While the party rested at night in the relative safety of their tiny hut, the maiden they were escorting, Sereetha, stepped out to take care of a bothersome bodily function. The next thing the party knew, they heard her scream, and woke (or in the case of the Elf, halted his meditation) to find her being carried off by a gang of tiny fey creatures- Quicklings!
The Quicklings were more concerned with trying to rob the party (or kidnap someone, as they possessed magic sacks that they could shove a medium-sized character into, thanks to some bull fey magic. Thanks to their movement speed, most got away, but two of them were blasted into the Feywild with magic missiles (despite having obnoxious offense and defense, Quicklings are quite frail).
They then pursued the wily fey, only to find themselves in a large clearing, where they saw a large straw hut, and an oversized bubbling cauldron atop a roaring fire.
The Quicklings proclaimed they'd brought "Grandmother" a gift, and out from the hut stepped an ogre-sized ugly Hag!
The fight ensued with Grandmother, the remaining Quicklings, and a surprise- once someone got close enough, the cauldron moved to attack!
At first the party thought it was some kind of construct, since one of them possesses a small-sized walking cauldron that follows them around like a puppy, but were soon dismayed to discover it's true nature- a large mimic with immunity to fire! The cauldron was thus filled to the brim with it's own boiling acid, and any time it was jostled, those nearby had to make Dexterity saves to avoid being splashed (a trait that was quickly nicknamed Hot Soup!).
The Hag was invested with a combo platter of nature-themed powers that she used to control the battlefield and pull enemies towards her with a souped-up thorn whip effect. The party had a complaint about her abilities, which I'll get into later.
It was a rough fight, but in the end, the Hag was forced to retreat into her hut, which despite it's crude appearance functioned just like a tiny hut- but when they proclaimed that they would happily sit outside her hut for as long as it took, she kicked Sereetha out the "door" and demanded they leave her alone.
Which they did.
----
Arriving near the cemetery, the party noticed the ground was becoming softer and damper. The flora had given way to some tall plants with bell-shaped flowers and twisted trees known locally as "bellflowers" (creative, I know) and "witchwood", which possessed unique properties. The flowers could be made into a poultice that, when applied to someone who had taken slashing or piercing damage, could improve any healing they received, while the leaves of the witchwood tree could be brewed into a tea that restored a few hit points and granted temporary resistance to psychic and thunder damage- not immediately useful, but will come in handy in a later encounter.
The cemetery was in the process of being reclaimed by the swamp- the ground was so soft that not only was it difficult terrain, but one had to make a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check each turn to be able to move more than 5' (with a failure by 5 or more causing you to fall into a hidden sinkhole and becoming restrained until the start of your next turn!).
Fog obscured all squares beyond 20 ft., and profane power gave all creatures in the area (including the party) resistance to fire and radiant damage.
This was done to prevent the party from just throwing around fireball willy-nilly. Most of the undead encountered were vulnerable to radiant, so this just meant they took normal damage from it.
For awhile now I've been using monsters with odd resistances and vulnerabilities to make things more interesting- with a largely spell using party, a variety of different damage types are thrown about, and normally, the type doesn't matter.
This usually works out fairly fine, as you can't always rely on the same spells, and there's usually a cool moment when someone realizes they have the magic bullet for a fight in their arsenal.
This time it backfired, and it really was my fault. Few creatures are resistant to force, but online I found a conversion of a classic monster, the juju zombie. Juju zombies are typically created when a creature dies from negative energy effects, and while still undead, have a stronger lifeforce than the typical zombie. This makes them more intelligent...well, slightly, and makes them faster and more agile. For some reason, the original monster was randomly immune to magic missile, and thus this version of the creature was resistant to force- something I thought would be a neat surprise.
What actually happened was that the party relies a lot more on force damage than I realized. I'd nerfed not only magic missile, but also spiritual weapon and eldritch blast. This wasn't a big deal in the first two encounters with the zombies- using some control spells, the old reliable spirit guardians and moonbeam made short work of the undead, though the Cleric was annoyed that they forgot an important fact about Turn Undead- a turned creature recovers when they take damage, and with the terrain being what it was, the zombies couldn't flee far enough to avoid taking damage at the start of their turns!
Now I had slashed the hit points of all the enemies in these encounters- I had a smaller party than normal and the defensive abilities were somewhat obnoxious. I removed a few nasty abilities from the monsters as well, thinking it would bring the challenge down.
I was wrong.
Entering the mausoleum, they found themselves face to face with Renit Alcoris, Sereetha's supposedly deceased father, now a juju zombie himself, and the controller of the monsters!
He wasn't really a spellcaster, but was infused with necromantic abilities due to the mausoleum being an Eldritch Location, a site of mystic energies that someone can attune to receive special powers- basically it's a powerful magic item, but not a portable one, though you can access the powers anywhere on the same plane of existence. This was intended to be a reward to the party...but more on that in a bit.
When he started to use his powers, the party was dismayed to find that, once again, these weren't spells. Not only did that mean they couldn't be counterspelled, but the Sorcerer's bloodline (found in a Kobold Press book) gives them the ability to regain Sorcery points when they make saves against spells, an ability he'd thought would be awesome, but so far has proved to be only somewhat useful- I don't use a lot of spellcasting foes because one of two things happens:
Either they get maybe two or three spells off before they're quickly focused down, or their spells are so obnoxious that the party really struggles with fighting them- like when they fought the Bandit leader some sessions back, a Wizard who used blink at the start of the fight, and five times in a row (and I roll openly mind you) she blinked out at the end of her turns, making it very difficult to do anything about her.
Later, when they fought the zombie dragon possessed by the spirit of a dead wizard, I ended up in a counterspell war with the party, which was even more obnoxious, and I didn't want to repeat that.
So a creature that didn't use spells seemed like a great idea in the moment, but the party was quite annoyed by it. I'm not sure what the answer is here, but it's one I'll have to mull over.
At any rate, the zombie master had another surprise up his sleeve, an Observer (a type of lesser Beholder) that he'd animated as a zombie!
The Observer was fairly weak, a CR 4 with only 30 hit points. It could blast the party with eye rays each turn, but any time it took damage, there was a chance it lost one of it's rays. It's central eye only functioned with a Recharge of 5-6 and it was used twice in what ended up being another long, grueling encounter.
Another nasty surprise was that while Sereetha screamed her head off on seeing her undead father, he was able to command her to do his bidding, at which point she started to attack as well.
The party was confused and not sure who to attack first. They had already grown to suspect Sereetha when they realized she had a lot of hit points, so they didn't relish trying to take her down. So they decided, hey, let's focus on the zombie master!
Now Renit had a suite of Legendary Actions, annoying defenses (AC 18 and Magic Resistance), and could fly somewhat as he owned a pair of magic boots that gave him a 30' fly speed, but at the end of his turn he descended 10' automatically).
What I expected to happen was that his Legendary Actions would be burned off fending off control spells- he could end a condition on him with one, or teleport 30', or conjure a juju zombie under his command.
But the party elected to just try and burn him down with damage, which ran into a problem. Renit had a large aura that, at the start of his turn, healed undead within it for 1d6 hit points, dealt 1d6 necrotic to his enemies, and destroyed 1d6 rations (that last part was meant to be an annoyance, as the party had a large stock of supplies). The aura would drop once he was bloodied, and he only had 50 hit points...but due to some bad rolls, they failed to do much damage to him.
So the fight dragged on, and soon they were desperately trying to keep themselves from dying. They gained a small respite when the Cleric activated a holy statue in the back of the mausoleum, which gave those near it the equivalent of a bless spell, as well as negated Renit's aura, but by not forcing Renit to use his defensive actions, he kept adding zombies to the field. Add to that the Beholder, which, while all of it's abilities were DC 12 to save against, had a few nasty powers (each round I rolled 1d8-1 to see which eye ray they were hit by. On a 0, there was no effect, but it regenerated a lost eye ray...which never happened, as it took them awhile to actually damage it, and on a 7, you rolled again, but if you rolled 7 again, it's lost petrification eye would trigger- which nearly did happen!).
They got Renit to 23 damage one turn (at 25 he'd lose his aura) but they couldn't quite manage it until the Cleric used a scroll of a control spell that he couldn't do anything about- a Kobold Press spell that I'm going to take a hard look at, since it offers no save and doesn't inflict an actual status condition, but does something far more annoying:
*At the start of each turn, any creature inside the 20 ft. radius of the spell has disadvantage on their first attack roll made that turn, and, when they move, they move in a random direction.
For several combat rounds, this turned the fight into a circus (cue Yakity Sax) as the Cleric used Turn Undead a second time. The affected enemies (including Renit) had to flee from him on their turns- but any time they moved, it was in a random direction, which often meant they went...nowhere.
At some point, Renit was forced out of the mausoleum and took to the air, at which point the fight turned into mop up operations for a few rounds.
It's probably for the best, since the fight was very nearly a TPK, but it was rather obnoxious to deal with at the table.
*Why didn't the Cleric use Turn earlier? Spirit guardians has a stupidly long duration, so the spell was still going when the fight started, and he didn't want a repeat of what happened in the previous encounters.
The party explored the mausoleum, found a secret door in Renit's coffin leading to a lower level, which was his laboratory- an alchemist in life, he had discovered a means of creating juju zombies without using magic.
They punted Sereetha down there (once Renit was turned, she was basically in a stupor, and they weren't inclined to find out if she could be freed from his control. She could be, but alas). They looted what they could, then used some mining bombs they'd filched from the Duergar to blow up the place (bye bye Eldritch Location) and flee the cemetery before Renit returned.
Not a satisfying end to the side quest, as they missed out on some good loot, and the threat of the undead was only halted, not stopped.
Lessons learned-
*The damage type experiment is over, at least for now. There's just too much of a chance that the player will choose the wrong spells to use, as there's no good way to divine what an enemy has, let alone what they will face in the future.
I'll go back to glaring and obvious strengths and weaknesses.
*It turns out that low hit points and tough defenses is a bad combination for my party. I'm not sure what to do about it- if monsters do too much damage, the party drops like flies. If monsters have too many hit points, they just don't do tons of single target damage. If monsters have too high defenses, they struggle and feel like their turns are wasted.
I really tried using mobs of weaker enemies this session, but the party is almost too good at dealing with such. I don't mind giving them easy victories from time to time (the zombie encounters were pretty much intended to be easy fights, despite the CR calculations saying otherwise), but the party's own defenses are such that it's rare that anything below CR 5 is really a challenge for them.
*If it looks like a spell, it has to be a spell. I can definitely agree that it's annoying when a monster ability isn't "magical"- as a player, I'm so used to it that I don't even stock counterspell on my Wizard, and try to shut down casters with control spells instead. But just because I've become inured to it doesn't mean that it's good game design!
Players want their abilities to work, not to be circumvented entirely. That's fair- I just have to figure out how to let that happen without having any spellcasting enemy be nullified entirely. I know how WotC does it- the typical spellcasting enemy can throw out spells higher level than the party- a CR 3 casting 3rd level spells is perfectly normal, and a CR 12 Archmage can use 9th level spells!
But that's always seemed kind of cheap to me as well. So the only answer is, multiple casters, throwing out spells the party has access to. But even then, I have to be careful- as I found out before, if I use good spells (such as the ones they themselves use!), a standard encounter can be turned into a massive slog.
