Veteran Adventures
This part of the game master guide is intended to help you craft the kinds of adventures and campaigns you want to play, especially as it pertains to the player characters' power. Traditionally, RPG characters play through an arc from insignificant power all the way to power that rivals the immortals. If that's what you want to run, no problem, you got it — a campaign from level 1 to level 20 has you covered. But Labyrinths & Liontaurs is carefully designed to allow four different styles of play:
From character levels 1-5, PCs make their way in a gritty, "realistic" world in which they are just a couple lucky hits away from permanent death. They are not far removed from humble beginnings. This is the Tyro Tier.
At levels 6-10, PCs are competent and experienced, but their concerns are still local. They can tackle dangerous foes, wield strong magic, and know a trick or three that are actually marvelous. They talk with kings and high priests, and if they die, they just might get brought back. This is the Adventurer Tier.
At levels 11-15, PCs are known, respected, and admired across the land. They are concerned with top tier threats, like armies of orcs and dragons and vampires. They are the priests who raise the dead, the mighty wizard, a member of the ruling class. This is the Hero Tier.
At levels 16-20, PCs walk among heroes of myth! They travel the planes, find artifacts, and deal with gods as they once dealt with kings. Their works are the stuff of ballads and dreams. This is the Legend Tier.
Many, even most, game masters are content to travel with their players across all four tiers of play, as the heroes rise from humble beginnings to the most elevated heights. Other game masters prefer some tiers to others. You, the game master, are free to start your players at the beginning of any tier, and to end their adventures at the end of a tier. Maybe you like the gritty realism of Tyro tier, and you think play at higher tiers gets silly. Or you reach level 20 and stop just because class rules end there. Heck, maybe you stop play at level 10 or 15 because it is harder to run a game at higher levels — there's nothing wrong with knowing your limits as a game master and stopping before the game experience gets worse, before running the game becomes more of a chore for you than a hobby.
But what if you want to continue the game with that tone, at that level of play, beyond the end of a tier but without advancing to the next one? Or beyond the last tier, to level 21 and higher? The rules for veteran play give players a way to continue playing at their current tier without advancing to the next, and yet still with some sense of advancement. But what do YOU, the game master, do to create adventures for these veterans?
I see two possible end-tier settings to consider. Your players' characters reach the end of a tier — how powerful are they? The options are that (A) they are the most powerful creatures in the setting, or that (B) they continue to face foes that are greater than they are in power.
(A) The Greatest Of All Time In the first setting, not unusual at level 20, the end of Legend Tier, the player characters are clearly more powerful than 99 percent of the monsters in the game. There are about 340-odd monsters in these core rules; of those, four are Challenge Rating (CR) 20, and only two are higher (see Monsters by Challenge Rating). The same problem applies if you have if you have carefully crafted a lower-power world for your campaign. Imagine a realistic setting with mostly animals and people, where NPCs are usually just first or second level, with only a smattering of weak undead and magical beasts. Nothing over CR5, no PC over level 5. If you remain true to that vision, it may be hard to find foes powerful enough for your level 5 superheroes. The level 20 game and the level 5 game offer a similar challenge: How to craft adventures beyond the end of the tier when the heroes can easily beat all of the setting's potential foes? Here are some ideas for creating challenges for these superstars.
- Surprise them. Novelty goes a long way to spice up any game, even high-power ones. Give your players new challenges with new monsters and magic items to encounter. Mix up enemies: Goblins teaming up with elves. Trolls led by a caster who gives them fire resistance. Reskin that Tarrasque as Godzilla or some other Kaiju. Interesting adversaries and items make for interesting adventures.
- Be clever! Even lower-power foes can be interesting if they are played smart, using the right items, traps and environmental advantages. I once put my high-level group into a burning hellscape that inflicted 10d6 fire damage per round in hurricane-strength winds. Their immunities and resistances made this trivial, of course, but I set them against fireproof treants who were using sunder attacks against all their gear. Once an item was sundered, it broke into pieces. The pieces, no longer touching the former owner and lacking fire resistance, burned to ash and were dispersed by the wind. They hated that! Muahaha!
- Be meta! Fiddle with the way the players expect to play. Seperate them and make them go to different rooms, with you, the game master, going from room to room. Curse your PCs with switched bodies; players swap character sheets and play their own personalities running other players' characters.
- Take them outside their comfort zone. Gary Gygax was famous for making high-level adventures that challenged his players in unusual ways. He ran a level of a dungeon based on Alice in Wonderland logic. Another "dungeon" was a crashed spaceship. He sent his PCs into the Wild West, with dynamite and six-shooters. His infamous Tomb of Horrors featured insta-death traps that killed at a touch.
- Player vs player. PvP can be friendly, not nasty. Imagine a tournament, with the PCs up against other NPCs and each other! Games of skill, shooting contests, battle royales, allowing only nonlethal damage, are possible examples. You might invite them to a card game with the game master sitting in as an interesting NPC — playing poker against each other (and the NPC) for "real" stakes of gold and magic items can be fun.
- Interaction and exploration. L&L is designed to offer challenges beyond pure combat. Imagine fighting slavery, averting a war, stopping a plague or famine, founding a zoo and collecting creatures for it, circumnavigating the globe, forging an artifact in the heat of the Plane of Fire ... big challenges do not have to focus on fighting.
(B) Life Is Hard In the second setting, the heroes may not advance beyond their current tier, but the foes they face are still dangerous, maybe even impossible to beat head-on. Sure, let your players have some easy victories from time to time -- they are awesome, after all. But also try pitting them against things that they must flee! The idea here is that your player characters will never be the most dangerous, the most powerful. In this kind of game, defeat and death is always around the corner. Be careful not to discourage your players — the game must still be fun. But victory may in these games consist of finding a secure way to survive despite danger, living like mice in the walls unknown to the masters of the universe. Victories come by being smart, by planning and understanding the enemy. People, maybe escaped slaves, living in an underground city of mind flayers, say. Or simply a group of rebels fighting a powerful evil empire of vampires at the top of society. Perhaps the easiest "life is hard" scenario: PCs who are capped at Tyro or Adventurer Tier who are facing the monsters usually thrown against Hero or Legendary Tier PCs.