Gears of Ruin: Session 1, Revolutions per Machines, Part 3

See part 1 and part 2.

First Contact

This combat encounter had 3 goals:

• Give players a fairly challenging fight to give them a better feel for their PCs’ powers.
• Set a hostile first contact with mechanical monsters, in this case some undead warforged (you read that right)
• Spring  a surprise on the player by playtesting something for a future gaming magazine article.

Freelancer aside: My very first magazine article was published in Kobold Quarterly #12 earlier this week.  I wrote a piece on combining skill challenges with combat encounters.  For a first successful stab at such high writing requirement, I think its pretty decent, thanks to Ben McFarland ‘s editing support. Go and get it!!!

I used the D&D Miniature Games pre-drawn Field of Ruin battlemap.  It depicts a battleground featuring debris from a busted airship, siege towers in various state of disrepair and several Siege-Engine boulders.  While we had used that map before, the players later told me that it really worked for this encounter, lending it the perfect feel for the fight.

As the PCs entered the battlemap, a group of derelic warforged, surrounding 2 better-built knights poured out of the remnants of an airship.  All the warforged seemed to be animated by some sort of necrotic energy.  Holy Clank could also hear the psychic commands of the mind behind the rebellion.  It was a strident, enraged mind shouting psychic commands semi-incoherently.  Clank’s inhabiting spirits (the source of his sentience) protected him from the enticing commands.

Minions for the controller? Check.  Undead for the Avenger? Check.  High Target environment for butt kickers? Check.  Absolutely no status effect attack?  CHECK!

The Warforged Derelicts were the level 6 minions of the same name in the compendium database that I upgraded to level 14.  The Warforged Death Knights were simply Helmed Horrors that I re-skinned to deal necrotic damage only.

It’s ridiculous how 4e is easy to customize from behind the screen.

The fight was predictably easy, even though Stef (playing the Dwarven Druid) was absent and things were all fine until the 5th minion was killed on Round 2…

Watch that Rock!

During the next round, I described how 2 of the siege-engine boulders that were shown on the map started making noise, the top of the boulder lifting to form some kind of turret.  Then a panel slid open and a blast of necrotic energy shot from each to blast PCs, dealing lots of damage.

Yan (channeling a certain Mon Calamari): It’s a Trap!

The fight progressed for another round.  At one point an area attack hit monsters and one boulder-blaster, the players asked me if the attack affected the trap.  It should have (I had one countermeasure specifically saying the trap could get hit by a power) but I was too scared to reveal the upcoming punch that I committed this DM sin. Fortunately it wasn’t a really important issue.

Did you just pull an Ed-209 on us Phil?

By round 3, both Knights were bloodied.  (Or oiled?  Or boned?  I’m confused with an undead animate monster) and that’s when the ‘fun’ started.  Both turret Boulders opened up further, turning into humanoid mechanicals made of stone and metal!  Picture the turret as the head and the rest of the body unfolding into an Ogre Sized piece of artillery that shoots you then runs to punch you in the face.

In essence, I had created a Lurker Blaster Trap Artillery Brute…Try to say that 3 times real fast… 🙂

That’s not all, when the Boulder Crawlers (as I called them) activated, other nearby boulders opened up to release swarms of ‘Mechanical Death Cockroach Swarms’ (Adapted from a high level swarm).  They were mostly there to allow nerf PC defenses and provide combat advantage to offset the brutes’ horrible attack bonuses.

While cool in theory, the fight kind faltered after the few rounds with the boulder crawlers.  First, as brute, they didn’t hit really often, even with the help of the swarms.  My players are top notch strategists and work well together and with a Warden, a Figther and a Swordmage, being a threat is going to be a challenge.

Thus, with 2 brutes and 4 swarms to fight and no controller, the fight became grindy.  Players stopped describing what their powers did and I even caught myself getting bored enough (alert!) to start getting distracted other stuff on my laptop.  When I realized I was doing so, I tried to snap myself back into focus.

Earlier in the fight, I had described how the boulder-crawlers had this large button thing on their torso… but until the energy level of the game dropped significantly, no one thought it necessary to do so. That’s when I knew my monsters were too weak for the encounter.

I did a ‘patch upgrade” (informing my players) to give the boulder-crawlers  more attacks per rounds and increase their damage output.  When a player decided to pop the button with an athletics check, I described how the monster popped back into a Boulder and could be disabled with a Thievery check at the high difficulty rating for DCs.

No one was trained in thievery… yet they succeeded… for both boulders.  I said it before, I’ll say it again, the revised DCs are way too easy.

Yan: That was a bit anti-climatic…

He’s right, I had a few design flaws in how to deactivate the trap/monster which I identified.  I’ll rewrite it and keep it for that potential gaming magazine article.  For example, I made popping the button a minor, which allowed a PC to disable the trap permanently with a standard in the same round.

Still the fight was cool… my players have all given excellent feedback on the session.

Franky: Dude, it felt like the later Terminator movies!  I really felt like we were fighting machines!

Epilogue

After the fight, they found the wounded intelligence agent who gave them direction to find his second colleague, inside the factory where the psychic signals came from. Also, looking over the remains of the Boulder-Crawlers, they saw the insignia of House Falkenstein on them…

Lessons Learned

• The key to challenging players who perform above the power curve is to exploit the range of damage, attack bonuses and non-XP encounter elements (Puzzles, Damaging terrain) allowed by the game to increase challenge without increasing monster HP, Defenses or level.
• Maintaining high focus on the game will likely always remain a challenge for me, the beer I drink during the game doesn’t help either.
• Using a party creation template works! Those PCs are awesome!
• Starting a campaign with a teaser and then skipping the next game so the DM can go to Florida with his family might be construed as cruelty to players.