NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 5323957" data-attributes="member: 2">The quick version of the "abides" were mechanically based on 9th lvl quickling runners, customized to make them feel more like shadowy versions of redcaps. Speed 12 gives you a lot of latitude for terrifying drive-by attacks. I made them immune to the near-frictionless ground, gave them a 2W encounter attack (jumping on someone with their iron boots), and gave them a painful vulnerability to slow and restrain that the PCs had to figure out on their own. I'm really happy with the way the monster felt.  My players have so much fun agonizing about difficult terrain that I wanted to give them the opposite: restricted movement, but lots of it! I deeply loved the frictionless floor from one of the S modules (White Plume Mountain? Tomb of Horrors? I'm forgetting now, but as there was rusty spikes with "super-tetanus" in the original I'm betting tomb of Horrors.) The plan was to model that.The PCs got lucky in that the abides had a round of free attacks (1d6+7 dmg each) on Cobalt at the beginning of the encounter, and I missed all of them. Oh, the ignominy. This was balanced by much lower than average initial damage by the PCs. Caldwell the ranger actually hit for 1 point in one round by plinking with a non-magical bow, and both rogues were rolling poor damage. By the time my dice started behaving themselves the group was working smoothly to keep the shaman alive.The room with hideous shadow-traps continues to make me happy, largely because of how wonderfully the players described and role-played the skill challenge. Man, that was fun. The final DC varied by the number of failures they had going in. It was a little bit of a nail-biter, with two failures and five successes going into the final roll.The illusory maze at the end was something that I thought might knock some PCs unconscious, or kill them, if the group wasn't thinking. There was a meta-clue in that I was describing the rooms they walked into a little loosely, almost as if they used dream-logic. Moving into each new "room" took a day of game time and knocked off a healing surge. I was hoping that the players would stop, close their eyes, and disbelieve before PCs started dropping. Thanks to the clever trick with the eternal chalk they sussed it out earlier than I'd expected; realizing they were actually in a small iron room filled with bones was something of a shock. This trap was nifty because it was all about player actions to environmental descriptions, and not about game mechanics.</blockquote>

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