Dungeon 204 The Sword Collector
by Michael E. Shea
For centuries, a solitary swordwing known as the Sword Collector has traveled the Underdark acquiring marvelous blades—each one feeding the creature’s obsession, and a unique phenomenon allowing it to draw magical energy from the collection. Can the PCs claim this prized hoard, or will their own weapons end up in the Sword Collector’s vault?
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Here it is two years later and I finally got around to running this encounter. The only modification I made was increasing the Dancing Sword's speed to 12 (I have two players with always-on flight, needed something to scrape them off the ceiling).
The double encounter aspect was *shocking* to the party ("Wait, what do you mean 'no short rest!'"), but considering how they routinely roll over just about every encounter I can come up with, I felt justified.
The hook horrors were dominated by the assassin and controllers, leaving the balhannoth to get locked down by our (very optimized) warforged fighter. When the wizard's usual trick of dropping daze/damage zones didn't work, I thought he was going to throw me out of the house. Which was awesome. When they figured out (i.e. I strongly hinted) that the hook hoorors were being controlled by the balhannoth, the entire part went nova in a single round and wasted him.
Unfortunately, that left a whole lot of weak encounter powers and at-wills remaining for the swordwing. Once it got down to nothing but magic missiles and basic attacks, I started to wrap it up (adding extra damage to the monsters while reducing their hit points). The increasing 'poison counter' was brilliant, nearly killing the hapless psion after my only swordwing crit of the evening.
Would definitely recommend the encounter. *****