Dastardly Encounters: Ratling, Swarms, and more.

What is a dastardly encounter?

A dastardly encounter is a riddle that presents like normal combat.  At first, the players will think we are trying to smite their ruin upon the tactical map.  We're actually trying to breed smarter players, but they won't know that until they've hit their third is dastardly encounter.  This is where the player goes from "dammit" to "what am I missing, there is always a way."

Becoming the dastardly developer

It's a two-step process. First, build a nearly impossible encounter.  It's important not to use homebrew or custom rules that are specific to this encounter.  What I'm saying is don't make up an impossible monster  for this encounter and throw it at your party.  It's important that the players and their characters clearly understand how everything fits together.  Otherwise, they won't be able to solve the riddle.

 Not evil per se

The second part, to make sure the party has the means to defeat the encounter, is more important than the actual design.  I could devote a whole article to this topic, but suffice to say, killing players is easy.  From the utterance "Rocks fall, you die" to throwing an Ancient red dragon at them, killing a party is literally the easiest thing in the world.  You are the game master and hold nearly all the cards. If you want to be entertaining and your players to have fun you won't murder them just because you can.

Building a dastardly encounter

To design a challenging encounter we must first remove our game mastering hat and put on our power gaming hat.  The first step in crafting any challenging encounter is, well, making that encounter metal as all hell.

This encounter is built in Pathfinder, but really, all of the advice is applicable to other game systems, more or less.  Sure the specifics change, but the process is almost universal.  So with our power gaming hat on we look for abilities in the game which aren't normal.  They don't scale normally, or they use different rules.

There's a reason it was a plague

We want a mechanic that breaks the rules. A rule that breaks rules, rules inception if you will.  We want to build this around a nasty creature and a swarm comes to mind.  What a swarm is, is a seething pile of discontent and hate.   These bad boys deal damage automatically at the end of the round, can stop a player from acting, and can be immune to weapon damage. A frigging nightmare for any fresh group.  A couple swarms won't do, we  should need a Cosco membership to buy this many swarms. These are seasoned adventurers we're designing this encounter for after all.  So what we do is have some other NPC cast summon swarm.  Now we have all the swarms we want.

If I want to cast a bunch of spells, then sorcerer is the right choice.  We can even layer in grade A invisibility so that they're hard to find.  As for the race, it'd be swell if they were good at avoiding ranged spells.  We don't want the players just side stepping this barrier, do we?  It'd also be great if they had alternate forms of movement so they could be in hard to reach spaces.

Not your typical bad guy

The rockstar race for this encounter?  Ratlings.  Ratlings have dark vision, evasion, climb, burrow, and swim speeds. aww yeah.  Don't skimp on stealth, even when visible they are hard to find.

Dungeon and Dragons Tactics

The players have to get from here to there, and they have to pass through these Ratlings home sweet home.  A cave system attached to a sewer would be an epic Ratling abode.  the Ratlings, for their part, want all the sweet sweet loot carried on the adventurers, and will do anything they can to cut off the group's escape. A scroll of wall of stone or even just natural terrain might just pee in the players cornflakes.

The face they'll be making

They first cast invisibility, then cast summon swarm.  If you want to turn it up a notch then just have them cast a new spell every round.  The swarms will still stay around for another two, stack swarms. The ratlings could be hiding behind stalactites for a bigger challenge, or hiding behind stalagmites on the floor for an easier one. This places several barriers to harming the main components of this encounter.  none of them are impossible to beat, but players have to think, not just use massive damage per round to destroy everything in sight.

Thankfully Ratlings are scardy-cats, so we have a reason to have the rest run away when they start being defeated.  Even so, we may want to sprinkle these guys into the encounter.  This might be too much for our players.  If you remove creatures from an encounter without a good reason players will know and it'll ruin their suspension of disbelief.  Even worse, you rob them of a sense of accomplishment.  It's hard to celebrate when you know the GM saved your butt from the fire.

Why this could be murder in the first degree

Attempted murder

I'm building an encounter that will kill the party right now.  I can stack them the swarms one on top of the other and deal 16d6 per round.  If I'm burning through spells(by casting every round instead of concentrating) then I can deal 32d6 per round.  No save.  That's before I look any of the summoning feats, or extend spell.  Extend spell could raise the amount of damage to 64d6 per round.  The swarm entry specifically says they can occupy the same square as any creature, and even if we house rule that this doesn't make sense at this extreme, size rules say 100 diminutive creates (spider swarms) can occupy the same space.  It's basically a middle finger to the group.

Remember, first we're sour, then we're sweet.  Like sour patch kids.

Can the players beat this bum wrap?

The issue here is that the players won't be able to beat the ratlings if the party doesn't have access to spells like dispel magic, glitter dust, and see invisibility.  So you have to go over to their character sheets.  Do they have access to these spells on the day they are traveling through the cave? If not do they have magic items that will help them?  If they can prepare these spells, but don't have them prepared, there should be some story warning. maybe they have to deal with a small pack of these guys, or maybe they've heard rumors of the invisible casters. Better yet have them run into some other unrelated invisible donkey clowns.

If the ratlings drop all these swarms on the caster, he may never get to act or get off his spells.  so don't do that.  The goal here is to make the characters work smarter and allocate their resources.  we have to make it feel real, so there should be a couple swarms over the caster(s) but it isn't necessary to drop them all on top of them.

This is the end goal

you have all the tools you need to run a good dastardly encounter.  I suggest you sprinkle these bad boys in for best effect.  After a couple, players tend to go from "this is impossible" to "what are we missing?"  which is exactly what I'm going for.

As always keep those games rolling
The Game Mechanic