Dragon Encounters

 

How to Use: The Enemy Inside the Walls

The earth elemental’s primary abilities are earth glide and siege monster. As these don’t work very well defensively, the earth elemental is going to have to be used as an attacker/invader.

(Technically, it would also make a fantastic sentry. Undetectable until it attacks, and then hitting by surprise. While good strategy, this is also boring.)

Combat Encounter 1: The Great Wagon Robbery (difficulty 6)

The elemental attacks a wagon train as it goes through a narrow canyon.

Encounter Setup

The obvious way to set this up would be to put the players on an escort mission. As these are wildly unpopular, a different way would be to send the players to meet an NPC who’s part of a merchant caravan, maybe to acquire something. The caravan isn’t going to the town the PCs are in, or they’d just wait for it, but will be passing nearby. As they approach, they see that it’s under attack.

You could also have the caravan belong to the villains, with the players going after it to raid it for something (information, items, taking out a villain, etc.’.) As they approach, or as the caravan does if they’re waiting in ambush, it comes under attack from a third party.

This approach might raise the difficulty a little, as they have to contend with the caravan as well. On the other hand, they might use stealth or disguises and take advantage of the chaos to beat the elemental to its target.

Running The Encounter

This is fairly simple. The earth elemental is after a target, whether an item or a person. As it can walk through walls, it will attack wagons from the side, tear a hole in them easily (siege monster trait), and check the wagon for goods. This will take it 1-2 rounds per wagon, on average.

The players will have to figure out how to access the wagons if they want to stop the elemental or get to the item first. As the holes the elemental is tearing are facing the canyon walls, they aren’t easily usable for the players purposes. In addition, as wagons are getting pushed about and the path is narrow, parts of the path along the length of the road might be blocked. 1-2 wagons might even be burning.

There are 3 goals to give the players. Choose one:

Option 1: Rescuing the Wagon Train

The caravan is friendly. The goal is to stop the earth elemental.

To carry out this goal, have the earth elemental be targeting the wagons in order, likely be working backwards from the front wagon. The players will have to be inside a wagon to confront the earth elemental, and will have to keep moving, as it won’t stay to fight once it verifies that the wagon doesn’t contain its target. It will attack before leaving, though.

This is the option that needs other attackers the least. Even so, you could use them to make reaching the wagons’ in front all the harder.

Option 2: Raiding the Wagon Train

The elemental is after some type of object that is distributed through the wagons. So are the players.

Use this with an enemy caravan. Have the objects that both sides are going after be some form of magic, gem, or the like. In this scenario, the elemental isn’t really an enemy. In fact, it’s helping distract the guards. Even so, it will fight them if they go after the same objective, and/or pursue them to steal their winnings. Aside from that, the scenario is a race to collect the most loot.

Option 3: Saving Bill’s Life

The elemental is after a specific objective, ideally a person. The players have to get there first.

The elemental is searching the wagons’ one by one, preferably in random order. The players know which wagon has the objective, and have to get there in time. This can be with a friendly caravan or a hostile one with a prisoner. As the objective is reached, the earth elemental arrives.

I recommended making the objective a person so that the players have to flee with him/her. If they stay and defend, the earth elemental can almost certainly reach them by traveling through the earth, hurling items, or collapsing a wagon. If they don’t realize this, either have the person warn them, flee in panic, or have the earth elemental miss them the first time.

The earth elemental will chase, and as the players can’t block they’ll have to accompany the person. The elemental isn’t skilled enough to pop out right where they are, giving the players chances to damage the elemental, drive it back, and help the NPC escape.

Note: While there is no official ruling against it, I would avoid having the earth elemental use the dash action. It will make stopping it too hard, and it doesn’t seem thematically appropriate for an earth elemental.

Combat Encounter 2: Bringing Down the House (difficulty 6)

The most obvious way for an enemy to use an earth elemental would be to send them through the walls to attack the building’s pillars and bring it crashing down. Even if the players are hostile to the building’s owners, they can’t just ignore the threat if they don’t want to be buried themselves.

I would suggest there being four pillars, both so as not to bring the building down too fast, based on a single loss, and so that the players can’t defend a single objective. The building won’t collapse completely unless the elemental knocks out three pillars, but taking out two will leave the building shaky, and it might collapse if the players are too careless with their destructive spells.

If the building does collapse, then the players will take a decent amount of damage and be trapped. It’s possible 1-2 players will be under a side spot and avoid being caught, but they’ll have trouble rescuing the rest. Maybe they can get help? Otherwise, the players will need to be either rescued or captured.

Combat Encounter 3: The Walls Have Fists (difficulty 8)

If you are going to use an earth elemental defensively, an awesome way to do so would be to have it make its attacks while inside the walls. It has tremor-sense, which should let it find the players, and you don’t need that much finesse when your attack method is “Hulk Smash!”

What you will need is a room small enough to keep the PCs next to the walls, and an enemy to keep them occupied. (Both to stop them leaving, and because attacking them without giving them what to do is horrible game design.) I would suggest a 5 by 5 square room, with 2-4 enemies besides the earth elemental.

So long as the earth elemental can bash a PC by moving a square or two sideways, it will do so. (Earth elementals don’t generally choose targets anyway.) You will need to decide whether it will leave the wall or circle when its target is across the room. If it leaves the wall, you can always have it suffer an opportunity attack to return at the end of its turn.

As the other enemies are defeated, the players will find it easier to move away from the walls. At that point, you might want one of the remaining villains to give the elemental a command to come fight and stop retreating. It will turn the fight ordinary, but the players will appreciate the chance to take down the annoying elemental.

Other Encounters

In this article, I focused on making the most of an earth elemental’s own powers. For more that you can do with the destructive power of earth, see Adult Blue Dragon

More articles on Making the most of Monster abilities

 

Wild Earth Elemental

Of all the elementals, the earth elemental is the hardest to figure out why it would be encountered in the wild.

Air elementals favor places with strong winds, some of which the players might need to pass through. Water elementals like lakes, along which people travel and live. Only a fortunate few find out about the ocean, and almost no fire elementals are lucky enough to discover Earth’s core. Earth elementals, on the other hand, should sink into the earth and remain there.

In order to solve this problem, maybe we can say that it doesn’t like tunnels. It sees them as annoying intrusions poking into its personal areas, and it worries away at them the way a person would worry at a wart. Either that, or the movement of living things doesn’t fit into its beliefs as to how matter should move, and it shows up to pound it into proper shape.

Combat Encounter 4: The Tunnel is Collapsing (difficulty 6)

The players are going through a tunnel, or perhaps a narrow passage in the mountains, when an irate earth elemental shows up and starts hammering on the walls behind them.

The first part of this encounter might be getting to the elemental. Its hammering will be dislodging boulders and other rubble, and some of that might well shift toward the PCs. Even if the players use spells and ranged attacks, they’ll need to get out of the way of the earth elemental’s rubble.

The second stage will be once they reach the elemental. We’ll assume it turns to face them (as if not the combat would be kind of boring), but the rock in the area is still loose. It would be fairly easy for a miss against DEX AC to be interpreted as the elemental smashing into the wall instead, or for a miss against STR AC to send shock waves into the ground, making it slide underfoot.

If they ignore the earth elemental, it will eventually advance on them.

If they win, and too much damage has been done to the walls, the tunnel might collapse behind them. That’s not entirely a bad thing. It means the shape of the story changes, with the players now needing to find another way out.

Summary: Six Earth Elemental Encounters

• Earth elementals make excellent sentries. They can hide inside the walls, and burst out to attack completely unexpectedly.
• Have an earth elemental stop a caravan along a narrow trail, and be breaking into the wagons to find and kill a target. The players have to get past the broken wagons and delay the it while the NPC escapes. Add bandits for extra challenge.
• Send the earth elemental to destroy a building by taking out its pillars. Even if the building belongs to the enemy, the players won’t want to be buried, and that means stopping the elemental somehow. Not easy, when it can hide inside said pillars.
• Have the earth elemental, along with a few other creatures, defending a small room. The earth elemental can remain inside the walls, using tremor-sense to detect when a PC is near enough to bash.
• Use an earth elemental to destroy a tunnel or other passage behind the players. During the fight, the elemental’s attacks can send boulders their way, and at the end they’ll have to find another way out.
• Have an earth elemental rampaging through a library or other room as the players are searching for something. It creates a tight time limit, as the elemental destroys everything around itself, and can attack randomly.