Designing my first adventure- could use some help with the details

[MossyMeow]

I recently agreed to DM a campaign for a friend of mine, his younger brother, and an exchange student living at their house. I plan to run a fairly standard dungeon crawl, with the twist that the players first have to figure out how to enter the dungeon, which is guarded by a sphinx. Basically, they have to retrieve a sigil from one of three people, which drives the first part of the game. The devil, at least for me, is in the details: encounter difficulty, treasure, experience points, etc. One of the players is a power gamer who frequently builds characters who overshadow the entire party in terms of damage output, and the other two players are people I either don’t know or know very little about. I could use some help in figuring out what to design in order to challenge them.

I already have a sense of some of the major boss battles, so to speak. As a twist, I want to reveal inside the final dungeon that the ancient civilization that built the tomb was ruled by gold dragons, and have the party fight a dracolich driven mad by the loss of her eggs. I also know the enemy the party will have to fight for two of the three paths: a blue dragon and an incubus. However I’m still uncertain about the third.

I also know that I want to start above first level, since my friend has frequently expressed annoyance with starting from the beginning- I’m considering either third or fifth. I also know he loves to collect tangible rewards like treasure and XP, and that if I provide lots of those two things, along with at least semi-challenging fights, he’ll be happy. The trouble is that I’m uncertain about how to do that. I could use some advice from you folks in the playground about what to do.

Oh, and I’m also using a homebrew setting, which complicates matters somewhat; I posted a second thread in the Worldbuilding forum to deal with that issue.

[Vorpalchicken]

I would start at first level for the benefit of the new players but make sure they quickly level to 3rd.

You could give bonus quest xp to encourage the group to refrain from murderhoboism. A bit of RP and one challenging encounter could bring them to 2nd. Two more nice encounters (not stabbing shopkeepers) could take them to 3rd.

From there you could occasionally give bonus rewards but the leveling should slow down significantly after that.

[MossyMeow]

Thanks for the help. I’m thinking I start out with a ‘prologue’ at level 1, where the PCs will have to figure out who has the sigils before heading of to find them. For a gold dragon to be a dracolich, it would have to be either an adult or ancient; while ancient would make more sense for a dragon that’s lived since the fall of an ancient civilization, the adult dragon is more reasonable in terms of CR. So the PCs would have to be around 17th level when they fight the final boss.

I might have to expand my campaign beyond the initial dungeon if I want to include a dracolich.

[Feddlefew]

I personally have the party start with a small dungeon- the classic five room dungeon model is good for this- so that they can get the hang of their characters, and then automatically have them level when they finish it.

I've started handling leveling by having a list of task for each area (ex: kill area boss, forge peace treaty between X and Y, find the lost throne of Babish, ect.) and each level needs a certain number tasks completed. How many depends a lot on the group- some groups are really, really time efficient, and others like to take their time getting through content.

[MossyMeow]

After flipping through the Monster Manual and considering my options, I settled on a vague outline for the first ten levels. I'll save the ancient gold dracolich for 20th level, if my group even manages to get that far, and will have the final boss of the dungeon be the gynosphinx who guards it-maybe it attacks after the party steals the treasure. I might even do the whole cliche "You stole the idol, now the temple is collapsing" thing to add to the tension.