Slayer Lord
2016-08-31, 01:20 PM
I'm going to be starting a new campaign in a few weeks, and I've been wanting to kick things off with a challenging and unique dungeon crawl and boss fight, and I'd like some thoughts on how to make things challenging without it turning into a massacre (barring the disfavor of the Random Number God).
The party is level 6, and consists of a Cleric of Hades (ported from 3.5's Deities and Demigods), the cleric's level 4 rogue hireling, a conjuration wizard, an orc barbarian, and two others who are currently undecided, though one of them will probably be some form of Hunter. It's a sequel a previous campaign I ran a few years ago. The party will wake up as prisoners on board a slave ship, and for most of the "dungeon" they'll have to figure out how to escape and make their way through the ship lacking most of their equipment until they reach the armory, without bringing the whole ship down on them. I do plan to provide a couple NPCs with class levels that they can recruit, plus all the slaves if they want to go full on slave revolt. Most of the crew they'll encounter below deck are generic lvl 3 fighters and rogues, plus a fighter/rogue tiefling mini-boss in the form of the ship's cook. What are some other ways to make this crawl more interesting or challenging? The cleric is a returning character from the previous campaign, and he's something of a diplomat and manipulator, so should I try to do something to deal with this in case he tries to Diplomance a mutiny and steamroll the boss with sheer numbers?
The top deck is where the boss fight is, consisting of the captain and his elite. The captain is a lvl 7 undine ranger, archer speciality with humans as his first Favored enemy (since our two spellcasters are both humans), a level 6 sorcerer with the Fey bloodline and specializing in enchantments, 2 minotaurs (one with levels in barbarian, and one with levels in bard), a couple ranger/rogues up in the rigging with bows, and three sword and board fighters to slow them down with. I'm hoping to try and use the captain and sorcerer as reoccuring villains (the sorcerer was the wizard's character in the last campaign and he's cool with it), so they'll probably escape into the sea if they take enough damage, though it won't be a huge blow if they die or get captured. This is the highest level encounter I've put together, and our group rarely gets past single digit levels, so I'm struggling to figure out what all to equip them with without it becoming a death trap. Any thoughts?
The party is level 6, and consists of a Cleric of Hades (ported from 3.5's Deities and Demigods), the cleric's level 4 rogue hireling, a conjuration wizard, an orc barbarian, and two others who are currently undecided, though one of them will probably be some form of Hunter. It's a sequel a previous campaign I ran a few years ago. The party will wake up as prisoners on board a slave ship, and for most of the "dungeon" they'll have to figure out how to escape and make their way through the ship lacking most of their equipment until they reach the armory, without bringing the whole ship down on them. I do plan to provide a couple NPCs with class levels that they can recruit, plus all the slaves if they want to go full on slave revolt. Most of the crew they'll encounter below deck are generic lvl 3 fighters and rogues, plus a fighter/rogue tiefling mini-boss in the form of the ship's cook. What are some other ways to make this crawl more interesting or challenging? The cleric is a returning character from the previous campaign, and he's something of a diplomat and manipulator, so should I try to do something to deal with this in case he tries to Diplomance a mutiny and steamroll the boss with sheer numbers?
The top deck is where the boss fight is, consisting of the captain and his elite. The captain is a lvl 7 undine ranger, archer speciality with humans as his first Favored enemy (since our two spellcasters are both humans), a level 6 sorcerer with the Fey bloodline and specializing in enchantments, 2 minotaurs (one with levels in barbarian, and one with levels in bard), a couple ranger/rogues up in the rigging with bows, and three sword and board fighters to slow them down with. I'm hoping to try and use the captain and sorcerer as reoccuring villains (the sorcerer was the wizard's character in the last campaign and he's cool with it), so they'll probably escape into the sea if they take enough damage, though it won't be a huge blow if they die or get captured. This is the highest level encounter I've put together, and our group rarely gets past single digit levels, so I'm struggling to figure out what all to equip them with without it becoming a death trap. Any thoughts?