Dragon Encounters

How to Use – Combat Encounters

• (difficulty 4) The players have to climb a cliff, and there is a carrion crawler waiting for them on top of an outcropping (to stop them from shooting it down.) They can climb around the outcropping, but the carrion crawler has an action readied to attack the first player who comes into reach (and remember that it has a ten-foot reach.) You can also do this with it waiting for them around a corner, or in a hole in the ceiling. If there are other enemies around, the consequences of being paralyzed are that much greater.
• (difficulty 3) [Note: best together with other enemies.] The carrion crawler is attacking them from the roof of a tunnel. If/when they take it down, the carrion crawler will lose its grip and fall on the PC who was attacking it [or being attacked], knocking him prone and pinning him to the floor. (Remember, the carrion crawler is large.) They can wriggle out with a strength check. This is mostly a problem when there are other enemies around. (Although you could have the area be flooding or collapsing, and make everything time-sensitive that way.)
• (difficulty 3) [Note: best together with other enemies.] They’re fighting the carrion crawler in a tunnel. When it collapses, like in the previous example, it will block the tunnel, and they’ll have to spend an action climbing over it. (Or at least a lot of movement.) If it was tamed, and fighting for the drow or the duegar, they can attach oil sacks to it, and if the PCs use a fire attack they will end up with not just an obstruction but rather a burning obstruction splitting the party in two. (it’s also possible that the drow or duegar will set it off themselves with a fire ray.)
• (difficulty 3) Sometimes, the underdark isn’t flat but rather riddled with chasms. Its denizens put up bridges to let people travel. There is a carrion crawler on a cavern or tunnel roof with a bridge below it, and if they kill it where it is it will fall on the bridge and collapse it. [This scenario is probably better after one of the previous two, so that the players realize the danger.]
• (difficulty 4) The players are traveling through a small tunnel, possible too narrow for two of them to go alongside each other. There is a carrion crawler approaching from a connecting tunnel. Because of the narrow tunnel and bad angle, no more than two of them can fight the carrion crawler, and even that only if one of them can get past. If they let the carrion crawler advance, though, its body will completely block the tunnel even if they do manage to kill it. Also, because of the small size of the tunnel, paralyzed players will get in the way of everybody. [Note: have a plan in place just in case they fail and the tunnel becomes unusable.]