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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Persiflage" data-source="post: 5276375" data-attributes="member: 73597">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.</blockquote>

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