Cellar

What Happened


See Hogar’s Journal


DM Points


Monsters: 5 x Vampire Spawn (Level 5 Minions), 2 x Skeleton Netters (Level 5 Soldiers), 2x Corpse Rat Swarms (Level 4 Solider), 1 x Frieda, Vampire Lord (Level 4 Elite Solider). – XP 1350 Level 5

Map "Cellar" Created map, see picture below.

As this is the last encounter in my Mini Adventure I made it more difficult than the previous ones to make it was more climatic. I had decided quite early on that the player character (PC) I used to play, Frieda, would become a villain so that I could still controller her and that she wouldn’t fade away into obscurity. As I was using lots of undead, due to my miniature selection there were three undead routes to go down, Werewolf, Zombie or Vampire. As my character was a female Eladrin rouge zombie and werewolf seems a little uncharacteristic so vampire seemed the most sensible option. I figured that all PC are Elite monsters due to having actions points so I set Frieda up as a Skirmisher and then applied an Elite template. The most sensible template to apply was vampire lord, so Frieda the vampire was born.

I wanted Frieda to arrive into the combat a turn after all of the other monsters, as an unveiling. This though only gave her 3 attacks in the whole of the encounter, 2 of which that missed! So the lovely template with lots of powers I had created was nearly useless, I have planned to use her Blood Drain ability once she was bloodied by getting into an advantages position with her teleport and then using her action point in the same turn, but she didn’t get a single action after becoming bloodied due to the amount of encounter and daily powers thrown at her pretty much by the whole party. I only made her level 4 as that is the level the characters were and she was meant to be one of them, but I think having her at level 4 meant her defensives were to low for her to have a meaningful effect on the encounter. 

On the flip side though we found out the swarms are really annoying!

We had only encounter one swarm before, at the beginning of the keep in H1. As we were very inexperienced then most monsters seems difficult, it was rare for us to go an encounter without someone being knocked out. So we didn’t really see the difficulty the posed. But as the party now has 2 and a half defenders 1 and a half strikers and two half of a leader only the controller has any meaningful close burst or area attacks. Also the first lots of rats did not move under PC’s as this is a rule were leant later, this meant that every time the rats were subject to an area attack at least one PC was. This helped erode some of there hp away, but even with theses factors the party all still remained standing. This shows that the party are more than capable of dealing with encounter a level higher than them, so I think I will have to throw more of them their way in the future.