Red Hand of Doom- Force Recon Edition Challenge

[sage20500]

So my group is currently going through the Red hand of Doom and we just recently killed off Ozzy. I was talking with my dm about some of the stuff that has been going on and he mentioned to me about he believes its entirely possible to complete the module with out access to 4th-5th level spells, and that the party would essentially be a guerrilla force that goes around assassinating all of the important people, which got me thinking.

So as a challenge\kind of curious experiment, without using too much cheese, how would you all design a 3 to maybe 4 person force recon styled party to take on the Red Hand of Doom? Gestalt builds are allowed and encouraged since thats what my group normally plays since we tend to only have around 3 characters in a party. Also heavily encouraged is any flavoring of tropes you might find involving military or mercenary squads

[sage20500]

So far for myself I've been looking at having a player that is a solitary hunting ranger\\rogue or ranger\\fighter who is able to switch up between ranged and 2 hand melee as needed (your weapon specialist\scout or sniper trope character), a rogue\\beguiller (party face and could also be the knife guy trope), and maybe a druid\\monk or a druid\\rogue who'd work as out of the squad medic or utility scout trope. Not sure what i do for a 4th character or if they'd be the person whos there as the oh **** button for when all hell breaks loose.

[Mongobear]

Maybe as the "Guy with the Biggest Gun" member, like Terry Crews in The Expendables. Something like a Barbarian//Fighter who is a pure beefcake that only really cares when he gets to blast people away with his huge Great Axe + Power Attack combo's.

Standard Ubercharger build works well for this guy, maybe a few different flavor choices to fit the soldier theme a bit better.

[Malroth]

Rogue adds nothing to Beguiler that it doesn't already have, Perhaps Warlock as it's Passive/Damage side instead since at will flight, darkness and Insane social buffs are very handy on a Beguiler chassis.

For your "OH S***" guy, I'm Partial to Metabreath heavy Dragonfire Adepts who really could gestault with anything and still work (archivist and wizard come to mind)

[sage20500]

Rogue adds nothing to Beguiler that it doesn't already have, Perhaps Warlock as it's Passive/Damage side instead since at will flight, darkness and Insane social buffs are very handy on a Beguiler chassis.

For your "OH S***" guy, I'm Partial to Metabreath heavy Dragonfire Adepts who really could gestault with anything and still work (archivist and wizard come to mind)

I was mainly thinking rogue for fitting into the trope of being the dagger\knife guy, pretty much the knife in the back kind of guy. Since SA is actually viable throughout all of red hand of doom, i was thinking they'd be the guy who infiltrates camps ir approaches guards by looking like ine of their forces before shanking the sentry\look out\scout, that whole idea.

[John Longarrow]

One character...

Pixie beguiler/Warlock.

Drops swarms, not on the leaders, but on the troops. They only have so many troops and swarms can be sickeningly effective.

Pixie just needs to never go where the big guys are and continually eat away their troop strength.

If something big and nasty shows up, RUN. If not, continue inflicting casualties.

I may just be looking to real world here, but any large force that is under continual contact with the enemy generally uses its reactionary force to try to deal with said contact. This slows the entire attack to a crawl. Unless they have a lot of supplies they will be foraging as they go. If they do have massed supplies the supply train become the primary target to force the army to move at a crawl.

Continual hit and run until the attacker's plan is derailed. Plus slaughtering lots of helpless goblinoids will be worth a ton of XPs, so by the time you face the big and heavies you'll have leveled a few times. Trick is to get low level mooks that are friendly to provide intel on where the horde is and where its moving.

[J-H]

I would go with warlocks (as mentioned) or swordsages. Swordsage/warblade for ALL the maneuvers and max HD!

[Malroth]

Sparrow Hengyokai is a much lower LA alternative to pixie

[John Longarrow]

Hmm... Awakened hummingbird warlock? Or is that too silly?