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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 5246615" data-attributes="member: 7737">At the climax of a planes-spanning 3.5 campaign, the party squared off against Erebus, God of Darkness.They had traveled backwards in space-time to The Beginning; only the PCs' force of personality and general badassitude allowed them even to exist, let alone face their enemy.Erebus was attended by numerous servitors: 1 nightwalker, 2 devourers, 6 darkness pseudo-elementals, 1 effigy, and essentially a limitless number of frost giants, all given various darkness or shadow related templates and advanced in HD appropriate to the party's level. (All the PCs were 16th level at this point.)Erebus himself, being a god, could not be fought directly. However, he could directly attack the PCs using various ridiculously high save DC spell-like abilities, that generally hit for 20d6 damage plus debilitation (slowed*, blinded, etc.).* Remember that slowed was a lot nastier in 3e than it is in 4e.In other words, a completely unfair fight.The PCs' only way to win this fight was to hold off the monsters, survive whatever Erebus could throw at them, and enact a ritual that would re-speak the Words of Creation (which Erebus had gone to great lengths to undo). This ritual consisted of 9 rounds of increasingly difficult skill checks, and had to be powered by the cumulative investment of life energy (represented in game by negative levels).In other words, on round 1, some PC had to gain 1 negative level. On round 2, some PC had to gain 2 negative levels. ... On round 9, some poor PC was going to gain 9 negative levels.I had carefully playtested this fight to ensure that it was theoretically possible for the PCs to win, but I honestly thought they would die in spectacular fashion.But the players surprised me with their resilience (never understimate 16th level PCs!), tenacity, and cleverness: they won.My only regret about that fight is not coming up with some more interesting terrain. But there was so much else going on that maybe that was for the best.</blockquote>

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