Predator-like creature / DM'ing a "hunt"

[Pielorinho]

I think it's fine to have a ninth-level pixie sorcerer helping the PCs out, actually. There's no problem with an adventure in which the PCs are primarily spectators.

As long as, a third of the way into the adventure, that ninth-level pixie gets killed savagely by the hunter, and the characters find themselves alone in the hostile woods, hunted themselves.

If you do this, give no sign you're going to do it: the pixie sorcerer should be sympathetic, admirable, powerful, like any other NPC ally you'd create. The death should be a terrifying shock.

What if you give the assassin the power of illusion? Perhaps a homebrew spell, a phantasm, that deludes creatures into believing they're fighting something else? The assassin may be weak individually,but might "recruit" the PCs into helping it kill unicorns, by the simple conceit of making the unicorns look like worgs, and making the PCs look like hobgoblins.

Daniel

 

[Hand of Evil]

Great ideas!

Hmm, sounds interesting but perhaps a little too much for what I need. Most of the terrain is pretty typical forest. I would rather the encounters be timeline-based rather than site-based for this adventure.

A ranger in one of my games always used levitate and invisiblity, pulling/pushing himself in the trees to snipe foes.

You can also treat each level as a type of terrian, above tree top, full movement, in the trees half, and on the gound (off trails) 1/3 movement.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Ways to model the Predator-style camoflage:

blur (20% miss chance)
displacement (50% miss chance)
[improved] invisibility

Blur is an annoyance, but displacement is a serious problem for 4th-level PCs. Improved invis. is probably overkill. You might also think about a creature that can use ethereal jaunt - a phase spider (CR 5) might be a good fit. Perhaps advance it to make it tougher, or give it levels in ranger or somesuch.

There's also a spell in Complete Divine (?) that grants you a massive bonus on Hide checks, +10 or so. Perhaps the creature has that as a spell-like ability.

 

[KnowTheToe]

I am putting something similar to this together in a large city setting (Renaissance England). At first animals are found slaughterd, such as the pigs that eat the garbage off of the streets. Then after some time, vagabonds are starting to die. Many thieves will die on the roof tops and then in the sewers, virtually locking the thieves guild up with fear. The players may or may not choose to get involved at this point, it depends where they are in the other campaign. This would mostly occur in the poorer quarters of town. Then some town guards or a wealthy merchant coming in the city late at night. The deaths will escavate in severity and impact until the PCs get involved. I am using many ideas I pulled out of an old adventure. Once the creature knows the PCs are after him, the hunt really begins. Traps and mind games abound and death hangs but a hairs width away. What happens when the hunters (PCs) become the hunted and they know they can't win

For tips, try and think or good techniques of horror movies. Sounds that seem to come out of nowhere, footprints in the dirt, a trophy or tolken of challenge left on a sleeping PCs chest. Let the PCs know the creature is toying with them, for whatever reason, it has choosen not to kill them, yet, but the games it plays are still deadly.

Good luck with your game!

 

[KnowTheToe]

Another idea, I may use this, but am undecided, is to have more than one creature. I would make them both the same type of creature, but there are 2 of them. The killings are of a different style, but enough similarities are found at the scene to make everyone believe it is the same creature, but then one evening they realize there are two, and then the PCs think, if there are two, why not three or four. They begin to rethink this whole thing from the beginning.

 

[DaveStebbins]

Give the creature a damage reduction which the PCs can't bypass without help from the pixies. The pixies know the creature's weakness, but aren't strong enough to exploit it without the PCs, and the PCs can wail on the creature all day without doing much damage, unless aided by the pixies. Give it DR 10/pixie dust or something. That way, if the PCs charge into a battle and finally realize they're doing squat, they can try to back out to the pixies to get their weapons dusted. The pixie dust duration should be short, minutes at most. Don't allow the PCs to move around all day pre-dusted, it should be something they do just before the battle (if they do well enough to find the creature), or they have to spend time during the battle to do it (if the creature finds them). Spellcasters covered with pixie dust would have a +10 to beat the creature's SR (SR 21 or so), so they might get a spell in once in a while on their own, but should usually get past SR with pixie help.


The foreshadowing thing can be great. I once had low-level PCs travelling through a swamp. They heard a loud and nasty battle a short ways away. Even though it wasn't far, by the time they got there, all that was left was the body of a huge spider which had been torn apart. That night, they heard the bog wump circling their camp in the bushes, beyond the range of their sight and quiet enough that they could never pinpoint it. The players were going crazy trying to decide what to do. Finally, since it didn't attack them, they decided not to go looking for trouble. It was an uncharacteristically smart choice. They never did meet the bog wump, but after the climactic encounter, when it looked like the BBEG had fled and gotten away after they beat him and his underlings up pretty good, they found his body outside, his face frozen in a look of terror. Knowing they had forced him to flee and seeing that the bog wump had finished him off the players started high-fiving, then they had the PCs get out of there as quickly as they could.

-Dave

 

[Desdichado]

KnowTheToe; what are you thinking of using for this adversary? And what level are your PCs? Oddly enough, I'm actually thinking of something similar to your idea, but have it be a hive of "aliens" probably using lowgrade kython stats, like tons of broodlings, juvies and an adult or two at the top of the chain. It'll also give me a great excuse to break out my tyrannid models...