WotBS - Help me with an epic combat. (spoilers)

[RangerWickett]

This post will be full of spoilers for the final adventure of War of the Burning Sky.

Having never run a campaign to 20th level, I would like a bit of help making sure the adventure turns out well. Any suggestion is appreciated, and your assistance will aid the gaming experience of many gamers.

[sblock]Quick overview: It is the twelve and final episode of the War of the Burning Sky campaign saga. While of course there is some wiggle room as to what path things have taken, what it comes down to is that the leader of the Ragesian Empire, Leska, will face the heroes and their army on a desolate plain, the dust of which is white like bone ash. In the center of this plain is a rift in the ground that leads to a colossal cavern, and at its bottom depths lies the Aquiline Heart.

The Aquiline Heart is a living relic, torn from the breast of an ancient elemental entity -- a primordial eagle who represented this land's connection to the plane of air -- and hidden here by the creature which slew it -- a likewise primordial dragon who represents this land's connection to the plane of fire. The Heart still beats, and any who find it and taste its flesh are completely cured of all injuries. Leska found the heart, and used her magic to become immortal.

The heroes will know all of this, and will also know that, according to the myth, if the heart is destroyed it will cause the whole region to tear itself apart from an imbalance of elemental energy. However, as long as the Heart lives and its blood flows through Leska's veins, it is impossible to truly kill her. Of course, there are ways to deal with immortal villains without killing them, and I'm sure the players will come up with a few, from the old "drop the whole cave on top of her" scheme to the silly "chop her up and throw her into a bag of holding with a wight."

The plot of the adventure is fairly straightforward. If your side is losing the war, you go to the Heart to defeat Leska and break the command of the army. If you're winning the war, you instead go there to stop Leska from destroying the Heart in spite. Your armies and hers clash on the field while you try to make your way to the entrance of the cavern, then you have to brave the ancient defenses put in place to protect the Heart, and finally you face Leska herself at the subterranean blood-filled crater where the Heart lies.

Leska is an epic spellcaster. The heroes ought to be 19th or 20th level here, so I'm currently statting up Leska as a LE female human wizard 3/cleric 3/mystic theurge 10/archmage 4/loremaster 6. That's caster level 17 wizard, 19 cleric. And she's immortal, so she has regenerative abilities similar to those of a Tarrasque. And she's got access to 4 epic spells a day (2 arcane, 2 divine) with a +48 Spellcraft check (though honestly, I'm willing to use this as sort of carte blanche to let her wield crazy but cool magic far beyond what 9th level spells do). I've given her the multispell feat and one each of the metamagic quicken rods so she'll be popping off 3 spells a round. She's also got the ability to reactively counterspell with a pretty damned good chance of stopping whatever she doesn't like each round.

Hopefully combat with her will last longer than it did in that famous battle against Vlaakith I read about in the Storyhour forum.

What I want help with is coming up with interesting tactics, good elements of the combat terrain, and ways to engage all types of high-level characters in a climactic showdown with the woman who is willing to destroy the world if she cannot conquer it. Give me your inspiration, your experiences with high-level games, and your idea of what would make a cool ending to this long war.

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[Piratecat]

What's her "theme", Ryan? All high lvl spellcasters with real style have a theme, which you can then hook visual and thematic cues on. Other than "power-hungry", of course. What's driving her?

 

[RangerWickett]

In brief, her motif is that she controls magic. Her minions, the inquisitors (whom the party have faced many times throughout the saga), are clerics who are trained in counterspelling and other antimage tactics. Leska founded the inquisitors, and throughout the campaign saga she has set her forces to the task of capturing enemy mages.

In the 8th adventure the heroes find the prison where all the captives are held. The mages are subjected to constant torture and magical agony, and special magic Leska devised feeds upon their suffering, powering an eldritch superweapon, the Scourge, that if completed would have let Leska create fields of antimagic anywhere in the world, from tiny and precise targeted areas to huge swaths of land large enough to render an entire army powerless.

She wants to be the only one who can wield truly powerful magic.


Her background was that she was loyal to her nation, such that when she was much younger and less cruel, she traveled the world looking for powerful magic to help keep her nation strong. Along the way she fell in love with one of her traveling companions, a fey man named Etinifi. Eventually the two followed a trail of clues that led them to the lost location of the Aquiline Heart.

There are many defenses that protect the Heart, but the most powerful is that the entire cavern's timeline is like an asymptotic curve. The deeper you go into it, the closer you get to the Heart, the older you become, until by the time you reach the blood-soaked shore of the lake in which it lies, you are only inches from death.

When this happened to young Leska, she was betrayed by her lover. Etinifi, too greedy to turn back and too frightened to risk dying, used magic to suck the life from her and give himself enough strength to make it to the Heart. He greedily drank its blood, gaining eternal life, but also being trapped as perpetually feeble, on the brink of death. Leska he left behind, thinking she was dead.

Leska, however, was made even stronger by her rage over this betrayal. With sheer will she forced her broken body to gather a vial of the Heart's blood, but then rather than drink it to save herself, she turned back to the surface, believing that if she was not strong enough to survive on her own, she would not take the power of the Heart. When she reached the surface, the grip of the strange timeline released her, and she drank the blood and gained the power of the Aquiline Heart.

But despite her now timeless youth, she felt as if she had died. The betrayal by the one she had loved left her with nothing but a desire to be certain she never needed anyone again. Everyone she meets now she treats only as tools, using them and then casting them aside whenever she has taken from them all she can. She learned that from her lover.

Oh, and as for Etinifi, she eventually found him. He was the first prisoner of her scourge prison. The perpetual torture and agony was intended to last for all of the man's eternal life. It was only by accident that Leska discovered she could draw power from his pain.


Her look is like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, or a dark Galadriel from Lord of the Rings: imposing, majestic, but heartless, and cold despite the fires of war around her. She wears a skull-like mask to hide the youthful beauty she does not feel is hers, and her robes are adorned with all manner of primitive charms and wards she learned in her journeys across the world, to give a somewhat primordial feel to her magic, in contrast to her regal countenance.

 

[RangerWickett]

This was the illustration one of our artist's did. It didn't quite capture the mask the way I wanted (I was hoping for something a bit more skeletal and bone-colored), but it's a good start. I'll no doubt end up commissioning another version when the 12th adventure rolls around.

 

[ashockney]

Excellent.

I hear a theme of "elemental air" for the environment, "time/immortality" for the obstacle, and "anti-magic" for the BBEG. One note that I'd definitely recommend, is that you can't ever, ever, ever put all your eggs in one basket at this level - the threat will have to come from more than her.

You've indicated a party of 4 20th level characters (please clarify if this should be greater than four or greater/less than 20th level). I would guesstimate that you'd be working around six or so "encounters" to lead up to this climactic battle. Again, keep me rained in if I'm way off course.

Sample Encounter 1 - War: I've run several very similiar encounters to this one, and they can be terrific fun. PKitty and many others have suggested that you let high level characters show off their stuff, and there's just about no better an environment than this. For the casters especially, the power that PC's wield at this level is devastating. I'm a fan of "incorporating" all the characters into it, and offer the PC's an opportunity to really shine. Your opponents will use the "fog of war" to cover their approach and hide themselves from your powerful casters. The only thing that slows them down is their limited capacity. Sure they can blow anything up, they just can't blow everything up. So, you have your fighter/paladin types pick a spot on the field and try to hold their ground from onslaughting "powerful" elites (soloing giants/ogres/war trolls, etc.). You require the rogues to be all sneaky like and target your opponents specific enemies, the ones that will give the "good guys" army a real bug-a-boo. This gives them a chance to really show off their ability to be the most deadly, mobile, stealth dudes around. They radio back a trajectory to the artillery (being defended by your fighter types), and the clerics/arcane casters, perhaps leading a whole brigade of casters) then unleash where targeted. Let them roll all the damage, put every "maximize/empower etc" into it, and calculate just how big that AoE was. It's a good time.

In the interest of letting others contribute, I'll skip to the climactic battle...

Sample Encounter 5 - Leska and minions, ok, it helps tremendously in epic/near epic to build layer upon layer upon layer to your badguys badness. EL wise, you've set this battle up pretty hard-core already, as Leska herself is CR26, so putting anymore into the battle gets real painful, but you just must do it. Ok, first off, the thing that's jumping out at me here is a personal anti-magic shell that she should be able to turn on and turn off. Pay particular attention to 3.5 edition AMS which allow syou to simply cast "outside" the shell and still wail away. The big issue in this case is that she has no big buffy defenses. Ok, so she's flying. Extraordinary flight, of course. You know, the kind that works in an anti-magic shell. : ) She may like floating over things like a sea of lava, a bottomless pit, you get the idea. They can fly up close to her, but must climb/jump/dive bomb, etc. to get near her. Oh, did we forget to mention that the heart of elemental air flows through her veins? That's right, she can control the wind around her, even from inside the antimagic shell, since the effect is all taking place outside the shell, so she's blowing things around like they're paper dolls if you try to take flight to reach her. This also will play bloody havoc with your "ranged" attacks, if you will. If you try to cast at her, she will generally ignore you, unless of course you try to cast any kind of dispelling/mordenkainen's effect, when she will of course COUNTER spell you. Otherwise she will typically ready one action a round as a defense (to drop the AMS and cast a defense spell like Blink/Statue/Spell Turning), has the free counterspell each round, and then will offensively strip in "elemental" air and poison spells in. I strongly suggest taking a look into some really beautiful ones such as cloudkill, acid fog, horrid wilting off the top of my head. In general, I think her tactics are all about "slow and steady wins the race". Now, as I've said, you just CAN NOT put all your eggs in one basket, so I think you've got to have some "surprise" love for your opponents. I would recommend, building on that "air elemental" theme with some good old fashioned "appearing" air elementals. Should the party get close, or set off triggering conditions, I would presume that one elder air elemental per PC would be summoned into the area that each PC currently is located. They've got a real nice, and real annoying whirlwind power that I'd recommend using liberally. So every unbeatable foe, and arch nemesis must have it's weakness. I think you can easily play off the "blood flows through the veins" component, and point the "knoweldgeable" PC's in the direction of "fight fire with fire" using your own air elemental powers, or to use the "antithesis" which is striking me largely as "earth" based powers, such as Xorn Movement, or other effects to get to her or protect themselves from her spells. Also, be prepared to deal with the party being ethereal, you may even want to rule those air elementals could appear ethereal if needed. She should have ample sources of spells to affect the party with gaze, sonic, and force attacks all working on both the prime and ethereal planes. As for her epic level spells, I'd recommend looking into simply allowing for the use of "higher than 9th" level spells, buffed up by cool metamagic feats and abilities.

Good luck on your adventure writing! I'm sure it will be a blast.

 

[RangerWickett]

Talking with my friends in my gaming group, they alternately entreat me to run a playtest to come up with cool stuff, and to take inspiration from the 1-round assassination of Vlaakith the lich queen of the Githyanki, which was popularized in our own storyhour forum.

I mean really, I'd be a little remiss in my duty if she didn't open up combat with a Time Stop, two gate spells, and a Mordenkainen's Disjunction. But I don't know if that would be as fun. I figure 20th level PCs will bust out with similarly broken tactics, so I suppose it's not too much.

Actually, I have a pledge never to use Mordenkainen's Disjunction in a game. It's just badly designed for D&D. Though she has mastery of counterspelling, so if the heroes decide to use that particularly mean trick, they'll suffer the consequences.

 

[jontherev]

I wouldn't (and won't) use disjunction either. I will have a similar issue in MANY levels as well, although I have a party of 7. I suggest not fighting them alone. It doesn't matter how powerful she is if they get initiative and do 300+ damage on her. So, you have to figure out how to distract them with the proper mooks without turning it into a TPK. You probably already know all this though.

She could hang back and bump herself up with spells while the party is dealing with the mooks. That's all I got for now...good luck.