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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ashockney" data-source="post: 3654966" data-attributes="member: 1363">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.</blockquote>

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