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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5486292" data-attributes="member: 78116">Eberron: Dark Prophecy My second game of the weekend is proving quite the challenge. Due to the fun of international time zones and my moving country, it has become quite early in the morning compared to what I was used to. None the less I am persistent and I was there for some good old fashioned hitting things. Like with the Builder's Cry I have lost a player from this game, so I had to find a replacement. I decided to go with a relatively simple "You were trapped by the bad guys and get rescued by the party" introduction, so to keep the momentum up into the final encounter of this adventure. Before introducing the new player though, we had the "simple" matter of getting across a dark, damp underground stream with some slippery rocks. Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong in this situation right? <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/CrazyCraudAssault.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> Oh. Crauds IMO are one of those fantastically goofy monsters that MM3 added, which I really love and have a similar position in my heart to chuuls. As aberrations are on my restricted monster list, the crauds became a good substitute. Additionally crauds - these are actually cave crauds technically - were an enemy type that fit the situation and they didn't have tremorsense. This gave Ryske and Walker a bit of a break and let them use their stealth abilities more effectively. In this situation the party started the encounter at somewhat of a disadvantage. Firstly the rocks were slippery, making rapid movement treacherous and secondly they were spread out over the rocks. These factors combined to make this even levelish encounter a bit more exciting than a simple straight up fight. Squinter got the worst of the initial attention as one impaler chased him around up north. Walker similarly had to escape from a devious impaler, while the majority of the party dealt with the rest of the crauds on the lower rock. Squinter had to then swim away from the ferocious impaler, while the rest of the party got thumped around the face by the huge clawed crusher and poked by impalers. Overall though the party didn't really have much of a struggle with this encounter and easily dealt to the various crauds. Towards the end of the encounter, Tybalt got in amongst the party with some excellent positioning to grant nearly every character a magic weapon bonus. The other impalers remaining stood very little chance and delicious cave craud was served. <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/CrazyCraudAssault3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> Unfortunately nobody remembered to bring any butter. The party then marched on towards Arianne, the strange sounds of wedding music beginning to fill their ears as they approached ever closer to her inner sanctum. Eventually they came to a horrific cavern filled with the corpses of strung up dead creatures. All of whom were wrapped up in deadly crystalline silk! Conveniently though, one of the packages was still wriggling and this was how I introduced the new character to the party: the Kalashtar battlemind Andraos. After a quick introduction and swearing of revenge, the party moved towards the sound of the music - only to be intercepted by something truly terrible. <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/WhiteWidow.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> The parties most deadly opponent yet... Combat began with the white widow rolling highest and subsequently the nasty surprise she bought with her - the sacks of rotting meat of various dead creatures being used as bludgeoning weapons! Effectively a hazard of their own, these bags of broken rotting flesh can be swung from the webbing like battering rams into unfortunate victims below. This provides basically an extra attack every round on the widows initiative + 10. PCs could stop the attacks by cutting down the corpses as well, making themselves more difficult to target. Being a solo, the white widow began combat by rushing into the PCs and dealing as much damage as possible with her attacks and an action point. She inflicted heavy damage across the party very quickly and almost killed the hobgoblin paladin with a brutal impale attack (Paladin had bloodied value of 21, she reduced him to -20!). This left the party in a tricky position, but dazing the creature and imposing some nasty penalties put her into a defensive position - going invisible for a round to buy some time (until she could make full use of her next turn). <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/WhiteWidow2.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> The white widow downs the paladin and he survives only just. On the next round with the widow bloodied the battlemind successful drew her towards himself and the nearby assassin, pinning the creature in place with a power (so she couldn't use her scuttling assault anywhere near as effectively). The assassin then used his shade form ability, but in a crucial mistake this actually meant he was now radiant vulnerable - a flaw that made a considerable difference. On the white widows turn she immediately started by scuttling around to get her additional attacks, slapping a bite onto the battlemind but otherwise having no luck. Unfortunately for the assassin she was able to generate CA and thus, extra radiant damage. Despite the insubstantial, the radiant vulnerability proved the killer as it just upped her damage enough to drop him and then actually kill him! Walker perished as the beast sunk a crystalline claw right through his mechanical heart. The next round was chaotic, with the party scrambling to kill the almost defeated white widow and attempting from preventing it from getting further victims. Unfortunately they were not *quite* able to finish the beast off and it amazingly began round 4 on a singular HP! Here the creature dropped the paladin using her crystalline cocoon and then impaled him. This did *just* enough damage to kill him as well! Accounting for two players this encounter, the PCs eagerly finished off the creature at last - taking some time to mourn their losses before swearing revenge on Arianne and her arachnid horde. <img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/WhiteWidow3.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> At the end of an extremely dramatic encounter, two PCs lay dead and the rest - except the battlemind ironically - were heavily injured. But victory was close in sight now... From a DMing point of view, it really isn't that fun to kill someones character as you always want the PCs to succeed. Getting horribly mangled in the process of course, but succeed is generally the goal and generally speaking a character death is more annoying than most things. In some fairness, due to having 6 PCs (but only 5 actual players, remembering I lost one) I changed the encounter somewhat from its original intent. Adding in the corpse swinging hazard and upping the white widows level by 1. Other than this, the main reason is this encounter was lethal was because I was trying to kill the old character (Marhu) to some degree and Walker just got plain unlucky. Stuck adjacent to the battlemind (and then knocked prone!) the creature didn't have a choice of targets for its main attack. So it had to split them between just the two characters and ultimately, the slight amount of radiant vulnerability pushed the damage up just enough to kill the assassin despite the insubstantial (oops). On thinking about things, I might have chosen to impale the battlemind instead of using the scuttling assault power in that situation. At the same time, either move was logical for the monster to do at the time. If I had checked the ranges and noticed she couldn't really attack more than two targets, I may have changed its action a bit and seen what result that had. None the less though, I made sure I had an idea what the player wanted to do and will probably wait until the next module to introduce his next one. If there is a silver lining to a player death, it means I might be able to introduce the next module into the game with the new player character. Solving two issues at the same time and advancing the story. </blockquote>

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