Sunday, October 19, 2008

Into the Demonweb Forest, Part 3

After defeating the pack of deathjump spiders, the girls headed deeper into the forest, always heading for the tallest tree, which they had seen jutting up out of the old growth before they entered, even though it was miles away. I flipped the battle mat over to the other side, with a slightly different layout of path through difficult undergrowth, and placed a pencil across the path in front of the party to represent a large web. The ranger spotted two giant spiders sitting in the web.

The wizard immediately ran to the front of the party and blasted both spiders and the web with burning hands. Again, all the spiders in the area started moving toward the group and we rolled initiative.

This encounter was the first to use some of my homebrew spiders from a couple weeks back:
2 giant webby spiders (level 5 controller, 400 xp)
1 deathjump spider (level 4 skirmisher, 175 xp)
3 crab spiders (level 4 minion, 130 xp)

The girls have gotten to the point where they can smell minion monsters a mile away, and they made short work of the crab spiders. The giant webby spiders sprayed webs all over the place, but once the minions were destroyed the webs didn't pose much danger by themselves. The warlord and the paladin ganged up on the deathjump spider while the ranger and wizard went hunting the webby spiders.

Analysis:
The giant webby spiders might require some work, or I might need to try them again with more allies. I think this fight would have been a lot more interesting if I had replaced one webby spider with two more deathjump spiders and another crab spider, which would have been about the same xp value. Heck, they're still slogging through the spider-filled forest, maybe I can throw that variant in and see what happens...

3 comments:

ChaoticBlackSheep said...

I think the webs would have been a lot more dangerous if Pele hadn't used her Fire Shroud encounter power to burn the webs off of the characters while hitting most of the other spiders after they closed. If the whole party hadn't made better saves the second time around when we were sprayed with webs, it would have been very different.

Kal said...

Last weekend I used your spiders in some sewer encounters with my group.

The first encounter was in a 15x15 room mostly covered in spider web. The five PC party burnt halfway through before a Giant Webby Spider did a webbed terrain on them. Then crab spiders attacked while the Webby backpedaled and hit PC's that saved against the earlier webbing with Web Net. 1d4 crab spiders appeared each round until the party managed to slay the Giant Webby. My players enjoyed the fight and officially hate being covered in spider web!

Shortly after the PCs found a humanoid creature cocooned and struggling in spider web, they began to cut it free only to discover it was a Narleth Webspitter! The Webspitter would have fared better if I he'd started with some range on the party, as it was he never got a chance to Spit Web on anyone.

He did repeatedly knock the fighter who kept him marked back but the warlord kept bringing him right back up. As with the Webby I had 1d4 Crab Spiders backing him up each round till he went down.

My players enjoyed both encounters. I had the monster's blocks printed on 4x6 cards along with the illustrations so I was able to show off the artwork.

Thanks for monsters; I plan to use several more soon.

Gregor LeBlaque said...

Excellent. I'm glad to hear someone's getting some use out of my monsters. Thanks for posting back and letting me know.

I'll have to remember the 1d4 crab spiders per round trick. I might use that myself...