Key Our Cars

Found a pretty cool thread that hopefully keeps going on Enworld.  Various DM’s are ‘rating’ encounters they have put up against their players and giving the specifics and how they turned out.

Makes for some really good idea fostering since they’re easily ‘consumed’ and aren’t burdened with giant blocks of stats and all that so you can ‘microwave’ them in a minute or two and go “that’s cool” or “meh” without spending a lot of time at it.  Then you can go stat them up into encounters of your own tailoring.

All the listed ones are good but I thought this one in particular would have some really good ‘visuals’ and could be adjusted with custom monsters pretty easily for any level.

Image Credits

XP Encounter Difficulty: Level 7+4
(Used on a level 7 party, but it is a level 11 encounter)

Brief summary: Adult White dragon blasting the snow away from graves awakening the dead.

Area setup: An island in the middle of a icy river with precarious stepping stones. The island has a big graveyard, the graves are covered by snow.

Enemies:
Adult White Dragon Level 9 Solo brute with 20% fewer hp, so award 1600xp
3xChillborn zombie Level 6 Soldier
3xMad Wraith Level 6 Controller

Enemy setup:
The Dragon awakens as the party bicker like hell crossing the river, fights them as they come onto the island. It uses its breath weapon to blast the snow away from some graves awakening the chillborn zombies the following round. It stays flying and uses its breath weapon a few rounds later to awaken the Mad Wraiths in the same way

How it went:
The archer in the party was scouting and noticed the dragon, shot it and started the fight with only two PC’s on the stepping stones. Otherwise it went about as planned. One of the fighter pushed the gravestones over the chillborn zombies as they awakened, slowing them by one round. (I didn’t let them use the aura when they had a gravestone on top of them). The dragon never landed and flew away after getting down to 25% hp.

Actual Difficulty:
The encounter is a little easier than it might seem, as the dragon uses it’s breath weapon to uncover the graves and the undead used some rounds getting up of the graves. Difficulty about as a level 10 encounter. The players used all available dailies.

How well did it work(on a scale of 1-10):
The multiple enemies that had to be handled and the big bad guy made for a very interesting encounter for every character type. The encounter has plenty of suspense and the characters feel threatened but not overwhelmed. I would give it an 8.5.