I'm temp DMing my weekly game this week, and I need to come up with the encounter/general thrust of things. This is a little long, so.
I haven't DMed 4E before. I've got a fairly good grasp of the rules and I've been reading the DMG and MM, but yeah, I'm rather lacking in experience.
I'd like for combat to be not a given, but still a possibility. We're currently well positioned for exactly that to happen.
Our current situation that has been passed on to me from the normal DM and last week's temp DM:
We visited a town that got destroyed while we were there when the monsters sleeping underneath it came to life suddenly and fought us. They'd been guardians of something sealed beneath the mountain the town had been on; we worked to the bottom of the caves and the pit at the bottom to find zombies guarding what turned out to be a shard of pure negativity. We also acquired one of the monsters that had been guarding the place, and now have a ludicrously huge lightning spider that the entire party rides on.
Our attempts to find out what's going on with the shard have been somewhat successful. The Warden, who grabbed it and has been carrying it, had a nightmare vision that revealed the shard to be part of a broken link in the chains that bind Tharzidun, one of nine. Communion by the Warden and my Seeker with the Primal Spirits resulted in a vision wherein a spirit showed us a representation of the shards being broken down into energy and reformed into a link once more.
We've been traveling since we found it to try to find further answers: Exactly what to do with the shards, how the heck we're supposed to do what the spirits suggested, etc.
Last session resulted in the acquisition of a second shard, and some funky stuff going on with the first one; the shards apparently resonate with each other, which makes anything with a shard attracted to us and helps us find them.
We've been traveling under a cover story of being a diplomatic expedition from the entirely fictional nation of Derkiderkistan, riding atop our spider, Fluffy, and have reached a town with a reputation for being both seedy as all hell and also home to some fairly decent and knowledgeable wizards. Last session ended with us having successfully BSed our way into a tour of the city, the selling and buying of loot, and then a spontaneous duel between our spider and the party's Bard.
Which is the first stumbling block. The guy playing the bard hates the spider. He thinks its stupid, hates that the rest of the party likes the spider, and has been trying to attack it in-character since we got it, as well as trying to use social skills on party members to get us to do the same. Last session it came to a head and he freaked out about it, decided he was going to try to take down the spider once and for all, and a fight was organized for the town to watch. The player was apparently intending to either kill the spider or have his character die and make a new one. Unsurprisingly, the spider was winning hardcore, and two rounds in the bard's player ripped up his character sheet mid-fight.
This leaves me in the fun position of not knowing what the party make-up will be next week; none of us know if he'll even be back and if he is I will undoubtedly have to deal with further attempts against the spider. I'm in the 'dude, giant lightning spiders are awesome' camp, and my character likes the spider, though he won't be there next time, obviously.
Party makeup is, all L13:
Wizard
Warden
Warlock
Wizard
(Unknown)
Spider (L12 Elite Controller)
My Seeker will not be present, of course. We have too many W classes, yeesh.
So good control, decent defence and lousy striking. Enemies for potential battles, given our location, are most likely humanoid and most likely of the roguish sort. We're in Dragonborn territory, though this isn't necessarily a town filled with Dragonborn.
I'm thinking that there is a guy in this town who can help us somewhat, but he's kind of skeezy and we have to find him without raising too much suspicion and blowing our cover. I'm picturing a short, fat dragonborn in robes with a turban enveloped in a cloud of smoke from the hookah he's using constantly who likes to rub his hands in glee. He's a bit shady, but not actually evil, and for the right price will cheerfully provide accurate, useful information, finding it to be better for business to be accurate. But he'll be hard to find and he's not the sort of person a diplomatic envoy would be looking for normally.
This calls for a skill challenge, but I'm not too keen on them because they always seem to go badly and be strangely designed and feel artificial. My instinct is to simply wing it with their location attempts and decide from their actions what happens, much like I did last time I DMed(3.5). I'm not certain what the best kind of way to have it all go down is, though. The PCs overhear a rumor is a likely place to start out, but I'm not sure what kind of hoops to jump them through from there. (And if they get on the right kind of track immediately I'm OK with them getting to the end of things immediately, sometimes people just get lucky.) So I don't know if I should come up with some kind of skill challenge and try to make it feel not so obviously 'Hi, I am a skill challenge, please refrain from trying to be cute or original and have only the people with the best modifiers in things try them' or just go with 'wing it', and what to have go on either way. If the party blows their cover and what they have comes to light, it will result in combat, that much I know. As I said above, probably more roguish types.
Which leaves me with 'I'm not sure how to properly challenge the party'. We have the spider, but we haven't actually *used* him in combat yet, so I don't know if they'll bring him in or not, or if we'll have a leader or not due to the Bard meltdown. We've had encounters for a while now that are all just plain too easy despite taking forever, where it feels like we're never really in danger. I'd like to break that pattern up a bit and see, I dunno, actual in-combat surge use and some bloodied or even negative PCs instead of the usual bland cakewalk, but I also don't want to TPK. I'm not sure what kinds of monsters to send against them to give them actual trouble, and how to keep it from seeming completely retarded and arbitrarily. (Suddenly, ninjas! Although that could actually work since this campaign leans heavily towards the silly side.) I guess build the encounter for all the possibilities and then just go from there and BS something if I need to.
I'm also not entirely sure what exactly we should find out if we don't screw up. This is the problem with suddenly being thrust into DMing a campaign you're playing in, you have to ruin your own sense of mystery for the sake of plot advancement. I'm thinking he knows something about how Tharzidun was actually imprisoned in the first place and how the chains were made, which could then be extrapolated to figuring out how to re-do this with the shards. I dunno WTF the generic 4E background on Tharzi is and I don't think anyone else in the group knows or cares, so making stuff up should be fine. I'm thinking Moradin should be involved somehow, but I'm not sure. Any ideas?
Need to get my thought cloud collapsed into some concrete stuff. Halp.
Wow!
I'm not worried about your game at all. Just relax. Let it follow. You just have to answer the things as they come up in play.
You've already done more work then most DMs I know. 
Anything specific you are worried about?
Mostly I'm worried about, if it does come to combat, that the combat is going to suck.
Pureheart: I like those ideas. Definitely helps a lot, thanks.
I actually hate combat, it's my least favorite part of D&D(Yeah I know wrong game, right).
Mostly I'm worried about, if it does come to combat, that the combat is going to suck.
Pureheart: I like those ideas. Definitely helps a lot, thanks.
You're welcome! I'm DMing for the first time too so I totally understand
I luckily have a co-gm to bounce ideas off of and he's sort of responsibile for making the combats - although I tend to give him direction as to how they occur.And most importantly, just remember that its YOUR Realms!
Throw foulspawn at them who have been called by the power of the shard (come up from below or from a portal from the far realm). In fact, throw a wave of minions at em (6-8) to suck up some of the wizards' crowd control, then hit them with the main force.
If you're afraid of TPK, you could have the shard chine once before the attack. Then if things are going badly, have it chime again and the foulspawn are all stunned (save ends).
If you're unsure you want the spider being a full player, have a foulspawn controller and give it a domination power that auto works on the spider. Each round, one PC and the controller roll to control the spider's actions for that round. So sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn't. But don't have the controller do anything but use the spider to attack on its turn.
If you want to skip combat, have them get arrested for being spies. Then they have to talk their way out (skill challenge). If they fail, they go to jail and have to break out and then find their spider, which has been detained somewhere else.
The best tool a DM can have is what I call the "DM Chill". Everything will stay on track if you just go with the flow. Don't let any situation faze you!
Is this your first time DMing ever? Or just 4e?