Lessons from Behind the Screen – Scion of a Dark God

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The Set Up

Time for my next creation, this time her name is Tarashon, Scion of Shar. My campaign has gone totally epic since the last of these articles. Szass Tam, the ultimate villain of the story, has begun a ritual that is changing the fundamental nature of the world that will turn him into an overgod. The gods have sent agents from around the planes to the world in order to either try and do their part to stop this from happening or take advantage of the situation. Tarashon is one of those agents working for Shar, goddess of Shadows and Secrets.

Meanwhile, I’m also moving into the last chapter of the Tomb of Horrors, where Acererak is trying to become a god (in my campaign the famous demilich is actually a former apprentice of Szass Tam from centuries ago and they’re both using similar methods to achieve similar goals). I’m reskinning a lot of the last chapter of this super-adventure from WotC in order to fit my campaign, but the basics are the same. Regardless, the PCs need to figure out how to get to the domain of a dead god (in my game Mystra’s Dweomerheart). Who knows such secrets? The scion of the god of secrets, of course.

So the party will have to find Tarashon, Scion of Shar, who not only knows how to get to Dweomerheart but has sent a team of her own agents (instead of Asmodeus as the adventure states as listed) to the former domain of magic to learn the secret of Acererak’s ritual.

But if they party is going to hunt down Tarashon they’re going to have to find her and get the information out of her one way or another. I figure this encounter could be purely role-playing and a few skill checks…but I suspect that the agent of a god of secrets isn’t going to give up this information easily…but perhaps she keeps an encoded book of secrets. So the party can kill her, take the book, decode it, and head off to face off against their demilich campaign mini-boss. So I better have her stats ready regardless of how this goes down.

The Design

How to design the scion of one of the original two gods of the Realms, the god of shadows and secrets? Well I want these agents of the gods to feel powerful. This event is my excuse as a DM to make my entire epic tier feel epic. No longer are we dealing with the organizations of kingdoms of the world…that’s so last tier, everything has to be bigger (as explained to me by the highly esteemed Mike Shea on a recent episode of The Tome Show and in his own book about running epic tier games).

So I’m making Tarashon a 25th level solo, but I don’t expect her to fight alone, I’m thinking maybe I’ll throw together some shadow minions to go with her. Being the scion of a god of shadows and secrets I find it only natural that she be a lurker. This makes life harder for me since I feel that making lurkers is probably the hardest type of monster to design (and run) well, but it makes too much sense so I’ll stretch myself. I want to accomplish the lurker role in relatively simple ways. A trait or a power or a combination of them that hides her quickly and easily and allows her to move so you’re never sure where she is. Make her hard to find and give her a chance to pop out of no where later, that’s what will make her a lurker.

First, let’s start with her traits (after giving her a full complement of skills and the like, since this could end up being a role-playing encounter I want to be ready for that). I’m starting with Mantle of Shade to simulate constantly being enshrouded in writhing shadows that makes it hard for people to see her. Sure, in a meta-game sense everyone knows she’s in the center of the aura, but the simulation still works because the aura will block line of sight beyond 2 squares and make everyone else hit her when she has cover. This raises the question of why not just give her bonus to all her defenses and block line of sight otherwise…I should probably have a way to negate the aura. So if she’s hit with radiant it will temporarily cut through the shadows.

I also really liked the way I designed Kezef with the many auras. It worked well because even if he was locked down he was causing some problems. I’m already making it hard to lock Tarashon down, she gets a +5 to saves as a solo and I’m giving her saves at the start of her turn…but PCs are crafty and they’ll use powers that stun for one turn and the like instead, so I’m going to give her a Shadow Bleed power as well that activates when she’s bloodied at which point the shadow essence within her starts to seep out and threaten all those around her.

Next I need to figure out how I’m going to make her move around and surprise people. I’m going to have her teleport up to 10 squares as a move action at-will and doing so grants her invisibility until she makes an attack (which will give her combat advantage regularly, which will work well since I’m giving her a sneak attack). Now she’s starting to feel like a lurker to me, I feel comfortable with her being in that role.

Now it’s time to fill her out. I want powers to capture her theme, shadow and secrets, as well as crank up her challenge and give her plenty of options while not making her overly complicated, because if there’s anything I hate as a DM it’s forgetting to use monster powers and never getting another chance later.

So I’m going to give her the power to blind people as a minor action and a basic melee attack with her weapon. The sword attack can be a little more fun than meets the eye as well, because it’s what she’ll be doing in conjunction with her Shadow Step and Sneak Attack which could make it all the more devastating. Adding up to a potential 9d8+10 damage and to make it be an even bigger threat I’ll have her get a free use of her Shadow Step when she spends an action point, allowing her to pop in, stab, pop to the other side, and stab again all in one round. That’s a proper epic threat even with a minor looking sword attack.

Lastly, I’m going to give her a power to capture the idea of devastating people with her secrets, it’ll do psychic damage and it will be a recharge power. I think I’d like it to effect pretty much the whole battlefield, my wizard and ranger have it too easy staying out of the fight, I want this to threaten them too. I’ll have it daze as well as it’s not nearly as much of a fun killer as stun is but still makes sense. She’s just said a secret so devastating to the mortal mind that they’re all confused for a moment. It’s a Cthulu-mythos-style secret, they may not even comprehend it but it’s shaken them to a core.

As for the shadowy minions…I’m thinking to either just reskin the Death Thrall Attendant or the Dread Wraith Minion (both available in the D&DI Compendium) and call it good enough. The Attendant probably does the job that I want better (since the wraith is a bit harder to hit being 6 levels higher than the PCs and does necrotic damage that most of my party will almost completely ignore). The Attendant does normal damage and explodes when it dies. That’ll work well and I think I’ll have a handful of them appear every round on Tarashon’s turn…melting out of the scenery.

There’s the design, now it’s just a matter of running the encounter and seeing how it goes.

The Experience

Well the fight is over and considering how difficult I think it is to both design and, even more so, to run a lurker in an encounter, I think it went pretty well. I mean, sure a monster designer can call a monster a lurker and make the numbers match up to that, but the real trick to lurkers is running them. Because if the bad guy pops out once and surprises everyone that’s only a little lurker-y to me. I like lurkers to feel like lurkers for the entire fight, and so often that’s hard or even impossible to do.

Tarashon was designed with being a lurker for several rounds of a fight from the get-go. She has powers that allow her to move around, be invisible, and simulate her being hard to see. In terms of story I think she was a huge success. In terms of the metagame of D&D, I’m less confident in that. Sure, she was invisible for a few seconds each turn (giving her sneak attack damage) but the players all knew where she was based on the location of her mini almost all of the time (based on how I ended up running her). She came off quite skirmisher-y to the players, even if she was lurker-y to the PCs.

I suspect the lurker qualities might have been more effective and evident to all around, except that one of my players used his brand new power that allows him to give the entire party darkvision until the end of the encounter…I determined that that would negate her aura’s ability to block line of sight, but not the cover. It was a compromise.

The minions worked well to keep the threat going when the PCs managed to temporarily stun Tarashon. When the fight started I had 6 minions appear out of columns in the room (because, what else am I doing with those columns I drew) for each of the first two rounds. I knew I wanted them to show up again later, but didn’t want to have them appear every round…that’s a trick I’ve gone to a bit too often lately. So I had them stop after two rounds (build up just enough of them to keep the PCs busy after they’d used all their stunning powers) and then when she became bloodied I had 4 minions appear each round until she was dead. That, along with her extra-aura when she becomes bloodied was enough to change the battle just enough to make it interesting mid-way through without making it feel like a completely different fight.

As a DM she was pretty easy to run and remember all her abilities (especially since I just tell my players about auras and trust them to remember). She had several PCs on the ropes a few times and I got to really challenge some characters that are normally off the hook. I beat up the archer for a while (and even when I didn’t the minor action at-will blind ability was great for him) and I had the leader almost down as well as had the wizard on the run.

I’m going to call this a success. The powers emulated the story of a lurker…although as I look at the design more and more I think that it’s really a kick butt skirmisher with some lurker-i-ness mixed in.

What do you think? How do you handle lurkers in your games and do you have a good design for them or advice on how to run them well? What things would you change about my design…or what did you like? Please share in the comments.

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