Yes, that seems to me the best way to go. I just cant use the monster as they are. I have to make "npcs" like those corrupted paragon centaurs with gear as lvl 20 npcs.
Its a lot more work for me, but i want them to be happy.
Help, players are too strong!
- Thread starter Icaaro
- Start date
Yes, that seems to me the best way to go. I just cant use the monster as they are. I have to make "npcs" like those corrupted paragon centaurs with gear as lvl 20 npcs.
Its a lot more work for me, but i want them to be happy.
One question.
This avatar they are facing casts time stop as spell like ability without limit as times per day.
Could he cast it inside the time stop? And getting more rounds?
jefgorbach
First Post
Nerull is the Greater God of Darkness, Death, and Covert Activity who predates ALL life except his siblings(?) Kord, Obad-Hai, and Pelor so while your PCs may be well-above average, they’re still rather insignificant mortals from his viewpoint, barely worth the effort of favoring them with an Avatar.
That said, he still remains aware of the mortal realm with worshippers on countless world so I would consider him easily a Divine Rank 20 and seriously doubt he’d approach the party intent on challenging him with anything less than Rank16; with all that implies – especially the fact he has perfect control over Carceri within 1,600 miles radius of himself, including deciding how well magical Domains, Schools, and similar spell-like abilities function (if at all). They better know how to work effectively blind and without their favorite spell effects/tactics because the Great Deity of Covert Actions essentially has copies of their character sheets and the time/resources to counter anything they’ve done/used upto meeting him face-to-face. Also keep in mind his personal aura can affect them upto 16-miles away if he so chooses.
SRD - Divine
“Nerull's scythe [lifecutter] is a +5 weapon causing instant death unless his victim saves vs. Death. Regardless, the damage done by the blade cannot be magically cured short of a heal or similar high level spell. Double damage is done against positive energy using creatures; undead creatures struck save vs. spell or have their negative energy drained and crumble to dust, while their spirit travels to the Underworld (Hades, Gehenna, Hell, etc). The scythe sweeps 10' wide and 2 feet broad in an arc of about 180 degrees before Nerull; it can cut even into the Border Etherel or through color pools, and it is effective against those in gaseous form.” – cannon fire. However keep in mind that’s a Mystara 1e description so equip him comparable to the PCs keeping in mind he can create Artifacts pertaining to his portfolios of covert action, death, darkness and time isn’t a factor since he’s literally had eons to craft.
Presuming HE is more than sufficient, Gary Gygax indicated he’s usually accompanied by a great winged daemon-mount named Putriptoq in his novel Artifact of Evil and other unique demons/undead. Further he’s believed to be served by Anthraxus, Bubonis, Cholerix, Typhus, Diptherius, Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Moloch, Mammon, Geryon and Dispater. Apomps, the tripartiate god of the demodands, is usually considered a lesser aspect of Nerull himself. In actuality, it was probably originally three unique 'daemons he fused together.
For background/ideas:
Nerull - Ghwiki
Canonfire! - Nerull
That said, he still remains aware of the mortal realm with worshippers on countless world so I would consider him easily a Divine Rank 20 and seriously doubt he’d approach the party intent on challenging him with anything less than Rank16; with all that implies – especially the fact he has perfect control over Carceri within 1,600 miles radius of himself, including deciding how well magical Domains, Schools, and similar spell-like abilities function (if at all). They better know how to work effectively blind and without their favorite spell effects/tactics because the Great Deity of Covert Actions essentially has copies of their character sheets and the time/resources to counter anything they’ve done/used upto meeting him face-to-face. Also keep in mind his personal aura can affect them upto 16-miles away if he so chooses.
SRD - Divine
“Nerull's scythe [lifecutter] is a +5 weapon causing instant death unless his victim saves vs. Death. Regardless, the damage done by the blade cannot be magically cured short of a heal or similar high level spell. Double damage is done against positive energy using creatures; undead creatures struck save vs. spell or have their negative energy drained and crumble to dust, while their spirit travels to the Underworld (Hades, Gehenna, Hell, etc). The scythe sweeps 10' wide and 2 feet broad in an arc of about 180 degrees before Nerull; it can cut even into the Border Etherel or through color pools, and it is effective against those in gaseous form.” – cannon fire. However keep in mind that’s a Mystara 1e description so equip him comparable to the PCs keeping in mind he can create Artifacts pertaining to his portfolios of covert action, death, darkness and time isn’t a factor since he’s literally had eons to craft.
Presuming HE is more than sufficient, Gary Gygax indicated he’s usually accompanied by a great winged daemon-mount named Putriptoq in his novel Artifact of Evil and other unique demons/undead. Further he’s believed to be served by Anthraxus, Bubonis, Cholerix, Typhus, Diptherius, Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Moloch, Mammon, Geryon and Dispater. Apomps, the tripartiate god of the demodands, is usually considered a lesser aspect of Nerull himself. In actuality, it was probably originally three unique 'daemons he fused together.
For background/ideas:
Nerull - Ghwiki
Canonfire! - Nerull
Ok, so now you are forcing me to tell you the story of the campaign.
Nerull wants to destroy all life in the Multiverse. He kidnapped/ killed several small deities in several planes. This to start corrupting them all. He's doing this as a massive attack on all life forms.He could do it one plane at a time, but this way, im multiple planes those deities just try to look at home and not seeing the big plan.
The heroes where handpicked by ehlonna to help her save BeastLands.
In beastlands, skerrit is corrupted and ehlonna doenst know why. She is losing her power because her realm that gives her her power is slowing dying. (This was made up by me to fit the campaing. THe deityes get power from their realms and followers)
Actually, Nerull left a Avatar in the form of Skerrit, a Centaur Deity, and corrupted all or almost all life forms in BeastLands (All get the corrupted template from vile darkness). The players will stop this avatar (And getting the source of the corruption) and then will look for skerrit to restore the balance and life to THIS plane specifically.
Of course Nerull wont bother to targets them individually himself, will just send some lackeys to get the job done.
After this they will roam other planes and eventually end up in carceri...
But that part is yet to be developed by me.
Just so that i would let you know the guidelines.
Persiflage
First Post
I ran a campaign for years that eventually got just shy of Level 30, and I have to say: your problem party members really don't look all that tough to me.
Seriously, you don't have to hand out massive XP every session just because the CR of the critters they face is listed as being high. CR is, at best, a guideline: and it breaks down completely at epic levels. Ignore it, and go with the "dozen-or-so-encounters-to-gain-a-level" rule of thumb. You can tell how difficult a challenge was for your party by judging how many of their resources were consumed: a challenge roughly equal to the party's "level" (by which I mean "power level", not their character level) will have consumed roughly 25% of their resources for the day. If it didn't, it wasn't, and you should reward them commensurate to the effort expended. I'd also like to echo previous comments about putting a single monster of any type in front of such a party...
Anyway, you wanted hard-and-fast suggestions about what to do, yesno? Well, here are some.
If the party is L25 and up, then anything lower-level can be regarded as pretty much "mooks", yes?
Take a bunch of 22nd-level casters. Make your life easy: have them be sorcerors to limit the spell choices you have to make. They're in league with Nerull: these guys are going to be his standard artillery pieces from this moment on, which makes life even easier because you can outfit them with a standard set of feats and abilities, only tweaking from time to time for surprise value. They're ghosts (CR +2). They can cast Antimagic Field. They have the Extraordinary Spell Aim and Transdimensional Spell feats (among others, which we'll get to shortly). This means that they can cast Antimagic Field and have the area-of-effect not include themselves, so they can still cast spells, be ethereal, fly around and all that good stuff whilst being largely impervious to magical interference. If they cast it as a Transdimensional Spell, it will affect creatures on the Prime Material plane... They also have the Permanent Emanation feat:
They can now turn this ability on and off as a free action, which means you get to indulge in all sorts of horrible tactics. Make sure you give them Rapid Metamagic so they can cast quickened spells and apply feats like Transdimensional Spell on the fly without it costing them actions. Note that the Turn Undead ability is supernatural and is thus blocked whilst the Antimagic Field is active (or see later).
Furthermore, give them the Sculpt Spell feat to make their AMF's (and other spells) significantly more flexible, or just "bigger"... Your Wizard, in particular, is hosed. If he's permanently on the Ethereal Plane and the rest of the party isn't, one of these guys getting close to him before the party realise what's going on could be lethal, depending on how he got himself there. He can't always be in a Prismatic Sphere: the effect of that spell is immobile. Furthermore, if he uses it whilst on the Prime Material, it won't stop the ghosts getting in: nothing in the spell description says the effect extends to other planes.
If you want a story, they're part of the Vengeant Dragon-Blooded Arcane Order of Nerull, a clique of high-level sorcerors who have been training in secret for decades against the day when their god would raise them to immortality to help in his great plans to bring about the End of Days. Which is, like, now. He could have dozens of the buggers; carefully played, just one of them could be a major handful. If you're worried about the Cleric readying an action to Turn Undead when the AMF's drop, give them Turn Immunity like that possessed by certain templates: call it a free bonus gift from Nerull, along with spell resistance appropriate to their level.
I could stat them out for you, although doubtless others here could do a better job. Make sure they employ all the standard "real" defenses themselves, like Greater Blink, Greater Anticipate Teleportation, Mind Blank, etc. and make sure they're all using True Seeing, Foresight, and other high-level divinations. The AMF's will make most - if not all - of the party's toys useless, and the fact that they can still use spells while the party can't is very dangerous indeed. Instantaneous conjurations, anyone?
They're particularly good because the party can't actually kill them, due to this:
So, unless and until Nerull wins or the party makes it impossible for him to do so, these guys are going to come back every 2d4 days... So by the time the party have managed to get through a couple of dozen, the first ones have come back to life. Of course, Nerull could just imbue his powerful undead followers with the ability to pop back into existence after 24 hours.
On that note, don't be afraid to have your monsters retreat if they're getting the worst of it: falling back and regrouping is perfectly acceptable.
Now rinse and repeat, but pull a similar trick with Clerics: Nerull could have a couple of dozen of those, too. Only this time, they're Death Knights. For extra kicks, have them pick up a couple of levels of Ruby Knight Vindicator for all sort of White Raven cheese. And they're riding Nightmares. Or better yet, Very Old Dracoliches. Don't forget Libris Mortis for feats that add up to very nasty undead indeed.
And these are just horde monsters, intended to give the party a pleasant workout: they're well within CR. Now have a mixed encounter containing representatives of both groups: if the party breezes through that then I promise you, You Are Doing It Wrong.
You're in Epic levels, which means that there's no degree of cheese that should be off-limits to you as a DM. Some of the tactics above could be employed at much lower levels than this, but they would break most decent games, even the high-powered ones I'm accustomed to...
However, as the Epic Level Joke Book is automatically so far outside the bounds of decency that you couldn't see them with a telescope, complaining about over-the-top tactics when using it is like the Queen complaining that the naked man who just p*ssed in her soup didn't bow before he did it.
Icaro said:
Seriously, you don't have to hand out massive XP every session just because the CR of the critters they face is listed as being high. CR is, at best, a guideline: and it breaks down completely at epic levels. Ignore it, and go with the "dozen-or-so-encounters-to-gain-a-level" rule of thumb. You can tell how difficult a challenge was for your party by judging how many of their resources were consumed: a challenge roughly equal to the party's "level" (by which I mean "power level", not their character level) will have consumed roughly 25% of their resources for the day. If it didn't, it wasn't, and you should reward them commensurate to the effort expended. I'd also like to echo previous comments about putting a single monster of any type in front of such a party...
Anyway, you wanted hard-and-fast suggestions about what to do, yesno? Well, here are some.
If the party is L25 and up, then anything lower-level can be regarded as pretty much "mooks", yes?
Take a bunch of 22nd-level casters. Make your life easy: have them be sorcerors to limit the spell choices you have to make. They're in league with Nerull: these guys are going to be his standard artillery pieces from this moment on, which makes life even easier because you can outfit them with a standard set of feats and abilities, only tweaking from time to time for surprise value. They're ghosts (CR +2). They can cast Antimagic Field. They have the Extraordinary Spell Aim and Transdimensional Spell feats (among others, which we'll get to shortly). This means that they can cast Antimagic Field and have the area-of-effect not include themselves, so they can still cast spells, be ethereal, fly around and all that good stuff whilst being largely impervious to magical interference. If they cast it as a Transdimensional Spell, it will affect creatures on the Prime Material plane... They also have the Permanent Emanation feat:
SRD said:
They can now turn this ability on and off as a free action, which means you get to indulge in all sorts of horrible tactics. Make sure you give them Rapid Metamagic so they can cast quickened spells and apply feats like Transdimensional Spell on the fly without it costing them actions. Note that the Turn Undead ability is supernatural and is thus blocked whilst the Antimagic Field is active (or see later).
Furthermore, give them the Sculpt Spell feat to make their AMF's (and other spells) significantly more flexible, or just "bigger"... Your Wizard, in particular, is hosed. If he's permanently on the Ethereal Plane and the rest of the party isn't, one of these guys getting close to him before the party realise what's going on could be lethal, depending on how he got himself there. He can't always be in a Prismatic Sphere: the effect of that spell is immobile. Furthermore, if he uses it whilst on the Prime Material, it won't stop the ghosts getting in: nothing in the spell description says the effect extends to other planes.
If you want a story, they're part of the Vengeant Dragon-Blooded Arcane Order of Nerull, a clique of high-level sorcerors who have been training in secret for decades against the day when their god would raise them to immortality to help in his great plans to bring about the End of Days. Which is, like, now. He could have dozens of the buggers; carefully played, just one of them could be a major handful. If you're worried about the Cleric readying an action to Turn Undead when the AMF's drop, give them Turn Immunity like that possessed by certain templates: call it a free bonus gift from Nerull, along with spell resistance appropriate to their level.
I could stat them out for you, although doubtless others here could do a better job. Make sure they employ all the standard "real" defenses themselves, like Greater Blink, Greater Anticipate Teleportation, Mind Blank, etc. and make sure they're all using True Seeing, Foresight, and other high-level divinations. The AMF's will make most - if not all - of the party's toys useless, and the fact that they can still use spells while the party can't is very dangerous indeed. Instantaneous conjurations, anyone?
They're particularly good because the party can't actually kill them, due to this:
SRD said:
So, unless and until Nerull wins or the party makes it impossible for him to do so, these guys are going to come back every 2d4 days... So by the time the party have managed to get through a couple of dozen, the first ones have come back to life. Of course, Nerull could just imbue his powerful undead followers with the ability to pop back into existence after 24 hours.
On that note, don't be afraid to have your monsters retreat if they're getting the worst of it: falling back and regrouping is perfectly acceptable.
Now rinse and repeat, but pull a similar trick with Clerics: Nerull could have a couple of dozen of those, too. Only this time, they're Death Knights. For extra kicks, have them pick up a couple of levels of Ruby Knight Vindicator for all sort of White Raven cheese. And they're riding Nightmares. Or better yet, Very Old Dracoliches. Don't forget Libris Mortis for feats that add up to very nasty undead indeed.
And these are just horde monsters, intended to give the party a pleasant workout: they're well within CR. Now have a mixed encounter containing representatives of both groups: if the party breezes through that then I promise you, You Are Doing It Wrong.
You're in Epic levels, which means that there's no degree of cheese that should be off-limits to you as a DM. Some of the tactics above could be employed at much lower levels than this, but they would break most decent games, even the high-powered ones I'm accustomed to...
However, as the Epic Level Joke Book is automatically so far outside the bounds of decency that you couldn't see them with a telescope, complaining about over-the-top tactics when using it is like the Queen complaining that the naked man who just p*ssed in her soup didn't bow before he did it.
Thank you very much for this change of ideias.
I loved this last one as making some "standard" npcs to hunt them, and also liked that i'm not the only one who thinks ELH is broken.
I'll come up with something and i'm not using standard monsters anymore.
Thank you all guys
Eduardo
I loved this last one as making some "standard" npcs to hunt them, and also liked that i'm not the only one who thinks ELH is broken.
I'll come up with something and i'm not using standard monsters anymore.
Thank you all guys
Eduardo
