Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3212912" data-attributes="member: 18549">These might be good ideas for a future adventure setup, but I think the OP has a mentor in mind who is not crippled, a wimp, or deceased.  He just wants some help with a project, presumably because if anything goes wrong they might be able to pull him out of trouble, which won't happen if he's alone.I like the idea proposed by several posters that the mentor is taking the PCs through a set of dangerous encounters, and is taking the brunt of it.  He's casting high-level spells, warding off attacks, and doing powerful things, but he can't take care of everything.  In each encounter there are a set of tasks that the PCs need to accomplish, for which the mentor's actions are merely backdrop.  Defend the horses from the orcs...locate the lever to close the portcullis before the mentor runs out of spells...keep the minions busy while the mentor performs the 10-round incantation that opens the Door of Peril...etc.The encounters can be pretty much normal fare for the party, since the mentor's actions are essentially window-dressing for the encounters.  Whatever he does is irrelevant to the outcome of the encounter, so long as the PCs succeed.  If they fail, they might spell doom for both themselves and the mentor.  If he's busy hedging out powerful monsters with walls of fire, he's not going to be capable of opening the escape hatch, which suddenly becomes the PCs' job.You could also play with it a bit.  In the Age of Worms adventure path [spoiler]The PCs' mentor becomes trapped by a magical device and needs rescuing.  While the PCs were by that point more powerful than he was, I imagine that if it happened to a mentor of greater power than the PCs, it would be pretty cool.  The dawning realization that "we're in a high-level dungeon and we just lost the guy who can keep us alive," would probably be fun to watch.  Suddenly the PCs are trapped in hostile territory, trying to find a way to save the mentor, so he can get them out of there in one piece.  [/spoiler]  Suddenly raising the stakes like that would make a pretty memorable session, I figure.</blockquote>

Verification