# Thoughts on Leska [SPOILERS]



## Synchronicity (Jul 18, 2009)

Last Thursday, we had the final session of our War of the Burning Sky game. Most of the session was taken up battling Leska at the Heart of History. The fight against Leska took three hours. And my players loved it. They loved that she felt like a dangerous spellcasting bad guy, but that she didn't try for cheap wins with 'save or you're screwed' spells. She just kicked out enough damage to have a five-person party on the back foot for almost the entire fight. 

We use alternate death and dying rules while makes it damn hard to actually kill PCs, so I adjusted her spell list to use some Spell Compendium spells. This isn't something I'd recommend if you're using standard rules even without enhancement, she's quite capable of killing the entire party.

It was also the largest, most involved fight with a last boss I've ever had to run, and I've run the final bosses of both Age of Worms and Savage Tide. At the start of the fight I sat down, scanned her buffs, looked at how many spell effects she'd have running and for one moment thought 'This is too much. I can't do this.' After that panic-stricken thought, I took it one thing at a time, and it seemed to go ok. 

For an example of the amount of work required, my notes on Leska's turn looked like this;

1. Check for adjacent enemies. DC 33 Ref or 10d6 electricity. [no action]
2. Throw 2x5d6 lightning bolts, DC 33 Ref. [free action]
(Both of the above effects are from the _lightning ring_ SC spell.)
3. Attack with _mage's sword_.
4. _Desertion of the Blade_. Will save.
5. Move _ball lightning_ [move action] (Another SC spell)
6. Cast quickened spell
7. Cast quickened spell
8. Cast quickened spell
9. Take standard action

It was a hell of a lot of work. But I'm glad I did it.

So, in short, kudos to the writers of WotBS. The quality was great all the way through, and Leska's the most memorable final foe that my players have seen in quite a while.


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## Morrus (Jul 18, 2009)

You finished the whole campaign?  Excellent!

Which was your favourite adventure?  Any particular encounters which stand out to you?


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## Synchronicity (Jul 18, 2009)

Ooh, my favourite adventure...that's a tough one. My impression was that my players found almost all of them adventures to be brilliant fun. Oh, on a specific note, they really enjoyed the 'soul-tapping' mechanic in the temple in The Trial of Echoed Souls. From a GMing perspective, I found most of the adventures really great. 

I suspect that from a players plus GM point of view, the best adventure would be either Shelter from the Storm or The Mad King's Banquet. Both of those had excellent setups, and really memorable final fights. I actually tweaked Lee Sidoneth a bit to use the 'aspect of nature' variant druid and make him a more ferocious melee combatant, and they had great fun beating him down in the middle of the giant rainstorm. 

They also enjoyed the fact that Laurabec the paladin died in the storm. One player said it was one of those occurrences that makes your characters realise that just being heroes doesn't mean you get away without loss, and that it managed to evade the slight heavy-handedness or impression that the players are somehow being punished that such 'Oh, this friendly NPC just died.' situations sometimes can.

There were a few sour notes, which I'll mention here quickly. Luckily or unluckily depending on your perspective, these problems were mostly confined to two books in particular; Trial of Echoed Souls and Under the Eye of the Tempest.

Firstly, 'Trial of Echoed Souls'.
- One of the drow assassins has levels in 'duellist path assassin'. I've never heard of this class, and I couldn't find reference to it in any books, or even with various google and message board searches. If I'd wanted to adjust that character somehow, it would have been very difficult. 

- Rhuarc as written is kind of a pushover. For most of his combat appearances, he's trying to stay at a distance from the characters, which deprives him of the opportunity to make sneak attacks. His main tactic seems to be to try and poison the hell out of them, but by 13th level, any cleric worth their salt will be casting _heroes feast_ every morning, making them utterly immune to poison. His shatterspell arrows are only at caster level 10th, making dispelling the player characters anti-poison wards uncertain at best. I rebuilt Rhuarc as a scout/shadowdancer because I felt it suited hit-and-run archery better than rogue, and game him a custom weapon enhancement which double the range at which he could apply precision damage, and it seemed to work pretty well. However, I feel that if I'd run Rhuarc as written, he would have kind of been owned.

- The tattoos. Oh my lord, the tattoos. If you're going to throw level 16 and 18 enemies up against the players, it seems ludicrously unfair to deny the players tens of thousands of gold pieces in loot by making all the powerful items their enemies wear tattoos. Everything the assassins possess except their weapons and armour is in the form of magical, unlootable tattoos! To be honest, I really don't see the reasoning behind this. If the players aren't supposed to have this massive cash windfall, why give the NPCs this fabulous wealth in the first place? This way, they're crazily over their gear value, and the players can't have any of it. That's the kind of situation that engenders ill-will, because it seems to be a direct snub to the players. Needless to say, I toned this down in my game, making some of the tattoos into standard items.

In counterpoint to the above, I will say that Trial of Echoed Souls has some beautifully plotted and executed pieces in it, and the rest of the adventure is excellent. It's just the assassins that have a few problems.

Secondly, 'Under the Eye of the Tempest'

- I'm afraid I don't really have a good way to say this. Every adventure path will have one entry that falls below the others in quality; it's practically unavoidable. I've certainly never seen an adventure path where I haven't been able to pick out one - or more - adventures that just don't cut the mustard when compared to the other adventures that path provides. I take it as the mark of an excellent adventure path when only one adventure falls into this category. In my opinion, for War of the Burning Sky, Under the Eye of the Tempest is that adventure. 

From my first read-through, my thought was 'this doesn't feel like an adventure. It feels like a couple of scenes.' Playing this adventure proved me right. Each other adventure took us between 3 and 8 sessions, at between 3 and 4 hours play per session, to complete. Under the Eye of the Tempest took us 1. Yes, that's right. One session. 

One problem is that the opposition is laughable. I was running the path in order, 1-12, and so by this point, the characters were 18th level. Nothing in the adventure could hold a candle to them. Pilus has barely over 100 hit points! Now, back in 'O, Wintry Song of Agony', the last boss was Kreven, who had less than 50 hit points. However, in that encounter, killing Kreven was never the problem; it was managing to get to Kreven in the first place. It was a fun puzzle-game like boss fight, figuring out what you needed to do to reach the big bad, and then killing him. My players enjoyed it. For Pilus, there was no such luck. It was all over in 3 rounds. The players never felt challenged or endangered by any of the encounters. 

There was only one encounter in the entire book that I felt was challenging, and I didn't run that one because it seemed to be utterly unrelated to the adventure at hand. I am, of course, talking about Glurthog, the advanced huhhoad with the intelligent sword. Glurthog looks dangerous. Glurthog looks like a challenge. Glurthog has..what to do with the adventure, exactly? I really didn't feel like having the players fight the toughest encounter in the book and then discovering it was utterly unrelated to the task at hand. Players get confused when you throw a random encounter at them which eclipses the final boss of the book. They start thinking there's more to it. And Glurthog _is_ a random encounter. It's unnecessary, and takes focus away from the alleged bad guys.

OK, I'm going to stop ragging on Under the Eye of the Tempest now. Please don't take my remarks on it as indicative of my opinion of the adventure path as a whole. All the other adventures were excellent, and the final book handles mass combat in a way that is sheer brilliance. I absolutely love the unit rules as a way to make large numbers of standard warriors dangerous to player characters. At last, level 20 characters have a reason to suspect that they may not, actually, be able to take an army of several thousand on alone!

In short: A breathtaking work of staggering genius, with a shoddy penultimate chapter. It doesn't manage to damage the brilliant whole, though. 

Reading back through this, that's quite a lot of negative in this post, which really wasn't my intention. I'll finish up with a mention of specific encounters that we really enjoyed.

..Well, I would, but there are loads of them. I'd estimate about 2 encounters per book, generally including the final boss encounter. That's the one that I think really counts. For every single book, with the one exception noted above, my players loved the final encounter. They were all evocative, interesting and compelling. Many of them had an exceptional setting. And none of them felt like a cheap shot or an unfair fight. My players came away from every boss encounter grinning, pumped to have won a hard but fair fight. And I think that's the mark of truly great game design. So thank you to all the people that worked on War of the Burning Sky. You gave me and my players a year and more of immense enjoyment.


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## Morrus (Jul 18, 2009)

Synchronicity said:


> There was only one encounter in the entire book that I felt was challenging, and I didn't run that one because it seemed to be utterly unrelated to the adventure at hand. I am, of course, talking about Glurthog, the advanced huhhoad with the intelligent sword. Glurthog looks dangerous. Glurthog looks like a challenge. Glurthog has..what to do with the adventure, exactly? I really didn't feel like having the players fight the toughest encounter in the book and then discovering it was utterly unrelated to the task at hand. Players get confused when you throw a random encounter at them which eclipses the final boss of the book. They start thinking there's more to it. And Glurthog _is_ a random encounter. It's unnecessary, and takes focus away from the alleged bad guys.




Glurthog was all my idea.  The idea was to include a tie-in to an epic level saga based around the METAMORPHOSIS trilogy.  The sword was a hook to get the players involved in Hedrenetherax's schemes.  As yet, though, we've not even begun to plan that saga.


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## Synchronicity (Jul 18, 2009)

Morrus said:


> Glurthog was all my idea.  The idea was to include a tie-in to an epic level saga based around the METAMORPHOSIS trilogy.  The sword was a hook to get the players involved in Hedrenetherax's schemes.  As yet, though, we've not even begun to plan that saga.




That, I would like to see. But then, epic level play must be incredibly hard to write, and there's the problem of actually getting the people who want to play it. I know my players are very wary of epic level, with the strange imbalances it possesses. At any rate, since I may have expressed it poorly in my post, my problem wasn't with Glurthog per se. It was more that compared to the rest of the opponents in the book, Glurthog was head-and-shoulders above the competition; i.e, actually dangerous. Which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that Glurthog isn't connected to the Tempest, or to Pilus, which could leave a slight feeling of 'What was that all about?'


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## RangerWickett (Jul 23, 2009)

Regarding the tattoos on the drow assassins, I don't recall explicitly why we did that, but I know toward the end of the saga I was realizing that NPC opponents are weak for their CR (a 15th level NPC is not a CR 15 foe), so I began arbitrarily powering them up. At first I still clung to a desire not to just make up new powers, so I added freebie magic items, but later on I just started giving NPCs powers that I felt would work well, with more of a 4e design mentality.

The 'duelist path assassin' was something Ari Marmell brought in. I know the book it's from is referenced in adventure 7's Section 15 of the OGL . . . I think something like Plot & Poison, maybe? Basically, it's a straight up assassin _class_, not prestige class.

I'm thrilled someone has finally finished the campaign, and it warms my heart to hear that you and your players enjoyed the ending. If I may be so bold to ask, how did it go down? How did the resistance make out in the end? Who dealt the killing blow? Any unexpected twists?


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## amethal (Jul 23, 2009)

You might be the first person to finish War of the Burning Sky.  I've certainly not heard of anyone doing so. Congratulations!

Our group have just won the fight at the command bunker, and will be heading into the chasm on Tuesday.

In the later adventures it has been very hard to challenge the party. I've routinely been doubling the hit points of creatures.

An initiate of the sevenfold veils who regularly shapechanges into a pit fiend is a horrible opponent to counter. However, the player was driven to those lengths in an attempt to keep up with the psion (who also regularly psionic-shapechanges into a pit fiend).

Your note on running Leska are going to come in very useful!


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## kumagroo (Jul 23, 2009)

For all of 4th edition's flaws (and I admit there are many), I do not miss the optimization abuses.  I myself tried both those routes as a player.  The Iot7FV is ridiculously powerful!


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## Synchronicity (Jul 29, 2009)

RangerWickett said:


> I'm thrilled someone has finally finished the campaign, and it warms my heart to hear that you and your players enjoyed the ending. If I may be so bold to ask, how did it go down? How did the resistance make out in the end? Who dealt the killing blow? Any unexpected twists?





They pretty much swept the board for best result, in the end. I think they went into the final book on 130 VPs, so after dealing with Leska's ward they had 145 VPs. The resistance was pretty much all aces, all the time. They didn't get Ostalin or Longinus's help, but I think that was about it. As for the killing blow...well, that was a bit interesting. A bit of context; I use homebrew death and dying rules, because I like my games more cinematic and don't like players having to deal with bringing in new characters or falling behind in level, so it's very tricky to actually kill PCs. Leska was dropping people to negative hit points pretty much every round, and she had Shalosha helping her due to the test of the ritual she'd performed on her. However, the party still had one fully charged _rod of absorption_ from 'O, Wintry Song of Agony', so the cleric was desperately draining out its power to fuel near-continuous _mass heals_. Every so often (by which I mean every other round, or thereabouts) the cleric would drop, and there would be a race to UMD a _heal_ scroll on her. 

Eventually, the Heart had been destroyed, and Leska was running seriously low on offensive spells. I think she had 2 _cacophonic bursts_, a _wall of fire_ and a _telekinesis_ left. Her clerical healing was almost totally untouched, and she was on 18 hit points. At this stage, I made a decision to let her go, because all I'd be doing by healing her was prolonging the fight to no good cause - she had almost nothing left she could do, and I wanted her to go out with a bang. So she looked  them in the eye, said something along the lines of "This changes nothing. There will always be war." and then dropped a _cacophonic burst_ on herself, killing herself and blasting the party as they closed in. The players seemed cool with it, and didn't appear to feel I'd cheated them of satisfaction or anything, which was good. I figured it was either that or a shift from 'epic final conflict' to 'Benny Hill sketch'. 

I skipped over the Aurana and Shaaladel fight at the end, because after that, everyone was shattered. I just narrated how they defeated them - which was a little bit of a shame, since I'd rebuilt Aurana as a sorcerer/shadow adept, as it appealed to my sense of whimsy - and then we had the wrap-up. They'd freed Trilla, so Hope was wandering around, and had generally kept everyone they could alive, so it was a pretty positive ending. I'm afraid this is all a bit general, but I'm afraid there were rather too many awesome bits to really pin down, or even to fit in a short list! All in all, my group found War of the Burning Sky to be an unqualified success!


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