How to Use: An Evil Cleric
In the previous article, we covered the core tactics for running a drow priestess of Lolth. To summarise briefly, the priestess is a spellcaster who cannot stand toe-to-toe with the party; if she does, the fight will end in a single round.
She has three primary methods of attacking:
1) Area control — using Insect Swarm or the 2024 version of Conjure Animals to block terrain and force the players away from one another. This is generally used for a single round; after that, she will leave the spell in place for as long as her concentration lasts and switch to method 2.
2) Fighting like a rogue — striking unexpectedly from the shadows with scourge (when she can manage it) or Ray of Sickness (when scourge would expose her too badly), and then slipping back into hiding before the players can gather to retaliate. This requires the players to have their attention elsewhere — usually in a larger battle with enough front-liners to distract them.
3) Spamming giant spiders — using the 2014 version of Conjure Animals (if you allow it). The spiders’ Web attack can interfere with even higher-level PCs, making them more effective than a typical CR 1 creature in a high-level combat. When she doesn’t need to summon spiders, she’ll slip around the battlefield using method 2.
See my previous article for more situational spells, such as Protection from Poison, Mass Cure Wounds, and summoning a yochlol. (Summoning a yochlol can completely transform the battle; it should either be the core of her strategy or avoided entirely. See the previous article for details.)
As is my norm, I am now going to give combat encounters that explore ways she can remain effective while operating alone. That will be the focus of this article.
Combat Encounter 1: Hunting the Priestess (difficulty 10)
If you’re running a drow priestess of Lolth and you don’t want to put her in charge of a small army, your next best bet is to give her plenty of places to hide. This will force the players to split up in order to flush her out. Also, give the players a time limit, as they will drag out the scenario if you don’t.
In order to make this a proper scenario, and to give you a good example of how to do it, let me outline one such D&D drow encounter.
The Story
The drow priestess of Lolth has gained the sacred ruby she needs to activate the power of the dark temple. Ideally, she would gain this by betraying the players, but the players having to race there, fighting the guards she sent to block them, also works.
She’s already activated the ritual, leaving her free to slip around, fighting the players when she gets a chance, even as they try to corner and stop her.
(Drow Priestess Tactics Summary:
You’ll probably need a battlemap for the inside of the temple, or wherever the combat takes place.
The Location
It’s up to you whether the area is dark or lit. Darkness provides natural cover, provided she stays at a sufficient distance. Light allows the players to move more freely, as they don’t need a line of sight to keep her from slipping behind them.
Either way, put a number of low walls and pillars in the area, so that the players have to split up somewhat to cover all the places she could be. Her spells, like most D&D spells, require verbal components, so they should be able to know her general direction.
Scenario Rules: Time Pressure
In order to give a timer, I’m going to put six statues in the temple. The statues are color coded as two white, two grey, and two black, although you can switch as you see best.
The first round, the white statues will attack anyone near them. The second round, the grey will attack, then the black on the third round. After that, it will be both the white and the grey, then both the grey and the black. It’s up to you as to whether “anyone near them” includes the drow priestess.
If you want more variety, you could have the black statues release swarms instead of attacking people near them. The swarms will go after the nearest target, although they’ll ignore the priestess.
Finally, on the sixth round, the statues will all come to life, move toward the PCs, and start attacking, although you might keep their movement down to 15–20 feet a round.
If a statue has 10 or more damage, it will spend its turn healing itself instead of moving, at a rate of healing 10 a round, until its damage is less than 10.
You might want to slowly increase the statues’ healing speeds and/or attacks. That said, since the statues can’t be killed, they will provide a timer even if you don’t.
This is meant to be the actual timer, but you’ll have a narrative timer also going on in the background. In other words, a timer that won’t affect the encounter, but might affect later parts of the game, and will make everything seem more urgent.
Combat Encounter 2: Pursuit of the Priestess (difficulty varies)
The other really good way to use Insect Swarm (and Conjure Animals 2024) is to block pursuit. Not only will placing it where it will block passage mean that you can’t chase without taking 4d10 damage, but placed right it can do much worse. I’ll give ideas below.
How to Counter Insect Swarm
When setting up an obstacle in D&D, one should always have three ideas as to how to defeat it, and be open to any other ideas that the players might come up with. You need to have your own ideas as to how it can be solved, as if not you are unlikely to give them the materials they need.
I do not consider running through and taking damage a solution. That one is my penalty for failing to find a solution. How can they get past Insect Swarm?
Solution 1: Ropes
One way is to travel through the air via ropes. If they can get ropes into the right position, they can climb right over the affected area.
Make sure to give them ropes. Try to design an underground dungeon with places where they have to climb down or up, as well as move sideways. This will establish that they have ropes.
Solution 2: Stones
Another way is if they can cover the area with something of sufficient size that the Insect Plague won’t automatically climb onto it. Columns that they can turn over and use to walk on work. Rolling boulder traps also work, as they can take the boulders and use them as stepping stones.
Edit: I didn’t realize that the Insect Swarm fills the air as well as the ground. My idea might work against Conjure Animals 2024, but it won’t work against Insect Swarm unless you can anchor columns to high-up ledges and use them as bridges???
Solution 3: Destroy
The third way is not RAW, but given that the insects are alive, it should make sense that you could drive them back or kill them, perhaps with fire, poison, or flooding water.
You’ll have to think hard as to whether you want to allow this, as it may compromise the spell, and the players will expect to be able to do this again. I suggest saying that it will drive the insects away from part of the area of the spell briefly, but that they’ll regroup. This makes it only useful for running past fast.
Homebrew for Insect Swarm
With all of these, not just the second, it will be easier if you limit the size of the Insect Swarm so that it’s just covering the ground. If you’re using the 2024 Conjure Animals, replace Insect Swarm with Conjure Animals. I suppose I’m homebrewing, but it will make the difficulty level better.
You can also make these easier by setting them up so that only one person needs to get past. Have there be an alternate approach that’s blocked by a portcullis, with the lever on the far side. Once one player gets through, he can throw the lever to let the rest past.
Setting up a Series of D&D Chase Encounters
You can use any of the encounters below as individual encounters, with the players facing the priestess right after, or with the priestess on the far side, blocking them from trying to get around the Insect Swarm. If you want to run several of these D&D chase encounters together, as a long chase scene, I suggest you choose three and run them as follows.
The first obstacle will be blocked by Insect Swarm or Conjure Animals 2024. The drow priestess set them up to block pursuit, and as the players can’t afford to wait ten minutes for the spell to subside, they’ll have to get past it somehow.
The second obstacle will be guarded by a pair of drow minions waiting behind cover, using archery or dropping rocks onto the PCs from above. This might be easier, but on the other hand the enemy is intelligent and can react to what the players do. This also breaks up the first and third encounters, to avoid having two Insect Swarm encounters in a row.
Finally, for the third obstacle, they come upon the drow priestess, who is busy activating some dark magic. She’s set up the second use of Insect Swarm to protect herself, and she’ll break from summoning to add Ray of Sickness or other attacks to the mix. Just make sure to keep her safe, as if they break her concentration, they’ll get through much too easily.
Moving on to the actual encounters:
Chasm Blocked by the Swarm
The simplest option would be to place a small chasm that’s too big to jump. Having the far end higher up than the close end will also make jumping harder. The Insect Swarm means that building a bridge to cross will be difficult, or at least painful.
If you want to make it even worse, Insect Swarm lightly obscures the area. Combine that with a ground leading up to the area that isn’t flat, and they might not realize that the chasm is there until they’re in the middle of trying to run through the Insect Swarm.
If you do this, consider giving them a ledge they can drop down onto. It will save them from having to run back through the Insect Swarm, but once they’re down there, they are stuck. There is no convenient ledge on the other side for them to jump back to.
The Climb
They have to climb a short cliff in order to pursue, and the priestess put an Insect Swarm on top of the cliff. In addition to doing damage to anyone going through it, the Insect Swarm will also make it impossible to stand on top of the cliff and lower a rope to PCs who don’t climb.
The solution is to climb the wall to the side of the cliff top. (There have to be walls on the side; if the top stretched out in either direction, they could just go around.) Once they’re above the Insect Swarm, they could find a ledge from which to get a rope past, use magic to blow the swarm away, or the like.
Locked Door
While a door can normally be lockpicked or broken down, that is going to be difficult and painful when an Insect Swarm is in front of it. Solutions include rolling a boulder toward the door to break it down, and ramming it with a long pillar. I suggest placing a boulder trap earlier so that they can take the boulders from there, as well as decorative pillars.
Ambush Along a Ledge
The trail leads along a ledge at the side of a cliff, with a wall on the other side. Part of the ledge is affected by the Insect Swarm, and in an alcove high above the ledge, there are ambushers lurking in wait. I suggest giant spiders, as their webs can trap PCs in the Insect Swarm, for lethal effect.
To make it a challenge instead of an impossible trap, have the ledge wind so that they can see the area where the ambush awaits before stepping into it. Also, have the spiders move a bit, so that they give away their position. This way, it will be a challenge, with the players needing to figure out how to get past the trap.
Puzzle of the Orbs
A spiral staircase leads down into a round chamber. In that chamber are four statues and a closed door. Only when the correct orb is placed into the cupped hands of each statue will the door slide open. The bottom of the chamber is covered with an Insect Swarm.
The players already have the orbs, and know about the challenge, from earlier in the campaign. If you’re having the drow priestess betray them, the fact that they have the globes could be used to give them a false sense of security, as they believe she needs them. In reality, she has a different way past.
The way I have in mind for the Insect Swarm to be evaded is by lowering a PC with rope, and having to maneuver him to place him above each statue in turn.
Variation for Increased Difficulty
To make the challenge harder, do some or all of the following:
The sides of the room are sheer walls except for where the staircase is. They can’t hold him in turn over each statue. It is possible that someone with climbing skills can get to all of the sides and drive pitons into the rocks to help with maneuvering.
The edges of the pit are somewhat sharp. While the challenge is still underway, the rope will fray and break. The PC being lowered will have to cling to whichever statue he’s near, while the others find a way to rescue him. (Logically, they should get to make a Perception check to realize the edges are sharp. On the other hand, not making a check will make it more exciting. You’ll have to decide.)
While they’re lowering the PC, enemies attack the players above. It’s very possible that this will cause the rope to slip. I suggest making the enemies fairly easy, so as not to have the distraction of doing two things at once.
Puzzle Idea
If you want, you could make the challenge easy. Have the globes straight out match the statues, and have the players discover lore that tells them what to do. Given that the Insect Swarm is complicating matters, you don’t need to do more.
If you do want a puzzle, the statues are dark gods with the heads of animals. They have the heads of a snake, a mosquito (describe this as a thin-bodied insect with a long, needle-like mouthpart), a toad, and a hawk.
The globes each have a victim creature inside. They are a human, a frog, a fly, and a worm. Describe them; don’t name them.
The players have to give each statue its prey; whether they’ll figure that fact out is another matter. Making it worse, several of the prey animals match the statues. The worm can be confused for a snake, the toad with the frog, the mosquito with the fly. The fact that the human and the hawk are completely different is the clue that they’ll need if they’re to solve the puzzle.
(If you like, you can make the victim creatures and the predators completely the same. Snakes do eat toads, toads do eat mosquitoes [in their larvae stage], and hawks do eat snakes.)
Other Ideas
For more ideas on using a drow priestess, see my page of traps and puzzles. Almost all of them can be used by her. In particular, the displacer beast article and the erinyes have complex traps in their final encounters that will adapt quite nicely for the drow priestess of Lolth.
Summary: Six Ideas for the Drow Priestess of Lolth
- If you want them to ally with a drow priestess of Lolth, perhaps as precursor to betrayal, give them a situation where both not allying also has bad consequences. Even so, don’t expect an alliance the first time it’s proposed.
- Use the drow priestess of Lolth away from her hometown, so as to limit the amount of drow she has with her. Put the players in a race with her to reach a treasure, or have her securing the area around her to enact a special scheme or spell. These Underdark dungeon encounters work especially well when the party feels her closing the net around them.
- The drow priestess of Lolth has an awesome offensive strategy in the form of Protection from Poison. She can lure the players somewhere, or let them capture something from her, and they won’t realize the place is poisoned, as she’s immune.
- The drow priestess of Lolth will use Insect Plague to leave after capturing an object and making a speech. The players will have to find a way to get around the Insect Plague before chasing, which will give her a head start. This is where your Insect Plague spell tactics really shine.
- The drow priestess of Lolth has Conjure Animals, which for her means giant spiders. Normally CR 1 monsters in a CR 8 encounter are nothing. In this case, you can use them to make climbing or swimming risky, since Web can mess movement up.
- To have an evil creature like the drow priestess of Lolth use healing, give her a look of irritation. In other words, “I can’t believe that you guys are so useless as to need help. You better not get killed until after killing my enemies for me!”
These ideas give you dynamic D&D drow encounters that make the most of her spells, personality, and environment, and help you run tense, memorable D&D chase encounters that feel dangerous without being unfair.
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