Lessons From Behind the Screen – The Horde Attacks!

This is the first of these articles, so I’m going to describe the idea briefly here. I’m taking inspiration straight from my own games where I am constantly trying new little tricks and following bits of logic or advice from various folks to come up with unique, engaging, and exciting experiences for my players. I want every encounter to have a purpose and for the design behind those encounters to make sense in that encounter. So I’m always trying new things to push that envelope.

So when I learn something that I think might be worth sharing I’ll write it up here in three parts. First, The Setup. This is where I describe the story that leads to the unique and interesting encounter. Story always drives my design, so that’s where I’ll start. Second, The Design. Once I have a story I need to design mechanics to support what I’m trying to do. That’s what is described here. And last, The Experience. Once I’ve run the encounter I’ll come back and let you know how it went, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d change if I could do it again.

So let’s jump in as I throw an endless horde of aberrant monsters at a city of eladrin…and the PCs.

The Setup

The party’s elven ranger was prophesied to some day free the Star Elves (a group of eladrin). This ranger was distantly related to Star Elf nobility and so he could control the mythal (magical aura and barrier) surrounding the city.

The party had slowly discovered more and more of the situation over the course of the previous few levels of game play and now they were ready to go to the city and see what this was all about.

The city was abandoned long ago when the pocket plane it resides in started to collapse. But by creating this plane they had accidentally created a rift in reality to the Far Realm from which the aberrant horde called the Nilshai were threatening to come through. So while most of the eladrin (Star Elves) left the city some stayed behind and sealed themselves in to maintain the mythal, using it and the city as a cork in the rift. If they could hold out until the plane completely collapsed then the horrors from beyond wouldn’t be able to use the plane as a window into the world.

This was also going to be the encounter that would conclude the paragon tier of play for my players and would bring them into epic, so I was looking for something on a grand scale that would allow the PCs to be powerful and important. The PCs were going to fulfill the prophecy, save the city, bring it into the world (giving them new epic allies), seal the rift to the Far Realm, and save the day for everyone by doing the impossible.

The Design

So early on I thought that this would be a good chance to highlight two PCs at the same time. The ranger, who is nobility in the city, allowing him to open the mythal and control it’s defenses and the wizard who’s paragon path (and up coming epic destiny) were all about planar magic, travel, and creation. So I figured I’d let the wizard shine in the ranger’s story, two for one.

I wanted to have the wizard do what the eladrin never could…seal the rift. He was going to cast a grand ritual, collapse the plane, transport the city to the world, and stop the Nilshai from coming into the world all at once, fulfilling the ranger’s prophecy.

This sounded like a good time to try one of those battles where the point isn’t to kill all the bad guys, but to hold them off while someone else does something important. In this case, the wizard casts the ritual, but needs the mythal opened to do it, so the PCs are going to hold off the endless horde of nilshai until the ritual is done. But that sucks for the wizard’s player. Sure he does the impossible but he doesn’t get to be involved in the fight. Enter allied minions!

I stated out a bunch of Star Elf defenses to hand out to the players. Most were minions with relatively simple powers and all of the powers HAD to be things that required no tracking. So all at-will powers or powers that triggered on circumstances like  death. A few of the defenders were not minions, like a series of arcane towers that could “cross the streams” for a super-beam (when you really want to take down one baddie fast) and the mythal itself, which only worked inside the confines of the mythal (so it’s awesome, but has it’s own limitations).

With these defenders there was enough for everyone to get one and the wizard would have something to do even though he was personally spending most of the combat making Arcana checks to complete the ritual (hit a moderate DC to get 1 success, hard DC to get 2 successes, and every success increased the DC by one, once you hit 5 the ritual is over).

Then I needed Nilshai. They’re aberrant spellcasters first created in the 3e days of the Forgotten Realms (they were originally ethereal, but that’s neither here nor there). I created one for a few sessions back, the one that became the Nilshai Brute (guess what it’s role was) which worked well but lacked some flavor. After talking to Greg Bilsland on an episode of The Tome Show I started to figure out what would make these guys cool.

First, when they teleport they get to be insubstantial. Second, they get a counter-spell that allows them to hit you with any effect you hit them with that allows a save. It doesn’t negate your power…but it makes you think twice about using it. So I tagged those into the Brutes, I used the discussion with Greg to come up with the Nilshai Lurker. I threw together a simple Nilshai Minion, I reskinned and tweaked the Spellweaver monster to be the big bad casters of the horde, and then came up with a Nilshai Giant as the occasional really scary threat (to make sure it was a threat I gave it an aura that grants all aberrant creatures within 10 a resistance to all damage of 20…and it could eat you).

I had the defenders, I had the horde, I had the ritual. Next I needed to represent that this horde was endless. So I decided that I would make a chart. On each PCs turn they would roll a d20 and the result would determine what and how many more Nilshai enter the fight. Not every round, mind you, on every single PC turn. This was needed because they could drop a lot of baddies fast with their defenders and because I wanted this threat to be real and large.

Last step, the map. I drew up a mythal barrier with a hole in it. I put some ruins of walls in front of the whole, not sure what I’d do with them or why they were there, but it seemed to provide an interesting maze area for the fight to take place, and then buildings around it to place archers and for the ritual to take place.

Encounter…designed. Check out my session notes complete with creature stats. I printed this out and ran my game right from it.

The Experience

So how did it all go?  Mostly really well. The Nishai Giant was a big threat and got all the attention that I wanted it to. The counterspell came up just enough for the PCs to notice it. The insubstantial when teleported came up a few times, but not much…which was probably for the best since there were so many monsters that it would have been hard to track it all if it was happening a lot. All in all, the monsters worked pretty well, although the Lurkers never did get to pull off their cool trick of grabbing someone and taking them to another plane.

The PCs got to do their cool stuff too. The minion defenders worked really well. They were designed for simplicity but to evoke their flavor and that all went off without a hitch.  I was extremely pleased with it since I thought this could be the one area where it would all break down. If I had it to do again I would have counted how many players I was going to have that night and come up with another type of defender so the wizard could have two and everyone else would have one. I didn’t know, when I designed it, that I’d have a full house that night. So when the wizard took two (as expected) one of the players had no defenders to play besides his own PC.

The ritual mechanic worked as well, it wasn’t horribly exciting, but that wasn’t the point. Adding a full skill challenge in the middle of a horde of allies AND enemies would have been a bit much. There was enough to keep track of so a simple Arcana series was fine and to the point.

The map worked well in terms of getting the players to think strategy and I came up with a good reason, on the fly, that the ruins were there. When the mythal was opened then there was an influx of Far Realm energy that destroyed that building. This is where I could have seriously improved my encounter.

You see, my players brilliantly bottlenecked the whole fight at the entrance to the Mythal and they held the Nilshai there the entire fight. A few of them got past the front line with teleportation, but were quickly taken out by the archers and mages who were left behind. This meant that the threat to the wizard never quite happened. The battling through the maze of the city and the ruins never played out (until the last half of the last round of the fight).

After thinking through it, if I had given the Nilshai a surprise round to move into the city it would have made TONS of sense. I had already explained away the ruins with a burst of energy, it could have easily also temporarily stunned the defenders allowing me to bring the front line to them, inside the city. One of my players also said I could have had the rift manifest as a hole inside the city and then there could be no bottlenecking, enemies could come out in a multitude of areas to threaten the city.

All in all, I’m calling this encounter a success. It was good…but with one little tweak, I think it could have been GREAT!

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