stop this so that means that the baddies will need to either Evade or Destroy the party. The problem with "Evade" is that (if I'm understanding things correctly) they can't actually just flee because that would put them out of the Manifest Zone. The best they can hope for is to fly around in the same general area and avoid the worst of the attacks from the enemy ship.

OR

They go at the party's vessel with all guns blazing, hoping to take them out first. The trick is that they don't have a whole lot in the way of potent guns to blaze with. So probably what the baddies need to do is spend some of their Magic Item Salary Cap on big boom items. Probably mostly Scrolls or maybe a Wand or two.

If they "outgun" the party's ship (in terms of spells with the range and damage to blast the party's ship from a distance) then they should still evade as long as they can and shoot the party's ship as they attempt to close the gap.

If the party's ship outguns them then their best bet will be to close and join the battle (possibly ramming, definately doing a boarding action) ASAP before they take too much damage. Their boarding attack should have a goal of disabling the party's ship because once that happens then they can go back to Evading thanks to their superior maneuverability. Secondary goals would be to kill anybody who seems cabable of doing the "big bang" magic (putting them once again in the position of being able to successfully evade) and (if things go spectacularly well) just killing everybody.

So my final analysis of what will make this encounter memorable and fun as the climax of the campaign is this:

If you deem it likely that the bad guys will outgun the good guys in a ranged battle, then the good guys will probably have lost a lot of their mooks by the time the battle is joined. That means that the party will need to wade through a lot of enemy mooks to get to the BBEG's and thus you don't really need to beef them up.

If you deem it likely that the good guys will outgun the bad guys in a ranged battle, then the bad guys will have lost a lot of their mooks by the time the battle is joined (and Team Good Guy will be largely intact). That means that there will be fewer mooks to deal with and you should probably beef them up a bit.

 

[Henry]

Are your players aware that this is a 'all or nothing' fight with the world at stake. If so, be prepared for the possibility of unconventional thinking.

Something really interesting I overheard at the last session - they're aware of the plan, but they don't think he's really going to do it! Their logic was that he wouldn't want to blow everything up, because they think he wants to rule it. However, they haven't yet come to the information of how deep his manic depression goes (or whatever the correct term for his psychosis would be). They do know he's hooked up with the Children of Winter, which I would have thought would be a big enough clue, but as of last session apparently not. OTOH, their more recent feelers for intel they sent out had not yet come back, so I may have to make the point subtly more clear.

I do live for those moments when the players realize that, yes, the bad guy really is that far gone. In which case, a Lieutenant Worf-style ramming may indeed be what they try - if the bad guy doesn't see them and use the artifact on them first.

 

[Felonious Ntent]

How hard is it to take down airships?
My first instinct would be to pour all our efforts into crashing the enemy aircraft. After that I would worry about other things.

 

[GrayIguana]

When will you be running this encounter? You will tell us how it goes, right?

 

[Henry]

When will you be running this encounter? You will tell us how it goes, right?

Not for several weeks yet, as they are having fun cleaning out an old dungeon in preparation for facing the Warforged. He tried to destroy said dungeon (an abandoned wizards' school, which was the training ground for the originator of the artifact, a bugbear Sorcerer named Khaaram) with the artifact, and they dug into it to find out why. What they find may tell them how to disable the artifact, but I haven't decided yet. At the very least, they will find some powerful magics to help them challenge him.

Also, based on suggestions here, I'm beefing up the NPCs slightly:

Warforged Psion 8 / Ftr 4
Druid 7 (still)
2 Ogre Fighter 3
2 Troll Barbarian 2
4 4th level Druids (still)
20 Warrior 3 / Barbarian 2

Plus entertainment from the artifact.

One more thing: I read a friend's Monster Manual 3 last night, and am thinking of employing a War Troll in a separate encounter - GOOD GOD, those things are tough! (Troll with 12 hit dice, Regen 9(acid only), and a 30 STR & CON mixed with armor and weapons - yeesh!) I figured if he wanted them dead and couldn't kill them yet, he'd hire one of the best to do it. That thing doesn't come cheap, either - 30 gp per day for standard merc work is pretty hefty. The the least it will be entertaining to watch them gang up on him.

 

[Henry]

After two months' delay (TWO MONTHS!), we finally wrapped up the Eberron Campaign. I beefed up the opposition considerably, including

Warforged Psion 9 / Ftr 4
Druid 9
1 Ogre Fighter 6
1 Troll Barbarian 5
7 4th level Druids with flame strike scrolls
3 War5/Ftr4
20 Warrior 3 / Barbarian 2

All said they had an excellent time. There was Ship-to-ship combat (via the characters on the ships, because each ship had no weapons of their own), there was midair flying & boarding, there was feather-fall paradrops, massive carnage, a wacked-out artifact that was vaporizing NPC's and creating wraiths, and an ending worthy of the Poseidon Adventure! I may yet write up a story hour about this campaign, but in the end, they were victorious, they destroyed the artifact (via a method I was TOTALLY blindsided about), and they slew the villain in mortal combat while flying 300 feet in the air! Artifact, Cor Azer (the warforged whose name I stole from an ENworlder ) AND Airship were lost to the Mournlands, and they flew back home in triumph. They were offered positions at various prestigious organizations throughout Khorvaire, but opted to stay in Sharn together. And they lived happily ever after...

...unless they decide to pick those characters back up again, that is.

 

[Rel]

Woot! Glad to hear that it came off well, Henry. Hopefully I'll have as much luck kicking off my Eberron campaign as you did ending yours.