I've asked for help twice this week and the first time I got some great responses and for that I an extremely grateful. I'm going to the well once more to make use of the collective expertise of the Dungeon Masters in this forum. Maybe someone reading this will also be inspired toward something in their own adventures.
If you're in my campaign, don't read this. Seriously.
I have an encounter in mind, but I don’t feel like I have the right monsters in mind for it. I’m hoping someone can help me either make this work with the monsters I have, or else help me find some other suitable monsters for what I’m trying to do.
The party has five members who are level four and are on the verge of becoming level five. They recently acquired a ship and will be sailing up the coast (with a few NPC hirelings to round out the crew). I have a couple of great battle maps that I’ve been meaning to use, and I’ve worked them into the story by saying the shoals near shore would require deep draft ships to sail through a safe channel which will bring them very close to these small coastal islands, which are connected by walking bridges. A crew of pirates have taken up residence there with a large ballista set up overlooking the channel. The pirates have a reputation for demanding a toll to any ship who wants to travel safely through and if the pirates think the ship’s cargo is valuable enough, they may plunder it anyway.
I have the map, I have the ballista. That part is good, and I’d rather not get rid of that aspect. The challenge for me is that the party will have recently acquired a clay golem and I’m sure they will want to try him out in battle. This wasn’t my plan, but it’s cool so I’ve allowed them to carry on for a while with this golem. The problem (for me) is that a clay golem has total immunity bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons that are not made of adamantine. Also, it has resistance against magic so even spells are going to be tricky. It also has a whole lot of hit points. Finally, I don’t really want to kill off their new toy the first time they get to use it, especially if I must contrive something that feels forced to do it. That just seems intellectually dishonest to me.
Originally, I was going to have a pirate lord, a couple of mid-level pirates and a whole squad of minions. The golem necessarily changes this calculus because he could just steamroll a million pirates without taking any damage. I still like the pirate concept. So, I thought what if it was a group of harpies? Harpies like coastal environments, they like looting and being cruel to people. And they can fly. They still can’t hurt the golem, but they can easily avoid him. But the harpies have a few problems too. For one thing, they can’t fire a ballista with their wings 😐 and for another thing, I can’t work out thematically how to make a squad of pirate harpies (which sounds badass) work with a smaller crew of humanoid pirates. But what if the humanoids were a type of monster that was immune to charm? Or I guess I could make them deaf or place a cone of silence over the ballista so that whoever is working it can do so without worrying about the harpies’ song. But then I must explain how a cone of silence got there.
Or maybe harpies aren’t the way to go. Maybe some other type of flying creature? A flying spellcasting creature who likes to be a jerk and might hang out near the coast with a gang of minions looting passers-by might be even better. As for the golem, I have a few ideas on how to keep it in check. A shot from a large ballista may not injure the golem, but I’ll bet it could knock it back a good way, maybe even into the ocean, which would take a round or two to come marching out onto shore. Same thing for the small bridges between the islands. If something could lift it up into the air, that could effectively immobilize it temporarily. I’m not looking for something to “solve” the golem for the sake of defeating it. I just want to create more of a fair fight for the enemy and force the players to get invested in this.
Hopefully you see what I’m struggling with. I’m on the verge of getting what I want, but I just need to find a few missing puzzle pieces to make it all fit together.
Harpies clearly have arms and hands to manipulate machinery the way I imagine them. The other pirates could be thralls under the harpies. I think harpy pirates or perhaps wreckers are a great idea. I say wreckers since flying creatures wouldn't have much use for a ship. Perhaps they are a combination of pirates and wreckers.
Having a powerful Golem is a bit overshadowing for the PC:s since it will outperform them all at their current level. It is a very powerful being, the only drawback of it being that it can go berserk. Perhaps you could make things more interesting by exploiting that?
The golem is definitely going to be a challenge for me going forward as the DM. I put it in the game essentially as an obstacle rather than something for them to fight. But rather than shutting down their creativity in tracking down a way of circumventing the obstacle and making use of the golem, I'm going to use it as an opportunity to flex my creativity and build the story around it without letting it overwhelm my narrative. My intention is to leave it as a powerful tool for the players, but to make it very situational. And at some point, they will either outgrow it or I'll have to deal with it permanently.
It really depends on what the players do. They will be on their ship so they have the option to stop and negotiate or add sail and try to run away. If they stop and things lead to a fight, the golem will take a long long time to engage. 20' movement, river muck, slight rise to reach the ballista...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I have two recommendations depending on which way you want to take the encounter. If you just want monster alternatives I would consider replacing the bandit/pirate captain with a caster such as a Crushing wave priest, cult fanatic, or lizard folk shaman and make them more piratey themed. This would potentially give the main baddy a way to interact with the golem. As far as the minions are concerned I can't find anything of a low enough CR that you could effectively swarm them that have the tools to break through the golems immunities, so unless you intend to give them weapons of a different damage type you have have difficulty enabling the minions to hurt the golem.
All that being said, my recommendation would be to try a different route. I want to preface this by saying that you have quite the endeavor ahead of you with the whole golem situation. More power to you if you manage to make it work, but keep in mind if you use the level estimation from XtE that one CR 9 monster is roughly equivalent to four level 7 adventurers, which will make creating difficult encounters rather tricky moving forward.
All that being said, I believe the way to make the fight fun and challenging without having to remove the golem would be to focus on the characters. Consider changing the minions to something amphibious, such as sahuagin, so that the players can't just hide on the boat and let the golem clean everything up. If the minions really pressure the players, you can still have combat be challenging as their survival is at stake, but at the same time you can allow the golem to plow through hoards of enemies to reward them for their cleverness in acquiring it.
Thanks, everyone. This is exactly what I'm looking for. I was not familiar with the sahuagin and they could definitely add a new dimension to the fight if it stays on the ship by climbing aboard, throwing a spear, then jumping back into the ocean. Alternatively, I could have the ballista ping the ship every few rounds while the harpies dive-bombed the players and just kept a safe distance from the big clay thing. And if it comes to land, you have given me several other wonderful options to work with.
Since golem talk looms large in any encounter planning, here's what I was planning to keep it situational.
The players will be working to acquire a control unit for it, so I made one. This doll is a magic item and using it to control the golem is going to be a bit ungainly.
This doll is made of rough burlap stitched together with twine. It is heavy yet pliable and you imagine it feels like it is filled with dirt and clay. It has a simple and bulky humanoid shape with two red sequins for eyes. When held by someone attuned to it, the doll's red eyes begin to glow and they feel a slight hum in response to the user’s thoughts as though sending them to a target. With some concentration, this doll can be used to control a golem.
It us up to the user to locate and determine which golem and which doll are mystically linked. The doll is fairly rugged, but is vulnerable to fire and can be damaged. A damaged doll functions as normal, but when commands issued to the golem, a persuasion check is required due to the weakened mystical link. Repairing the doll is complicated and can only be done by an artificer of appropriate ability.
Controlling the golem:
The commander must hold the doll in one hand, establish a link to the golem and issue a command, all of which takes one action
The golem is very unintelligent, and commands sent to it must be short, direct, and specific (protect me, defend this location, kill this enemy, open a door, move an object over there)
Once a command is given, the golem will relentlessly carry out the order until incapacitated or ordered otherwise. The player issues the command and the DM controls the golem to execute the command as directly as possible
Once an order is given to the golem, the holder of the doll maintains a mental link to the golem via concentration and may issue follow-up commands as a bonus action. The user does not need to keep holding the doll so long as the link is maintained
When the golem thinks it has finished the task, it stops in place and stands by for further instructions
If the concentration link is broken, the user must hold the doll and spend an action to re-establish a mental link and command the golem once again
If the golem is destroyed, the doll loses all magic forever
Also, I've decided the golem weighs between one and two tons, so even simple things like getting onto the ship will require some trickery as it cannot simple walk along a gangplank. He won't be able to get on the small boarding rowboat without swamping it. And I haven't decided, but even moving around on deck might be considered difficult terrain if he doesn't want to risk damaging the deck (until the players can go to port and pay to have the deck reinforced). And if the players march the golem into town, it will become clear to them that he (and they) are not welcome walking around with a big clay Frankenstain with them.
One way to handle a combat like that would be to come up with ways to "crowd control" the golem. Could it be possible to home brew a ballista firing a huge net, grappling and perhaps even incapacitating it? Or just make the net incredibly tough and hard to destroy/escape from.
This way the PC's would most likely need to rely on their own strengths, and you could keep to your original plans.
You have a lot of very good ideas, likely better than mine. But here are my 2 cents anyway.
1) I love the sahaugin as low/mid level enemies. If the fight becomes to easy, they can just telepathically summon some sharks to help, and you can leave the sharks behind if the fight is too fierce.
2) I think that the ballista already provides a potential out for the golem, without sacrificing its value or your players' ability to be creative. If the Ballista blasts a hole in hull of the ship, the players will be forced with the choice of sending the golem to staunch the sinking or commit to an all out fight and risk being marooned as your boat sinks. The earlier designed methods of marooning and/or isolating the golem also have a lot of merit. If I were using pirates here, I would have them fire flaming arrows at the ship near the golem, hoping to undercut the structural integrity of the hull.
3) Is there anyway that the Golem can become defective/the doll be slightly cursed? For example, what if its berserk function were on a hair trigger, so that there was a roughly 50/50 chance that it would go nuts if activated? What if the doll was sentient/evil, and made progressively bigger demands in exchange for allowing you to control it? There are a lot of possibilities there.
4) As a last (possibly absurd suggestion), someone could have made the ballista into an animated object, so its attack would count as magical against the golem, and there could be the false relief of a perception check revealing that the weapon was unmanned, only to be able to fire and reload itself later.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. These ideas have helped me shape the encounter into what i hope is a much less linear experience for the players. I have things roughly mapped out with some variations depending on the choices the players make. if they stay on the ship, I'm going with dive-bombing harpies and hit-and-run Sahuagin climbing up the side of the ship while the ballista blasts the passing ship every few rounds. If the fight ends up in the water, there will be sharks (thanks DuffPhD). I'm not as concerned with providing a deadly challenge to the PCs as I am with instigating the players to react to the problems created by it.
If they go to shore to confront the pirates, the question will be whether they take the golem with them (the easy part) and how they get it back on the ship afterwards (player creativity time). If they leave him on the ship, I've got a straightforward skirmish on tap. The the golem comes with them, the ballista is going to open up on the golem as often as possible. Piercing damage won't hurt it, but I'm going to say the force of the hit will knock it back and possibly into the water. I like the net concept, but I haven't decided how I like to deploy it. I'll look for ways to slow/distract/impede/incapacitate the golem. Again, the party is going to win this fight, but I want to see how they use the golem in the skirmish as a sneak preview of what I can expect from future encounters.
It's also worth mentioning that it came up in a past adventure that the ship the players sail has a mount point for one heavy weapon and I know this fact is not lost on them. If they can win the ballista, they will very likely want it on the ship for future adventures. That's why i think the battle is likely to go to shore at some point.
I'll let you know how it goes. We play in about two weeks.
For what it's worth, the golem played no part in this encounter whatsoever. It ended up being a fairly straightforward battle between the party and a bunch of pirates to capture and secure the ballista and to free up the channel for passage. Now they just need to figure out how to put the big bad ballista on their ship.
I'll save all the fancy stuff for a future nautical adventure. Thanks again for the help, everyone.
It quite possibly could carry the ballista. In this case, they left their ship in the city harbor with the golem on it and then the party traveled overland for several days before learning about the pirates. After defeating them, they decided to leave the ballista where it was and sail back later for it. It sounds a bit awkward when I describe it this way, but the point is that the golem was not with them at the time.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Not all those who wander are lost"
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I've asked for help twice this week and the first time I got some great responses and for that I an extremely grateful. I'm going to the well once more to make use of the collective expertise of the Dungeon Masters in this forum. Maybe someone reading this will also be inspired toward something in their own adventures.
If you're in my campaign, don't read this. Seriously.
I have an encounter in mind, but I don’t feel like I have the right monsters in mind for it. I’m hoping someone can help me either make this work with the monsters I have, or else help me find some other suitable monsters for what I’m trying to do.
The party has five members who are level four and are on the verge of becoming level five. They recently acquired a ship and will be sailing up the coast (with a few NPC hirelings to round out the crew). I have a couple of great battle maps that I’ve been meaning to use, and I’ve worked them into the story by saying the shoals near shore would require deep draft ships to sail through a safe channel which will bring them very close to these small coastal islands, which are connected by walking bridges. A crew of pirates have taken up residence there with a large ballista set up overlooking the channel. The pirates have a reputation for demanding a toll to any ship who wants to travel safely through and if the pirates think the ship’s cargo is valuable enough, they may plunder it anyway.
I have the map, I have the ballista. That part is good, and I’d rather not get rid of that aspect. The challenge for me is that the party will have recently acquired a clay golem and I’m sure they will want to try him out in battle. This wasn’t my plan, but it’s cool so I’ve allowed them to carry on for a while with this golem. The problem (for me) is that a clay golem has total immunity bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons that are not made of adamantine. Also, it has resistance against magic so even spells are going to be tricky. It also has a whole lot of hit points. Finally, I don’t really want to kill off their new toy the first time they get to use it, especially if I must contrive something that feels forced to do it. That just seems intellectually dishonest to me.
Originally, I was going to have a pirate lord, a couple of mid-level pirates and a whole squad of minions. The golem necessarily changes this calculus because he could just steamroll a million pirates without taking any damage. I still like the pirate concept. So, I thought what if it was a group of harpies? Harpies like coastal environments, they like looting and being cruel to people. And they can fly. They still can’t hurt the golem, but they can easily avoid him. But the harpies have a few problems too. For one thing, they can’t fire a ballista with their wings 😐 and for another thing, I can’t work out thematically how to make a squad of pirate harpies (which sounds badass) work with a smaller crew of humanoid pirates. But what if the humanoids were a type of monster that was immune to charm? Or I guess I could make them deaf or place a cone of silence over the ballista so that whoever is working it can do so without worrying about the harpies’ song. But then I must explain how a cone of silence got there.
Or maybe harpies aren’t the way to go. Maybe some other type of flying creature? A flying spellcasting creature who likes to be a jerk and might hang out near the coast with a gang of minions looting passers-by might be even better. As for the golem, I have a few ideas on how to keep it in check. A shot from a large ballista may not injure the golem, but I’ll bet it could knock it back a good way, maybe even into the ocean, which would take a round or two to come marching out onto shore. Same thing for the small bridges between the islands. If something could lift it up into the air, that could effectively immobilize it temporarily. I’m not looking for something to “solve” the golem for the sake of defeating it. I just want to create more of a fair fight for the enemy and force the players to get invested in this.
Hopefully you see what I’m struggling with. I’m on the verge of getting what I want, but I just need to find a few missing puzzle pieces to make it all fit together.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Harpies clearly have arms and hands to manipulate machinery the way I imagine them. The other pirates could be thralls under the harpies. I think harpy pirates or perhaps wreckers are a great idea. I say wreckers since flying creatures wouldn't have much use for a ship. Perhaps they are a combination of pirates and wreckers.
Having a powerful Golem is a bit overshadowing for the PC:s since it will outperform them all at their current level. It is a very powerful being, the only drawback of it being that it can go berserk. Perhaps you could make things more interesting by exploiting that?
The golem is definitely going to be a challenge for me going forward as the DM. I put it in the game essentially as an obstacle rather than something for them to fight. But rather than shutting down their creativity in tracking down a way of circumventing the obstacle and making use of the golem, I'm going to use it as an opportunity to flex my creativity and build the story around it without letting it overwhelm my narrative. My intention is to leave it as a powerful tool for the players, but to make it very situational. And at some point, they will either outgrow it or I'll have to deal with it permanently.
I have a plan. We'll see if it works.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
It really depends on what the players do. They will be on their ship so they have the option to stop and negotiate or add sail and try to run away. If they stop and things lead to a fight, the golem will take a long long time to engage. 20' movement, river muck, slight rise to reach the ballista...
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I have two recommendations depending on which way you want to take the encounter. If you just want monster alternatives I would consider replacing the bandit/pirate captain with a caster such as a Crushing wave priest, cult fanatic, or lizard folk shaman and make them more piratey themed. This would potentially give the main baddy a way to interact with the golem. As far as the minions are concerned I can't find anything of a low enough CR that you could effectively swarm them that have the tools to break through the golems immunities, so unless you intend to give them weapons of a different damage type you have have difficulty enabling the minions to hurt the golem.
All that being said, my recommendation would be to try a different route. I want to preface this by saying that you have quite the endeavor ahead of you with the whole golem situation. More power to you if you manage to make it work, but keep in mind if you use the level estimation from XtE that one CR 9 monster is roughly equivalent to four level 7 adventurers, which will make creating difficult encounters rather tricky moving forward.
All that being said, I believe the way to make the fight fun and challenging without having to remove the golem would be to focus on the characters. Consider changing the minions to something amphibious, such as sahuagin, so that the players can't just hide on the boat and let the golem clean everything up. If the minions really pressure the players, you can still have combat be challenging as their survival is at stake, but at the same time you can allow the golem to plow through hoards of enemies to reward them for their cleverness in acquiring it.
Thanks, everyone. This is exactly what I'm looking for. I was not familiar with the sahuagin and they could definitely add a new dimension to the fight if it stays on the ship by climbing aboard, throwing a spear, then jumping back into the ocean. Alternatively, I could have the ballista ping the ship every few rounds while the harpies dive-bombed the players and just kept a safe distance from the big clay thing. And if it comes to land, you have given me several other wonderful options to work with.
Since golem talk looms large in any encounter planning, here's what I was planning to keep it situational.
The players will be working to acquire a control unit for it, so I made one. This doll is a magic item and using it to control the golem is going to be a bit ungainly.
This doll is made of rough burlap stitched together with twine. It is heavy yet pliable and you imagine it feels like it is filled with dirt and clay. It has a simple and bulky humanoid shape with two red sequins for eyes. When held by someone attuned to it, the doll's red eyes begin to glow and they feel a slight hum in response to the user’s thoughts as though sending them to a target. With some concentration, this doll can be used to control a golem.
It us up to the user to locate and determine which golem and which doll are mystically linked. The doll is fairly rugged, but is vulnerable to fire and can be damaged. A damaged doll functions as normal, but when commands issued to the golem, a persuasion check is required due to the weakened mystical link. Repairing the doll is complicated and can only be done by an artificer of appropriate ability.
Controlling the golem:
Also, I've decided the golem weighs between one and two tons, so even simple things like getting onto the ship will require some trickery as it cannot simple walk along a gangplank. He won't be able to get on the small boarding rowboat without swamping it. And I haven't decided, but even moving around on deck might be considered difficult terrain if he doesn't want to risk damaging the deck (until the players can go to port and pay to have the deck reinforced). And if the players march the golem into town, it will become clear to them that he (and they) are not welcome walking around with a big clay Frankenstain with them.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
One way to handle a combat like that would be to come up with ways to "crowd control" the golem. Could it be possible to home brew a ballista firing a huge net, grappling and perhaps even incapacitating it? Or just make the net incredibly tough and hard to destroy/escape from.
This way the PC's would most likely need to rely on their own strengths, and you could keep to your original plans.
You have a lot of very good ideas, likely better than mine. But here are my 2 cents anyway.
1) I love the sahaugin as low/mid level enemies. If the fight becomes to easy, they can just telepathically summon some sharks to help, and you can leave the sharks behind if the fight is too fierce.
2) I think that the ballista already provides a potential out for the golem, without sacrificing its value or your players' ability to be creative. If the Ballista blasts a hole in hull of the ship, the players will be forced with the choice of sending the golem to staunch the sinking or commit to an all out fight and risk being marooned as your boat sinks. The earlier designed methods of marooning and/or isolating the golem also have a lot of merit. If I were using pirates here, I would have them fire flaming arrows at the ship near the golem, hoping to undercut the structural integrity of the hull.
3) Is there anyway that the Golem can become defective/the doll be slightly cursed? For example, what if its berserk function were on a hair trigger, so that there was a roughly 50/50 chance that it would go nuts if activated? What if the doll was sentient/evil, and made progressively bigger demands in exchange for allowing you to control it? There are a lot of possibilities there.
4) As a last (possibly absurd suggestion), someone could have made the ballista into an animated object, so its attack would count as magical against the golem, and there could be the false relief of a perception check revealing that the weapon was unmanned, only to be able to fire and reload itself later.
Fenchurch, Gnome Wizard, Red Skies in Mourning
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. These ideas have helped me shape the encounter into what i hope is a much less linear experience for the players. I have things roughly mapped out with some variations depending on the choices the players make. if they stay on the ship, I'm going with dive-bombing harpies and hit-and-run Sahuagin climbing up the side of the ship while the ballista blasts the passing ship every few rounds. If the fight ends up in the water, there will be sharks (thanks DuffPhD). I'm not as concerned with providing a deadly challenge to the PCs as I am with instigating the players to react to the problems created by it.
If they go to shore to confront the pirates, the question will be whether they take the golem with them (the easy part) and how they get it back on the ship afterwards (player creativity time). If they leave him on the ship, I've got a straightforward skirmish on tap. The the golem comes with them, the ballista is going to open up on the golem as often as possible. Piercing damage won't hurt it, but I'm going to say the force of the hit will knock it back and possibly into the water. I like the net concept, but I haven't decided how I like to deploy it. I'll look for ways to slow/distract/impede/incapacitate the golem. Again, the party is going to win this fight, but I want to see how they use the golem in the skirmish as a sneak preview of what I can expect from future encounters.
It's also worth mentioning that it came up in a past adventure that the ship the players sail has a mount point for one heavy weapon and I know this fact is not lost on them. If they can win the ballista, they will very likely want it on the ship for future adventures. That's why i think the battle is likely to go to shore at some point.
I'll let you know how it goes. We play in about two weeks.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
For what it's worth, the golem played no part in this encounter whatsoever. It ended up being a fairly straightforward battle between the party and a bunch of pirates to capture and secure the ballista and to free up the channel for passage. Now they just need to figure out how to put the big bad ballista on their ship.
I'll save all the fancy stuff for a future nautical adventure. Thanks again for the help, everyone.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Couldn't golem carry the ballista?
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
It quite possibly could carry the ballista. In this case, they left their ship in the city harbor with the golem on it and then the party traveled overland for several days before learning about the pirates. After defeating them, they decided to leave the ballista where it was and sail back later for it. It sounds a bit awkward when I describe it this way, but the point is that the golem was not with them at the time.
"Not all those who wander are lost"