“ <b>THE COVEN</b>
When the characters approach a clearing in the forest, they will see 4 ogres who are guarding, and preventing from escape, 4 human males, and 3 human females. The ogres will see the party and leap to attack. The females will scream 'OUR SAVIORS!!' and run screaming straight across the currently forming battlefield, in between ogres and party members, to hide behind the rearmost party members. They will be safe there. The males will try to skirt the battle to the north side to join the women.
To the south, giants will be hiding in the thick underbrush until the party has engaged the ogres and then attack the most opportune target EXCEPT the ones that the females are next to.
It should be noted that the female commoners are not female commoners at all, nor are the male commoners actually male commoners. The female commoners are the hags, who have polymorphed themselves as the commoners in their stewpot to escape detection. The males skirting the battle are actually MORE ogres, the hags were in the process of polymorphing ALL the ogres into regular humans for ambush purposes. The REAL commoners are already dead, having found their way into the coven's cauldron for dinner.
The hags (the women) will position themselves near to any spellcasters in the rear first, and then near anyone else in the back of the fight. The ogres (the men) will wait until the hags shift form, and then attack first the rear folks, then shift into the melee.
It is possible that the characters, as they approach the ogres, will notice the giants in the bush, and be able to warn the others of the ambush.
<i>GAME NOTES</i>: If you sell the screaming women correctly, they will not even be suspected until it is too late. Therein lay the problem. This encounter is ESPECIALLY deadly to the rear eschelon of the party. It is entirely possible that the hags will finish off half the party before they even realize they have been duped. Caution is required if the game master wishes to avoid a TPK(total party kill).”
“ Imagine that all the humanoid and demi-human laguages are actually the same, but pronounced with outrageous accents and bizarre idiom. All the elves have a French accent, all the Dwarves have Swedish, Dragons have a Pakistani accent...”
“ Here at Dragonsfoot http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=65381 The post discuses the use of the classic arcade game " Dragon's Lair" as a playable dungeon but it approaches it like a normal D&D game. You cannot represent DL with " Ok Bob, it's your turn what are you doing?" So I've got a germ of an idea.
The castle itself is a dream construct of the way-too-powerful-to fight Dragon. From a distance the castle is changing, growing towers, walls falling , getting bigger and smaller in rapid succession. The castle "eats" interesting things that the players will need to extract. It is also Multidimensional and planer and moves around.
The way I am planning on running it is that individual rounds are broken into 3 parts and only one player gets an action to interact with the "trap". a second player will be able to aid the "phasing" player in what ever action he takes. casting spells will be broken up over the 3 partial rounds(depending on L of spell).The phasing player will in essence be the party leader for the 3 partial rounds. The phasing player "job " will be rotated in some fashion(havent got this worked out yet). This is all run w/ the idea that you are trying to recreate the frantic pace of DL The growing and shrinking nature of the castle forces constant movement on the players A brief description of the situation will be provided with the idea of "looking around" will be an action that takes up a whole "partial" round. A few normal combats to be sprinkled in.
Since a lot of work will go into an encounter that should only take IRL 2 maybe 3 min., the rooms and traps are reusable (justified by the "dream logic")
This will obviously not work for a large group of players. Prob want to keep it to 3 or 4.
This will require MASSIVE prep time for what will prob amount to a 1 hour crawl at best (depending on how many standard fights you work in) That's why REUSABILITY is key. To make the prep worth it , you can rerun it w/ the "dream logic"
Not sure if I'm going to pull the trigger on this. But I really like the idea.Not promising a part two if I don't.”
