Making PotA More Challenging

[the_brazenburn]

While playing Princes of the Apocalypse, I encountered an unusual problem. While the adventure appears to be a series of dungeon grinds with little opportunity for RPing, my group has created the opposite problem. High-Charisma characters, previously established alliances, and lots of charm spells make for a group that, rather than attacking the BBEGs themselves, simply find dissatisfacted members of the cults and support their coups. Inevitably, they destroy the prophet, but manage to keep the cult itself under their fingers. This has been getting boring for all of us, and I'm wondering how to stop it. Any ideas?

[Breashios]

Wow. That actually sounds pretty cool to me. What makes it boring?

[Breashios]

I am at the end of running PotA and our group has gotten to love the interaction with the various NPCs. They do enjoy the fights as well, but now I think some are getting into having their own little organizations or their influence on them running around the Sumber Hills.

[Theoboldi]

I'm confused. What stops the new leaders of the cults from taking up the Elemental Weapons and summoning the Princes themselves? They already have a corrupting influence on those who wield them, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that the Princes would use them to simply create new prophets to summon them. And even if they're high level, the players can't be everywhere at once, so this could blindside them.

If the players have claimed the weapons already, then their goal should be to destroy them before they can cause more harm. All the while, of course, the weapons attempt to corrupt them as well. Heck, make their presence corrupting even if the players aren't wielding them, to add on the pressure. Further, even though the cults are on their side now, there most certainly will be dissent if they figure out that the players want to destroy the holy weapons of their faith. And they should figure it out, since the players can only destroy the weapons inside of the Elemental Fanes and the Princes are always capable of sending their worshippers vague dreams and visions.



That said, your group sounds really cool. My players are only at Feathergale right now, and picked up their first hirelings in form of that group of Aarakocra and an air elemental those Aarakocra summoned together. I only hope they'll eventually get into the faction stuff at least a little bit, though right now they seem a little more focused on the personal high adventure stuff.

[solidork]

I'm a player in a PotA game that is nearing the end of the storyline so I am going to try to avoid spoilers. I'm also not sure how much of what has happened was in the book and how much was made up by my DM. Here is some of how things played out for us...

A schism helped us take out the parts of the fire cult that were in the upper levels of the dwarven city, which caused all of the other prophets to retreat to their respective nodes with their most fanatical followers. The fire node was positively lethal and if our characters were built differently then we would have lost one or more PCs: getting ambushed on the elevator with three fireballs (we counterspelled two of them), the later encounter Flameskulls (again, two countered fireballs), and the Fire Roper (the wizard and my cleric beat it on initiative. It made it's save against the first Banishment, but failed the second). We cheesed the fight with the dragon by banishing him and then just closing the portal and running.

[ThurlRavenscrof]

Find a way to incorporate a doppelgänger. Maybe a cult leader employs one to impersonate a dissatisfied cult member for example. It makes intrigue and drama for high charisma groups go crazy