Working out kinks in the final adventure

[RangerWickett]

I'd like the final adventure to take place over a single day, so that the PCs don't get to go into the final encounter at full power. They're max level, so they should be able to survive a few crazy threats in a single day. I want to avoid them just nova'ing and taking out all the foes in one round.

The problem is geography. I have events happening in Flint, and then the party needs to rush to Axis Island, which they can do by airship in the window available to them. But while they're flying, they have plenty of time to take a long nap and recover to full. I've got two possible ways to enforce the 'no rests' idea, but I wonder whether they're good ideas. I think the gameplay goal is a good one, but I don't want to seem like I'm screwing over the PCs for no good reason.

Option One - The Gauntlet
This would be a montage scene representing the hours of the PCs flying to Axis Island, during which smaller Ob airships, summoned monsters, surface-based bombardments, and teleporting attack squads assault their ship every thirty or forty minutes. No threat is serious enough to require an actual tactical combat, but they force the PCs to stay on their toes, preventing them from resting.

The challenge here is balancing it so that the party can't just say, "Eh, put everyone but Bob in a demiplane to recover their spells. Bob will hold them off by himself."

Option Two - Linked Souls
Metaphysically, the PCs in the real world and the version of them in the Gyre were distinct until they both got near the end of their quests - Axis Island and the plane Reida. The result is that once you resolve the battle against the Voice of Rot at the end of adventure 12, the PCs in the real world will be in the same condition when they arrive at Axis Island in adventure 13.

The challenge here is, well, I didn't plan this when I designed the fight against VoR, which I pushed because I figured as long as at least one PC lives, the whole party can win. So do PCs who 'died' at the end of 12 suddenly keel over at this point in 13?

Option Three - No. Just No.
The GM tells the players, you woke up this morning fully rested. You don't get to rest until the campaign ends.



What do you think is the best solution, or do you have a better one? Or I could just plan the fight at Axis Island to be nova-proof.

 

[mdusty]

What if you let the PCs get to the final battle site all nice and rested, but do the battle in phases? Different aspects of the final boss require some unique finagling, like phase 1 requires the PCs need to do 'this' to advance to phase 2? Make it a long, epic battle? Kinda like with the witchoil golem from book 2 or like the Kefka battle in Final Fantasy VI. And maybe they need to take care of a few minions and right hand men before and/or during that last battle? That's off the top of my head and without really knowing much about said last battle.

 

[RangerWickett]

There's a limit to how complicated I want things to be. I mean, I've already got:

The PCs on their airship.

A ritual ring with 8 nodes, which you can finagle with to alter some of the rules of reality. You need to control all 8 to win.

A crater in the middle lashing out wild magic tendrils once a minute to keep you from dallying.

A 300-ft. colossus, trying to do its own finagling.

An enemy airship with a handful of high-level NPC foes, trying to take out your airship or keep you away from the colossus.

The mastermind, a ghost mage who absolutely cannot be killed until you gain control of the ritual. Most of the time he's disrupting and monologuing, but I'm pretty sure when things look bad, he'll possess the colossus and attack you directly.

Hm. Maybe that *is* long enough to grind through all the various tricks and powers PCs have at this level. I suppose I could leave it up to the GM.

 

[efreund]

The Gauntlet? While the PCs were out, Pemberton & Oddcog installed rocket boosters to the airship. Now it can get to Axis Island in only 6 hours! Wee!

Or the enemy forces have planar disruptor rocket launchers, which are like EMP grenades for magic, causing any long duration spells to become disturbed (i.e. knock people out of Rope Trick) every so often. Doesn't actually dispel, because that would a little too rough if you're sending dozens of these, but frazzles magical defenses enough that everyone aboard is vulnerable periodically and you can justify mass Reflex saves versus "hail of spells" every hour or so of flight.

As for Linked Souls , if you *don't* go this route, how are the PCs supposed to track resources? Given the double-helix nature of the final two adventures, are the PCs supposed to maintain different character sheets and track consumables separately on each?

Personal opinion from playing Rappan Athuk: there's no such thing as nova-proof. You gotta wear them down, at least in PF. Now, maybe that doesn't apply as much in your combat, since the ghost and the golem are immortal, and the win condition doesn't directly involve killing. But that airship of enemy NPCs? I can't imagine how it's not gone in one round if the PCs are on full rest. It has the highest ROI for competing to win the rocket tag. (Based on the bare bones info you've shared )

Riffing off of something mdusty said: what if some of those magical nodes were near some bunkers filled with badguys (didn't adventure 10 establish there were bunkers nearby?). These bunkers are irrelevant to the wider combat if nobody is near the relevant node (to make combat easier to flow and track), because they don't have the range, and their defenses are tight, but if anyone comes into their sphere of influence, they unleash a hail of readied actions. Then the combat arena becomes a bit more like a series of rooms you'd see in a dungeon.

Perhaps this is a riff off of No Just No, but since you're grabbing the reigns of the cinematic flow through this double-helix-climax-thing, you could handle the Flint-stuff in one vignette, and then jump back to adv12, and then when you jump back to adv13, they're already on Axis Island, and you can describe how their flight was harrowing, and they've already done it, so deal with it.

Anyway, those are my post-midnight ideas :-/

 

[hirou]

Just chiming in: in 4e there's that ritual called Fastastic Recuperation, which basically allows you to get an extended rest in 1 hour. Broken enough, but remember that you inserted that fastastic witch cauldron magic item in adventure 2, which allows to cast any ritual as a standard action once a day. Oops.

Basically, any and all tricks withing the rules of the game can and will be broken by persistent players by this point, so The Gauntlet simply doesn't work. I don't like how Option Three sounds, to put it frankly, so metaphysical explanations are probably the best here. Perhaps take the "mean" between fully rested party and their condition after VoR battle? Or we can brainstorm plausibly sounding explanation why the cosmic pandemonium, which is happening all around, screwed up the healing power right now. Something with Av, Nem and Avilona being eroded in Gear, perhaps (Primordial Eagle death should affect the world for sure)? Time loops from Reida destruction? Powers realigning from VoR death?

 

[hirou]

I actually have very limited GMing experience, Zeitgeist is my first full-scale campaign, but even in my experience, there's no such thing as nova-proof enemy (we kinda finished adventure 5, currently in hiatus). And that's 20 levels before this fight you're planning here. I really hope that those high-level NPC are prepared for their ship evaporating under one round of attacks, considering that each PC hits much harder than a ship cannon at this point...

You can pull off "this is not even my final form" gambit, but combat encounters are already kinda long in 4e. The one thing that worked really well for me is when the fights have non-traditional goals, like protecting Neward at the hill and at the Dawn square. The ritual you mentioned sounds like it can drag things a bit... Perhaps it really depends on a group. IMHO Nicodemus monologuing can be the greatest weapon here. Perhaps exactly now, with evil gods of the world defeated (VoR/demons/false gods), it is time to join forces? Does he still have anything to offer, to threat with? I wonder.

 

[jacktannery]

Option 4: the party's experience at the end of the First Act of Adventure 12 (don't want to put spoilers here) has affected their internal equilibrium, and every time they start to fall asleep in the real world they have vivid dreams that their mirrors are in space. So they cannot get benefits of an extended rest.

 

[efreund]

Had this thought last night: why not use a carrot instead of a stick?

The McGuffin Buff: There's something awful about the Axis Seal Ritual, or Nic's magic, or Borne's leaky furnace, or radiation from the Axis portal, or something. And Harkover Lee (or whomever) has to cast a special spell on you to protect you from it. And for whatever reason, if you sleep (or otherwise recover magic, or do something else silly, like cast AntiMagic on yourself), the McGuffin Buff wears off. Now, the PCs can still choose to rest and lose the buff, but then they suffer the consequences (as the badness deals them 20 unsoakable damage a round during the fight, or something).

Separate point: I don't know how 4e works, but in Pathfinder, remember that divine spellcasters don't need to get rest in order to prepare spells. They just need a time on the clock to occur (usually sunrise), and then spend just one hour to prepare. So any "you can't prep magic" plottricks also has to pass the "and you can't pray, either" sniff test, which can have weird RP implications.

Another idea: War Council: There's a stressful RP-montage that the PCs have to conduct on the deck of the airship while in transit. If any PCs duck out of the war council, they lose the support of their faction. (And given that you've hinted at use of Sacrament of Apotheosis, maybe this could tie in?)

 

[Elfshire]

Here's an idea: Nicodemus' ritual is set to be irreversibly completed, and SOON. So soon there's no time to take an extended rest.

Yes, Axis island is hours away by airship, and you can't teleport there because of planar influences... but who's to say you can't have the PCs steal some Reida-flavored time-element energy from their Gyre-selves to speed up the airship, like a high-level haste spell?

 

[RangerWickett]

My personal preference for bizarre pan to get there faster is to awaken the airship and have it jaunt (anywhere it can see) to orbit, then fall back onto Axis Island.

I have an idea that makessense if they use the sacrament, but they might not. Hrm.

It'll probably just end up being a suggestion to the GM,rather than a hard restriction.