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View Full Version : Final Battles: The time's a-coming.



Christopher K.
2010-08-19, 11:54 AM
Well, it finally happened - the first campaign I've ran is coming to a close. The players are on par with their nemesis, and armies are gathering on both sides to finish the ongoing struggle. (I'd rather not go into details because I'm not looking for suggestions. Merely inspiration.)

How have the final battles in your campaigns played out? Have the villains lured their foes into a trap-riddled maze where they have the upper hand, or have the heroes valiantly drawn the villains to fight them on equal ground?

Comet
2010-08-19, 12:09 PM
The heroes tend to be kind of dragged into the final conflict after either them or the villains have had enough of delaying the inevitable showdown. Not much time for planning. Not that the players usually want to plan that much to begin with. The world needs saving now, let's just jump in there and rip some stuff up until the world is a better place.

And afterwards there's the very satisfying "Did we just do that?" moment.

Fayd
2010-08-19, 03:54 PM
Preface: This was not in 3.5, or 4E. This is in a system of my DM's own design.

In mine, (which has the journal of the entire campaign conveniently located in my sig), the evil people had seized the capitol city, captured the Grand Duke (basically King), and were rounding up the populace of the city to sacrifice them all, culminating with the sacrifice of the Grand Duke to summon a Demon Lord bodily to the material plane.

The party teleports into town with the aid of our NPC allies, and meet up with more allies in town. We have: the head of the church to the god of civilization, the dragon of the most prominent river in the country, an epic knight/berserker (uncle of the paladin), the paladin's sister (a powerful divine support caster in her own right), the Captain of the Ducal Guard, an archmage from the world's premier magic studying organization (my character's master), my character's childhood friend (a powerful healer), and a contingent of battlemages.

The mages, including my mentor, childhood friend, and the battlemages go teleporting around down messing up the summoning glyphs and sigils, keeping just ahead of the demonic soldiers (on demon-horses, both of which were modified, not actually directly from Hell) pursuing them.

The party sneaks into the palace where the culmination of the ritual is to take place. Intelligence we have gathered informs us that there is a psychic connection between all the soldiers and their leader, a Centaur. So the dragon, the berzerker, the church head, the captain of the guard, and the paladin's sister will hold off the horde of demonic soldiers while we take out their leadership.

We sneak in. The assassin in the party shanks guards in full plate left and right, killing them in single blows (Con damage poison on her daggers), the barbarian makes a moving Whirlwind style strike through the enemy horde, the paladin is laying holy out holy fury, our healer is keeping us alive, our archer is loosing round after round into the enemies, and I am destroying masses of cultists with a single spell.

The (important) enemies are the general, a demonically modified centaur who charges through the air wielding a lance, and a powerful lieutenant who is dual-wielding levitating rapiers and throwing around shards of metal. Our healer is killed outright by a charging critical from the general early on. The barbarian gets close too. I use some wind magic to throw the enemies into other enemies, causing fall damage and knocking them down.

Our Assassin finishes of the Lieutenant on the round after she is nearly killed. I bring her back from the very brink of death, she feigns death for a little while, and then she leaps up and sneak attacks the guy with her daggers, dealing CON damage from the poison... and enough of it to kill him outright.

The General, who has disgustingly sick AC, is very hard to hit. In the end, our Archer-Gish does two things to win the day.

1. She fires some Con damage poison that actually gets through his high fort save.

2. She takes a rose seed from her seed pouch, magically fixes it to her arrow, and fires it, depositing the seed in the general's bloodstream. From there, her plant magic is focused on the seed, causing it to grow inside his veins and arteries.

The paladin and I assist this process... He by having his fiery celestial horse quicken the centaur's metabolism, quickening the growth of the seed and making secondary con damage arrive sooner. I use a magic pendant I was given almost at the beginning of the campaign (and promptly forgot about) that had 5 uses of Magic Circle Against Evil to make him unable to do anything for a while.

He died from a rosebush exploding inside of him. Fun times.