HotDQ Spoilers - Fight in Chapter 8

[JFahy]

You saw the spoiler thing, right? Okay. Here it comes.

Vampires, according to the monster manual, are challenge 13 which
suggests one of them could reduce my group to a thick yellow spray -
and then they throw in two thralls, who are no slouches either.

Has anybody had this fight happen? How did it go? I can only picture
my party winning it if the vamps use hyper-dumb tactics (grossly
overconfident, maybe).

Of course the whole encounter is sorta-kinda avoidable, but on paper
it looks lethal-ish and I'm wondering if I've missed something.

[heavyfuel]

Tyranny of Dragons, as a whole, is pretty difficult.

Instead of XP or Milestone, I used the Session Based advancement (DMG p261) and they got to the Vampire at lv 9, and it was still pretty difficult (I think they're supposed to get to the fight at lv7 via the milestone, or 6~7 by regular XP)

If your players are cautious, they can avoid it entirely as you said, and it would be very very wise for them to do just that. Try to throw in some hints that they should avoid the fight at all costs, because seriously, they won't walk away without casualties.

But yeah, if they're lv 7 as the book suggests, they are going to lose. Pretty much no way around it.

[JFahy]

Cheers.

Now, here's my dilemma - I've painted up three vampires and I'm fairly
happy with how they turned out... :smallbiggrin:

[Madfellow]

My advice is to just use a single vampire thrall, instead of a full-blooded vampire and two thralls. Maybe give it immunity to Turning.

[kaoskonfety]

Cheers.

Now, here's my dilemma - I've painted up three vampires and I'm fairly
happy with how they turned out... :smallbiggrin:

Oh man, that is a problem... guess the party is totally doomed. :smallbiggrin:

[RulesJD]

It depends on your party makeup. If you have a Paladin with Divine Smite slots left, it's a decently easy fight. Same for a Paladin with the aura against being charmed. Protection from Evil is also a necessary buff for this fight.

If any of your players have access to a spell that generates sun light, it is also pretty easy. Same for a high enough level Cleric, both for the Turning Undead ability and divine protection spells you will need.

Other than that, if you play the Vampire to its full mechanical potential, it will TPK a party most every time. It has enough HP to force multiple Wisdom saves to avoid being enthralled. It can cut a party in half in just 2-3 rounds because there is no limit on the number of creatures it can charm each turn. With half the party fighting the other half, and the pretty solid damage a vampire can do, it will crush parties without divine casters.

[JFahy]

It depends on your party makeup. If you have a Paladin with Divine Smite slots left, it's a decently easy fight. Same for a Paladin with the aura against being charmed. Protection from Evil is also a necessary buff for this fight.

If any of your players have access to a spell that generates sun light, it is also pretty easy. Same for a high enough level Cleric, both for the Turning Undead ability and divine protection spells you will need.

They do have a paladin, and his one-round burst (even with a d8 weapon) is pretty freaky - and they have a cleric.

When I first noticed the fight I thought, alright, the cleric (who worships a sky god) will have Daylight by then, that'll level the field a whole bunch. But it turns out Daylight (3rd level spell) isn't sunlight; the sunlight spells are levels 6 and 8. That's when I went from :smallsmile: to :smalleek:.

[Dizlag]

The vampire and thralls came at us (9 players with 5th level characters) in the control room while the clouds were out blocking out the sun. We then took down the clouds and broke the windows to the control room where the sunlight came in doing pretty good damage. I was sneak attacking with my rogue and our paladin got dominated. We killed the thing before the paladin did too much damage though. Pretty fun fight!

[Endarire]

Once we saw the vamps coming, we changed the cloud setting from 'thunderstorm' to 'sunny day.' That removed the two adds.

From there, we (a party of about 10 level 4-6 characters) proceeded to beat on it. Protection from evil and good was helpful but not necessary.

[TrexPushups]

Cheers.

Now, here's my dilemma - I've painted up three vampires and I'm fairly
happy with how they turned out... :smallbiggrin:

They can roll new characters you can't get the time sent painting those minis back.

[JFahy]

They can roll new characters you can't get the time sent painting those minis back.

I'm glad we're on the same page. :smallwink:

[Gnomes2169]

My players were level 8 when they faught the vampire. At night. With almost every single one of their spell slots spent. And the paladin at only 80% HP (with literally 0 spell slots left because he blew them all on Rezmier). The vampire brought both spawn with her.

My players survived because they had befriended Blokthagkus the Storm Giant, who (with his garrison of 25 ogers (yeah, I actually rolled the maximum garrison size)) drove off the white dragon... at great personal cost. Only 8 ogers survived, and while Blokthagkus managed to take one of the dragon's eyes and foreclaws, he lost an eye of his own, had gouges all along his chest and was frozen in a few places. However, giants are really, really hard to kill. While he did sustain permanent injuries (or at least, injuries until he got a regeneration spell), Blokthagkus managed to remain conscious until he had made sure that Rezmier was dead. Aaaaaand then he fell over to "sleep off" the whole near-death thing (he didn't wake up for three days... I sort of lean on the brutal side for NPC recovery rates). The vampire, wanting to own the castle and assuming that the party was too beaten up, decided to focus on killing Blokthagkus (well, more the six oger guards who had taken up position around the storm giant) instead of the PC's for exactly the first round of combat.

Since the paladin was a paladin of devotion, this was the worst of ideas the vampire could have had. Especially after the wizard used his last fireball to blow up the vampire's Children of the Night. All of them. This is quite literally the only reason why the PC's survived. It was most amusing.

[Inevitability]

My players finished HotDQ yesterday. And with 'finished' I mean 'Killed Rezmir, ignored the upper level entirely, went straight for the dragon, and escaped with its hoard.' I wasn't going to have them fight the vampire, though.

I would probably have cut it out in all entirety, then replaced it with something else of an appropriate CR. Maybe an assassin, hired to spy upon the cult by a third party, has made his lair there, only coming out at night. Maybe a deactivated clay golem stands atop the tower, attacking all who dare enter. Maybe Rath Modar has summoned a chain devil and hidden it up there, in case things go awry.

[Callin]

It wrecked my party at lvl 7. Wizard, Bard, Barb, Rogue, Warlock/Fighter. I was the lock and my buddy the bard we both got charmed at the start. I could not pass my save for nothing with a +0, neither could the bard. So we hindered the party and did not contribute. The rest of the group ran after killing 1 thrall. Me and the bard replaced him....

Did not another encounter with them. Fought them in the Wyvern Stalls by the way.

[Chaosvii7]

The wonders of Chapter 8 was that every fight in the castle is optional, and it was possible to forge alliances with the people in the castle. My party befriended every important NPC but Rezmir, so when the final fight came around all they had to do was fight Rezmir and everything on the first floor(Sandesyl fought everything on the second floor and Blagothkus was piloting this ship towards the north to his army).

That said, when Rezmir was about to die, Talis showed up and engaged the party, but not before finding the time to enrage the dragon. The party had alot of NPC help, but they're still proud to say they fought Rezmir, Talis, and Glazhael all in one encounter.

[JFahy]

Tyranny of Dragons, as a whole, is pretty difficult.

Instead of XP or Milestone, I used the Session Based advancement (DMG p261) and they got to the Vampire at lv 9, and it was still pretty difficult (I think they're supposed to get to the fight at lv7 via the milestone, or 6~7 by regular XP)


With only regular XP, they might even be level 5. My group just made 6 last
night after getting the wyverns settled down, and that's with me giving regular
plus a substantial bonus for finishing each chapter. (But admittedly they
haven't done a ton of 'side-quests'.)

[Jbones]

This was one of my favorite battles. We arrived on the castle early in the day. This was fortunate as it ended up giving us time to learn about the vampires in the tower before nightfall. Our party cosists of a Monk, Cleric of Light, Bard and my Paladin/Rogue; all level 7. After the arduous task of climbing the tower after the half dragon bard broke off the balcony when he dimension doored onto it. We found the vapires. The main one was in thier coffin while the the other two spat warnings to leave from the darkened corners. Luckily they were held at bay long enough from light partially spilling in. Once a couple of us left the light the spawns called for their leader who exploded out of a castket attacking the Monk. My paladin/rogue (who had portection from evil) ran over and grappled the leader, after mistakenly putting himself only 10 feet fromt the light and 25 from the doorway, and began dragging the vamp into the light. My Paladin and the vampire had a epic battle that included me misy stepping onto the ceiling, regrappleing the vampire and pile driving him back onto the sunbathed floor after he broke free and fled up. While the others were kept busy he two of us struggled on the floor. I continually hacked and smited with a hand axe while rolling us closer to the door. By the 4th round we we in th doorway th vampire failed one more attemped at breaking free and the two of us rolled out plumeting 70' utterly destroying the vampire and wounding myself terribly. The spawns were taken care of fine enough while the big guy was held down.

[Drake S.]

Through an unfortunate mistake and a lucky die roll, our Dragonborn Paladin actually destroyed the vampire's tower before we ever even discovered them. We then headed to the control room. Our party overall cosisted of a Dragonborn Paladin, a Half-Orc Fighter, the Human Ranger(me), a Halfling Druid, a Stone Dwarf Barbarian, and a Hill Dwarf Bard all level 7. We already pissed off Blagothicus(sp?) and after an epic battle, he was killed.

I'm going to put the next in spoilers just in case you haven't gotten that far:

(The White Dragon had escaped from an earlier encounter where we got extremely lucky, first of all). Since Blagothicus was dead, the ghost of his wife found out we were responsible, so she literally brought down the flying castle on us since we could not succeed in bluffing that we were not responsible. As the book states, we survived the incident and when we started collecting ourselves after the fall and healing ourselves, the vampire and the two thralls appeared. We had already brought down an entire tower on top of her, AND crashed the castle with her inside, so by the time we faced off against her, she was already very bloodied and pretty hurt.

So, she did end up getting a few licks in there on us and nearly killed our Dwarven Bard at one point, but in the end we were able to take her out. Our DM was pretty suprised with how everything unfolded though. It was fun.