Aetrimonde

For today’s topic, I’m taking a breather from non-combat encounters to discuss their polar opposite: extraordinarily powerful enemies inspired by videogame “bonus bosses!”

General Concept

The core rules in Aetrimonde are designed to support characters from level 0 to roughly 20. That’s a soft cap: you can absolutely run a campaign past that point, and characters can keep gaining levels and powers and feats, but past that point the system’s solid level scaling (one of my initial design goals…) starts getting less solid.

So level 20 is the maximum supported level, and as such serves as an “aspirational” level for a campaign: this is the level at which the GM, if they aren’t going to start using a lot of homebrewed content to keep going, needs to start bringing the campaign to a satisfying conclusion. And one thing that a satisfying conclusion needs…is a climactic fight with the campaign’s villain.

You can absolutely make a satisfying climactic fight without the ultimate villain being some gigantic demon or eldritch monstrosity. (For my part, I once ran a well-received final battle as a gauntlet, where the PCs had to fight their way through a huge force of the villain’s guards and lieutenants, and the villain himself was a noncombatant.) But, that’s an option that the rules need to support. So, Aetrimonde’s Bestiary contains several endgame super-bosses (which is not a rules term, just a description): Tier 6 Champion enemies designed to be a challenging fight for a level 20 party, all by themselves. All of these creatures are unique individuals with their own lore and, in some cases, unique loot…

Viridithrase the Avaricious

As initially mentioned in the dragon lore I revealed a few weeks back, Viridithrase the Avaricious is a dragon largely responsible for the invention of paper money in Aetrimonde. (Because after she stole the reserves of several banks, they had to start issuing claim slips in place of coin…) And she’s still around!

Viridithrase Lore

Difficulty 15 History: Viridithrase the Avaricious became notorious four centuries ago with a string of bank robberies—in which she simply tore the roofs off of the buildings, ripped out the vaults and flew off with them. She later graduated to corporate raiding, leveraging her wealth to perform marginally less hostile takeovers of other banks and add their reserves to her hoard.

Difficulty 15 Society: Today, Viridithrase’s public face is the “Bank of Viridithrase,” a commercial bank with branches across the continent. The bank is notable for accepting deposits in both coin and paper money, but allowing withdrawals only in banknotes backed by Viridithrase’s hoard (and her willingness to do violence when provoked). Viridithrase’s banknotes are considered a high-quality asset and widely accepted as a form of payment.

Difficulty 20 Society: Viridithrase has her claws in many industries: through an array of holding companies, she owns major stakes in numerous merchant houses, manufacturing concerns, and trade guilds. Her investment strategies are unorthodox, often making returns only after decades or centuries.

Secret Knowledge: Though no less avaricious than any other dragon, Viridithrase’s financial holdings serve a long-term agenda rather than to enlarge her hoard. The actual goal of this agenda is unclear, but over the centuries she has periodically suffered avoidable financial losses, some of which coincidentally contributed to changes of government and outbreaks of war.

Viridithrase as an Enemy

Viridithrase is based on a different “family” of dragons than the Fierce Dragonet/Rampaging Drake/Cataclysm Dragon I previewed earlier. She’s a Skirmisher, a role for enemies whose challenge lies in their mobility…and despite her Colossal size, Viridithrase is a swift and evasive flier. The initial challenge, for any party of adventurers who don’t all have effective ranged attacks, will be to bring her down to their level by damaging her wings until she loses her flight speed. This is more easily said than done, given that one of her initial moves may be to make a Flyby attack, grabbing a handful of PCs in passing, and then just…fly off with them. Played cunningly (and Viridithrase is nothing if not cunning…), she can open an encounter by grabbing the PCs whose ranged attacks pose the greatest threat to her, at which point they face the dilemma of trying to use those ranged attacks from inside Viridithrase’s melee range, using their presumably weaker melee attacks…or trying to get out of her grip and falling to their dooms.

Viridithrase is also unique among the dragons in the Bestiary in breathing poison, rather than flames. Her Dragonstrafe power allows her to lay down a lingering trail of poisonous fumes, which will force any PCs not thoroughly resistant or immune to poison to relocate or take a deadly amount of repeated damage. (4d4 + 14 averages out to 24 poison damage per turn, which is enough to reliably incapacitate unprotected PCs in 2-3 turns even at level 20.) And, this poison damage comes with a side of the Dragontox affliction, causing the affected PCs to hallucinate horribly.

Viridithrase has some other movement-based abilities, including Wingover (allowing her to dodge out of range of an attack or behind cover), Backwing (letting her scatter the PCs as she moves in for the kill), and Heavy Landing (knocking her enemies prone across a potentially huge area as she touches down). And this is capped off with Terrible Roar, forcing enemies to flee her in terror.

Viridithrase as a Villain

The GMH naturally provides some advice for using such a unique enemy in a campaign:

Viridithrase is the wealthiest individual in Aetrimonde, and she uses that wealth to guide and manipulate mortal society for her own agenda—which is unclear, but some interesting possibilities all revolve around her desire to own everything in existence:

• She is working on a ritual that will physically draw all of the refined precious metals in the world to her, causing untold physical destruction.
• She is working on a device to crack open the planet and draw the gold from its molten core.
• She is working on a scheme to enslave all of mortalkind by poisoning every source of food or water outside of her control.

There is virtually no way for Viridithrase to be taken by surprise in her torpor: the entire purpose of her guards and other security is to detect and delay intruders long enough for her to rouse to full wakefulness. A party of adventurers who intend to slay Viridithrase could, with extensive planning and preparation, obtain various maps, talismans, keys or disguises allowing them to penetrate partway into her lair before being detected: they will still inevitably set off an alarm at some point, but if everything goes according to plan they might be able to reach Viridithrase before she is fully ready to fight back.

Other ways to prepare for a confrontation with Viridithrase involve removing her two main advantages: her flight, and her poison.

• A good first step would be for all the PCs to acquire good ranged attacks, so that they can all help to damage Viridithrase’s wings and bring her down to ground level.
• It could also be effective to set up an ambush with siege weapons or artillery to damage her wings.
• Poison resistance will help the PCs cope with Viridithrase’s poison attacks, but most commonly-available sources will not stand up to the amount of damage they deal. The PCs could seek out specially-made antitoxins or poison-proofing spells to compensate.

Viridithrase’s Hoard

Viridithrase’s hoard can hypothetically contain literally anything that the PCs are looking for: powerful magical items, tomes of forgotten knowledge, lost cultural artifacts, etc. It also naturally contains vast wealth in the form of coinage, bullion and precious gems; however, because the hoard consists of the reserves of numerous banks that Viridithrase pillaged or acquired over her centuries, PCs that lay claim to the hoard may find themselves fighting off rival claimants to the treasure, with paperwork and legal rights giving their claims legitimacy. (This can be the basis for a further adventure, in fact.) How much of the hoard the PCs can legitimately keep is up to you, but it should be at least a few million gp—far more than PCs could ever hope to spend on magical items and other adventuring equipment, and enough for them to retire in style and comfort even after paying out any competing claims.