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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5387700" data-attributes="member: 78116">Dark Sun: Builder's Cry So I have had time to ponder my Dark Sun game today after some dinner and couldn't wait any more to start writing it up. The entire arena start has paid dividends quite nicely overall and has set the general tone for the entire campaign as planned.The PCs resumed where they were last week, with a crowd raring for blood and hostile templars of Kalak overlooking them: including the master of the arena himself Judriath - who has come to oversee the PCs execution personally (as they have committed various degrees of crimes against Tyr and Kalak). With the PCs first victory, he unleashed a strangely dressed champion calling himself "The Great Pung!" into the arena. Pung was a simple elite with a slight catch: He had eight minion "Slaves" who he could raise back from the dead with "Rise Fool!". This was inspired by happening across the guy while reading the monster builder at one point. Using this, he could increase the minions resilience and give them extra rounds to mostly be annoying.Pung himself could toss PCs to the floor with his spear and then attack them with his daggers. The interesting part of the fight was if the PCs could slay Pung without killing all the slaves. If they did so Pung's slaves would not know what to do and just decide to follow the PC who did so out of a lack of better ideas. The PCs though had other ideas and quickly got on top of most of the minions and then unceremoniously finished off Pung himself. The one minion who was left quickly saw what way the wind was blowing and swore his allegiance to the thief Zephan (who got the killing blow).The next encounter was as much for the general comedy as anything else. Three silt sharks (Dark Sun Creature Catalog) lowered in level to 3 or so were the order of the day. Relatively straight forward for a EL1 encounter though and while the sharks did good damage, they were dispatched without much issue. Surprisingly the minion slave was able to live through this encounter, but he didn't get to live much longer as the next encounter came swiftly: with Judriath getting increasingly infuriated with the PCs resilience. Overall this encounter and the last one proved non-taxing and straight forward.The fourth encounter (fifth overall) I had some high hopes for: Two arena beast themed gnolls with powers taken from that part of the DS:CC. Unfortunately, the ranged artillery got too close to the PCs (even if it was to use a very solid encounter power) and got picked off easily. This left the melee one, which was on the other side of the arena isolated and immobilized due to a power - so lost out on using its feature and triggered encounter power. He did manage to get a sweeping blow off, but sadly was on 1 HP and bloodying three PCs was little consolation for dying without having spent his action point that round (a true shame of any monster).At this point I felt the PCs were going to get through the arena with little actual complications. A bit of a disappointment given the settings reputation for lethality and being a bit more "hardcore" than normal. Then came the Builders and oh boy did they change things.The first thing about the Builders is they are excellent creations from Rodney Thompson, published a few issues ago in Dungeon Magazine. Their basic feature is that they scatter like bugs from burst and area attacks if an ally within the burst is hit, shifting their speed and making haste out of such effects. As this is an immediate interrupt, they can almost entirely ignore area and close effects in many situations. It also means they are a group of monsters that can safely group up together with little fear of PC controllers or anyone else for that matter. One power I did change was the Cultists "mark" like ability. Basically if he hits you for every other ally of his you target you take damage equal to his attack value. This can be ridiculous when you consider a Wizard hitting 4 of the cultists allies immediately taking 4*attack damage straight away. I hadn't changed the text in game, but I clearly wrote in my notes for the game "Treat this like a mark". Bear in mind these are level 2 creatures. Their features and general power level is so good actually, that I can easily see these level 2 monsters simply scaling into paragon tier with absolutely no changes except to damage. By RAW, a single cultist can shut down an AoE controller with a single blow, or the AoE controller will risk massive automatic damage for using any area or close attack. Making this work like a mark is far better and more fair: Otherwise it is dreadfully simple for a PC to basically kill themselves. I can see hilarious paragon shenanigans involving dominate though - much like how PCs can use dominate to make monsters provoke a fighters mark.The encounter was set up with the builders arrayed in a tight formation on one end (bear in mind, they don't care if they are targeted by area attacks due to scatter) with their leader - a defiler called Karras in the middle. The PCs arranged themselves along the middle and opposite side of the arena. The initial monsters were:2 Builder Cultists1 Builder Defiler1 Builder RecruiterThe Thri-Kreen monk got the first turn and hit the recruiter and one of the cultists in the face first up. The builders soon retaliated and managed to take a good chunk out of the monk in return. The recruiter died before he ever got to do very much aside from an initial OA and I was starting to be concerned this would be a breeze (this was soon to be an unfounded worry). The defiler went next and used thunder fist to punch the parties wizard in the face. She then moved to the protection of the other cultist. The parties defender moved up and tried to engage Karras, but found the dessicated old wizard a bit too much to bother with (I indicate monsters that are unique in an encounter with their level as ???? in the summary window in maptools).Karras then got his first turn, where he made a strange and oddly prophetic threat before disappearing into the sands of the arena (prompting many of the templars guarding the arena to leave, off searching for where the wizard had gone). In his place he left three deadly silt elementals - unfortunately I made a gaff here that would later have hilarious repercussions. Silt Elementals are another of Rodney Thompson's creations and like the builders above, have a few incredibly amusing quirks. The first is they can shift 3 squares as an at-will move action (If you're wondering, scatter is at-will) dealing 5 damage and slowing the target. Additionally they function somewhat like a swarm, in that they take 1/2 damage from ranged/melee attacks, but are vulnerable to force. This made them quite tricky opponents.Due to the damage they did, 1d4+7 and +2d6 against a slowed target I made two versions. The first was a weaker "Summoned" elemental, that did 1d4+5 damage and 1d6 against slowed targets. Unfortunately, I hadn't accounted for this and accidentally used the full elementals, so they did a bit better than they should have in the encounter. Overall though their worst effect was the silt shift auto-damage and slow, which they used to solid effect to keep up with vulnerable characters and to keep generating extra damage reliably (even if it was somewhat higher).As the combat continued the damage of the builders and elementals built up considerably: The monk went down and almost died from ongoing damage until he was literally saved at the last second (after failing a death save no less). The silt elementals pursued the wizard and shaman, while the Wizard got locked down into only attacking the stronger defenses cultists after being whacked by one. Eventually at one point both the defender (Eshara, Battlemind) and the healer (Hadithi, Shamam) were in a heap bleeding to death. Appealing to the crowd for some extra assistance, the thief got some of the more rowdy members to throw in a few healing fruits (one landing unfortunately next to the defiler). This got the defender and healer back into the fight, though only temporarily as the defender copped it again from a silt elemental.Two dramatic moments capped off the encounter nicely, though one was more when I realized I'd used the wrong Silt Elemental. The first was when a Silt Elemental punched the Shaman in the face and got a critical hit, which would have killed him! Only for me to notice the damage was 9+12 - that was a bit high. I had actually not remembered to replace the bonus damage taken from another monster that suited the original "Silt Elemental" with the lower damage of the "Summoned Silt Elemental". The difference in damage was just enough to ensure that the Shaman didn't die once I realized (and corrected) my mistake. This left the party without an active defender (on -2), an active shaman (-9) and the monk was down again as well (-4). All three characters also had a failed death save to their name: So things were getting desperate!The PCs were able to get some of their comrades back up about round 4 with liberal use of healing fruits and with just about every PC bloodied or badly damaged, Othagal used his daily power (flaming sphere) to cook the defiler. Unfortunately he missed on his main attack, giving the caster another round to potentially deal even more pain to the badly wounded party! But then I reminded him of the defiling rules. Now regardless of what you've read from people that nobody would ever defile, when the crap hits the fan and you either need to go deeper or get out of it: Rerolling a daily power into a hit is invaluable. In this case he made the decision to defile quickly, rolling a much better to hit roll and cooking the defiler firmly into HP territory that the sphere could finish off with automatic damage on her turn (essentially killing her before she could act again, given she had her encounter left - this was a good idea). The flaming sphere then finished the job and also burned one of the remaining elementals down to few HP.With two elementals left, one spent its second to last turn downing the battlemind again and then the monk for the millionth time on its final turn next round (Magic Missile, which does force damage that silt elementals are vulnerable to has never been so useful, especially when it auto-hits!). The final elemental was destroyed when one of the other PCs got the Monk back to his feet and on his turn, he charged it dealing a critical hit to explode it into a shower of inanimate sand. This ended a pretty exciting an epic combat, having gone through all of the defenders surges, brutally beat most of the other party members to a pulp and nearly everyone bloodied/failed death saves. My only regret was missing the damage of the silt elementals being wrong until the crit (where it became pretty clear something was wrong), but it was a fantastic opening to the campaigns primary antagonists.The PCs have some calm to look forward to as a reward next session. Some skill challenges, poking around the arena and the major events that are to shake Athas firmly just about to happen (you might be able to guess due to my mentioning of Kalak being alive <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />).Next session, delicious rewards for the PCs efforts in the arena as well.</blockquote>

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