High Level Eberron Campaign

[slayer187]

Ive been running an Eberron campaign from level 3 to 15. The party has encountered dragons, gone to Xen'drik, and gone into the depths of Eberron and battled monsters from Xoriat. The last war has restarted and the houses are making their attempt to conquer Khoravaire.

I only get to run a game once every 4-6 months and I've got four highly experienced and committed players so I usually wind up writing about 20 pages of material for each game. The issues I run into every time is that encounters either always go way too fast or way too slow. The party is really good at planning things out so stuff that they get any time to prepare for at all for doesn't last long. And I also feel like I cant get each player his own amount of spotlight time in each game. If theres a lot of fights the barbarian and the wizard get a lot of play and if its more scheming then the artificer and rogue get more play. I was wondering if anyone had any cool Ideas to help me out, been running this game for a couple years and Im running a little dry.

[Alleran]

At 15+, they should probably be power players. Not mechanically (necessarily, anyway), but they should perhaps spend less time going through dungeons/fighting monsters/exploring Xen'drik (in fact, they should in part be the ones sending lower-level PCs/NPCs to do that sort of thing) and more manipulating events, engaging with other power players, and so on. Be warned that it will shift the tone.

Another option is to throw lots and lots of lesser enemies at them. They say that high-level characters should be able to fight an army? And that the Last War has restarted? Well, throw one at them. Don't give them a chance to stop and rest up, either. You might find that you're getting bogged down in combat mechanics as a downside, though.

[slayer187]

Thank you for your advice. Sorry I originally wrote more but the first thread I tried to start didn't save for some reason. Kind of got tired and just rushed it.

Around LV 12 the party was hired by an organization based out of Thrane to investigate a disturbance in the Mournland that was causing the fog that borders the area to expand and was causing taint (Heroes of Horror Handbook) to spread through out the nation. It was a long campaign that was full of role playing that took the party to multiple nations and even into Khyber. There was a lot of action to include assaulting the crimson monastery in Karrnath. Unfortunately I tried the "a lot of weaker enemy's" idea and they just breezed through it. The puzzles and mystery's were still a lot of fun to watch them solve though. By the end of that campaign a member of the party was framed for the death of the queen of Thrane and was imprisoned in Dreadhold. The new war was kicked off because of the attack on the monastery in Kharrnath was pinned on Thrane and the murder of the Thranian queen was pinned on Breland due to who the party members were working for individually.

The 13th level campaigns was the party breaking their buddy out of Dreadhold and fully going on the run from the Houses and the Nations. They wound up going to Xen'drik to get away and because one of the members wanted to find an ancient dragon artifact called the crown of Sandar Thaj. (I got it out of the Eberron Explorers handbook/The Complete Guide to Eberron Handbook) The reason for the shift was because I planted a story in one of the players past a few games back. His mentor was actually a dragon who raised him since he was a small child, that had been his secret since he made his character a couple years ago. The mentor never really played a big part but he recently had informed the player secretly that the dragons were planning on wiping out Khoravaire like they did Xen'drik and they were using this new war as a reason to due so since the last war caused the Mournland. The player shared the secret with the group and by the end of the game the players did a few side quests and managed to get the crown hoping it'd give them an edge to stop the dragons. I had been waiting a long time to use that players background story, he put a lot of work into it. He had asked once he was high enough level if he could get a Sybiris Mark, I was so impressed I gave it too him.

Anyways the last game took the party to Argonesson where they killed the Dragon responsible for causing this decision to wipe out khoravaire and who was actually behind the incidents that caused this new war. There was a lot more that went into it but basically during this time the war was fully raging on and the houses decided to take advantage of the situation and make an attempt for power. When the last game ended, 2 of the players were completely destroyed by the dragon (still trying to figure out if true resurrection can bring back gear or not) Khoravaire is at war, the houses are at large, one player is stranded in Argonesson, and the other is still on the run.

What the party is thinking about doing is trying to get the stranded member back to Khorvaire, somehow, find a cheap way to get true res. for the other two, hit a khundurack bank to get money to refit and hurt the houses. They wont need much since the one player who's stranded (assuming he can come up with an idea on how to get back) is a 15th level Warforged artificer. Thats about as far as I've gotten so far.